Chapter 25

It was getting hard to think about life outside the truck but Solomon didn’t think they were in Pennsylvania anymore.

It had been days since he’d been stuffed into this metal grave, sometimes driving for hours, sometimes parked the whole day in the heat. It was getting more and more packed with people until they were sitting on top of each other in the aisle between the crates and pushing against each other, pressing him into the metal brackets on the inside of the truck door. The brackets looked as if they were fusing together into the metal door. It was all one solid inside-of-a-coffin that only opened to swallow up another body, and another, and then another.

Solomon was sweating and filthy hot inside his windbreaker but when he tried to take it off Wilson told him not to, that he had to keep it zipped up. The stench from everyone’s bodies and from the waste bucket sitting there slopping over was unbelievable and they still hadn’t been given any food the entire time.

Just water.

Which he always drank first.

Even when they put in two gallons of water as their numbers grew, Wilson waited to drink from his jug until after Solomon had what he wanted him to have.

He dreamed of Rithvik every night so he couldn’t tell which night it was that Wilson woke him up and whispered to him, “You see this slip of plastic inside your wristband’s sleeve? With the barcode printed on it? Trade your barcode slip with hers.”

It was so dark Solomon could barely see. But there was only one girl next to him, the Black girl around Adah’s age. So just as Solomon had drank the water when Wilson had told him to, he took out his barcode slip and started to ease the girl’s out without waking her up. One tiny tug at a time on the end of the plastic sleeve built into their wristbands like a pouch on a kangaroo, and the barcode slip the joey –

Her eyes fluttered open.

Solomon froze. His fingers were on her wristband. He’d already made a tear in her plastic sleeve. Wait, wait, all he had to wait until she was still again… good. He slipped her barcode out and slid his barcode into her wristband which took less time and then he was done, he’d obeyed, he’d done what Wilson had told him to do.

The faces of the other prisoners started blurring for him even in the daytime, looking like a giant multi-headed monster digested into a single form. Solomon was almost at the point where he thought it might be better to die than to have to be in this truck for a single second longer when it stopped and the doors opened, to stay open this time.

Wilson was on his feet at once, grabbing Solomon’s arm. He didn’t let go of him even as they climbed down into a sunlight that was dazzlingly bright after being in darkness and shadow for so long. He felt as if he couldn’t see anything, that he was being guided only by Wilson’s grip on his arm.

People in uniforms were shouting things at them but their words were like a series of overlapping drum beats in Solomon’s ears, ba bam, ba bam, ba bam. Maybe they were telling them to squat? Wilson was pulling him down, at any rate, and then he let go of Solomon’s arm and Solomon saw that Wilson had put his hands behind his head so Solomon copied him and saw that next to him, in front of him, behind him, were prisoners from their truck also squatting, also putting their hands behind their heads.

Where were they? Solomon couldn’t really see from the position he was in, face turned down by his own hands behind the back of his head. There was a cement floor underneath his feet. Maybe they were in an above-ground parking garage though because he could feel some wind but to his side there was a cement column the kind that held up a roof and he was under some sort of shade.

He focused on the wind, taking in gasping breaths. It felt as if he were breathing for the first time since being stuffed into that truck. Wilson grabbed his arm again and pulled him to his feet. They were walking forward, a platoon of them, not marching in step by any means, but still grouped together.

Wilson stayed by his side when their sad mimicry of a platoon was pushed into a single line; he was right behind Solomon. It was an above-ground parking garage they were in, and at the end of it was a row of what looked like self-checkout kiosks from a grocery store. Solomon thought it was the second to last one on the left that Wilson and he were in line behind, but he wasn’t sure. They looked like copies of each other, as if someone had gone control + v ten times on the first kiosk. Solomon watched as the prisoners ahead of them, one by one, put their wristbands up to the barcode scanner as directed by an armed guard standing beside it. The kiosk had some sort of slot where people were pulling out what looked like small circular swabs that they placed in their mouths before dropping them down into another slot.

Suddenly Solomon knew where they were.

This was what Wilson had described to him the very first time they’d met.

He was in a processing center.

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He watched the screen flash green after an elderly Asian man put his swab back into the kiosk. The man was pointed to a flight of concrete stairs built into the side of the parking garage. Next up was the Black girl who’d been sitting next to Solomon in the truck. Her screen flashed red, and she was pointed back to the truck.

Someone else went and then another person and then it was his turn.

He didn’t want to go up. Red or green he didn’t care, he was sure both choices sucked, but Wilson was shoving him from behind and so even though he was reluctant Solomon stepped forward and held up his wristband for the barcode he’d taken from the girl to be scanned, and then he swabbed his mouth and put it into the slot.

His screen flashed green. He took a few steps forward, but slowly because he was terrified that Wilson’s screen would go red and that they’d be separated, but Wilson was fast, and only moments later he was behind Solomon again, urging him down the stairs.

Solomon had trouble on the stairs. He kept thinking they were crumbling into each other, that they were turning into a slide, and so it took him a long time to get all the way down to the first floor of the parking garage. There were a few guards around shouting at them to keep going until they exited the parking garage onto the sidewalk outside it, and then they were out in the sunlight with nothing overhead.

Solomon blinked, his head spinning as the world tilted around him. The rectangular towers thrusting into the sky seemed to warp in his vision, their edges sharp and unsteady. He tried to focus on the ground beneath his feet, but the torn and crumpled road wavered, the jagged surface making it impossible to tell where to step. His body felt disconnected, his legs stumbling forward only because Wilson’s grip on his arm was pulling him along. The soaring buildings blurred together as the crowds pressed in, and Solomon could barely register the rusted playground to his left or the field of mud-covered tents that flashed by. Every step felt unsteady, his senses overwhelmed by the chaotic landscape.

Wilson didn’t stop. They walked past what had to have been trees planted along the sidewalk. They’d all been cut down so that only stumps and trunks were left. He moved Solomon past what might have been a church but its steeple was broken and its roof caved in. It looked as if it had been damaged by fire.

Along the bases of more sky-high buildings were long empty storefronts with smashed glass doors and windows. And people. People everywhere, thousands of people, dirty, gaunt people with plastic bands around their wrists. Some glanced at him and Wilson but most ignored them.

Solomon was guided across the plaza that the burnt-out church was in, around another two towers, and then onto a path. To its west he saw a fence topped with barbed wire. Through the fence a river as large as the Susquehanna shone through the gaps. Were they on an island? On the far side of the river he saw a cityscape that looked as if it were reaching for heaven. Towering skyscrapers of glass and steel gleamed in the sun, endless cars and delivery drones darted around them.

Wilson didn’t even look across the river. He walked Solomon along the path for a few minutes, then he found a sky walkway, like a ten-foot covered bridge made of bricks that connected two towers on either side of them. He pulled Solomon in under it, and only then did he finally let go of his arm.

And it was only then that Solomon realized Wilson had been barely holding it together the entire time. Because he was gasping now, sinking to his knees on the uneven dirt. Solomon sat down next to him. “We were extremely lucky,” Wilson finally whispered. “If either of the two barcodes we took had already been processed, they would’ve shot us on the spot.”

Solomon didn’t understand. “What?”

Wilson tapped his wristband. He was still whispering. “We both got civilian barcodes and passed off our combatant barcodes to other people. Now those people are getting shipped to the hard labor camps, while we get to stay here in a re-education camp.”

His words hit Solomon like a sledgehammer. The little girl whose barcode I took… Wilson’s saying that as red zone soldiers they tagged us for delivery to the hard labor camps… but since I took her barcode and gave her mine…

Her screen flashed red.

Now Solomon was the one having trouble breathing. He felt sick to his stomach even though he hadn’t eaten anything for days and there was nothing inside him to throw up. He couldn’t believe he’d done something that terrible. From the water he’d drank first every single time, to this, he couldn’t believe –

Maybe Wilson could tell where his mind was going because he grabbed the back of Solomon’s neck and forced him up onto his knees. He was pulling Solomon’s forehead to his, he had another hand on his left shoulder, and he was gripping it tightly. “Nobody gets out of the camps clean, okay?” he whispered, his face in Solomon’s. “Nobody.”

But it wasn’t okay and although Solomon hadn’t cried since basic training he thought he might be about to now –

“Listen, listen,” Wilson said quickly as if he could tell what Solomon was feeling. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know. You didn’t know what switching the barcodes would do. And you don’t have to know. What happens to you is my responsibility. I will get you out of here, I swear it. All you have to do is keep obeying orders.”

Solomon knew what Wilson was offering him. He was offering to absolve him of responsibility. He was feeling such incredible guilt that for a moment he was tempted, desperately, to take him up on it, to be able to retreat to a place where he could stand on his feet and say he did his duty and obeyed as he was supposed to and that nobody could ask anything more of him. But one day at the end he would stand before God at the Great White Throne Judgment and he would have to answer for how he’d lived his life here. What was he supposed to say to God then? That Wilson had told him to do it?

Solomon didn’t know the answer. He didn’t know how he was supposed to balance his oath to obey orders with his searing sense that he ought not to have obeyed this last one. And yet, underneath it all, he was ashamed because he was glad he had. He was glad he wasn’t the one on his way to a hard labor camp. He knew nobody stayed alive for very long in one of those, and he’d promised Adah that as long as he was alive he would come home to her.

“I will get you out of here, Solomon,” Wilson repeated and Solomon found his fingers were clutching Wilson’s clothes, that he was clinging to him.

He hoped Wilson could.

He hoped Wilson would.

But in the meantime Solomon knew that the little girl whose barcode he’d taken was going to join Rithvik in his dreams tonight.