Chapter 4
The day Solomon turned eighteen, he felt light-headed, as if all the pent-up breath of the past six months had finally been released in a single, dizzying exhale. He’d never skipped school since even before Umma and Dad disappeared, but today he thought he might. He didn’t think he even had to go to school anymore now that he was eighteen, but he knew Umma would be upset if she knew he was even entertaining the thought.
He was entertaining it anyway.
When the factional militias locked down inter-zone travel, they’d made it so people could only attend college in person in Westsylvania. But in some blue zones to the east, that wasn’t the case. Students there could study remotely or travel to other zones for school since they shared a border with other blue zones. Though he’d read that New York was tough to get through because of all the red upstate, this opened their options. Even in Solomon’s red zone, he could apply to Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Point Park… and then, maybe, if he couldn’t find work in this zone, he could apply for a remote job and hope his new degree would give him a leg up.
That was what Umma and Dad seemed to think he would do, at any rate. In the decades before the Great Splintering, businesses had started aligning either blue or red and only selling to either liberal or conservative customers. There were Republican pillow companies and Democrat pillow companies. There were Republican light bulb manufacturers and Democrat light bulb manufacturers. Those were all still around, and if you lived in a red zone, you could work remotely for a corporation headquartered in another red zone, even if you couldn’t ever travel there.
Solomon remembered when the zone borders got closed, there’d initially been massive shortages because distribution of goods got shut down too. His parents had been very worried because it was November then. It wasn’t a problem they could garden out of, and without shipments of food, they’d go hungry. Dad had kept saying that they’d unlock the zones, that one thing Americans couldn’t stand was being poor, and he’d ended up being half-right. The leadership of different red and blue zones swapped rights of passage, creating corridors to allow inter-zone deliveries.
These days, AI-driven delivery trucks were searched at each zone border, but eventually allowed across borders to complete their old, pre-fracturing routes. At the cost of cutting human drivers out of the arrangement, this made it possible for red zone light bulbs to reach distant red zone sockets, and for blue zone pillows to rest on other blue zone beds. But everything moved much more slowly, now.
At any rate, Solomon wasn’t seeing signs that interzone travel was unlocking for humans anytime soon. Besides, Dad and Umma weren’t here anymore, and their cash was running dangerously low. He didn’t have enough to pay for college tuition. He was surprised they had even made it this far. Umma and Dad had had more saved than he’d realized, but they were going to run out soon, and that meant he needed to find work or there would be no more jjinppang for him and Adah.
On top of all that, the very first people to get arrested by the red zone militias had been the college professors. Who would even be teaching him if he did go to college? No, he was better off not applying. Anything he wanted to learn, he could learn online anyway, like the one weekend he’d taught himself Perl after getting curious about legacy scripting languages.
Maybe he should’ve spent more time doing that kind of thing over the summer instead of playing video games and hiking in Frick Park with Adah. Or looked for a job. He’d prayed for one, but little more than that. He’d been so focused on getting to eighteen without anyone finding out that their parents were gone that he hadn’t thought to act on anything before his birthday.
And now, his birthday was here.
A rare sunny October day, perfect for visiting a pumpkin farm. Not that he had been to a pumpkin farm since the Great Splintering. He had a vague memory of rolling a pumpkin down a 45 degree slide and hoping it would smash at the end. He must have been no older than six at the time.
Something about that memory appealed to Solomon. He found himself wanting to see orange guts dripping out of shards of pumpkin all broken up. Umma had drilled into them since they were toddlers all this stuff about sharing their feelings with their words, however, so he started to wonder if he was angry. Angry that they were running out of money. Angry at himself for not having done anything about it earlier, for wasting the summer. Angry that he couldn’t go to college. Angry that Umma and Dad had never came back. Angry at himself for not being able to find them.
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“Solo?” Adah called out into the hallway. “The bus is almost here. Are you coming?”
Solomon peeled himself out from under his blanket, closed the threadbare drapes, and shuffled to the door. Adah was at the top of the stairs just outside her room, the door ajar. Music was spilling out from behind it. It was from some musical, probably Les Miserables, her favorite. Adah loved musicals, she had a whole stack of vintage CDs from shows that she played all the time.
“I’m not going to school today,” he told her. “Go ahead and catch the bus.”
She made a face. “I’m sorry,” he said. He knew she didn’t like to go without him. “Just this one time, okay? For my birthday.”
He saw her think about it. “Okay,” she said. “Since I didn’t get you a present.”
Solomon smiled at her joke. He’d been the one to tell her in no uncertain terms that she was not allowed to spend a single cent on getting him a birthday gift.
“By the way, a drone dropped off a package for you.” Adah held out a flat yellow package about the size of an 8-by-11-inch piece of paper.
The upstairs hallway wasn’t very long. One step took him past the towel closet and the bathroom door on the left; the next past Umma and Dad’s room on the right, and the final step brought him to the end of the dimmed corridor to take the envelope from Adah’s hand. He glanced up at the cracked ceiling. The bulb had gone out a month ago but the hall wasn’t dark enough to waste money on a new one.
He waved as Adah ducked back into her room to turn off her CD player, and then she was down the stairs and out the front door, her self-done braids slightly askew. Ripping open the package, he confirmed what he’d suspected through the manila: it was a single-use screen.
As soon as he touched the screen, the words WESTSYLVANIA MILITIA COUNCIL crawled across the top. Underneath, Solomon was directed to confirm his name, birthdate, address, and phone number before registering for a faction. He knew right away which one he was going to pick and poked the checkbox next to CULTURAL NATIONALIST. It was the biggest faction in their zone. There were six other factions he could have chosen, but he couldn’t join the ALL-WHITE faction, and he didn’t want to join the ANTI-WOKE or the CHURCH MILITANT. Besides, CULTURAL NATIONALIST was the faction Umma and Dad had joined after the Great Splintering.
Solomon remembered them arguing about which faction to join, actually. Umma hadn’t wanted to sign up for anything. “That’s how you end up on someone’s kill list, by signing up to be part of a political group, any group, it doesn’t matter which one.” And at first, they’d been able to avoid it. But when the interim militia council started centralizing power, it had required every Westsylvania Zone resident to register for a faction. Of all the factions, cultural nationalism fit their views the best, so that was what they had picked. It wasn’t ethnonationalism which thought America should be for White people only, it was more a West-is-best attitude. Kind of like the manifesto WhiteFunk, or Sam, had shared with Solomon all those months ago. Don’t come to America if you’re just going to complain about America, don’t come to America if you’re just going to try to use America to get riches for yourself, come to America if you want to be American.
Which made sense to Solomon. Dad had always joked with Umma that when White people got something right, they got it really right. Like the scientific method. When they got it really wrong, you got race-based slavery.
“See, that’s what the West is like,” Dad had said. “It’s a mix of the real good and the real bad. But it’s a tactical mistake to talk just about the bad parts. If you push White people to choose between outright White supremacy – which they’ve had a thousand years of practice at – and playing the villain in their own national story, well, they’re going to lean toward what they know best. They’ve only been in villain shoes for what, a century?”
His parents’ conversations had grown less lighthearted as time went on. “American history was always just two groups of White people fighting over which group of White people was better, from colonists versus the British to the North versus South to liberals versus conservatives,” Umma had fumed once. “And now, because they just had to fight about it, I’m stuck in this zone and can’t go and see my sister.”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Dad had soothed. “Her text messages are still getting through sometimes, right? She’s just waiting it out, like us.”
Eemo’s family had been living in the western suburbs of Chicago before they’d tried to flee. Solomon’s parents had shared with him some ugly rumors about the red zone militias taking over that whole area. In Illinois, the militias were mostly made up of ethnonationalists, and from what he could gather, they hadn’t held back on any part of their vision for a “cleaner Chicago.”
After Solomon finished filling out the screen, he pressed the submit button at the bottom. The screen turned blank except for a loading symbol in the middle. Round and round and round it flickered. He almost put the screen down to go to the bathroom while he was waiting when onto the page flashed the words: SOLOMON WILLIAMS SELECTED FOR MILITIA SERVICE. REPORT FOR DUTY ON JANUARY 1.