Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  After packing and securing all of their gear from the water plant, they’d hustled up the mountain, and, climbing through the snow and trees and brush, they had come to where they now stood. The snow deposited by the blizzard came up to their knees as they stood and looked out over the valley.

  Below them, Warwick was a smoking ruin with not one stone left upon another. It looked like something from a war zone and, in fact, that is exactly what it was. Lang thought of the words of Tolstoy, “What a terrible, terrible thing…” The picture brought him in his mind to visions of Borodino, of Moscow as the Russians had left it for Napoleon, or of the 200 days of Stalingrad. Dark black curls of smoke rose here and there from the rubble like souls returning to their maker.

  The jagged gash in the earth left behind by the drones’ payloads meant two things to Lang. First, that someone somewhere had known enough to shield their weapons of war from the EMP attack. Someone knew it was coming. Second, it meant that somewhere in the hills of Virginia, or Maryland, or perhaps even in Washington D.C., there was a control room—probably underground—that still operated with full power. That someone had launched and perpetrated the attack on Warwick left no doubt as to its conclusion.

  Overkill.

  This thought process led Lang to consider something that until then he had not contemplated. Someone obviously thought that Warwick was still a threat. Just that morning he’d been convinced that the town had escaped the worst of the damage, having survived the EMP. He’d even briefly considered returning one final time to make a last ditch effort to find Cole, or to maybe convince some more of the residents to flee.

  As he stood on the ridge and looked down on Warwick’s apocalypse, this valley of Megiddo, he shuddered and was glad that the thought had only been a momentary one. The devastation was total. Not even a mouse could have survived this attack.

  It wouldn’t do to have them catch us out here in the open, Lang thought. The drones have infrared capability too, and if they were to return, the three of them standing on the rise would be toast in just seconds.

  Peter interrupted Lang’s thoughts. “It’s all gone,” he said, without any discernible emotion. “I can’t say I’ll miss it.”

  “That was our home, Peter,” Lang replied, sadly. “Not to mention the people… the people. We grew up there,” he continued. “You’re older than me. I’m barely eighteen, but neither one of us has ever been anywhere else. We used to ice skate and play hockey on the pond behind the church there, just up on the ridge.” Lang felt like he needed to choke back a tear as memories overwhelmed him. “We used to have Christmas plays right there in the gym. How can you have no feelings for it at all?”

  “It was a town of lies, Lang, and you know it,” Peter growled. “Warwick sent our parents off to Russia, mine these thirty long years ago, and we’ll never see them again. I lived there as an orphan. As an adult I was blessed enough to smuggle a son—my beautiful little Nikolai, and my wife with him—out of Warwick during the confusion.” Now Peter’s voice lowered to almost a whisper, though his anger still owned his words. “Warwick destroyed my life. If my family had not gotten out, this town would have eaten them too. I’ve never seen them again or spoken to them since that day twenty years ago.”

  Peter looked at Lang, his eyes flashing fury, “So don’t tell me what to mourn, Lang.”

  “I’m not telling you what to mourn, Peter, really I’m not. I’m just saying that the town didn’t do those things. Warwick was what it was, but for most of our lives it was just a home. I know what Warwick was. This place was a tragedy for everyone, but it was home, Peter. Blame the people who did this, the Americans or the Russians, but the people who lived in that town are not to blame.”

  They stood for a moment in chilly silence. The cold in the snow began to hurt in their feet, passing through their boots and into their bodies. Lang shook his head, and then his boots, and shifted the straps on his backpack. Peter will calm down soon enough, he thought, but the older man had been in a foul mood all day. He heard the man breathing in the space beside him and noticed him clench his jaw and then release.

  “Just don’t tell me what to mourn,” Peter repeated angrily, before turning and retreating the way they had come. Lang took another long look at the ruins of Warwick Village, and then followed Peter back down the hill.

  Natasha stood for a moment longer, hoping to catch some glimpse, some vision of movement, there in the hopelessness of the rubble.

  CHAPTER 11

  5 Days Earlier – Sunday Night

  The candle’s flame twisted around the wick and hissed its tiny protest, sending up a small trail of smoke that curled around the motion of waves as the burly man stepped into the hallway and peeked through the peephole in the door. The warmth from the fire in the other room dissipated, trailing away from his body in invisible little traces. The blanket over his shoulders did little to insulate against the cold night air. The blizzard had passed, but it had left behind it the cold of winter and the promise of a harsh season ahead.

  When Vasily Romanovich Kashporov walked up the stone steps that wound through the elevated gardens, he’d been unsure of what he would find. Life had taken a sideways jolt for everyone in Warwick, but his life, in particular, was spinning off madly into he knew not what.

  The last few hours had been eventful ones. First there’d been the prison breakout, and then the show trial in the gym and a bloody execution. The gang of prisoners, led by Vasily’s peers, had first taken over the prison and then overrun the whole town of Warwick. Though Vasily had escaped in the first breakout with the rest of the prisoners, he’d not taken any part in the coup. The leaders thought of him as just a useful idiot.

  After the mock trial, the leaders chose Vasily to be the keeper of two men they’d locked away in a jail cell as “enemies to the revolution.” They’d chosen Vasily specifically because they believed him to be loyal, and if not loyal, then too stupid to be of any harm. But he was neither loyal nor stupid.

  He was, however, in danger.

  He’d plotted an escape with the two men who, he hated to admit, were now almost certainly dead.

  The first of the two men was an old citizen named Lev Volkhov. Lev had been his mentor, as well as a revered elder and teacher in the village. The other man was a friendly traveler he knew only as Clay.

  The three of them had attempted their own prison break in order to escape the dangerous power grab that was evident in the town’s insurgent revolution.

  After Vasily had set them free from their cell, the plan had been for Lev Volkhov and Clay to leave through an external door at the rear of the prison while he, Vasily, gathered Clay’s backpack and exited through the prison’s hallway system into the courtyard that led to the town.

  At least, that was the plan. The second prison break, unhappily, had happened concurrently with the arrival of outsiders—paratroopers sent by someone to support the coup attempt in the town. It seemed like things might have gone horribly wrong for Volkhov and Clay.

  Vasily had witnessed the show trial and the brutality of the takeover, and right then and there he’d made a decision. He was impressed by the old man and the traveler, and he’d decided that his best hope for freedom was to throw in his lot with them.

  There were politics involved, as there always are. But there were also the sheer instincts for survival, and in that moment, the two had become fused into one force, and from that point the young man moved with a singular purpose.

  He knew more about the kind of politics involved, and the way those politics linked to survival, than anyone in the village other than Volkhov. This was because Vasily—although almost no one knew it or suspected it—was probably the foremost expert on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in all of Warwick. He’d been introduced to the works of Solzhenitsyn during long tutoring sessions at the hands of Lev Volkhov and had taken the Russian author’s words to heart. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, detailing the ongoing communist threat agains
t the world, and this work, written by his countryman, he believed sincerely.

  This great man, this winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, this sufferer from the Soviet Gulag, had warned America—the stated enemy of his own country—to be wary of Russia. In the Warning to the West, Solzhenitsyn, speaking of the forces of social change in America, and of the ongoing threat of Soviet communist hegemony, had said, and Vasily knew it by heart…

  “They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat—one which has never before been seen in the history of the world. Not only in the history of the country, but in the history of the world.”

  Solzhenitsyn had warned America of everything that the old man Volkhov had said when he’d addressed the crowd gathered for his show trial, in the moments before being summarily convicted by the gang.

  It was Solzhenitsyn who’d once said, “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Vasily had heard the old man speak that truth in the simple word… No.

  Vasily had also read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, as had most of the boys in his school, but he hadn’t let it end there as most of the others had. Wanting more of this truth that outweighed the world, he dove deeper. He read more about his supposed country of Russia in The Gulag Archipelago, and in the Red Wheel books. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s short stories, like Matryona’s House, and unlike the other boys in his school, he had cried, only a few years back, when he’d learned of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death.

  This was the secret life that Vasily Kashporov led, one of books and of the mind, and this is why he chose truth and freedom over any of the other options being offered to him by men of every age who wanted and abused power.

  Walking away from the prison, he’d heard the gunshots, and he knew that he was now alone, save for the man who was in this house to which he’d been sent.

  Lev Volkhov, before he was killed, promised Vasily that his nephew, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky, would ‘know everything’ and would know what to do next. Volkhov had ordered Vasily to go to Pyotr and not to look back. Vasily respected his old friend enough to do exactly what he’d been told.

  He knew the house, and found it easily, and had climbed the steps with trepidation, not knowing whether the gang might have already arrived, or if its inhabitant had already cleared out. There was fear in his heart, cold and brittle like ice, as he raised his hand to knock on the door.

  ****

  Pyotr opened the door and saw the young man standing there with his face pale from the cold and fear. He grabbed Vasily by the shoulders and guided him into the house and then through the hallway and into a tiny room near the back. An earnest fire snapped in a fireplace, sending shadows of the two men leaping onto the walls. Pyotr poured the young man a cup of coffee, black, bitter, and strong, from a pot on a stove, and pointed him to a chair by the fire. They made introductions as the cup was handed from one set of hands to the other, but such things were unnecessary. Everyone in the town always knew everyone else as a matter of course, or seemed to.

  Pyotr had a million questions, and he spoke in rapid-fire Russian, but Vasily was too shaken to respond immediately.

  “What was the shooting, Vasily?” Pyotr asked. “Who was shot? I heard so much shooting…” He let the implications of his question hang in the air like the cold. “The whole town’s been turned upside down since the trial. I cannot believe it! Mikail shot Todd point blank. And right in the head! And in front of everyone! And then these soldiers fall out of the sky. What kind of thing was that? I’m worried sick about Lev. How is Uncle Lev? Have you spoken with him? Is he ok?”

  Vasily brought his eyes up to look at Pyotr, and in the look he tried to say what he feared he could not. He waved at the older man to slow him down, and then dropped his head to his chest. He drew in his breath slowly. He knew that the news that he carried was dark and would hurt Pyotr. “Only English, Pyotr. Only English now. Please. I’ve come from the prison. It’s not good. I don’t know it, but I do know it… Lev Volkhov and the man called Clay are dead. There would have been no shooting if they had escaped.” Vasily looked up again and into Pyotr’s confused eyes. “The shooting was too fast and too soon. They cannot have gotten to the fence. They are both dead, I know it.”

  Pyotr sat forward, his eyes widened as a flash of despair crossed his face. He opened his mouth, but for a moment no words came out. He clenched his jaw, taking a deep breath through his nose. Vasily could see the man’s ribcage expand with the breath and then hold there for a moment, as if in pain, before a long, sad exhale, and the older man pushed his head back in resignation or supplication.

  “Uncle Lev is… dead?” he asked, in English. The sound of the words was plaintive. His hand reached out and gripped Vasily’s shoulder, steadying himself.

  “He is, Pyotr. He has to be. There is no other way for me to know, but he has to be. He cannot be alive.”

  Vasily went through the story of the planned escape, telling Pyotr about Volkhov’s words, and how Vasily was to exit the front of the prison with the backpack, get to Pyotr, and then go to some water plant. He told Pyotr about how Volkhov and Clay were going to try to rush the guard at the back entrance and somehow make it through the destroyed fence line and then head to this same water plant.

  “It was always 50-50, Pyotr. We all knew that. Either Lev and Clay would get the drop on the guard, or the guard would get the drop on them. And… and… just as they made their exit, the troops parachuted in on top of them and dropped down all around the prison.”

  There were tears in Pyotr’s eyes as he listened, but he nodded his head and did not interrupt until Vasily had shared his whole story. Vasily told him how the soldiers had landed all over that end of town, and he told of the sound of machine gun fire coming from behind the prison. There was the sense of finality in his voice, a certainty gained not through witness, but certainty nevertheless, based on the only reasonable conclusion he could draw.

  “That’s it then,” Pyotr said, choking back tears. “They’re dead.”

  Pyotr stood and walked over to the ikons on the wall and, with tears in his eyes he bowed his head to the holy saints. “Now… Now I’ve lost everyone,” he said to the saints who were flat and long dead and who could not hear him.

  Vasily sat and watched him and the twin of his shadow on the wall. Pyotr stood for a moment before exploding in anger and, ripping the sacred iconography from the wall, he smashed each frame individually against the table that held the candles. He hurled the broken frames against the opposite wall. They burst into a hundred separate pieces against the plaster, each one a tiny fractured narrative describing the man’s pain and anguish. Vasily flinched, but he understood Pyotr’s pain. He could hear the sound of humanity in his weeping, and he commiserated with the language.

  Pyotr wept until he collapsed across a nearby table, his sobs coming in rolling, heaving waves, each gasp passing through his body and then out into the universe.

  After a time, through some inner strength, Pyotr regained his composure, steadied himself and walked calmly back over to Vasily. He wiped the tears from his face. His eyes were red, and he seemed to have exhausted himself with the outflow of emotion.

  “What do we do now, young Vasily?” he asked. “They will come for you.” Pyotr, it seems, was fully Russian. His attitude now reflected the millennia of Russian experience, which was to say… Enough of crying, I’m done with that, now what do we do?

  Vasily’s eyebrows arched. Hearing the danger that he knew was around him expressed in the words of another suddenly made it real, and he tried to push it away.

  “Why would they come for me? I was out of the prison before it happened. Maybe they won’t know I was involved.”

  “Don’t be silly, son. How did Uncle Lev and Clay get out of their cell, Vasily Romanovich? Think! How did they get out of the cluster? Who could have let them out?” As Pyotr spoke, his voice started to rise in anger.

 
“Well, they can’t know it was me. Maybe Lev or Clay got a key from somewhere else, or picked the lock, I don’t know.” He was searching in his mind for an explanation, anything… even as he knew he would find none suitable.

  “Listen, Vasily. Those paratroopers you saw were probably Russian Spetznaz. Special Forces. Uncle told me that the EMP attack would probably come on Tuesday, during the election. The arrival of Special Forces troops in Warwick means that someone felt like there was a risk of something leaking out before the event. Or maybe there is someone here who they do not want to escape. Maybe Mikail contacted them as soon as his gang had taken over the town and told them he’d captured an American spy. Who knows? That’s the thing, Vasily, we don’t know anything.”

  Vasily flinched at the name of the gang’s leader. Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov was the leader of the gang that had, just recently, taken the prison and overthrown the town. He’d been the one who had misjudged Vasily. Volkhov, before he died, had told the young Vasily not to trust anything that Mikail said.

  “Well, I said that we don’t know anything, because we don’t have a clue what’s going on, but we do know one thing,” Pyotr said. Pyotr had been raised and trained by Lev Volkhov, and knew his old uncle’s mind backward and forward. He spoke steadily now, in perfect accentless English. “We know that we must get out of here right now. I know that’s what uncle wanted, and that’s why he risked himself to get you out of there first. If you go back up there to find out what’s going on, they’ll probably kill you. If you don’t go, they’ll come here and kill both of us. The only option is that the two of us leave right now.”

  Flee? Vasily thought. It made sense, and that is what the outsider Clay had done. That is what Lev Volkhov himself had attempted. It was, of course, the best, or at least the most sensible, option. But the heart of valor has a stubborn fiber. There were too many friends and loved ones still in harm’s way for Vasily to flee just yet.