Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  Natasha followed and quickly gestured that she would appreciate some coffee, while Kolya reached up to cover a yawn and then to straighten his glasses. “Yes, I was afraid you would never ask. I don’t suppose you would have a Pravda on hand or, better yet, a New York Times?” He looked at Pyotr to see whether this request registered any notice. It didn’t.

  As Pyotr poured the coffee, Kolya’s eyes seemed to still be on a distant thought, and Natasha watched her brother as the thought solidified and was formed into words that then came forth from his mouth.

  “I noticed something odd during our walk here, and it only now has occurred to me what it was. I don’t know what it means, but it was odd, and I thought I’d tell you.” He took the coffee as it was offered, and lifted the cup to his nose, where he smelled it and took in the rich aroma. “The whole town of Warwick is up in arms. They’ve all come out into the streets—all kinds—and they can all be seen running to and fro; and there are battles and meetings and shouting and all of the things you’d expect in a societal meltdown—”

  “Yes, we know, Kolya,” Pyotr replied, prompting him to further his thought. “Is this the thought that has finally occurred to you?”

  “No. The thought is this… where are the oldlings? What I mean by that is, where are the oldest Warwickians, the people who have been here since the beginning? I saw them all in the gym during the trial. And I’ve seen several of them since then, but it is not what one would expect. Walking here with Natasha I saw people of every kind and age and economic class, and of every ideology, all out there marching or fighting or fleeing. But the old people are… well… they’re just gone.” He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee, before adding, “It’s strange.”

  “That is strange,” Pyotr replied. “What do you make from it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think on it. Where could they be?”

  He took his coffee to his lips for another sip and let the liquid, like the warmth of his contemplation, flow through his tired body.

  ****

  The four of them descended the stairs to the basement, and Pyotr pointed out the packs lined along the wall. He described the materials he’d placed in each, and they quickly discussed a game plan.

  He was going to carry the ample medical supply kit that Lev Volkhov had gathered together over the years through some contact in the outside world, and he would also carry the gun—a Ruger 9mm pistol—that the old man had gotten somehow on the black market prior to the takeover. The rest of the supplies he’d divided among the bags by weight and what he thought the individual hikers could carry.

  In just a moment they would climb into the tunnel and traverse it on their hands and knees until they reached a spot about fifty yards in, where he and Lev Volkhov had constructed a small dugout that they could use as a way station until the EMP hit.

  “There is no sense coming out to the surface until that event takes place,” Pyotr informed the team. “All kinds of strange and wild things might happen once the electromagnetic pulse is unleashed. We’ve never seen planes fly over Warwick, but who knows what will happen when over three-thousand aircraft, a goodly percentage of them at any one time flying over the eastern seaboard of America, come plummeting to the ground when they lose power all of a sudden.” At that, the four of them each stopped and pondered the loss of human lives involved in that scenario, and though none of them had ever been on an airplane, they’d seen them on Russian television, and each could not help but imagine, even for a split-second, what it might be like to be on one of the doomed flights.

  “When the EMP hits, if it does, there may be fires, and there will certainly be panic, and one never knows what the outcome will be, so we can’t stay here. But there’s no need, once we’re hidden away in the tunnel, to come out until the air has cleared a little.

  “Lev said that there will be massive disruptions, and the power plants will go offline—probably forever—and maybe the nuclear plants, not able to shut down properly or use generators to cool their cores, may melt down as well. It’s hard to know.

  “Most vehicles, any that still have fuel and are still running after the recent storms, will stop right where they are in that micro-second when the burst hits, and the highways and cities will become death traps. This is what we face when we head out there outside the wire. Form that thought clearly in your mind. Life becomes a challenge, once the end of the world as we know it comes about.”

  “Fine, Pyotr. We will treat it with the reverence it deserves. But if I may be so bold, can we cross that bridge when we come to it? I have a more immediate concern. I have some reading to do. Will we have light there, in the tunnel, in case we need it? Or will the EMP knock those out, too?” It was Kolya with his questions, again. Pyotr was already coming to realize that the young man’s penchant for questioning was something he would have to learn to appreciate in the man.

  “I’ve packed flashlights that we can use. I have no idea how well the flashlights will weather the EMP, or if the pulse will penetrate the tunnel. Just in case, I’ve packed a few extras with batteries into the ammo can with the radio we got from the man named Clay’s backpack. We have to be careful about starting any fires in the tunnel since that would both endanger us from the carbon monoxide and threaten to give our position away should any smoke escape the tunnel. I’ve brought thick woolen blankets to cover both ends of the tunnel and block out the air so we will stay warmer throughout the night.

  “Since we only have four of us, we should be comfortable in the dugout. If Vasily had succeeded in convincing more to come along, I was beginning to worry how we would accommodate many additional people.”

  Kolya looked at Vasily and winked. “Probably a good thing you weren’t a bit more persuasive then.”

  Natasha chided her brother, quick to pick up on the hurt look on Vasily’s face, and eager, as always, to tone down her brother’s idea of humor. “Yes, Kolya, but lucky for us that he was persuasive, at least a little.”

  “What can I say?” Vasily replied. “My life is a two-edged sword. I’ve spent most of it allowing people to think I am a fool and they’ve begun to believe it.”

  “Ahhh, a fellow of infinite jest, caught in his own mousetrap,” Kolya replied.

  “Perhaps, Kolya” said Pyotr, “but he did make the effort, which is more than any of us did. It’s bad form to jab at one’s hero. And besides, we are men now, not mice.” He smiled at his own rare joke.

  “And women,” added Natasha. “Women, not mice. Don’t forget me.”

  “Wow, sister,” Kolya rolled his eyes, “you always know how to kill a good punchline.”

  She playfully punched him on the shoulder and they all had a good laugh. “Yes,” all three of the males added in a good-humored unison. “We expect that you won’t soon let us forget you.”

  “Oh, and Vasily?” Kolya said.

  “Yes?”

  “I knew you spoke English. Even before, when we were digging the graves.”

  “Well, good thing you didn’t tell Mikail and his thugs. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I like to talk, and I didn’t want you interrupting.”

  “Ahhh!” Vasily said, nodded his head and laughed.

  ****

  With that the four set off on their journey. There was camaraderie among them already as they stood in the cellar on the precipice of adventure. They strapped their bags to their backs and climbed down into the tunnel. They all moved as one in making their way out of the home that had been their only world and into the tunnel that would lead to a world they’d never seen.

  Somewhere in the mists of time, in an alternate universe, in another record of the times, there was a memory of a traveler named Clay Richter standing next to a red-haired man on a bridge talking about life and love and loss, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

  “This storm is going to wake a lot of people up,” the red-haired man had said. “There are going to be a lot of people who are homeless now.”

  Th
at was then. This is now.

  CHAPTER 14

  Red Bear energy drink was founded by Leonid Timchenko while he was on his way to becoming a billionaire oil magnate in Eastern Europe. Needing something better than coffee to keep him awake during all-night trading and gambling binges, he’d searched the world over looking for the perfect elixir. He’d found it on a busy street in Bangkok, and, before long, he’d purchased the rights and the formula. He had it altered to satisfy European tastes and, within a dozen years, Red Bear energy drink was within reach of almost everyone who could afford one anywhere in the world.

  To build the brand and to capitalize on the net number of eyes that might be tempted by his advertising for the product, Timchenko had invested millions and millions of dollars in sponsorships, supporting sporting events and concert tours, and other similar venues. He had a preference for anything that seemed dangerous, crazy, or suicidal. For this reason, one might find the angry Red Bear that graced his packaging on the hoods of racing cars at Daytona and Baja trucks in San Felipe, or on the gas tanks of motorcycles as they flew over school buses and water fountains in Las Vegas. One might even find the Red Bear on the wings of solar-powered aircraft that flew experimental technologies and touched the edges of space.

  One of Leonid Timchenko’s sponsorships was about to pay off in a way that the rest of the world wouldn’t even comprehend. Three years earlier, he’d invested millions of dollars in the crazy attempt, by a daredevil named Klaus von Baron, to parachute to earth from space.

  The plan was to launch from Roswell International Air Center in New Mexico (just a few miles from the place where the aliens had landed… or didn’t) a space capsule that was to be hauled over twenty-four miles into the stratosphere by a huge metallic balloon designed to carry Klaus von Baron into space. From his platform on his tiny capsule, in a spacesuit designed to perfection by a million of Leonid Timchenko’s dollars, Klaus von Baron would jump into the history books, plummeting faster than the speed of sound before opening his parachute and landing once again in the desert floor that had been the source of haunting, beautiful myth since long before D.H, Lawrence had written about it or Georgia O’Keefe had painted it or Billy the Kid had ridden through it or Coronado had “discovered” it.

  From space the area looks like a giant fall leaf, or maybe the soft tissue of a brain, with its landforms folded on top of each other in a veiny, vascular web. Timchenko liked the idea of his brand, his bear, floating in the sky to land on its pink, dusty surface, after having sped ferociously through space. He liked the juxtaposition that this symbolized for his drink—the hard, fast rush coupled with the sweet soft landing.

  From the outset, the magnificent attempt had been fraught with troubles and setbacks. In fact, if one were the suspicious or conspiratorial kind, the concerns that led to the many delays of the Red Bear Starjump might even seem planned or contrived. In 2011, von Baron and Timchenko were sued by a man in Massachusetts who claimed that he'd come up with the space jump idea first, arguing that the two foreigners had stolen his idea. That case was settled out of court, but it did delay the jump by almost a year. On another occasion, von Baron pushed the date back himself after having a concern over data that was the result, his team had found, of a misplaced zero in a set of velocity projections. In early October of 2012, a planned jump was aborted because of a forecast of severe weather at the launch site, only to find on that day a sunny lightness to the air.

  All of these delays had been very public, and when Timchenko and von Baron filled out their permits and papers to re-attempt their jump in early November, there were many people in and out of government who had come to feel sorry for the pair. It was beginning to seem that someone was working to sabotage their plans, and then, in the last days of October, they came to wonder if that someone was God himself. This is because, only a week before the newly re-scheduled jump, Hurricane Sandy, and then the arctic nor’easter, had struck the northeast of America.

  Those twin storms, and the havoc and social unrest that followed soon after them, made it seem like the Red Bear Starjump was going to be doomed forever. But, luckily for our intrepid daredevil and his financier, someone somewhere in the halls of power decided that perhaps having the whole world watch Klaus von Baron LIVE streaming on the Internet, as he jumped into the record books from space, would be just what a divided and beleaguered country needed. It may not be bread, the feeling went, but it was a circus, and what the country needed in the moment was release. So the jump was set.

  Since the election had been delayed in most of the northeastern United States, and since many folks in those areas were suffering without power anyway, as a distraction, the Red Bear Starjump was rescheduled for the Tuesday of Election Day. America needed some good news, some unifying event that would encapsulate why these world changing feats and challenges were uniquely representative of the things that Americans stood for. Sure, the daredevil was a German who was being financed by a Russian billionaire, but the science! The science was purely American, and therefore it passed for religion. It would provide a balm in Gilead, so to speak, made with physical daring of the elements rather than grinding chemistry of nature’s bounty. But the point would be the same. It would give the country salve to ease its wounds.

  Well, maybe that is a bit overdone, but it wasn’t altogether false either. And in any event, there was one thing that was undeniable and unstoppable. The feat was going to be accomplished over America and live via YouTube.

  ****

  Far from being diminished by the initial burst of fury spent, the escalation of the battle in Warwick came in the intervening hours to fill the forest like wildfire.

  The thin veil of law and civility that had governed relations between neighbors, bringing them along in the past so that they settled disagreements with compromise, was torn in two with a lawless spree. Not all of the crime was political, of course. The glass encasements of Kopinsky’s Jewelry were smashed as opportunists sought to profit from the madness. The longsuffering priest of St. Olaf’s church stood in the doorway and watched his chapel stripped of its treasures.

  Men who had come to despise their wives gave them beatings without threat of reprisal, and women who were jealous of their neighbors’ good fortunes stood in the street and applauded the arson of their rivals’ homes. A cruelty that had been unimaginable only hours before suddenly announced that it had been silently brewing for ages.

  In the battle lines that formed, there were rich against poor, and weak against strong, and young against old (but not the very old, for some odd reason that almost no one had recognized). In the forming and reforming of alliances, the battles ultimately descended into simply whoever happened to be in the proximity of reach against anyone who had anger and hatred to burn. There was no rhyme or reason to the ordering of the conflict.

  Instead, there was simply breakdown and confusion, and double-crossing and intrigue. In such a situation, even the cooler minds had begun to flail in imagined wrongs that deserved redress. In this way, the Battle of Warwick was perhaps no exception to any battle that had ever been fought in a civil war in a community of humankind. It was like a nightmare born of chaos, sired by rumors and fueled by neglect.

  If you had asked any one of the townsfolk what they were fighting for (or against) it would have been impossible to find a consensus. The answers would have been myriad. Country, pride, family, flag, brotherhood, freedom, jobs, religion, economy… anything. But in the innermost heart of that wide-ranging chaos, there was perhaps only one true note. Survival. Life itself descended into every man for himself and every woman for her interest. Bertrand Russell once wrote that war does not determine who has won or who has lost, but merely who is left, and this became the overriding ethic of the day’s developments.

  The point had shifted from taking back the town or impressing upon others a central tenet or ideology, to one in which everyone simply wanted to live through it. Make it right, or make it good, became… just make it.

&n
bsp; The fact that the expediencies of war quickly descended into brutality and disorder was not entirely, of course, due to a lack of effort on the part of the gang led by Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei. The triumvirate of power had spent the long previous night trying to put down the initial signs of uprising with the belief that, through a decisive show of force, they could convince their fellow townspeople to abandon their thoughts of war and reprisal and settle into their newly-established places under the leadership they hoped to provide. They believed that the control they exerted over the Spetznaz troops was a definitive advantage that they could use to put an end to the matter before it had even begun. However, here is where the differences in approach between Mikail and Vladimir came into play in perhaps its most crucial twist.

  The brutish Vladimir never had any sense of the nuances or subtleties of leadership that Mikail had tirelessly attempted to show him. He’d always believed and ceaselessly relied upon the unerring superiority of physical force as a means of proving his point, and, as a result, there had been perhaps a natural split between the two and between those who were inclined to see the points that the two were each attempting to make in their own way.

  Vladimir had influenced a certain contingent of the Spetznaz, even through their very brief association, to shoot first and ask questions later, while Mikail had likewise argued for a more long-term, circumspect, and perhaps more patient approach in which the influence of power could be used without actually having to resort to its display. This had resulted in the Spetznaz being divided between those who were ready to fight the townsfolk immediately in order to secure the perimeter of the battlefield, and those who were more content to simply watch and wait until the action seemed to reach its own conclusion.