Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  “That means the wound is healing and the gauze has dried into the wound,” Peter said. “Even though it hurts, ripping the wound open is actually good for it.”

  Lang bit down and looked at Peter through bleary eyes. The older man spread his hands as if to indicate that he could not quite explain exactly how it was good, but Lang would just have to trust him. Lang leaned his head back against the now cold stone and blinked that he did.

  After Peter was finished caring for the bullet wound, they boiled enough water to fill all of their water bottles, and Peter said that this was the best they could do in the moment as far as water purification.

  “Does boiling the water guarantee that the water will be pure and free from any dangerous bacteria?” Natasha had asked.

  “Nothing ever guarantees anything,” was all Peter had said to that.

  After packing up their gear, by around 8 a.m., they were ready to continue their walk. Checking the map and the compass, Peter plotted a course for them, and they set out through the snow, feeling the weight and mileage in their legs from the previous day’s trek.

  They continued their southwesterly advance, and they were surprised and pleased to discover that, for most of the day, they moved through empty forestland and not suburban tracts or areas thick with farms and their fences. They made good time, and kept up their cautious movement, advancing steadily until the day began to morph into evening.

  ****

  As the darkness began to fall, they saw from a low hill a space in the distance where the forest seemed to end, and they noticed the long black shadows of some type of structures that rose above the trees. They couldn’t quite make them out at first, but in a moment they could see them, distinct in their regularly placed intervals and structurally different from the chaotic mass of limbs and branches reaching like tentacles into the nighttime sky. In the gloaming they looked like dinosaurs against the darkening heavens, sitting up on a ridge where their skeletons towered over the valley.

  As they grew closer, the structures disappeared into the mishmash of branches and darkness immediately over their heads, and they began to hear the now familiar sounds of people and gunfire, first in the distance, and eventually in the foreground. They slowed their approach and wove through the trees, staying hidden among the trunks and the brush until they eventually stepped to the edge of a clearing and saw spread out before them what looked, for everything in the world, like a battlefield.

  The clearing was now deserted. However, this desertion had only happened recently, because the fires of a large encampment—one that would have served a large group of families—were spread here and there throughout the long, clear-cut strip, and the fires still burned.

  As they surveyed the damage and looked around for any signs of movement they heard a crackling overhead and one of the wooden dinosaur looking structures, burning at its base from a fire set near a group of tents around the foundation, came suddenly to groan and creak and then to give way. It crashed to the ground in a huge, roaring din, its tail, connecting it to the other structures, tightening from the weight of the fallen beast before the tension was too much. The fall of the dinosaur and the tension in its tail caused it to snap and whip back upwards, sending a high-pitched ricochet through the valley that made the hikers flinch and step back as the noise whistled down the valley.

  ****

  The trees and forest ended abruptly in a straight, ruled line and there was a long clearing, and when the three travelers examined the scene they noted that the strip was actually a long beltway that ran from northwest to southeast. Down this long, cleared strip ran power lines, held aloft by enormous wooden towers. The streak of land cut through the forest like a landing strip, and the scene looked, if they hadn’t known better, as if planes had merely skimmed in low to the ground and strafed the dozens of encampments along the strip with gunfire. Obviously, the refugees had been using the stretch of clearing as a highway to move from wherever they were to wherever they were going, and, not unlike Highway 17, which was still clear in their minds, this well-traveled route of escape had become a death trap for those who had thought to take the easy way out. In fact, if anything, this strip was the worse for having had one day more for the crowds to indulge in their mayhem.

  Peter made sure the trio stayed low, and they moved quickly and with purpose, and they kept their eyes peeled to their surroundings as they surveyed the remains of the battle that had taken place, seemingly just moments before, in the field.

  From the destruction, debris, and corpses lying around in the snow, Peter determined that this had been a makeshift refugee camp. He deduced that maybe thirty families had been staying in the clearing until only moments ago. The battle was not long in the past—perhaps an hour or so—but not longer.

  The older man knelt down, and his eyes took in the gruesome scene. He looked out into the woods to the south, and he pointed so that Lang and Natasha could follow what he was about to say.

  “It looks like they came from that way, through the woods. Some kind of looter raiding party. A gang of thugs, or… maybe they were middle-class teachers, grocers, and lawyers? Who’s to know? I’d say it was ten or twelve of them. The attackers came out from the woods. It was not long ago, this very evening, because the fires were burning. We heard that noise earlier. It’s likely that the refugees had no night vision from staring into the fire. Some of the tents and supplies spilled over into the fires in the confusion. The raiding party probably staked out the place from those trees.” He pointed back to the south, along a thicket of brush.

  “They waited until they felt it was the right time, and then they hit hard and fast. It looks like about two-thirds of the people in this camp didn’t even stand a chance, cut down before they could stand up and figure out what was going on. No chance at all to get to any kind of cover.” Peter turned and swiveled on his heels as if he were watching the attack in real-time as it played out before him.

  “The looters took what they wanted, then they went that way.” He pointed to the northwest, following with his finger up the greenbelt.

  Peter didn’t want to spend too much time in the refugee camp, but he felt it prudent to do a quick and cursory search for supplies and weapons, anything the looters had missed. They moved quickly. Wrapped up inside a fallen tent, they found a .22 Marlin squirrel rifle and about ten boxes of ammunition. Lang was the first to find it, and he silently held it up for Peter to appreciate.

  Natasha protested at first, when Peter and Lang took the rifle and packed away the ammunition in Lang’s backpack, but Peter explained to her that the people who owned this stuff… they were all gone. And the gun, if left here, would be taken by someone else coming by, either by good people with benevolent intentions, or by wicked people with evil intentions. “The only way that we can ensure that it falls into the right hands,” he spread his own hands, as if the answer were obvious, “is to take it ourselves. Use it for right purposes.”

  Despite the clear logic in that argument, Natasha felt conflicted. “You need to know right now,” Peter told her, in a firm way, but with concern and kindness, “that much of what we’re going to need to survive is going to be found and salvaged from this point forward. We don’t have the luxury of hunting down the next of kin, or taking found goods to the sheriff’s office or authorities. There are no stores or businesses now, not from what we’ve already experienced. From what you’ve seen with your own eyes, Natasha, there aren’t any authorities.”

  Natasha nodded her head, and Peter told her he was glad she understood and that he hoped that she would have the stomach for everything that was ahead of them. “Even if you don’t, however, you have to be honest about what we’re facing. This is not a movie at the Pushkinsky-Cine, little daughter. This is our life now.”

  She nodded again, and told him that she knew what was required, but that she just didn’t want to lose her humanity.

  “I am helping you to save that humanity, dear girl,” Peter said. He let that sink i
n for a beat. “We are not in the land of the living anymore.”

  Peter frowned and she grimaced. Lang bent to pick up his pack. The three of them stood in the clearing for a moment, and the ancient differences between men and women swirled around them as they weighed their thoughts. Unlike the couple from the day before, they silently agreed to let those differences help them rather than tear them apart, and eventually the three of them turned to trudge back toward the tree line, to make their way out of the clearing.

  Just as they were turning to take their leave, however, Natasha told them to stop. The men almost responded in anger. Peter drew in his breath to rebuke Natasha and tell her to get past her doubts. He looked at her as if to warn her that they had to get moving and was just about to speak in his impatience.

  It was only then that he heard what she was hearing. Natasha raised her hand as if to quiet him, and he held his breath and his eyes followed in the direction of her pointing.

  A moan came from one of the collapsed tents. They rushed to it and lifted its canvas and dug into its crevices to find the door. Once they had found it, they gently lifted the tent away until they found her.

  She was beaten and bruised, and terribly afraid, but she was alive. She was still in the land of the living.

  CHAPTER 23

  Dostoevsky said that “the best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”

  Lang could not help feeling that this was true of himself at that instant, as he realized that the woman in the tent was alive and that her injury was minor and survivable. He did not mean to think of rushing away and abandoning her. Such an act certainly would never have occurred to his conscious mind willingly, but it occurred nonetheless. Somewhere in his unconscious mind, his reckoning of the stench of death and fire in the clearing mixed with his guilt at the thought of leaving, his conscience burned brightly like the flames of perdition. He smelled it like charred goose feathers in his nostrils, and he melted in those flames. Had he so soon forgotten his own relatively recent deliverance from bondage? From injury? Was he that ungrateful? He considered himself a man of human compassion and was he so soon to be devoid of that feeling? His face flushed.

  Lang had never really read the Bible much, but he was aware of many of its teachings, and one of the ones he liked most was the notion that a man could show no greater love than to lay down his life for others. He caught himself in his quick brush with self-centeredness and reached down a hand to help the woman off the ground. Maybe only a man who is aware of his weaknesses and failings can properly love in that way.

  ****

  Elsie was her name and she was barely conscious. It took some doing to carry her into the woods and into some similitude of safety. Lang had a wounded arm, and they dared not drop their packs or weapons, so the going was slow, but they eventually accomplished the task. Once they were in cover among the trees, Peter went to work again with the first aid kit. Before long, he had her forehead wound cleaned up without too much trouble. It was harder to get her to take the two aspirin that Peter gave her for her headache than it had been to carry her into the woods. She didn’t want the pills, but it helped Peter that the woman was in shock and that she didn’t put up too much of a fight.

  Before long, and with some water and attention, Elsie was able to give her name and ask where she was. Slowly, she began to piece together her new reality. Peter noticed right away that this lady was made of stern stuff.

  Elsie knew that her husband was dead. She’d seen as much before she lost consciousness. Even though she’d been struck in the head with a rifle butt at the onset of the attack, she didn’t lose consciousness immediately, she told them. Her husband, before being shot to death, and in the midst of the confusion from the raid, was able to hide his injured wife in their tent. She was peeking through the tent flap with her hand over her own mouth to stifle her cries and her overwhelming need to scream, and she’d started to lose consciousness when she saw one of the men shoot her husband in the head. That’s when she passed out. Now, here she was awake, only to find out that her nightmare was very real.

  As she told her story, Natasha sat down beside the woman and placed an arm around her waist. She could tell that Elsie wasn’t sure what the intentions of these three people were, and she wanted the woman to know that she was in good company now. With the telling of her story done, through sobs and tears, Elsie collapsed into Natasha’s arms and the men fell silent with nothing to say that might even begin to help.

  Peter and Lang had their guns at the ready, torn between allowing this woman space to grieve for a short moment, and the need to get moving before more trouble came through the woods or up the greenbelt.

  Elsie’s sobs faded, and now she seemed to draw strength from somewhere unknown. She placed hands on her knees and tried to push herself up, falling woozily back into Natasha’s arms as Peter reached out to lend a hand.

  “We have to bury my husband.”

  Lang and Peter exhaled in unison, and Peter’s jaw tightened as he drew in another breath. He consciously scanned the horizon in every direction for the trouble that he knew was surely coming. The two men stepped to the side to confer, leaving Natasha to comfort Elsie.

  Peter and Lang stared into one another’s eyes for a moment, recognizing the difficulty of the situation. Neither man said a word for one, two, three seconds… then Lang’s eyes softened. He shrugged and nodded, and Peter’s jaw tightened again, but this time the older man closed his eyes and nodded his head in agreement.

  “Ma’am,” Peter said as gently as he could manage, kneeling down in front of her so his voice would be soft and low. “I am sorry about your husband. I know that doesn’t help you, hearing me say that, but it’s the truth. The three of us have lost more friends in the past couple of days than you can possibly imagine. None of us is immune to loss… but,” he paused and searched for the best words to say what he had to say, “there are some things… I need…” He paused again and took a deep breath.

  “Ma’am, we’re in the middle of cataclysmic meltdown. The whole country and, really, the whole world as far as we know – it’s never going to be the same. I can’t explain entirely, but let’s just say that I have an uncle, he was a friend to all of us. His name was Lev. He was… well… let’s say that he was a highly-placed official. He wasn’t really, but that’ll help you believe what I have to say. Lev told us that there are probably going to be 300 million people dead or dying in the next year, and… well… frankly…” he hesitated for a moment, looking at her to see if she was willing to believe him, “…we can’t bury 300 million people.

  “All of them are real people, and they all have loved ones, but we just can’t do it. Nobody can.”

  Elsie looked into Peter’s eyes without anger or hatred or even confusion. He saw that she believed him, even with his roundabout way of telling her the truth. But then something else flashed in her eyes.

  “I’m not asking you to bury 300 million people,” she said. “I’m merely asking you to bury my husband.”

  ****

  The attempted burial was difficult to an extreme. The hard ground, frozen solid in the north in winter, meant that in the old days, bodies were simply placed in a back, unheated room to wait for spring. Burials happened after the thaw when the ground softened and shovels could break it more easily. However, you try telling that to a woman who just saw her husband murdered before her eyes. Tell her that you can’t bury the body because the ground is frozen.

  Peter looked into her eyes and determined that she was an intelligent woman, and reason would return to her in good time. Nevertheless, for right now, Elsie needed a token that would let her turn her back on her dead husband and walk toward the rest of her life. She needed to have closure, and so Peter needed to find some way to bury the man that would give her that token… but it needed to happen quickly, and they had nothing even approximating the proper tools.

  Peter had a mini camp shovel in his pack, and Lang had the knife
and a stick. They quickly located and dragged Elsie’s husband into the woods. She’d pointed out the area where he had gone down and described what he was wearing, and they had rushed quickly out into the clearing to retrieve him; so quickly in fact, that they had pulled off his shoes while they were dragging him.

  Glenn was his name. Peter seemed to be intent on noting that as they collected his body. Lang just noted aloud that he was tired of digging graves.

  They set themselves to digging. They couldn’t go very deep. To do so would just be impossible with the tools at hand. They scratched down a few inches under the snow, and when they could go no further, when all of their efforts resulted in nothing at all, they dragged Glenn’s body into the indentation and searched around for twenty minutes to find enough rocks so that they could pile them on the body. They ended up with an above ground burial. The rocks would serve—as much as possible—to keep the animals away from the corpse. Elsie would just have to understand, because, well, it was winter and the ground was now frozen. They had no tools. What else can you say?

  They gathered around the grave with Elsie, and no one said anything. What do you say in such moments, standing at a stranger’s grave with a woman you don’t know who has just lost her husband? Peter thought of his wife and children. Lang thought of his town and felt the pain shooting through his arm. Natasha thought about her brother.

  After a few minutes, Elsie just nodded and walked away. Peter and Lang once again caught one another’s eyes as they turned their backs on Glenn and the specter of needless, wanton death. Natasha lingered for just a moment and looked into the night’s sky. She saw in a patch of blue-black darkness a line of geese flying overhead through the stillness. She would have sworn that the geese’s Ya-honk was an accusation, but for the life of her, at that moment, she could not have explained just why.