Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  Peter took in what they said and didn’t ask questions. He was calculating how to adjust the trajectory of their hike in relation to this news. One of the men, the first one who’d spoken, now chimed in again, pointing to Peter’s weapon and the one Lang had slung over his good shoulder.

  “Those guns. You better be careful with those. The Guard has been shooting on site anyone caught with guns and ammo. They don’t even ask questions. They simply fire and then relieve you of your burden. And they have snipers posted at outposts all around the town.” He nodded at Peter as he said this, as if to promise him that what he was saying was true. “They shoot first and ask questions later, buddy. And they rob and steal at will, and they are deadly efficient at it.”

  “Lord, have mercy on us!” Elsie said, almost involuntarily. Her gloved hand covered her mouth and her eyes betrayed her fear.

  “Well, you better hope that the Lord does, because the people running Carbondale will not.”

  Lang scratched his chin. He, too, was considering this new information. He’d learned from Volkhov to dig deeper, and so he did. “And they all went along with it? The whole National Guard unit?”

  “Oh, no,” the second man replied. “That’s just it. There was… thereis… a battle going on over that very thing. That’s one of the problems right now. It’s hard to tell who’s who. There was a large portion of the Missouri Guard unit that wouldn’t go along with the plan, and they’ve kind of formed themselves into, I don’t know… what would you call it?” He looked at his friends and they shrugged. “…A resistance unit?” His friends shrugged again. “They call themselves the FMA, the Free Missouri Army. Man,” he said, shaking his head, “you can’t make this stuff up. Only a few weeks ago I was buying milk on the way home for my wife, and now we have armies battling in our streets. A lot of former cops and ex-military – those are the ones that don’t seem to be going along with the Guard’s tyranny.” He looked at one of his friends. “Well, dang it, it is tyranny,” he said, obviously continuing some argument the two had been having. “You can call it temporary measures if you want, but it ain’t temporary for those folks lying in the ground.”

  Turning his back to his friend, he continued. “Anyway… so, there is a group that has set themselves up as an alternative, and they do seem to be more reasonable. If nothing else, they have local folks involved. And this FMA is the only hope that a lot of rural people have around here of not being forced into the camps. So right now, we’re all in the middle of a little ‘civil war’, and it really just comes down to who you run into.”

  Peter sighed deeply and looked at Lang. The two men raised their eyebrows at each other, and each waited for the other to speak.

  Peter spoke first, and he spoke to his group.

  “I suppose we should head straight west. We’ll have to find some way to cross Interstate 81, and that might be worse than Highway 17 was, but if we make it we can turn south. It’ll be a longer walk that way, but we’ll avoid a lot more trouble, and it seems to me like the farther we get away from Carbondale, the better.”

  Lang nodded his head, and then turned back to the three men.

  “You said we can see Carbondale from the top of that hill? Is it safe to take a look?”

  “Probably,” one of the men said. “As I said, there are snipers here and there, or at least we have heard that there are. Hell, most of what we’ve just told you is hearsay, except for what we’ve seen with our own eyes, but what we did see was bad enough. So you prolly want to lie down and keep low and don’t stay on the ridge very long.”

  “I’d like to check it out, if that’s alright with you, Peter?”

  “Yes. I think I’d like to see it too, but, you go ahead. I’ll stay here with the ladies.” He looked at the three men and smiled, before adding, “No offense of course.”

  “None taken.”

  ****

  Lang walked up the hill, and as he walked, he noticed that the pain in his shoulder had increased. Perhaps it was the standing around. The constant walking gave him focus and took his mind off the pain, but the time spent standing and talking caused him to feel every movement of the wound. He could feel the ache throb through him like a knife. It pulsed with his heartbeat, and the pain spiked if he breathed too deeply.

  As he reached the top of the hill, he dropped down on all fours in the snow and crawled the last bit until he crested the plateau. Looking down on the city, he inhaled sharply at the sight and felt the pain shoot through him, even down into his lower back.

  Spread out before him was a landscape only seen, in our age, in the movies. There was an encampment consisting of thousands of large tents pooled in the middle of a low-slung valley. Sitting up on the hill was the highway that wound around a mountain and ran through the heart of what used to be Carbondale. The camp was bordered on all sides by trenches dug into the earth - scratched in, really - with razor-sharp wire strung along the borders and watchtowers being constructed at the four-corners by people being herded through their labors by men with guns. Along the outside of the fence, men and women were digging the trench deeper, and the occasional guardsman placed around the perimeter shouted orders to hasten the work.

  The town was a direct likeness of a World War II era Nazi prison camp. There were tents stretching almost as far as the eye could see, and prisoners, most of them in clothes better meant for the city, were trudging through the gates and wandering aimlessly along the inner areas of the fence, as if they were plotting an escape, or hoping that the fences would hold fast against whatever terrors had attended their way to the camp.

  Off to the east, placed, it seemed, so that the newly arriving refugees had to trudge through it on their way to the camp, was a fresh cemetery, a burial ground for the thousands of dead. Diggers worked feverishly in the snow.

  Lang pierced his lips, blinked his eyes, and surveyed the scene. He thought about the two graves he’d already had to dig in the snow, and he knew that the ground was getting harder day by day. That wasn’t the only reason he felt sympathy for the people down below, of course, but it was one reason. He knew how hard their work was and how much harder it would become.

  Pretty soon, he thought to himself, those people are going to have to find something else to do with the bodies.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Hey, wait! Let me turn it up. That’s my jam!”

  Calvin Rhodes ran across the painted concrete floor and slid the last four feet, the brand new leather soles of his Tony Lama boots sliding, almost frictionless, to a stop at the edge of the floor-length toolbox. He reached up, cranked the handle on the radio/CD player, and then swiveled on the pointed toes of his boots, grabbing a ratchet from an open drawer in the process and using it as a microphone while he broke into a rap that betrayed a hint of accent from his Chinese heritage.

  “Yo, microphone check… one, two. What is this? The five foot assassin with the ruffneck bizness.”

  His companion, the older man leaning over the engine of an old Ford pickup, looked up and wiped the grease from his hands on his jeans. He laughed as Calvin did a little dance across the floor, throwing his knee out to the side and then pulling his hips into alignment, waving his free hand above his head and giving a little hop. He looked like a bony windmill-like contraption, or one of those air puppets that you might have seen, not long ago, in front of party stores.

  “Cal, you’re a clown. That song is older than you are! You got moves, though, I’ll give you that.” The old man changed his smile into a look of mock seriousness. “Okay, young man, we have to get busy. I’m fixin’ to see if I can get this thing started.”

  Calvin stopped his dance and came over to the front of the truck, leaning in studiously to let the man tell him what he was doing.

  “Now, this thing runs pretty simply. It’s four on the floor, and as long as you keep some coolant in the radiator and check your oil as you go, it should get you where you’re going. It’s not gonna win you any speed contests, and the only lights I have wo
rkin’ are the headlights, but if you’ll look here…” the man pointed down to the front of the motor and then traced with his finger towards the back of the engine compartment, “…I’ve been able to replace all the belts and spark plugs… put in new filters.” He paused. “And the tires are good. She should be fine.”

  Calvin looked into the engine. He was like most young American men his age and had almost no idea what he was looking at or what the mechanic was talking about. He’d been brought up in a time when cars ran on computers, as if by magic, and he wanted to ask questions so he could know what to do if the engine stopped, but he didn’t even know where to begin. The man saw the doubt in his eyes.

  Calvin looked at the man a little sheepishly. “I know that once upon a time men were both drivers and mechanics. Butmy generation…” Calvin was searching for the words when the old man helped him.

  “Well, you’ve done the first poorly, and the second not at all.”

  Calvin shook his head. “Yeah… They just became so complicated. I mean, if you can’t do it on a video game…” he paused and the old man thought, well, that won’t be a problem anymore…

  “I’ve just never even tried to work on them.”

  “Relax, Cal. Compared to those new machines, this ol’ dog is a bicycle.” He fiddled with a connection on the distributor cap until he was satisfied and then closed the hood.

  “This here is the Ranger model of the 1965 Ford F-100. It was a new thing in its day, and they only made a handful of ‘em. This special model had bucket seats, which was pretty unique for a pickup truck back in them days.” The old man walked around the front of the pickup toward the toolbox, cleaning a socket wrench with a rag as he walked. “It had carpeting, which has since been worn out, and a curtain that covered the gas tank behind the seats.” He sorted through the open drawer, found the tool he was looking for, and then turned to Calvin. “She has a couple hunnerd thousand miles on her, but it didn’t get there by not being solid. Long as you keep gas in the tank and don’t get in a hurry, and don’t git y’self killed along the way, it’ll get you to Pennsylvania.”

  Calvin shrugged and smiled at the older man. “I have no doubt. I just hope I can find gas between here and there.”

  “Well, that’s just the thing. Your man and me, we’re gonna set you up with a couple of stops along the way that’ll take care of your needs in that regard. This thing has been outfitted with a twenty-gallon tank, and I’m going to put as many gas cans as I can muster in the bed, covered by a tarp. That’ll get you as far as, maybe, Memphis.” He pointed to the running boards along the pickup’s short bed. “Now, those things there might get you into trouble. If you run into anyone on the road, don’t let ’em get close enough to jump in the back using those things. I’ve turned the rotors and replaced all the pads so the brakes shouldn’t give you any trouble, but you’ll have to be awful certain that you don’t get into any wrecks or stop too soon. If you do…,” he brought his hands up into fists and splayed his fingers and then his hands out in a slow-motion pantomime… “Poof.”

  “I got ya.”

  “Now look here, Calvin. You’re not gonna wanna to stop for nothin’, right? There are bad folks out there and they ain’t as nice as you are. You gotta get this package to your man’s folks up in P.A.” The way he said that made Calvin smile… peeyay. “There are people that’ll try to stop you just for something to divert themselves. Once you hit that road, you put your ears back and go. You hear what I’m tellin’ you?” Calvin nodded. He understood that it was an important mission that he’d been entrusted with, and he was glad to do it.

  “Believe me, this truck is gonna be the fanciest thing on the road. Everything else out there… all those automobiles that were dependent on a centralized electric nervous system… they’ve recently met with their death—powered down for the last time. However, the ol’ dog here, she’s in her prime. Even with the springs pokin’ up through the seat cushions, you’re gonna be ridin’ on a gold mine. That’s the reason I’ve kept her around for all these years.” He ran his hand along the rusted fender as lovingly as a mother might stroke the hair of her child. “That, and the fact that my granddaddy drove it, and he didn’t leave my dad much besides it. Then my dad left it to me.” He paused, his mind gone elsewhere, and then came back to himself. “So anyhow, son, now I’m leaving it to you. You take care of her and she’ll take care of you.” The older man placed his hand on the young orphan’s shoulder, this boy whom he’d come to know and love as if he were his own son.

  Calvin gulped. He didn’t much like displays of emotion, even if it was coming from the man who’d largely raised him. He was about to blush, and he could feel it, when he became aware of the sound of a screen door slamming over near the main house and the crunch of footsteps walking on the gravel across the yard toward the garage. He heard the radio wind down to the chorus, as a Tribe Called Quest rapped about how they were buggin’ out. He saw the pretty, young face of the girl he’d come to think of as his sister as it rounded the corner into the open doorway. She stood silhouetted in the frame of light, cleared her throat, and told him that Jonathan Wall was standing in the kitchen and wanted to talk to him.

  ****

  Stephen sat in the dark and listened to his mother breathing. Ever since they’d heard someone try to break into their bunker early that morning, his mother had been a bundle of nerves, but he’d finally convinced her to lie down and take a nap while he continued to prepare things for their escape.

  They would take a couple of bikes, some sets of the hazmat gear, and as much food and water as they could haul with them. They’d carry whatever they could load onto their backs and onto the bikes and still be able to ride safely and swiftly. The plan was to take their gear and flee southward, out of the city. They both admitted that it was a crazy gambit, but what else could they do?

  While inspecting the place, Stephen’s mother had discovered that the bunker had an open airway at the back of the storeroom, a small pipe that lead somewhere that they couldn’t figure. That fact made their plan to shelter there as bad as being outside, because, who knew if that airway was filtered, or—even if it was—if the filtration system even worked?

  “We need to get as far away from here as we can get,” she’d said. “This place won’t do us any good against what I fear is coming. And worse, if someone with a little more sense or a better tool than a shoulder tries to break down the door, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “I understand,” Stephen had said, “but why isn’t this place built better? Why would somebody go to the trouble of building a bunker that doesn’t protect you from the very thing it’s supposed to?”

  “Peace of mind, Stephen. Or marketing. Back during the cold war, there were people getting rich building facilities that they sold to people based on their fears. They’d weave a swell story, tell the people how only they could fix a problem, and then they’d come in and throw up some half-designed thing that would seem to the uninformed to suit their needs. Most people just want to think they are safe. That’s always true, Stephen. It doesn’t really matter whether they are actually safe or not. The same applies to a lot of the survival industry. Companies sell cheaply made goods that wouldn’t do what they were advertised to do even if the sellers had intended them to. A lot of them simply push products to make a buck. Castles in the air.” Veronica paused. She knew her rants sometimes disturbed the boy, so she got back to the point. “Of course, we don’t know if that happened here or not. Maybe that airway has a fallout filter on it and is perfectly fine. That’s just the point, boy, we don’t know. The airflow seems to be a bit too free for me to feel safe about it. Maybe it was just a design flaw, or a contingency plan, or something that, in all those years of lying dormant, got uncovered. Either way, this place is useless to us now because we can’t trus’ it. We’ll have to leave.”

  Now they were just waiting for nightfall before venturing out, and his mother had finally drifted into a fitful sleep. Stephen had unpacked a
nd repacked their bags, putting in the things his mother had laid out for him. He hummed to himself quietly while doing so, drumming his fingers on the tops of the boxes in the storeroom. He thought of his iPod and his CDs and his video games and wished he had a guitar and had learned to play it.

  He listened to his mother breathing, and wondered how long it would be before he could live, once again, in a world of music like she lived in a world of art.

  ****

  The campfire crackled when the log split open and tiny embers flew up into the air, rising on a small puff of wind and lifting toward heaven before burning themselves out and disappearing into small bits of ash.

  Four men sat looking into the fire and calculating how much food they had left and how far it would take them. Three of the men had set out on their journey together, and they had a bond that seemed solidified by some past history, perhaps the commission of a crime, while the fourth had joined them by happenstance. It was clear from the tenor of the conversation that, despite their journey thus far, the fourth remained the odd man out.

  “Mike, we need to pick up our pace if we are going to get out of these mountains before our food runs out,” Val said. Val was a hulking brute of a man, and gave off an air of one who ought not to be trifled with.

  “Relax, Val. I know what I’m doing, and listen, try to use contractions more. For example, instead of ‘ifweare going to get out of these mountains,’ you’d say, “if we’re going to get out of these mountains.’ Americans use more contractions and speak more lazily and fluidly. You sound like a robot.” Mike looked at Val and didn’t quite smile. His eyes smiled, but did so with a hint of authority and superiority. He continued.