Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  He looked at the box, held it up and wondered what was in it. He’d said he would open it if ever there was a moment when the contents might be used to help them survive or to save a life. He’d not thought of the box when he’d almost given up on treating Lang with anything other than a parlor trick.

  Peter did wonder if anything in the box could speak to the issue, but, just in the nick of too late, the sugar had come to the rescue, and now he felt like the sanctity of the box must remain intact. He could not have explained why, if you’d asked him to, but he trusted his gut. He placed the box back in the bag, sat, and thought.

  Altogether, for Peter, it was a moment of perfect beauty, the placing of the sugar in the wound, and then the box in the bag. Like in some, perhaps even many, of our best moments, there was a connection, something tangible but also spiritual. He felt that there was direction in the confluence of events that was unknown because unknowable. There was something in not looking in the blue box, because that box had a purpose, and that purpose was not yet. If Natasha had not found the sugar, and then Peter had been searching the backpack, he’d surely have opened the box. But Natasha had found the sugar, and it was perfect. It was what was needful at the moment.

  Sure. He’d be disappointed if, upon opening the box someday, it turned out that the box was full of childhood teeth, or Chiclet gum, or beads from some bracelet or necklace from long ago. That would be a downer, for certain, because Peter believed that whatever was in that box was important. It was for saving lives. It had to be, and it was for the sustenance of that crucial belief that he once again refused to open the blue box. This once… this one shining moment… Peter trusted his gut.

  ****

  As the darkness gave way to gray, and then the gray in its turn succumbed to the brightness of the new morning, three of the travelers slept a little longer than they should have, and the fourth, Peter, hadn’t slept at all. He’d tried to maintain watch but had drifted in and out of deeper and deeper thought. Anything to keep his mind off of Lang.

  For this reason, none of them were ready when the attack came.

  It all started peacefully enough. Peter, eyes open, was slipping in and out of brain sleep as he leaned against a tree. He’d been looking down at the cabin from a small ridge to the southwest of the structure when some men rode up on horseback and said hello.

  He never saw them or heard them coming.

  CHAPTER 30

  Life often goes along in a stream. The details float by like a leaf on a river. The current is pushing and pulling the leaf, but we do not see it because we are standing on the banks of the river, attending to our lives. There are moments when the leaf is caught up in little eddies. Events pile up. They gather like twigs—like flotsam and jetsam—caught up in the stream of life. Time blocks and unblocks in little bursts at such places. Information pours through like water. The details crystallize. Various pressures and turbulences in the river, pouring into the sea of life, push and pull, but we do not see it. We do not see the leaf or the pushing and pulling.

  Because we are standing on the banks, attending to our lives.

  The leaf cannot be blamed for our missing it. Nor, from its perspective, should it care that we missed it. For its part, it is merely floating down the river on its back, caught up in swirling little curlicues of water, looking up at the stars. Perhaps, in the end, it is a matter of perspective after all. Perhaps if the leaf were to notice us, standing there on the shore,we would seem like mere details. Perhaps the leaf would think that we are just details among many other details, standing there along the banks, trying to be seen or to avoid being seen.

  But sometimes even that is not the case.

  Sometimes we are the leaf.

  We get caught up in ourselves, in our own bodies, or in the stream. We are running, or driving, or riding, but almost always we are in motion. The details, the narrative flow of our lives, the events, they simply stream along past us. Drawing from the past, pushing toward an unknown future.

  Perhaps we can be blamed for what we miss, we who are in perpetual movement. Perhaps not. We feel the miles roll by underneath us on the highway and feel them to be, like the stars overhead, endless, when they are not. We drift along on those details, noticing them as if they were standing on the river waving to us as we stream along. But we do not really notice them—the details—not really. Because we are on automatic pilot, just lazily floating down the river.

  This happens even in catastrophes. We miss the signs.

  ****

  It was almost midnight, and Veronica and Stephen had covered an incredible amount of ground on their bikes in two straight days of riding.

  They’d ridden across Staten Island, and then into New Jersey, and on into Pennsylvania. If you had asked Veronica to tell you her plan—what she hoped to do—she would simply have pointed to the ground and said: “Get as far away from here as possible.”

  After crossing the Verrazano Bridge, they’d passed through the destruction of the storm called Sandy on Staten Island. There were still boats in people’s yards, some sitting on roofs of houses, and rubble and debris were everywhere. The Island was all covered with snow now. Here and there, the rubble peeked up through the piles of snow, as if to remind the people that it—the rubble—was still there.

  Veronica and Stephen rode along through the broken city and past the destruction, past the piles of snow. Here and there they dodged rats that skittered across their pathway. Their hazmat gear barely raised an eyebrow as they rode along the coastline, and they rode on through the frozen fog likes ghosts, their yellow suits shimmering with a light glistening of moist sea air.

  They rode past the piles of broken boards, the twisted pieces of siding, the musty old couches, all frozen under snow piled high along the rubble’s edges in heaping white mounds. They passed by in silence.

  They passed into New Jersey and into the suburbs and crossed bridges and hills and streams. They pushed forward like pilgrims, seeking a celestial city, or at the very least, a better country.

  ****

  Closer to the cities, the people were fleeing. The crowds were fleeing. They were on the bridges and the byways. They pushed like cattle through a chute where the roads narrowed around the debris of cars and trucks strewn through the streets. Vehicles and obstacles caused the waters of humanity to bulge around them like boulders in a stream, and, at the overpasses, the humans would stack up and bubble and roil until the waters made their way to the narrowed passage where they would gain speed and pick up momentum before shooting out of the other side. The people streamed along as if they were being drawn out of the cities and into the countryside by gravity or some other force of physics. They all walked with purpose, heading… Where?

  ****

  Veronica and Stephen had passed through the crowd as if in a protective bubble. Their hazmat suits worked like talismans. The crowds opened up around them as if they had the plague, as if they were aliens just landed on earth, and no one wanted to get too close.

  Veronica and Stephen traveled as if under a star.

  As darkness began to fall, the crowds thinned. Then, eventually, they disappeared altogether.

  It was almost midnight.

  Veronica and Stephen cruised along the back country roads that spread across the Pennsylvania countryside like a capillary system, drawing the goods from the richest farms in the world to market.

  Every once in a while, they would get off the bikes and walk them for a spell. Or, they would stand and rest for a few moments and look at their surroundings in excitement and wonder.

  “These roads once all led to Hershey,” Veronica said. She pointed off in the distance to a skyline that was darkened except for what was illuminated by the moon.

  Stephen smacked his lips. “Man! If I only had a Reese’s cup right about now!” He poked her in the ribs.

  “Naughty boy. One day, I will show you your Gramam’s recipe for chocolate. It is twice as good!”

  Stephen just laughe
d and they stood with their bikes and looked down the fence lines at the farms along the road.

  “These farms are among the most productive in the world, and the most beautiful.” She indicated with her hand to the farms. “And see how the fields spread thick with snow in wide, white blankets?” She pointed with her hand to the thick white swatches of color in front of them. “They look like that most winters. The snow lies there and replenishes the earth. And in spring they turn the pig manure under. Ewww!” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Then the whole county stinks, but it’s not so bad when they use horse or cow dung.”

  “How do you know all this, mom?”

  “I learned how to read, boy. You should too.” She looked at him sideways. “You with your video games.” They shared a look and remembered where they were, and what the world was like now.

  It wasn’t really hard to do, the remembering, standing there, as they were, in the midst of the wide blue world, the ancient winter of Pennsylvania farmland rising up around them in a glow, their bright yellow suits shimmering with moisture in the moonlight.

  ****

  “Dude, I saw this interview with Manson once. He said the difference between him and the regular people out there is that—” The tattooed teenager paused and leaned forward. “Give me a loosie.” The other young man handed him a cigarette. He lit his match and fired up the end, and then he indicated to the world with the cigarette. “If the regular guy out there, if he stepped off a bus in Des Moines at 10 p.m. and called his Aunt Gertrude and she wasn’t home…,” The tattooed young fellow blew out smoke in tiny little circles, and coughed. “…and Aunt Gertrude was his only ride, and if he was flat broke, the average guy wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Whereas he—Manson—would dip into an alley and grab a tire iron and he’d be in business.”

  Snort. Hmph! The second young man, who was listening to the tattooed young fellow rattle, gave only this harrumphing series of audible gesticulations as retort, and this conversation continued thusly for a while.

  The two teens were sitting by the roadside, crouched low to the ground in a ditch. They were part of a militia patrol unit sent forward to scope out the road. Actually, they were scouts for a group of bandits, but they liked to think of themselves as a militia. They’d copped some uniforms, and several of the older bandits had some military experience, so they’d received a little training, but not much. They called themselves the Pennsylvania Anarchists Corps, the PAC, or usually, “The PACK.”

  This unit, made up almost entirely of new recruits, orphans, and people forced into duty by the leaders, had been sent forward to make sure the road was safe, but right now the boys were sitting along a ditch. Actually, to be accurate, they were sitting in the ditch and telling stories to one another—trying to impress each other with their toughness, their readiness to do whatever it takes—the way teenaged boys will.

  They didn’t notice at first when the two yellow suits rode up on bikes.

  ****

  Sometimes life can go by like a stream of details in a narrative. Page after page, the stream of time pushes through, gathering force. The details can be like brushwork on a painting, the buildup of the paint. Or like the fingers at the keyboard, the wastebasket full of crumpled ideas. The drink of scotch, the scratch of a head, the scratching out of ideas on pads of paper. The pushing in of soil around the roots. The coming of spring. All this is done in the pursuit of art. Beauty, and Art. Which are to enliven and protect life. Because the point of all this is to enliven and protect life. To live, that is, in the here and the now. To live thoroughly and authentically. To live in nature. To walk out under the stars like Whitman and look up in the silence and take it all in.

  Veronica was thinking these things as they pedaled along.

  It is really very simple,Veronica thought. The point is to live–and to keep living.

  Hear that, she told herself.

  The point is… to live.

  ****

  Veronica and Stephen had no idea what they were riding into because all they could see was white and even more white. Patches of field spread out across their view in the moonlight, enhancing the panorama with its breathless series of farms and fields. It looked like an Amish quilt. The fields of white were intercut with black segmenting lines that ran their way around the edges of the farms. Veronica and Stephen were simply riding along enjoying the cool night air, weaving down another mile of long, thin ribbon.

  At first Veronica didn’t even see him. The man simply stepped out into the roadway and held up his hand. It was probably his rifle she saw first. Slung over his shoulder the way it was, it hung across his body, intersecting his torso, pointing up at right angles to the nighttime sky. She had just begun to focus on the rifle when she felt herself motioning to Stephen to stop. She began to search for the pistol she had strapped to her bike.

  That’s when a gang of bandits descended on them from all sides.

  ****

  Calvin Rhodes also cruised along the stream of time. He also drove on his ribbon of highway, stringing up and down the rolling hills and stretching plains and backwood hollers and the ancient farmland of This Great Country (That’s the way he’d always heard it said where he’d grown up. This Great Country.)

  The countryside he’d passed through was some of the richest farmland in the world. He passed mile after mile through the Piney Woods, then through the Ozarks, and through West Virginia coal mining country, into Pennsylvania. He drove into that state’s coal country and then dropped southwards along the state’s border, and into what is perhaps the best farmland of all.

  But before that—along the way—along the seemingly interminable stretch of highway that is Tennessee, he’d stopped at one of his checkpoints.

  “I knew yer daddy. He was a good man.”

  That was all the man had said to him. Then the man leaned into the window and shook Calvin’s hand. He told Calvin that now he ought to have enough gas to get him to his next stopover.

  “Tell Mr. Wall, when you see him, that Lem said hello.”

  Calvin nodded solemnly, and the old man put his foot on the kickboard and made a motion with his arms like he was slinging the truck outward into space, throwing his arms out, as if to say ‘on your way!’

  Everyone, it seemed, knew Jonathan Wall. Everyone who was helpful at a time like this had read Mr. Wall’s books.

  Calvin pulled out along the winding road and out to the county highway, and the adventure continued.

  He thought about home as he drove along. He thought about that word. Home. He thought about Texas. Then he thought about his dad. He’d always had a kind of fluid identity. Maybe his dad had passed that on to him. Mostmen are, he thought, fluid beings. They either bend with the times, or they are of the sort that shape them. His mind had wandered, and he wondered whether he was a “home is where you hang your hat” kind of guy. Then he thought again about the man who’d sent him on this journey, Mr. Wall. Jonathan Wall was a man who shaped the times. His name described him more than anything else did. Everyone of any import in this new world knew Jonathan Wall because Mr. Wall was the man who’d said that all of this would happen. He was the man who, in his books, told people to expect it and to prepare.

  The rolling hills and the beautiful trees and the quiet of the nighttime sky whizzed by, and they all could have been waves on the ocean for all Calvin noticed them. He was riding on a train of thought down a track.

  He watched the road ahead of him the way a person who is getting sleepy watches the road. In a daze. That is perfectly understandable. It is in the nature of things.

  Because it was midnight, and Calvinwas, in fact, getting sleepy.

  CHAPTER 31

  The lamps from Calvin’s old Ford pickup threw a distinct pair of spotlights onto the roadway. They were not centered on the stripe, aiming at some unified middle distance. They simply pointed straight forward out onto the roadway just in front of him, but only just in front. Headlights are one of the things
that did, indeed, improve over time.

  The Ford’s lights only revealed the world in stages. They lit up each successive field of vision only a slight… bit… further… ahead. Having driven mostly by instinct for an hour, flying mostly blind, Calvin was blurrily staring out into the dark of the night. He was looking into the space that the lamps lit least. They shone out as if they were spotlights on a stage. They pointed downward from the balcony onto the stage of his life, which, right now, was the roadway. Seated in that balcony, he was only a spectator.

  In the two globules of light, spread out and amplified by the white of the snow, framing the shot, were two yellow suits fighting for their lives.

  They were fighting as if they wanted to live.

  ****

  Calvin saw them but he did not know, at first, what to make of them. It was a surreal vision. They were off in the further distance, just on the wings of the stage. The scene, gathering light, only came slowly into view. There were two groups of men. Boys, really. Fighting with the suits, trying to get them into several trailers or wagons parked along the road. The yellow suits were struggling to escape from their captors. The taller of the suits was reaching backwards, toward something lying in the road.

  ****

  Calvin can almost make it out. He can almost see what the thing is laying in the road. It is coming into his headlights. And then he is upon it. The miles and the yards and the feet… and the inches. They all flew by him. He came to a dead, forward, thrusting standstill.