Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  The man ordered the other soldiers to tie Peter to the tree, and they did so without any hesitation. It was at this point when reality zoomed back into focus, the brain sleep cleared, the adrenaline began pumping, and Peter realized that he was seconds away from being killed.

  ****

  When the firing started from down the hill, the man on horseback, the leader of this Missouri National Guard unit, was sighting down his rifle and just about to pull the trigger in order to execute Peter for the crime of illegally bearing arms. He hesitated though, just as he was about to squeeze off the fatal round, when he heard shots ring out from just down the hill, near the cabin. His eyes shifted towards the sound of the shots and he spotted the interruption just in time to see the second soldier, who was just then attempting ingress into the cabin, fall mortally wounded.

  During that millisecond when his eyes cut to the cabin, his rifle swayed. It was a tiny motion. Most people would have never noticed it. Perhaps the sway was involuntary, but it was enough. Bringing his attention back to his task, he had to take just a tiny second longer to steady his aim, sitting on the horse, and at that moment, almost the instant he found his target again, his head burst into a spray of blood, brains, and bone.

  The body toppled off the horse, and as the dead officer’s blood began to pump into the snowy ground, his body writhed. Two more of his men dropped in succession—felled by bullets fired from somewhere in the distance.

  The shots that killed the soldiers could only be faintly identified as sharp cracks piercing the crisp morning air. The sound echoed for a moment and then was gone. The remaining soldiers began to drop to the ground in panic, and they attempted to crawl back over the low rise, but before they could find cover, two more of them were shot dead from afar.

  It was a turkey shoot.

  ****

  Lang awoke to the sound of gunfire. Really close gunfire. He remembered waking up this way that last morning in Warwick, and he instinctively rolled over and felt the pain shoot up his wounded arm. It was a different pain, and his brain registered the difference. He was feeling better, he could tell. The sugar cure was working, and even without any food last night or breakfast this morning, he felt like life was returning into him. He’d gone to sleep not knowing if he would ever wake up again, but now he was awake, and the gunfire gave impetus to his feelings of being free and alive. However, now there was shooting going on, and he needed to find out what it was all about.

  He low-crawled into the hallway and saw a dead soldier slumped over the broken wood of the door, and could see another dead soldier only a few feet outside the entryway, splayed backwards and bleeding from his mouth and nose.

  Lang heard shuffling and felt a strong tug on the back of his jacket. He looked up to see Natasha and Elsie pulling him. He lurched to help them, and they dragged him out from the sight lines of the doorway and into the front bedroom. He looked around at the room. It was the one that Natasha had first rolled into when the men tried to invade the cabin. He rolled up on his shoulder and, just as he did, more gunfire shattered the morning. Bullets pierced through the walls like they didn’t even exist, and Lang noticed as little holes of light appeared in the walls and streams of sunshine flowed through the little holes and splashed across the floor in tight lines. A wooden building is not a great place to be in a battle, he thought.

  “Nope. Not this room!” Natasha shouted, and now Lang was being dragged again, like a mannequin, past the hallway and into the kitchen. Natasha had noticed when they’d first entered the cabin that the exterior walls of the kitchen were made of heavy field stone. If she remembered correctly, the stone went at least four feet up the surface. Natasha, Elsie, and Lang stumbled in their low crawls into the kitchen area as the cabin began to rock with the gunfire that relentlessly pierced the structure.

  ****

  Kent was sick. He could feel his stomach spasm, and the stew and vodka tumbled around in his gut and would not settle. It was not the food and drink from the previous night that had made Kent sick – at least it was not primarily the food and drink. He was sick of everything. Mostly he was sick of Val.

  “Damn, are you drunk, again, pudgy boy?”

  It was Val, talking over his shoulder. The large, brutish man had become for Kent a symbol of everything that made him sick, of everything that was making the whole world sick.

  “I drank but one cup last night,” Kent muttered under his breath. The alcohol sloshed in his stomach. He knew that probably wasn’t true.

  The four were struggling up a sharp incline, and Mike had ordered Kent to carry the new backpack—the one they’d just taken from the man that Val had recently killed.

  The four travelers had stumbled upon the man sobbing in the woods. He was wearing what might have once been a business suit, and he didn’t hear the approaching party until it was too late. In fright, he’d spun around, and as he did so, he lifted a hunting knife, and before he could even rightly wield it or threaten anyone with the instrument, Val had kicked it clean out of the man’s hand.

  What had happened next was the reason that Kent was sick.

  The man had immediately dropped to the ground and had begun pleading for his life. His story spilled from him like water over a dam. The story went by so fast that it was hard to make out, but Kent had gotten the gist of it.

  The man and two of his friends had been traveling on behalf of the Governor of Pennsylvania when all the cars had simultaneously stopped on the highway (the EMP, Kent noted.) The three men tried to escape the horrors of the highway by making their way through the woods, but, in the last few days, both of his friends had been killed.

  While the man whimpered and sobbed through his story, Val was busy rifling through the man’s backpack and noticed that it was full of survival gear, ammunition, and food and even an ammo can with a radio and other electrical devices.

  “Where’d you get all the swell survival gear, huh?” Val asked with an accusation in his voice. “I’m pretty sure that Governor’s aids don’t carry this kind of gear on business trips.”

  “Uhh… ahhh… well, we just came upon it,” the man answered. Guilt and shame were evident on the man’s face, and this, more than anything, enraged the brutish Val.

  Val stopped his rummaging and walked over to the man and kicked him straight in the face as hard as he possibly could. Kent noted to himself that it was remarkable what a boot can do to a human face. Remarkable and grotesque. The man, bloody face buried in the snow, began sobbing again, and now he’d locked down completely. Emotionally and mentally the man was just spent. He didn’t respond to any of Val’s questions, and this struck Val as a lack of the proper respect he thought he was due. Mike, Steve, and Kent had all tried to stop him, but Val began to stomp the man, and in short order, he’d succeeded in leaving behind a bloody corpse.

  This is why Kent was sick to his stomach.

  ****

  Elsie’s mind was churning, and her eyes flicked from left to right as she tried to calculate and understand everything that was happening.

  She shouted it. “Peter!”

  “He’s up on the ridge!” Lang said over the thwacks and zings of bullets coming through the building.

  “I’ve got to get to him,” Elsie whispered.

  “You can’t go out there, Elsie,” Natasha said. “They’ll cut you down.”

  “I can go out the back. The firing is starting to slow down, and it has all come from the front. I’ll run out and keep low and get into the trees and then work my way up to the ridge.” She looked at them. “I have to.” She had the beginnings of a tear in her eye. “He’s up there all alone.”

  “Peter can take care of himself,” Lang said, a little too sharply.

  “He’s not up there taking care of himself, young man.” Elsie shot back. “He’s up there taking care ofus.”

  “If you go,” Natasha said, as debris from the walls rained down around them, “take Lang’s backpack… in case you get lost, or we don’t make it.”<
br />
  “You’ll make it, Natasha. Both of you will. I just know it!”

  Natasha smiled amid the horrors. Nothing like a Pollyanna to give you hope when the world is collapsing on your head.

  Elsie saw Natasha’s smile and returned it. Then she broke for the back door, picking up Lang’s pack and throwing it over her shoulder on her way out.

  Lang grabbed the .22 and Natasha lifted the pistol. Both weapons were woefully inappropriate for such a gunfight. Still, both of them began to tug at the carpets that covered the windows so that they could lay down some covering fire for Elsie. They did this because both Natasha and Lang were thinking about Elsie and Peter and not about themselves.

  ****

  Kent had finally made it up to the top of the grade when he felt his gorge rise, and in a second he was doubled over, vomiting onto the snow and rocks.

  “Great,” Val sneered. “What a winner you turned out to be. Just look at you. I’m sick of your weakness!”

  Kent wiped his mouth with his sleeve and dropped the pack. He took a step towards Val, “Then why don’t you try to stomp me to death, you sadistic bastard!”

  Val seemed willing to do just that, but Steve and Mike jumped between the two before any more violence could commence. After the two men had been pulled apart, Mike stepped into Val’s space and put his face only inches from the brutish man’s nose. He’d done this once before, back in a prison cell in Warwick. Val was a full foot taller, but Mike’s presence had a weight and gravity all of its own.

  “One more argument,” Mike said. He cleared his throat. “One more threat. One more unauthorized stomping. One more unauthorized anything from you Vladimir, and I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand me, Comrade?”

  The man who now called himself Val dropped his eyes and took a step back. “I understand, Comrade Mikail Mikailivitch.”

  Mike looked over to Kent and pointed to the fallen backpack.

  “Pick it up.”

  Kent did.

  ****

  The four men fell back into line, and as they hiked in a southwesterly direction, they saw the valley open up below them, and Kent was glad that at least for a little while they’d be walking downhill.

  He took up the rear, right behind Val, and as the group marched forward through the snow, Kent whispered so that just Val could hear him.

  “I called you a sadistic bastard because you are literally a sadist and the fatherless son of a whore. So there’s that, Vladimir. And, also this. Before this is over, I am going to kill you.”

  Death and violence have a tendency to multiply when the shackles of civility are thrown off. Men who are violent and rapacious killers can be identified more readily, and men who might otherwise be peaceful and passive are sometimes not able to resist the desire to rid the world of soulless predators. There are such men even among the poets.

  ****

  Elsie sprinted towards the trees and bullets zipped around her. Snow popped up into the air where the shots plowed into the ground. She could hear that gunfire was being returned from the cabin, and she could see the impacts popping at her feet. Then the shots that were loosely aimed in her direction stopped, but she did not.

  Rounding the edge of the hill, she was surprised to meet up with Peter who was on his way down toward the rear of the cabin. He had the AK-47 at the ready, and he grabbed Elsie by the arm and pulled her over to a stand of trees, and they crawled into the brush near the base of the stand.

  “How’d you get out of there?” Peter asked.

  “Natasha and Lang covered me,” Elsie answered, breathlessly.

  “Why didn’t they escape with you?”

  “Lang is better, but he is in no condition to travel. Natasha would never leave him. I would have stayed too, but I thought… I ought to find out what happened to you. We—” she indicated to the cabin with her hand. She tried to brush a wisp of hair away. She tried to do it with the gentleness of her fingertips, but they were clammy with dried blood, so instead she raised the sweaty backside of her arm to her forehead and wiped away the strand. “We… we thought you might be dead,” Elsie said, her eyes dropped to look at her knees in the snow.

  “I’m not dead, but I almost was. I was captured on the ridge up there by the Missouri Guard. They were going to execute me.”

  Elsie sucked in her breath. “I’m sorry.” Peter shook it off as if to say no need. “How’d you get off that ridge, Peter?” Elsie asked.

  Peter looked at her and shrugged. The knowledge that he would certainly have been dead by now was fully upon him as he stared at Elsie. He smiled a crooked smile and said one word…

  “Ace.”

  ****

  The sounds of gunfire from the battle grew louder as Mike, Steve, Val, and Kent moved to the southwest. They came to a ridge, approaching from the northeast, and they crawled up to the top of it to see if they could make out what the fuss was all about.

  What they saw shocked them. At the top of the ridge were a number of dead bodies. All of the corpses were in uniform, and Mike, crawling to one of the men who had been shot in the back of the head, saw the insignia for the Missouri National Guard on the uniform.

  Looking down from the ridge, they could see that a gunfight had erupted around a small cabin. Forces in the woods opposite the front door of the cabin were pouring fire into the structure, while every once in a while random and impotent shots would ring out, fired from the windows of the cabin itself.

  Staying as low as possible, Mike, Steve, and Val moved quickly, checking the bodies of the dead soldiers for weapons, ammunition, or other valuables. Even on the ridge above the valley of death, there is salvage to be had. Kent, meanwhile, had come across another body—this one looked to be the corpse of an officer—and he discreetly secured a pistol he found on the ground near the body. He was an intellectual and not a fighter, and prior to the end of the world, he’d have never considered hurting anyone. Sometimes, however, a gun can come in handy, and Kent figured that such a time had now presented itself.

  Mike never saw Kent take the gun. He was now busy spying out the battle taking place below him. He heard a sharp crack from the distance ring out. He could not make out from where the shot was coming, but he saw one of the soldiers from among the contingent assailing the cabin fall dead.

  Another crack from the distance, and another soldier fell. Mike’s eyes began to scan the hills in the distance to the east. He knew from his training what was happening…

  Sniper.

  CHAPTER 33

  Veronica said, “Okay, now this is what we’re going to do, boys.” They looked at her expectantly. “My dad was a resourceful guy. Back when he was doing work on the faraway settlements in Trinidad, he saw these Indian guys packing straw into their tires, because there was no compressed air to be had.”

  “Yes!” Calvin said, excitedly. Veronica and Stephen looked at him with startled looks on their faces. It was something in the way he said thatYes! He made it sound like he had more important things to say on the manner. So they let him speak.

  “My dad, he was a pharmaceutical engineer back in China. Back before the crackdown. During it, really.” He paused and looked at them.

  It should have been strange. Just last night he’d rescued these two strangers from a gun battle, and now he was telling them things… things about his dad. It should have been strange, but it wasn’t.

  He continued. “Yeah, so my dad, he told me this story about how the Chinese government sent him to the outback, you know, down in Australia. They wanted him to find this one plant or something, to make an assessment of its chemical potential on the spot.” He paused. “They were testing him.” Calvin felt a little flush rise in his cheeks, just a hint of anger. He looked at the two of them, and then remembered where he was, and what he was doing. He blushed in full.

  “But anyway, he told me some natives did just that. They simply rolled the car over on its top and filled all four tires with straw, all at once. My dad said those guys were lik
e a Daytona pit crew, just all wild and crazy. Detailed and quick and efficient. They packed the grass and straw together, wetting it down. If they had water handy, they’d mix it with thick mud, like cob. They’d bend it into the curves of the tire and then pound it in with rocks.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “If they didn’t have water, they just packed the grass and straw really tight… just pound it as tight as they could get it with the stones.

  Veronica and Stephen smiled at the image.

  “Strong at the broken places…” Veronica whispered, under her breath.

  “Ma’am?” Calvin stuttered.

  “Oh, ‘strong at the broken places.’ It’s something Hemingway wrote. I was thinking how the straw in a way becomes strong, inside the tire, by bending, by bonding with the others, by utilizing both its tensile and flexile strength.” Her voice trailed off at the end of the sentence. She’d seen the hurt in Calvin’s eyes when he talked about his father. She’d also heard the anger in his voice, although she did not know where that anger came from. Veronica knew, without his having to say it, that Calvin had lost his father. She wanted to say something to help him, but she realized that, in this time, there was not much room for such niceties. Still, she wanted to him know. She wanted to say the words… We know. We’ve lost someone, too…

  ****

  “And I was also thinking of you, young man!”

  Veronica turned to Calvin, who looked startled. “You’ve lost your father. Anyone who has eyes to see can see that. My son has lost his father, too.” She paused, and looked at Stephen. “And I have lost a husband. But, we become strong at the broken places. Even here.” She placed her hand to her heart, her hand in a fist. She tapped her heart two times. Calvin looked at her, and he wanted to say something, anything, to let her know that he understood.