Michael Bunker - WICK

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. Most men 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.

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.

He heard the gas cans slosh behind him as the pickup rattled to a shuddering halt. Sheesh! He ducked his head down and held his breath, cringing. He’d heard of static electricity building up in gas cans that are not grounded, then blowing up like a bomb. He sniffed the air for any smell of leaked gas as he got out of the car and ran around to the front. He smelled no leaks and bent down to inspect the items in the road. Two bikes, with some bags strapped to them. Stepping out, he gathered both bikes and threw them into the back of his truck bed, moving deftly and staying low around the truck. He didn’t know exactly why he was doing it, but it felt right, and he didn’t argue with himself. He worked quickly and instinctively, without a plan other than to help. He swung around the door and jumped into the cab and realized that he had not turned off his lights on approach.

Some of the men who’d been fighting with the yellow suits, the ones in motley military uniforms, were now coming towards him. They were shouting at him and waving their arms. Calvin could not make out what they were shouting but he did not need to.

He inched the vehicle forward, as if he were pulling up to ask directions. As if he were just some guy out on a Sunday drive and he’d taken a wrong turn. He came upon the first of the men, and he punched the truck forward. He pushed at the horn but with no effect. He was just ad-libbing now, an actor on the stage who didn’t know his lines. He just did what felt right.

He swerved this way and that as the thugs tried to run along beside him and reach into the cab. He swerved into the snow embankments on the sides of the road, spinning the wheel and the truck to shake the men off, and he just kept driving. The men in the uniforms up ahead, the ones fighting with the yellow suits, stopped and gawked at the spectacle. Everyone stopped for a moment as Calvin broke free and drove like a maniac toward the yellow suits and toward the uniforms.

There was a moment when, in the headlights of the pickup, Calvin saw in the eyes of the uniformed bandits that they thought they might intimidate him. They raised their guns and pointed them directly at his head. They stood in the roadway as if they thought that would stop him. They thought that it would stop anyone . They can’t be blamed much. It is in the nature of things. The guards were simply not accustomed to dealing with people who did not understand the underlying force implied in such situations. They lived, unconsciously, by the Maoist doctrine that truth was found in the barrel of a gun, and they were not accustomed to coming across people who were not familiar with such a philosophy. The guards weren’t normally challenged in such a manner. But it didn’t take them long to figure out that they didn’t like it.

They stood in the roadway with their guns pointed at Calvin’s head, and they wondered whether the driver of the approaching pickup knew just who they were . Did he know exactly who he was dealing with?

The answer to that question, had they bothered to actually ask it, would have been “Yes.”

But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was not that Calvin did not know who the men in the road were, or that he did not see their guns, or that he did not assess the danger. Rather, it was exactly the opposite. The problem was that the soldiers in the road, pointing at him with their guns, thinking that threats were all that needed to be said on the matter, did not know Calvin Rhodes.

The light of the headlamps bore down upon the guards and they scattered like cockroaches before it. One of the rear guards held his ground though. As the guard sighted down his gun to shoot though the windshield, Calvin leaned slightly to his left, and then turned his head towards the side glass. He prayed.

As the bullet ripped through the windshield, and the cab, and then the back glass, missing Calvin’s head by inches, he slammed on the brakes and the truck slipped sideways and struck the gunman with the passenger-side rear fender back by the bed. Calvin thought, that guy ain’t gonna make it, and then he accelerated again, streaming by the other bandits, heading towards the yellow suits.

Calvin came upon the yellow suits as if in slow motion, and they looked like aliens, these people, in their hoods and breathing apparatus. They leaned toward his pickup, in the ball of light created by the ancient headlamps, and held up hands as if in supplication. Their bright yellow suits were set in contrast with the red of the truck, the green of the tarp, the white of the snow.