Michael Bunker - WICK

Calvin leaned over to look into the framing of his pickup truck’s window. The taller suit leaned in to stare at him as he passed. A face in a window. The truck paused.

Time itself paused. It was a woman’s face, looking out the plastic window of the hazmat helmet. Her breath momentarily, just for a micro-second, fogged up the shield of her helmet as he passed by, but then it cleared. Her startled visage was luminous in the nighttime glow. Not even for a moment did she look frightened. But she looked at Calvin, and he noticed it. And she mouthed the words…

Help Us.

Get In! He mouthed the words back at her. He pointed to the back of the pickup. The two yellow suits put their weight on the running boards and pushed their way up onto the bed, even as Calvin peeled out along the highway. He punched the gas and shifted gears, and they were almost fifty yards away before the bullets began to rain down on them. The shots, thankfully, were not very accurate. He was half a mile away before the sounds of gunfire faded into the night and were masked by the crunching of the tires on the road and the cold wind knifing through the bullet hole in the windscreen.

He’d learned from his recent mistakes, and, after the two yellow suits had piled into the bed of the truck, he’d flipped the headlights off. It’s hard to hit what you cannot see, his father had told him. But now he was driving blindly through the night, and he tried his best to use the glow of the stars in the nighttime sky to drive by, watching intently for the faint reflection from the road that disappeared near its edges.

He drove unconsciously, and couldn’t have told you if you’d asked just how long his mind was frozen in the shock of the moment.

Kerthump.

Calvin heard it, but it didn’t really register. Then it came again and again.

Kerthumkerthumpkerthump… kerthump!

He struggled to hold the wheel on the road, and as he gripped the wheel in a white-knuckled embrace, he became aware of the knocking on the window behind his head. The car rumbled and shook. The drive shaft shook too as he fought to keep control. He glanced at the gauges. He’d been doing sixty-something in the dark. Maybe more. Adrenaline exploded through his mind and body. The truck slowed to almost nothing, and the sound of muffled screams through the busted window behind his head. It was timed with the pounding of a fist on the cab top.

Calvin had driven into a ditch. He was riding on four flats tires. Blowouts, he thought, On all four, and all at once! He’d been blessed that the truck hadn’t overturned… blessed to be alive.

He sniffed the air and jumped out of the cab. Again, no fumes. Calvin gave a little hop to look over the truck bed, where he saw a tangle of tarp and bikes and cans… and yellow hazmat suits. He looked in at the wriggling bodies inside the suits. The tallest of the them eventually righted itself and reached up to unbuckle its hood. It was the woman. The face in the window. The shorter suit was a boy, obviously her son. The resemblance was clear. They were beautiful, the two of them. Calvin smiled.

“Sorry about the ride.”

“What?! Are you trying to kill us der, boy?”

Calvin looked at the woman, and then she smiled at him. It was all the thanks he needed, her smile. There was something poetic in it, the same quality that made people stand in front of the Mona Lisa and stare.

Stephen looked at his mother. He’d noticed that her accent was coming out with the stress of the travel. He looked at the guy who had just saved them, and they both broke into a grin. Stephen jabbed his mom in the ribs. “Kill us der… Mom? Der? Really?”

Stephen smiled at Calvin again and nodded his head to the older youth. He did it in a way that said Hey, nice rescue and stuff . Calvin looked at the two of them, these yellow suits, whom he’d just rescued from a gunfight in a snowfield… and he screwed up his face. It should have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t.

He looked at them with his most inquisitive look… and asked, “Hey… got anything to eat?”

“You looked like those guys on Breaking Bad,” Calvin said. There he was again, referring to a television show. The two of them just laughed.

“Yeah, I guess we did,” Stephen answered. “Good thing, too. I was about to go all Heisenberg on them.” Calvin and Stephen laughed again. They were sitting with their backs against the truck while Veronica scouted out an area to see if she could find some little nook or cranny where they might hide throughout the night.

“We’ll attend to the vehicle in the morning,” she said. And then she’d gone to scout.

She’d only been gone fifteen minutes, and the two teens were already talking like old friends, remembering what that other world was like, as if it weren’t really gone.

“Dude… did you see that one show that was going to come out on F/X?” Stephen paused. That was one way to tell that the boys were beginning to reckon with the new world. They’d begun to talk about the old life in tenses that showed they’d once thought for a moment that it might return, but now they no longer did.

“Yeah … that show that was gonna be about Russian spies in America? What was it gonna to be called?”

“Oh yeahyeahyeah. That one from the Cold War, with Reagan and Michael Jackson and stuff. Ummm, The Americans? ” Stephen said, nodding his head. “I saw the preview. It looked like it was going to be good.”

“Dude, that chick on that show was hot,” Calvin said, looking at Stephen and smiling. “She looked like she could kick some butt.”

“Yeah,” Stephen said. He smiled and thought of a girl in a bodega in that other world. “I’d betray my country for a chick like that.”

“Yeah… a chick like that, or…” Calvin made a little mock motion of sniffing the air, “some French fries.”

Veronica could hear their guffaws from several hundred yards away as she walked toward them in silence through the night.

Veronica stayed up through the night, watching. She had her pistol and she hoped she’d never be forced to use it. They’d walked a good quarter-mile into the forest before bedding down for the night. Stephen and Calvin slept in fits and starts. Before morning broke, she roused them, and they put on their clothes while she put out some food for them. She hummed a song under her breath, and occasionally she’d break out into a small bit of lyric. She sang the line in its lilting, sing-song herkyjerkyness. She swung her head to the side when she did it, her long ropy braids whipping over her shoulder. Then she stopped, and caught herself. She’d thought she was humming under her breath, but she’d actually sung out loud. She stopped, and the boys looked at her. She was caught like a deer in the headlights.

“What’s that song, Mrs. D?” Calvin was already fitting in the way that kids like Calvin do, seamlessly. He was already calling her “Mrs. D.” He looked at her, expectantly.

“Oh, just a song that I was listening to before,” Veronica said. As she did so, she waved out into the nothingness, as if to say all this . Stephen rolled his eyes. “Oh, again, with the Clay stuff.” Veronica cut him a sharp glance. It was clear that whatever “the Clay stuff” was had been a topic of some conversation between them. Calvin looked at them both, wondering what he’d stepped into.

“There was this guy that came by our house during the storm.” Stephen indicated with his hand somewhere back there. “He was cool. He and my mom connected. They listened to this group called the Mountain Goats, and…,” He rolled his eyes at his mom.