Michael Bunker - WICK

“What? It’s a good song,” Veronica said.

“I agree,” Calvin said. Stephen looked at him sideways like a sibling who realizes he has competition. Stephen made a mock look of pain.

“No, really. They’re cool,” Calvin said. “I mean, I haven’t heard the new new stuff, but they are always good.” Stephen stepped back as if to say You’re killing me .

Veronica laughed at their antics. “The thing that really bothers Stephen about the Clay situation,” Veronica said, nodding her head to Stephen as if they’d had this conversation before, “I may have overstepped my bounds when the man stayed with us. I took some poems of his and had them bound without his permission. Stephen thought that what I did was a horrible breach of privacy. But I couldn’t help myself.” She looked at Stephen and he looked at Calvin. “Well, some of them were…” she searched through the air to find the word, “…lovely.”

They were walking low along a hedge at the edge of a paddock, keeping their eyes peeled across the pristine field of white. The boys could tell that she was bound to go on and so they let her.

“There was this one poem that described a Van Gogh painting. And I love Van Gogh. It was partly him who inspired me to paint! Anyway, the poem described the lush fields and broken doors on their hinges, and the sea, and the sea of faces that are found in his paintings. But it was more than just about the color. It was also about the loneliness of being Van Gogh, in his brilliance, and his madness. We almost never knew him, you know? It was only through the support and the promotion of his brother that he became well-known. Otherwise, he was an outcast. In Gauguin, he had a friend who seemed to understand him, but Gauguin was always promising to come and see him. He rarely did.”

Veronica and the boys walked circumspectly as they talked. She indicated to the wider world with her hand, the white of the field, the hint of blue invading the gray of the morning sky. “Anyway,” she said, “it was a lovely poem.”

With that, Calvin, Stephen, and Veronica found themselves standing at the back bumper of the rusted red pickup truck in the brown-white slush of the accident. “It was a nail strip,” Veronica told them. “I found it last night when I was out on patrol. Whoever put it there will be around soon enough to check it. We have to work quickly.”

Standing in the thin blue light of morning, their breath rose up before them. It rose in little puffs against the coldness of the air.

The shot and the echo of the shot rang out across the little clearing and bounced up into the trees and then the sky.

Peter turned and saw the man on horseback, his arm raised, holding a rifle at a right angle to his body. His brain at first refused to believe the information being transported to it by his sleepy eyes. A warning shot. The man brought down the rifle and aimed straight at Peter. He wouldn’t warn again. His uniform was that of the Missouri National Guard.

Peter understood enough of what was occurring to know that he should not raise his own rifle. He put his hands in the air, and from around him appeared other soldiers who swooped down on him like hawks. They disarmed him and pulled his hands behind his back.

The man on the horse, the one with the rifle, was lecturing him about the new laws. Specifically, the man was telling him that it was a death penalty offense to be carrying a weapon of any kind. The officer droned on for a moment, the horse turning from side to side, as Peter was led to a tree at the edge of the clearing. It took the entirety of this time for Peter to become cogent enough to understand that he was not in a dream.

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.