Michael Bunker - WICK

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.”

“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.