Michael Bunker - WICK

He began to peel the orange in neat little spiraled strips, beginning each portion by plunging the knife’s sharp edge into the wrinkled skin of the fruit, noting how the veins in the rind made the thing look like a fist-sized brain. He carved each strip, and then peeled back the rind. The juice squirted out into the air, and the orange spray smelled nice in the warming air of the drawing room.

Clive and Red Beard saw the candle flicker and noticed, in the flickering, their shadows dance on the wall. They looked up, and in the hallway, the figure of Veronica flashed by, going down towards the kitchen to make her morning coffee. Red Beard lifted his chin in the direction of the hallway. “She turned out to be a good one,” he said. He thought of how Veronica had seemed to fit perfectly into their little household. Had it only been a week ago? Only a week?

Clive reached up, pulled at the corners of his mustache and nodded his head in agreement. “She sure did,” he said. His head nodded even more emphatically. “A strong, smart woman.”

They listened as she bustled around in the kitchen down the hallway humming to herself as the pots banged in the glow of her camping light. Clive and Red Beard were just about to blow out the candle to preserve the little bit of wick left for some other talk, some other morning, when Veronica called down the hallway to see if either of them wanted coffee. The suggestion in her tone indicated that she had asked this question before and that she knew what the answer would be. She was right.

“No, ma’am. We’ve got to get moving.” The reply was in precise, practiced unison, and with it, Clive and Red Beard were out the front door of the farmhouse.

To where? Where were they going? These two had been veritable whirlwinds of activity during the last week. Had it been a week already? They’d been inseparable as they went about their work, preparing some business of Clive’s—some business known only to themselves—and in their activity they had burned their candles at both ends.

It was never clear to anyone else just what, exactly, the friends were up to. The two were everywhere: directing the militia who patrolled the farm; arranging a number of convoys in and out of the complex; loading unspecified goods and materials onto and off the trucks; leading the convoys along the grid of farm roads and down a ridge of trees to… who knows where? No one knew. Or, no one was telling if they did know.

This was what happened every day, this coming and going, and everyone else watching, working, and not knowing.

In the evening, Clive and Red Beard discussed philosophy. They cooked meals and organized chores and played hosts to their guests. The two men had also taken to sitting up in the evening, having a scotch, and smoking cigars. That’s what they called it. Having a scotch. It had become a private joke between Clive, Red Beard, and Veronica. “You ‘drink’ water, or tea, or juice,” Clive was fond of saying, “but you ‘have’ a scotch, just like you ‘have’ coffee. It implies relationship, and a time set aside for something more than just refreshment or sustenance.”

Last night, they ‘had a scotch’ well into the night. Veronica joined them, and they’d argued (in a friendly way) about just exactly where one might find the world’s Archimedean point. It was the first real conversation the two men had had with Veronica. They found themselves looking forward to more.

They’d reached a happy little moment when preparations were just coming into order. They could see the results of, and perhaps an end to, their work, and they redoubled their efforts. The two men pushed themselves to feats of durability they had not previously thought possible. They didn’t sleep much. Truth be told, neither man seemed to notice the strain. They were just two friends, passing time, talking about ideas, going about their business.

The odd little community of Clive, Red Beard, Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin, had formed in a weirdly organic way, in the way that such communities must form in the end times. Everyone naturally fell into a specific role, using his or her own talents, insights, and experiences. Clive and Red Beard had their private business, and they didn’t feel the need to talk about it. The others didn’t feel the need to ask them about it either. The two odd friends seemed to be directing and steering some larger concern—a global one maybe—and all the time they held firm hands on the tiller of their local preparedness. Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin had their own small little family to contend with—a family within the larger family. Everyone knew that the group was preparing themselves around the farm for something, and knowing that fact gave impetus to their activities. They were all preparing… but, for what?

During the talk over scotch from the night before, Veronica argued a theory that botany would necessarily play a role in leveraging the future. “Talk about your Archimedean point!” she’d said.

She spoke on like she was giving a TEDTalk, but with nothing to show for slides. She was convinced —still—that knowledge of plants held the key to the future. She said that, whether in foraging for food in the forest, or planning a nursery, or feeding a population, all of these things would require knowledge, and an understanding, of plants. She was passionate about this. Clive and Red Beard were impressed by both her ideas, and her passion.

“And also…” Red Beard said, interrupting the thought. “Calvin especially interests me. For some reason I feel very fatherly toward him.”

Clive smiled under his mustache. He, too, felt a paternal urge toward the young man. He’d heard Calvin tell stories about his childhood; how his father had come to be persecuted by the Chinese for his participation in Falun Gong; how his father had died rather than take a kidney offered by the state, because he thought it was an organ taken from one of his brethren. Calvin had called his father a “kind of hero.” Clive recognized the hurt in the boy’s voice when he discussed his father. Like Red Beard, he’d felt the desire to give fatherly advice to a bright young man who’d lost his father.

Last night, finishing off their scotches, Clive had also thought of the church, and the jails, the government, and the state. It had occurred to him that all of them, in one way or another, were giving fatherly advice to young men who had lost their fathers. There is a world of difference between advice given by someone who cares for you, he thought, and advice given by an institution interested only in its own preservation.

“Yep. I agree,” he had said in reply to Red Beard, and the southern drawl came out. “Jonathan Wall done good when he sent that young’un.”

Observing that it was ‘never clear’ whether Clive and Red Beard were coming or going — it should be noted, of course, that this is not to be taken as exhaustively true. If one were watching carefully and paying attention, one might have figured something out.

A person, invisible, watching from the tree line at the crest of the hill, might have surmised things by the movements of the odd-shaped RV on its many ventures in and out of the farm complex. Sitting just above the tree line beyond the northwest fence of Clive’s farm, one might have seen that the two friends had, in fact, been coming and going. There, nestled along a stand of trees that started near the river and stretched along the edge of the farm where it rose in elevation, one would have been able to see, without obstruction, the amount of activity going in and out of the farm. Standing there in the snow and paying close attention, one would have seen all of the coming and going, and would have known without any doubt whatsoever, that something was about to occur. Something Big Was Coming .