Michael Bunker - WICK

Why were some people subjected to horrors beyond imagination, while others lived in relative comfort, and then disappeared into light, without such suffering? Why were many people still out there somewhere, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened? Natasha could not easily comprehend this detail, this suffering. She wasn’t foolish enough to demand fairness, but she did feel like she had a right to ask why.

Anyway, she was glad that Cole was not a dragger . That bit of unfairness she could appreciate. Cole’s billet wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there was no job worse than that of dragger, and she was relieved that her brother, at least, had escaped death duty. Cole had drawn garbage detail. He was hauling trash (mostly human waste and kitchen refuse.) Not human bodies, though. The stench in Cole’s job was bad too, she imagined, but his job had the advantage that he wasn’t hauling bodies that would come apart and spill their contents across the ground, causing you to slip in the guts as you dragged the lumps of flesh to the fires. Handling kitchen refuse was worse than the worst day of any job ever held by the imaginary woman in New York City who’d died in the flash of light, but at least Cole didn’t end up covered from head to toe at the end of the day with gooey remains of what once were people. Natasha thought about the fairness of that and how fairness didn’t even matter when it came to her brother. Humans are capricious and hypocritical that way — always demanding fairness and justice, but never really wanting it.

She wasn’t ignorant of this hypocrisy in herself, so she just hauled bodies all day.

Mike, she thought. Mikail Brekhunov . Talk about un fairness. Mike was another thing altogether. Being a master manipulator, after only a few days in the camps, he’d already wormed his way into a position of power. Cozying up to authority, he’d gotten in with the guardsmen. He’d done it with a pack of cigarettes here, a pretty prisoner girl there. Perhaps someone needed a payback murder or a targeted beating—Mike knew how to get those things done if the right person needed it. His years of practice covering his tracks benefited him greatly now, as he found ways to work his agenda without ever letting anyone know his true intentions. Now, he very nearly ran the place. He was the official spokesperson for the prisoners, even though not a single prisoner trusted him. He’d found that he could do without trust recently. He preferred rather that the people fear him. If the prisoners feared him, he cared not whether they trusted him.

Wait, that word isn’t to be used. It is not ‘prisoners.’

Natasha laughed to herself as she thought of it. They’d been told over and over again that no one here was a ‘prisoner.’ Mike was the official spokesperson for the refugees. Or the settlers. Those terms were officially acceptable. In any case, Mike Baker (that was Mikail’s name… for now. Names become fluid when the world melts down.) was the man in charge.

So, they were all now to be called settlers because Mike preferred it. Mike reminded everyone that as soon as things were safe, and as soon as order could be restored, the people in the ‘resettlement camp’ would be ‘settled’ on land where they could grow crops and live out their lives in peace. Right, she thought. That’s what they’d all been told. Nobody believed it. No one believed that anyone was going to live long enough to be resettled.

Actually, that part about nobody believing the lies probably wasn’t entirely true. Ignorant hope still thrived in most of the settlers, even the kind of hope that was pie-in-the-sky. Especially that kind. There were many who, with empty heads filled with fairy tales, thought that things were going to get back to normal. Unhappily, despite promises of land and freedom, hundreds of prisoners died every day from disease, hopelessness, and violence.

Yes, there was violence in the camps. This prison camp was no safer than the chaotic world outside the wires. Still, there’d been no wholesale escape attempts or riots. Victim psychology—a communal Stockholm syndrome—convinced the prisoners that inside was better than outside, even if that statement was objectively not true. Natasha had been outside, and it was no picnic, but life in the Carbondale camp was a nightmare that seemed to never end. Violence in the camps was especially common against women. Natasha shook her head when she thought about it. A man had to be either crazy or criminally ignorant willfully to bring his wife or daughters into a refugee camp.

Still, women were not the only victims. Men were also attacked and beaten, sexually assaulted, and even killed. Such things happen in jails. Gangs of miscreants operated freely inside the wired walls of the Carbondale camp.

Natasha had been kept safe, mostly because she never went anywhere without Steve or Cole by her side. She also suspected that Mike had something to do with the gangs leaving her alone. If it were true that he’d put out a do not touch order on her, she hoped he didn’t expect her thanks for it.

The two Warwickians grunted and heaved the torso of a young man onto the growing pile. Sometimes they’d handle the same body twice in the same day, once with the dragging, and again when it came time to stack more bodies into the burn hole itself. For now, they were glad to be done with the burden of that particular moment. Natasha had stopped counting individual bodies, but her mind kept track of the size of the piles. She quickly estimated how much more work was left to do. It always seemed, somehow… endless. She scowled as she heard the thump of another torso plopped into a pile. More fleshy residue now ready to be combed through by the pickers.

Natasha used her forearm to wipe the sweat off her brow. Despite the cold temperatures and the snow on the ground, dragging made you sweat. Sometimes this complicated things, because whenever a rare rest break happened, the sweat would bring on chills, and sometimes the cold would weaken a dragger. Corpses, blood, and waste held diseases that could multiply easily, even in the cold, and sickness often worked to weaken them as well. Dragging duty was not just a ringside ticket to death and decay—sometimes it was a death warrant in and of itself. Natasha personally knew of four draggers—men and women she’d worked with—whose bodies were now either in this pile, or had already been burned into ashes and bone in the bottom of the burn pit.

She looked towards the fence where five guardsmen were overseeing the pickers. It was the picker’s job to go through the piles of the recently deceased and remove any items of value from the corpses. Wedding rings, earrings, jewelry, necklaces, pocketknives, lighters, etc. Pickers sorted all of these things into rubber bins, and hauled them off to the Commander’s office. What he did with the valuables, lowly draggers could not know, but they certainly did speculate. There was no shortage of gossip on the many ways and means available to the Commander for enriching himself with goods looted from the bodies of dead prisoners.

Natasha looked over at Steve and laughed scornfully. She was feeling mean, and when that happened, she usually directed her anger at Steve.

“Why were you stuck with dragger duty, Steve? Isn’t Mike your best friend?”

“Mike doesn’t have friends, ” Steve replied. “He has supplicants.”

“So, why do you put up with it? Why be his stooge when he treats you like this?”

“He said he’s teaching me discipline,” Steve answered coolly, and with a hint of irony.

“Discipline? Dragging duty is not discipline, Steve. Dragging duty is just another form of the death penalty.”