Michael Bunker - WICK

“I know,” Steve said. He didn’t look ashamed, and he did not look away. He stared at Natasha and betrayed neither thought nor emotion. “You can’t say that I don’t deserve it though.”

“I don’t understand you,” Natasha said.

“That’s because I’m Russian.”

“So am I,” Natasha replied.

“No you’re not. You speak Russian, Natasha, but you are something else entirely. I can’t say that I’ve figured you out, but you are definitely not Russian.”

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“Because of this ,” he indicated with his hand everything around them. “This dragging of bodies, senseless war, deprivation, tyranny, authoritarianism, duplicity, horror… acquiescence. This is what it is to be Russian down deep in your soul.” He looked back at Natasha, and for the first time that she could remember, he actually smiled. “Everyone from Warwick spoke Russian. But not everyone from Warwickwas Russian.”

“Well, I am Russian,” she said, leaning into the noun. It was all she could say to that.

“No you aren’t, Natasha, but don’t take that truth the wrong way. It’s not an accusation. Perhaps you have the best parts of being Russian somewhere within you. Maybe you have persistence, and optimism, and poetry, and music. Surely, you have pain and suffering. Those things are truly Russian. But the rest of it, the bad parts, those you don’t have.”

Natasha looked at Steve and couldn’t speak for a minute. She looked down at her boots, covered in mud, blood, and guts. Then she looked back up at Steve. “So why did he punish you this way?”

“God? Or Mike?”

“Is there a difference right now?”

“There is a difference, Natasha.”

“Mike.”

“I angered him.”

“What did you do?” Natasha asked. She felt the sweat beginning to cool her body temperature, and she stomped her feet in the snow, hopping up and down a little to get her blood pumping again.

“He wanted me to work with him—to help him take over the camp.”

“He’s already done that. And you wouldn’t help him?”

“No. I refused. He hasn’t done all he wants to do yet. He wants to do more than run things for the people in charge. He wants totake over the camp. He’s going to overthrow the commandant and take control.”

Natasha looked again at the guts on her boots and felt them slip under the soles of her feet as she shifted her weight from side to side. Did it really matter who is in charge? She decided to play along. “How is he going to do that? I mean, these National Guardsmen are military people. They are not a bunch of Russian villagers!”

“He’ll do it. Don’t doubt that. He learned a lot from his failures in Warwick. He’s already triangulated the leadership. It’s as good as done.” Steve stomped his feet and clapped his hands together rapidly. “I’ve had enough of his posturing and manipulation. I told him that he’d have to move forward without me.” He looked around the camp and gestured with his hand as if he were unveiling some exciting prize. “Ergo, I am on dragging duty.”

“Well,” Natasha said, as she walked over to the stack of bodies the pickers had just finished looting, “with friends like Mike, who needs enemies?”

The mysterious activity at Clive’s place seemed particularly fervent that morning. The farm, its winding road lined with traffic whirring out of the complex and onto the grid of curving country roads (headed who knows where,) was abuzz with activity. At the end of a line of military-style vehicles pouring out onto the roads, was the command RV. In the cab of the RV, a cowboy and a leprechaun sat intent on the duty at hand.

The RV lumbered forward on the uneven road. It wasn’t much of a road, really, just two dirt slits cut into the field leading out to the county road. From its exhaust pipes, the odd-shaped RV that Clive called ‘Bernice’ emitted two little trails of steamy smoke. One trail rose from each corner of the back of Bernice, and the puffs lifted up along the sides of the vehicle and out into the inky, fluid light of dawn. The rocking of the RV sent the smoke up in minor turbulences, shaking the trails into tiny little spirals. The wheels peeled through the dug-in trench of a road, and the earth, clay-like and primal, clung to the tires in desperation, or hope, or just curiosity. The smoky spirals rose up like dust devils into the cool winter air.

Veronica D’Arcy lifted the plastic lid off the coffee can and stuck her nose down into the aroma, bringing it into her body. She already had a fire going in the black, cast-iron stove, and she sat a pot of water on the grill. She thought about how nice it was to ‘have’ coffee, even if it was campfire gritty. She ran her tongue across her teeth, thinking about how, during the long bike ride out of the city, and the excitement thereafter, she had lost all sense of time. At one point, she couldn’t even remember when she’d last brushed her teeth. The loss of that kind of luxury, of some connection to what once was a ‘normal life,’ occurred to her, but she did not feel the worse for the loss. She had, very recently, experienced a world of debris—bricks and stones, wreckage, gaping wounds on corpses, and blood running from limbs, and all of that, but the indignity of perhaps losing herself in the mix was a new concept for her. The loss of connection to a body in time— that was something to consider, so she thought about that.

In this new world, a person grew attuned to smells . The eyes are not the only sense used to determine the truth of things, after all. Before this new world, back in the world of Mad Men commercialism and extraordinary excess, brushing one’s teeth seemed to be a duty . Time was something measured only by a clock on the wall, or the television schedule, or the boss at the office, not by the sunrise or the next meal.

That old world seemed to her to have utterly vaporized. Her old lifestyle was becoming increasingly unimaginable, as if it had only been a dream.

She took a drink of the coffee and really tasted it. It was good because of, not in spite of, the grit. She felt the heat radiate from the stove and was thankful that they were in a secure location. In the old world, security was rarely a consideration because, in the end, it was always someone else’s responsibility. The city. The Mayor. The cops. The government. The President. It was their job to see to security. They existed to keep people from panicking. Insecurity leads to panic, so security was necessary to insure that business could go forward. You need business to flow freely if you are going to feed four-hundred million people on the productive capabilities of only a few thousand. Security is necessary to guarantee the free flow of cheaply made goods at market prices. So what happens when those transient forms of security evaporate?

She heard a sound down the hall and wondered whether it was Stephen.

She’d spent a great deal of time during the past week with Stephen and Calvin, watching them grow together like brothers. Every day, Clive and Red Beard went off to their business, she woke the boys, and they went about making themselves useful. Mostly, they’d spent their time picking through the out-buildings on the farm. Looking in sheds, attics, lofts, nooks and crannies, cupboards, anywhere they could think of, seeking to scavenge anything they thought might be valuable.

The barns and sheds were old, but not dilapidated or abandoned. The two young men found many handy items in their searches, focusing on multipurpose things that they could easily carry, along with any materials with specific, useful properties. Old rolls of fencing, chicken wire, screws and nails were particularly valuable. Pieces of old rubber inner tube, aluminum flashing, piles of feathers — all of these things were becoming more and more valuable in a world without industrial manufacturing.