Michael Bunker - WICK

“That makes sense.”

“What do you think, Ace?” Peter asked.

“I’m with you,” was all Ace had to say about that. He smiled, though, which was as rare as hearing his voice.

“Okay,” Peter continued. “The guy said there is a town up ahead. Only a few miles up the road. It’s a mess, but we have to go through it. It’s been the focus of a few major MNG offensives, but the FMA holds the town now. To try to skirt the town by going through the forests or the fields is way too dangerous. So we’ll just try to get through it as fast as we can.”

“I’ve grown to hate towns,” Elsie said. “And don’t think I don’t get the irony of me, of all people, saying that.”

Veronica continued her solitary watch, standing on the porch as the atmosphere slowly turned from purple to blue, then yellow, and then pale white, and then pale white turning golden. These colors splashed across the atmosphere as the morning wore on. The air shimmered in iridescence. Veronica blinked. As the light expanded, the horizon turned brown, green, and red. These colors in the distance slowly came into focus. The red, is the neighbor’s barn. The brown, she thought, was the shingled roof of his farmhouse. An Amish farm, Clive had informed her. It was beautiful, in the distance, in the white morning light. The smartly constructed barn and outbuildings stood in crisp relief against the natural elements. She admired how the farm didn’t have all the dissecting and diagonal power lines leading up to the house to mar the natural beauty of the objects, and she thought of the farm’s value as a canvas, wondering how Van Gogh would have painted it at just that moment. She admired it as a rural landscape, and then wondered if art would even be possible to imagine in this new world. That thought caused her to make a mental note. She’d have to take the boys out in the spring and teach them to pick berries to mix up some paints.

In some of the farthest corners of the field, along the fence line, the slightest dusting from the black soot in the atmosphere sat on the tops of the snow, a distant reminder of what was going on over there, beyond this tribal region. The tiny dots along the horizon seemed to stand as if in a snow globe. The smoke kicked into the air from the recent dustups over in the cities, with the civil war and anarchy and lawlessness breaking out in the world — there had been… all of that.

Still, the light breaking through on the horizon was beautiful. The earth was now fully out of its shadow.

Stephen D’Arcy lay twisted among the sheets of the sofa-bed. He’d slept roughly last night—when he’d slept at all. He kept waking up with his back hurting him. Even at his young age, his back hurt him. He hadn’t realized how deeply the muscles in his shoulders had ached from the bike ride and all of the excitement after that. He’d realized it last night, however. So much sleeping on the ground, floors, and tables recently had taken its toll.

The scrounging was hard work too, and had added to the soreness. The tension in his flesh, the little tears in the fibers of his unused muscles, made them tender from overstrain. The soreness radiated out across his young shoulders and down his back, into his deltoids. He was sore even in his bones. The sheets were tangled like vines around his legs as he lay. He’d tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable place to rest his body against the strange shapes of the fold-out couch that he’d shared with Calvin for the past week. The couch, for its part, didn’t care about his comfort, or lack thereof.

Both boys had risen early each day to get ready for their scrounging duties. Today they were making a run to the outer limits of the property line. Stephen stretched his back and yawned, and wondered if Calvin was just as sore. He arched backwards to roll his shoulders forward fully, looking to find the range of motion so he’d know just where the pain would hit.

He looked around and got his bearings. He still was not completely used to living at the farm. Through the open door, he could see that his mother was already up. The rest of the fold-out was empty, and that meant that Calvin was up too. He felt for his boots and sat up on the edge of the bed.

Mom has been sleeping roughly too, he thought as he dressed.

They’d sat up talking last night, just the two of them, as they did at the end of every day. She talked with him about where they might go in the future, and what they might do. He felt that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she feared was coming. All she’d said was that they should stay put.

This is a good place, she’d said. At least for the moment. Even with the weird relationship that they’d established with Clive and Red Beard, it was a good place. His mother liked the men personally, and she’d left no doubt about that. She was concerned, however, that there seemed to be a tension between them all. Stephen had noticed the tension, too. They all had developed some sort of unspoken arrangement, and it must be admitted that the arrangement allowed everyone to live peaceably—that much was certain. However, his mother was still too new at all of this to entirely trust the two older men. She wasn’t sure she was fine with the arrangement, and told him that she wasn’t completely comfortable with people who kept secrets. She made motions in the air, putting air quotes around the word “secrets.” However, they were guests, after all, and she’d told him that she understood everything that being a guest implied.

Maybe it was just her motherly instincts towards Stephen and now, by extension towards Calvin, who seemed like he was close enough to be Stephen’s brother. Stephen could see that. He knew why his mother liked Calvin so much. Calvin had an old soul. There was something in his manner and presence that suggested that he was a man who ought not be slighted or treated like a youngster, merely because of his youthful appearance. He exuded a kind of wisdom born from experience. Where, Stephen wondered, did his new friend get such wisdom? He was clearly too young to have had much experience. It was a mystery.

Veronica had said all of these things, and Stephen had listened. Stephen listened to her and thought that maybe his mother had been saying that Calvin was somehow more mature, more capable than he was. He laughed to himself when he thought of this. He didn’t see it that way at all. He saw Calvin as a brother, as an equal. They were two brothers who had lost their fathers — misunderstood, as all youth are.

The morning was cool and light and Stephen couldn’t help thinking of the way his mother looked as she stood at the fence line while he and Calvin headed out to their day’s work. She stood and watched as if she were waiting for something, just as she had on his first day of school, when she’d sent him down the hall towards his classroom. His mother perennially had that look of a mother sending her child off to the danger of the world. Even now, in the midst of catastrophe, she had it.

As the two friends walked off to work, Stephen saw Calvin look back at Veronica over by the fence, and noted that his friend saw the look too. Calvin glanced back at him and smiled. Stephen smiled back and changed the subject that had never been spoken aloud.

The three of them, as a family, bonded as the scrounging project progressed. It was important for Stephen, as a youth still growing in his maturity, to have someone his own age to talk to. Someone who spoke his language. Someone who was member of his tribe. He had often leaned on Calvin’s guidance. He did that now.

“So what’s the plan?” He asked.