Michael Bunker - WICK

He looked down again at the foot. “Ouch.” Ouch! The skin was all blue on the top of the foot. The nail hadn’t quite punctured the skin on top, but had gotten… just … that… close. Blueish-black blood was already coagulating just under the skin, and there was a tiny circle of deepening hues where the nail had nearly come through. The bruise moved outward in concentric circles of purple. The pain, too, radiated outward.

Stephen looked up at Calvin, who tried his best to smile at his friend sheepishly.

“You want to put the boot back on or hobble with it off?” Calvin asked.

“On.” Stephen said. “Maybe it will help hold down the swelling.” He put the boot back on and they headed back across the field toward the farmhouse.

Veronica was standing in a cornfield, thinking about the harvest that this field might bring in the spring. She’d always read about Pennsylvania farmland and its rich soil, and its suitable climate. She looked around and thought, it has other advantages, too. She’d read that Pennsylvania has more miles of rural roads than any state in the nation—miles of roads running through cornfields or dairy farms. Back ways. Away from the huddled masses, yearning to… well… to live. Many of the Amish farms were connected, one to another, fence to fence, for miles in every direction.

She looked across the field now, examining it forensically, with her artist’s eye. She’d always liked the way snow looks against the line of the sky. The field was white but splattered here and there with broad swaths of color. The fence line cut a grid across the fields, and Veronica was trailing her eye along that fence line, and then along the fence by the river, when she saw Calvin helping Stephen along. She could see that Stephen was hurt. Something in the pit of her stomach made her know that it was bad. The birds in the tree above their head scattered, chirping madly as they flew away in the opposite direction of the two approaching boys.

She ran, her arms outstretched, unconsciously open like a hen wanting to gather in her chicks. She was running toward them, eyes wide open, panic gripping her heart, when there was a blinding flash, as if someone had flipped on a light switch, amplifying the light and making it ten times brighter. Day. No. More than just day. Daylight itself, as if the world had just been put under a magnifying glass. The light was intensified .

It almost blinded her with its intensity. Had she been looking just a few clicks further to the right, it certainly would have blinded her—at least temporarily. As it was, it knocked her to the ground. She rocked, feeling as if the flash of light had sent a wave under her feet. She heard a boom. No, it was more. It was a BOOM! She was on her knees and trying to get to her feet.

The thing she’d most feared had happened.

She stood up again and continued running toward the boys. She saw Calvin helping his brother along, with Stephen’s arm slung over his shoulder. Stephen, her son. He looked like a wounded soldier whose friend was helping him hobble back from the battlefield.

She saw them come over the hill and she was running. When she’d been knocked to the ground by the blast, something in her had changed. There’d been an almost instantaneous realization, as if God Himself had stepped out of the clouds to speak the awful truth.

The world would never be the same. There was no going back. The decision was final. She looked into the assembling clouds and saw the sky open up and the wind rush out, and she ran toward the nothingness.

The odd-shaped RV was barreling down a road emptied of military style vehicles for the first time in many days. In the cab, the cowboy was spitting and cursing, and the leprechaun was listening. “Damn it all, damn it all.” Clive spat again, angrily. “Those bastards did it!”

This was the bomb that took out Philadelphia.

Across the adjacent field, they could see the woman who they’d brought into their home, and she was running towards the boys. The RV had been a hundred yards up the road when the flash split the morning sky. Now, Clive and Red Beard pulled up to the farmhouse and stopped. “Damn it all. ”

Veronica reached the two young boys, and she knew that there wasn’t time for explanations. A storm was coming. A new kind of storm. She put her arm around Stephen and threw his left arm over her shoulder. With two of them taking the weight off of Stephen’s foot, the three of them picked up the pace.

All five of them got to the house at about the same time. Clive and Red Beard told them to follow, and they all spilled into the farmhouse’s drawing room. They pulled back the table, and then rolled back the rug. Clive bent down and picked up a slatted door made as a cutout in the floor. “I was hoping not to have to do this,” he said, “but we don’t have much choice now.”

He pointed to the stairs leading down to a dark steel door.

“In you go.”

Calvin went first, and he helped Stephen limp his way down the steep stairs. Clive and Red Beard stood and waited for Veronica to go, both of them looking unsure as to whether she would actually go or not. She did. She didn’t even think to ask why.

The Farm. After the Bombs.

Taking a bigger look at things, from space, the planet rolled on. It was now dimpled along its surface by a number of pockmarks, and in its atmosphere was a cloud of dust so thick that, in many places, it might occlude much of the sun for years. Still, the earth rolled along, pushing through the roiling violence of space as if the dimples hardly mattered. It swung its wide arc around the solar system as if the dust was only a hiccup in its calendar. In many places on earth, someone gazing into the nighttime sky would have looked in vain for stars, but still the stars were there. For those seemingly trapped under the darkened blanket, the stars would be seen another night, after the winds would blow in and sweep the skies clean. In some regions, the dust effect would linger, causing drastic temperature drops over the next year, killing crops that weren’t already lost to disease and the poisoning of the soil. Other locations would see wild and unnatural temperature swings and difficult growing conditions. Still other places in North America and around the world—areas where the jet stream protected the earth from dust and fallout—would actually benefit from the cooler temperatures that would bring more rains than normal.

From above the eastern portion of North America, the ethereal clouds that hung between earth and space, the clouds that were even now diminishing, were made up of ash and smoke—remnants of The City. Not just a portion of the city, like what had happened at Ground Zero when the twin towers fell in New York — this cloud consisted of the entirety of a cultural and social construct we call The City.

Mirroring the reality of the intermittent pyres of global thermonuclear war, from a nearer view, on earth, the phenomenon of fire as a tool and hub of society had returned to the world, spreading outward in webbed fingers into the night. These were the fires of humanity—of humanness. Gathering around campfires, people huddled ever closer together. Shell-shocked. The fires stretched across the landscape in waves. Nearer the old population centers, they increased in number slightly and then spread out toward the horizon where they diminished, and disappeared into the unpredictability of the wilderness.

There were many hunks of metal hanging in the pull of earth’s orbit. These metal objects once served as communication satellites, but now their only purpose was to bide their time in gravity’s tug until they all, in the coming years, and in their turn, would become streaking stars across the earth’s skies. Looking at the earth from one of these satellites, we would have seen through the haze of the clouds and dust that, as time passed, the number of fires on the surface of the earth was dwindling. Immediately after the blasts, though, the pockmarks on the earth—those that we mentioned earlier—shimmered like trinkets in the light of heaven, or mirrors reflecting back, flashing a signal code. It was strange, this reflected light. Then, studying it closer, we might have read the code and understood. The blinking was coming from the center of each of the blasts. The superheated gas had turned the surface of the earth in those pockmarks to glass.