Michael Bunker - WICK

As the sunlight expanded across the valley, had one been standing along the ridge overlooking Clive’s farm, one might have wondered whether the smoke blocking out some of that sun was also made of pulverized human bones. One might consider the possibility of cancer-causing chemicals and radiation in the smoke. One might pause, watch the sunrise, and ask, “Was all of this necessary?”

It is, in the end, a matter of perspective. Some would surmise, not without ample evidence, that humanity’s crimes were immense, and that the inevitable justice for such crimes was only now being meted out by some unseen hand. Or perhaps one would have thought that even then, in that moment of most terrible devastation, the earth was bigger than humankind. “Look what I can do,” says the child, bending the rules of nature, spreading his havoc. The Earth stands with her hands on her hips, threatening with age and experience. She yawns at the antics, as she yawned at the dinosaurs. She will outlast these tantrums. Earth, in this scenario, simply keeps rolling toward the light in the horizon, as inevitable as the tide. Perhaps one might have considered that both realities were simultaneously true.

Just now, these considerations were just speculations. There was no one there yet, standing on the ridge, to consider them. There was only the farmhouse down in the valley, which seemed for the moment to be protected. Prevailing winds had taken the bombs’ immediate toxic cloud out to sea. The farm was peaceful, resting and quiet. The only noise of discomfort came from the barn, from animals that hadn’t been fed yet.

The farmhouse, too, was quiet. Occasionally, an electronic blip sounded, emitted from a source in the old farm’s drawing room. In that room, in the middle of the floor, just to the side of a hidden floor panel that covered the entry door to the bunker, was a Geiger counter. Clive Darling had left it there as he’d descended the steps on the day when they’d entered the bunker. He’d herded everyone into the cellar, and then he’d placed the Geiger counter on the floor, hastily wiring it up according to his plan.

Completing the task with the counter, he’d then pulled the flooring into place. All of this occurred in only a few moments after the bomb went off. He felt certain that they were all going to be in good shape, but he needed to get some readings before he could be confident. The Geiger counter sent active readings down into the basement.

Now, down in the bunker, Clive sat at an antique oaken table lighted by a wind-up lamp, and fiddled with a slide rule. He made calculations, and occasionally he reached up to grab the lamp to wind the small handle and generate more power. The sound of the lamp’s whirring dynamo filled the bunker, echoing off the walls. Despite the noise, Clive sat alone. Everyone else snoozed silently, not even stirring at the sound of the small machine being cranked back to life.

Clive stroked his mustache, leaned in, and tapped the window of the read-out dial on the counter. He waited for a moment and then flipped through a number of sheets in a small spiral notebook he kept in his front pocket. He made a mark on a page and then flipped back to a different page, where he made another kind of mark. On a whim, he thumbed back in his notebook, and his eye caught an entry. He stopped and stared at the page for a moment.

The note was from the day he’d met the traveler—the man he’d called Ned Ludd. Clay was his real name. He smiled at the thought, and he wondered what had happened to old Ned Ludd. Somewhere in Upstate New York, I reckon, trying to get by.

Now, another man stood his turn at the lonely vigil. He was wide-awake, and his mind raced through a well-worn philosophical maze. He enjoyed these nights alone. He fiddled with his red beard and pondered.

Time will, in future days, become again what it has always been in the past—an ancient and endless thing. Eventually people will come to live by the sunrise again, and that can’t happen soon enough for me. People will once again live as ancient man lived. Earth, that changeable mistress, will simply endure. In her heart of hearts, she has always been an unemployable lay-about. Left to her own devices, given time, she always reverts to the most decadent forms of wastrelism. Entropy and atrophy. Weeds growing through pavement in a parking lot. Waves crashing against the Colossus of Rhodes until they sweep it out to the sea. Humankind has spent the last several millennia thinking that they are in control, all the while walking on soil that covers dinosaur bones. Technological man built their whole society on the ancient remains of a larger, heartier species. Hmmm. I wonder what future species will build on the remains of humankind? Perhaps humans, ever the most selfish of all earth’s creatures, will leave no remains…

Red Beard paused his thoughts for a moment. He leaned his head against the cool of the concrete and found that he liked the sensation. Soon enough, his thoughts continued…

And all this while they could have been loafing. Not ‘loafing,’ as in ‘doing nothing.’ Loafing, as in not worrying. Not working on a treadmill. Not slaving away to own things they don’t need, and that can never last. Not straining at a brass ring that will only leave them empty. Now, it will take years to regain knowledge that has been lost in the mists of time. They must relearn skills that will help them beat back decadent, violent nature. In some cases, humankind will literally have to reinvent the wheel. That will all be true in time. But for now, there is the waiting, and that too, is endless. The interminable waiting. The ground has been literally swept out from under the feet of the cities. Ground(s) zero! In New York and Philly, and other places stretching out beyond into the western horizon…

Red Beard was right about one thing, even if he was wrong about others. The systems that had eradicated the importance of concepts like day and night (all except for that most persistent of human requirements… sleep,) disappeared in the blink of an eye. Once again the natural cycles of life would reassert themselves. Day. Night. Seasons. Age. Life. Death. Frailty. All of these realities were rising again to insist upon recognition by humankind. From the hustle and bustle of the 21st Century, in a crystalline moment, the brakes had been applied, and now time would be experienced more purposefully, even down in the depths of a fallout bunker.

Red Beard leaned back in his chair and checked the dial. He made a mark in a notebook. He leaned his head against the concrete again. He thought, somehow, of prisons, of caves.

Time passed. Inside the bunker sat a group of people brought together by whatever forces ruled the universe. God, chance, luck. Everyone in that bunker didn’t believe all the same things, and individually they conceived of different motivational powers at work in the universe. They did, however, share one commonality: Together, they waited in the bunker for the smoke to clear.

Time is experienced in both small and large increments in such confined, underground spaces. The scenes flashed by in bursts, like blips from the Geiger counter on the floor above them in the farmhouse. Long, lazy hours of conversation coupled with short bursts of emotion. Living underground can be like being in the warm enclosure of a womb, or the cold, dark grip of a dungeon, but, either way, one can only sleep so much. One can only read so many books. The body gets weary in such a prison, such a grave. Time becomes a vanity. Moments are measured by the hunger in one’s stomach, the tension in one’s legs. There is a feeling of wanting to run unfettered across a field, just as there is a need to sit and explore the inner quiet of one’s own nature. Time becomes meaningless in such moments, and it becomes everything.