Michael Bunker - WICK

Here we find Clive and Red Beard sitting and talking. There, Veronica is doctoring her son’s foot. Time goes on like this for a while. Now, Calvin is joining Clive and Red Beard in animated conversations and arguments. He is sitting with his back against the wall, polishing some tool he fashions for purposes that only he seems to care about.

Again, Veronica is tending to her son.

There, Red Beard is trying to get her to eat something.

Over here, Clive and Calvin are quietly discussing something in the corner.

The time passed on like this, the intermixing of the people in the bunker, the boredom being embraced, the moments being measured in swirls in the coffee cup. The scenes rolled by in endless succession. Time became both meaningless and endless. The Geiger counter was registering. Its dial showed clear, as it had since they first burrowed into the ground. Still, they were waiting, seemingly forever.

For what?

Only Clive Darling knew exactly what they were waiting for, and as per usual, he wasn’t talking.

Clive had purchased the piece of property in Lancaster County years before. The property suited his purposes, and it had the added benefit of being a stunningly beautiful piece of Pennsylvania. It rested along the river, which was lovely in its own right, and the river’s wide, unnavigable waters served as a kind of natural barrier to the western edge of the property boundaries. Clive had bought the property because he liked it, but he’d also bought it because it was the closest farm in the county to a man he sincerely wanted to know. That man’s name was Henry Stolzfus.

Clive had met Stolzfus by placing himself in the right booth of the right coffee spot—one that Henry Stolzfus frequented. This act of buying land next to a man in order to meet him and create a bond with him might be considered particularly manipulative or scheming, and one would be forgiven for thinking that all hidden motivations are inherently guileful. Clive, however, looked at the reality of the situation and excused his own behavior. How else would such a partnership come to be—between a rich worldling and a religious separatist?

The meeting of these two men took place at Smarty’s, a shiny, stainless-steel enclosed box of a diner on a shady back road in the southern center of the county. Every Monday at 8 a.m., many of the men from the local Amish community would meet at Smarty’s and exchange news. Clive spent some time scouting the area, and it didn’t take long for him to notice that the buggies were lined up deep around the diner on Monday mornings.

Clive had goals to be sure. He wasn’t just looking for friendship with like-minded individuals. Those many years ago, he’d been looking to secure a ready and available food source at a time when the Cold War was raging and the future had looked particularly bleak. Moving forward, Clive would need a sustainable source of food supplies for his men, and for the groups that he financially supported throughout the country. Considering all the factors, and counting into the equation his own long-term geopolitical goals, it seemed to him that collaborating with the Amish seemed like the best plan for getting his needs met. But how to strike the bargain?

On the first day of Operation Stolzfus, Clive walked into the diner to watch and learn. He noticed how the other men treated Henry, as if he was the man to know. The next Monday, he arrived early and sat down in Henry’s favorite booth. He’d learned something by watching the Amish man, and had decided the straight-forward approach was probably the best tactic. It turned out that Clive was right.

There was a reason that, in one of the most renowned Amish counties in the country, one of the most respected Amish men lived on the edge of society. Henry Stolzfus lived as far west as one could go and not be in the river or out of the county. Clive decided he might have a friend and confidant in such a man.

“You know, the problem is, people came to love the bomb.” It was Red Beard talking. Long soliloquies and spoken-word performances had become just another way to pass the time. This conversation happened not long after the nuclear blasts took out Philly and New York. Red Beard was sitting with Calvin and filling the air with words, which was something he loved to do.

“I mean, it goes way back—even before that song about wearing your sunglasses at night. You remember that one? Probably not. Or the one that talks about the future being so bright you gotta wear shades?” He hummed the tune from the song, but it didn’t sound like much to Calvin.

“It became cool to love the bomb. The country suddenly became that guy from the What? Me Worry? generation. I don’t have to look at the military-industrial complex to see some bomb fetishization going on. It was all over the media, too. You can go back to Dr. Strangelove at least, but when it happened, it happened. The country fell in love with the bomb, either in an actual way, by wanting more and bigger ones or, ironically, by mocking more loudly and derisively. We loved it or we hated it, but either way we thought about it (that is what love is, after all), and in time we all accepted the bomb as a reality not to be questioned. That’s how we became fallout kids, all of us. Besides, what could we do about it, anyway?”

Calvin didn’t usually know exactly what Red Beard was saying, but the words passed the time, and sometimes the words were interesting. Not always, but sometimes. Calvin had come to think of Red Beard’s dissertations as extended poetry recitations that didn’t need to make sense to be art.

Red Beard was talking to Calvin while Clive, who had been napping in the corner, awoke and began shaking off the sleep. None of them had any idea what time of day it was at that instant. Time was irregularly kept by events, and not by machines making declarative statements about subjective concepts. In the morning, or thereabouts, they had breakfast. Then there was the time period known as “after breakfast.” There were other periods of the day known by names such as “dinner,” and “after dinner,” and “reading time.” People cleaned up behind a sheet hung in the corner.

Red Beard was talking and Clive was yawning and stretching when they all heard a knock at the door upstairs. Even from where they were in the bunker, they heard the vibrations of sound from the knocking coming from above them. Then there was a bloodcurdling scream. Someone had entered the farmhouse. The person up there had found their way to the trapdoor and now he was pleading for his life. They heard the banging of fists onto the outside shell of the steel door until the thud of the fists made them sound meaty in their return. There was no threat of violence in the pounding, only the sound of pleading. After a while, they made out the reason why.

The person pounding on the door had the voice of one who had come to know the bomb intimately—someone who had survived its blast close up. The person pounding on the door was a temporarysurvivor, one of those stumbling this way from the east, irradiated by a bomb that, Red Beard was convinced, the people had decided to love.

There was no love in the sound of the pounding.

Days later…

“Here is what happened in the city at that moment.” Now Clive was talking to Calvin. Calvin had been cleaning his tools, and he’d asked the older man about a nuclear blast.

“At the point of detonation—well, imagine that there was a dot on the map about the size of a dime. That dime marks the area where a large hole, three quarters of a mile across, opened up. The devastation within that circle would have been total. Zero survivability. Imagine 9-11, but instead of planes, they had nuclear bombs. Lower Manhattan? All of it vaporized.