Michael Bunker - WICK

“Out beyond that, compare it now with a circle about the size of a nickel—this circle is the blast radius. Anyone and anything in its path would have turned to flames. If there were any survivors, they would soon have had acute radiation poisoning. The person out there a while ago? The man knocking on the door trying to get in here? He would likely have poisoned us with toxic radiation if we’d opened the door. How he got here so fast has me concerned, but…” he let his thoughts trail off.

Calvin was starting to get the picture. They weren’t in the bunker to escape radioactive fallout. They’d pretty much determined that the fallout cloud had been pushed out to sea. Clive had them in the bunker to escape those who hadn’t avoided radioactive fallout. He was waiting for those who were irredeemably poisoned, to die off.

In other places, people didn’t need a bunker, or didn’t have one. Maybe they didn’t run into irradiated refugees, or maybe they had fallout suits and just shot strangers… or maybe they didn’t know any better, and got poisoned, and would die ten or twenty years hence from cancer.

“Okay, for the next radius, think of a circle about the size of a quarter or a one ounce gold coin. If you placed that coin on a map and looked at the concentric circles and the diagrams of all the blast patterns—that circle is the radius wherein the air is going to be highly toxic, and the soil is going to be spoiled. We’re outside that circle, or at least we hope we are. None of us really knows the megatonnage of the weapons that were used, so all of this is speculation, you know? And, we should be happy about that—that we’re outside the worst of the problems. Anyway, the fact that we were able to stand and see what we saw, and still get down here to safety in time… Well… We did okay.”

Clive flashed his best Sam Elliott smile. “The point is that if you were close enough to survive and you did, you had to keep going. You had to do what was necessary to do.”

“Yeah,” Calvin said. “It’s hard to imagine. I think I’ve always just thought of it as something that either happens or it doesn’t. A bomb going off, I mean. I either survive or I don’t.”

“Yes, Calvin, but in Dante’s deepest pit of hell, it is coldest winter,” Clive said. “It’s hard to imagine that, too, until you take a look around. Once the money has been accounted for, the imagination of man is the root of most evil.” He pointed at everyone in turn, and then tapped on his own chest. “They call that the ‘heart.’ Desperately wicked. Who can know it?” He nodded his head as if he knew it.

Clive motioned around them. Red Beard was talking with Veronica and Stephen was moaning in pain. The sound coming from Stephen sounded like the noise you’d make when mocking a pain, actually. Stephen was not really giving into it, or, not yet acknowledging it. In fact, it seemed that Stephen was indeed, mocking the pain. As if he could fight it back by mere force of will power.

“How’s he doing?” Clive asked Calvin.

“Veronica thinks he has tetanus,” Calvin said.

Clive winced. It was just a small movement, behind his eyes, but you could see it if you knew where to look.

It should be said here that most of the world has long operated under a misconception about tetanus. This misconception has, in many ways, been a purposeful deception, perpetrated by a few generations of salesmen who have grown very rich by convincing the world to have faith in vaccinations as an answer to every ancient bogeyman. As part of this deception, almost everyone in the world was propagandized into believing that the medical condition of tetanus comes from rusty metal. It does not. Tetanus comes from the production of a highly dangerous toxin produced by the introduction of the tetanus bacterium into the body.

The widespread belief that tetanus comes from rust was encouraged by people in the medical and pharmaceutical professions who wanted to sell tetanus vaccines to everyone in the world. The idea that tetanus is always resident on rusty nails and other rusty items is based loosely on the fact that most rusty items are found outside. Most tetanus cases, especially in earlier generations, happened on farms where animals defecated, and where the tetanus bacteria would often thrive in anaerobic environments (like the pits and deposits on a rusty nail) and in the dirt in areas frequented by animals. The rusty surface of a nail just happens to be a great place for the tetanus bacteria to hide, and when a puncture is made in the surface of the skin, the nail is a handy delivery device that can push the tetanus endospores deep into the wound. It should also be noted that the fatality rate of those who contract tetanus in a full-blown way, and who do not receive treatment, is about 50%. It’s a coin toss, if such a thing can be said without it seeming to be too callous.

Everyone doesn’t always have all of the information they need to properly treat a medical condition, especially in a situation where there has been a great—even worldwide—calamity, and when the only recourse is found in the colonized minds of technologically crippled people who have relied for too long on chemical drugs and high-tech treatments to maintain a semblance of health through brute force application of money and industry. In short, there are ways to treat someone being afflicted by the toxins produced by the tetanus bacteria. Keeping the wound extra clean; flushing it with clean and sterilized water or saline solution; soaking out the toxin with a drawing solution and with Epsom salts; flooding the body with natural substances that have anti-bacterial qualities; all of these treatments can help, and sometimes even cure, a patient afflicted with tetanus. Whether or not the people in a given radius have that knowledge is what makes the issue problematic.

Veronica stood at Stephen’s bed and looked down at him. A few hours ago (or was it yesterday?), he’d begun to complain of tightening in his jaw. Not long after that, the jaw had wrenched into uncontrolled spasms. That’s why they used to call it lockjaw. He almost bit his tongue off because the spasms were so violent and unexpected. Now the convulsions had begun in his feet and arms. She looked down and took his hands into her own. He’d been rubbing them frantically in his sleep. She thought of how, when he was just a boy, she’d held his hands in her own as she taught him to clean the paint from a paintbrush. Those hands were now writhing in grotesque shapes, held there as if frozen in ice, his back arching up and then out, waves of uncontrolled musculature rolling up into his shoulders.

Stephen’s face was frozen in pain. Veronica wanted to take the weight from him, but she could not. She felt the helplessness of a mother whose whole world is passing before her eyes. She felt her art slip away into the distance. She hung there over the precipice, over her child.

Just south of Elizabethtown, Peter, Elsie, and Ace joined the few other travelers on the state highway heading southeast towards Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. Peter’s contact in the FMA had informed him that they would come upon a large militia checkpoint there, just below Mount Joy.

“They’re stopping most everybody from entering the heaviest Amish areas,” the man said. The way he said it made it sound as if that answered all that needed to be answered. “If you’re lucky, you’ll meet up with some other refugees heading into the same country; maybe get in with some party that has a legitimate claim to be allowed in.”

Peter liked the way the man didn’t stress the word legitimate. The tone of the statement suggested that there was social order enough there that one might find someone reasonable in charge to talk to. He didn’t know if luck had anything to do with it, but he was silently hoping that just such a scenario might avail itself.