Michael Bunker - WICK

“You haven’t even heard the plan.” Mike said calmly, looking at Natasha with no discernible expression on his face.

“So tell me then,” Natasha said. “Where will you go? Where will you take all of us prisoners?”

“Settlers.”

“Prisoners!”

“I’ll be the senior commanding officer of the Missouri National Guard. I will assume the name of the man who currently runs the MNG. I will take his identity. Once that is done, we will go somewhere else. Maybe we’ll all go to Missouri. I’ve heard it’s nice there.”

Just then, Cole stomped into Mike’s tent and the wooden door slammed closed behind him. A smile crept across the bulldog’s face and his shoulders drew back in amusement. “Oh look, a hero!” he said with a laugh.

“Cole!” Natasha shouted.

“Natasha,” Cole said. He glared at Mike. “Time to come with me, sister.”

“Glad to,” Natasha replied, sneering at Mike as she moved behind Cole and towards the door.

The smile on Mike’s face grew, and he raised his hands above his waist with his palms out, as if to show that he’d committed no crime and that he intended no harm. “It’s funny,” Mike said, “that you two have a way of treating me like some kind of cartoon villain, when I’ve done nothing but protect you ever since Warwick.”

“Oh,” Cole said, his eyes half drooping as if he were bored. “We are so thankful for all you have done for us, Mikail Mikailivitch .” Sarcasm dripped from Cole’s lips as he spit out the words in a hard Russian accent. “We’ll remember you in our prayers every night. May all of Russia place you in the pantheon of national heroes! May your name be remembered alongside those of Stalin and Lenin, comrade Mikail!”

Mike sighed and his head dropped to register the undeserved abuse. “I should tell you both—” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if he had no other alternative, “—that if you leave this tent without reaching an agreement with me, neither of you will live until morning.”

“Yes,” Cole said, smiling, “you don’t sound a bit like a cartoon villain.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“We don’t need your help,” Natasha said.

Just as she said these words, the door flew open once again, and a cold icy breeze followed Steve into the tent.

“Great!” Mike said, “A Warwick reunion.”

Despite the placid look on his face, Steve brought into the tent with him an atmosphere of steadfast determination. The air was electric with tension as Steve quickly moved Cole and Natasha towards the door with his left hand.

None of them saw that in Steve’s right hand was a tire iron, gripped tightly and hidden up close to his right pants leg. None of them noticed the two lumps, one in each pocket of the pants he’d worn ever since the day that he, Mikail, Vladimir, and Kolya had first escaped into the tunnel that had brought them out of Warwick.

Steve ignored Mike and spoke directly to Cole and Natasha. “You two go directly to the tool shed at the southeast corner of the camp. Don’t run, but walk quickly. Wait there in the shadows until you hear my signal.”

“What will the signal be?” Cole asked.

“You’ll know it when you hear it,” Steve replied. Mike was moving toward him now, and Steve looked away from Cole and Natasha and fixed his eyes on Mike, arresting Mike’s movements for a moment. Both men froze and stared at one another.

“At some point, if all goes well, there will be a breach in the fence. That’s when you two need to make a break for it,” Steve said flatly.

Mike half-stepped toward Steve again before stopping. “Steve, your Chechen blood is rising up in you.”

At that, Steve turned fully to square up with Mike. “Shut up, Mikail.”

“I always said you could never trust anyone whose people came from Chechnya,” Mike said with a sneer on his face. He stepped defiantly towards Steve and this time Steve met him half way and swung the tire iron with all of his might. The iron struck Mike just behind his left ear, and the short, muscular man instantly dropped to the ground. A tiny trail of blood began to pour out from just above his right ear. He was unconscious.

Steve turned back to Cole and Natasha as if nothing at all had just happened. “Listen for the signal, and watch for a breach in the fence. When it happens, you go! Don’t try to take anyone with you.” Steve now looked directly at Cole. “Kolya, you made that mistake once before. You went back to the tunnel for your glasses and you got caught. Don’t make that mistake again. Once the fence is down, RUN!”

“People have always thought that disease would end the world—some bug or some transmuted virus—and it will, eventually. At least that’s what I think. Disease will end the world. However, it won’t be like everyone has imagined. We will have to deal with things like tetanus again, and the rampant and deadly diseases of the middle ages will all return.” Red Beard said.

“Rats,” Clive said. He spat the word out and turned to look down the small hallway of the bunker.

“Ok, I want to clear up something right now, since we have time, and we’re just talking here,” Clive said. “Most folks have it wrong about the middle ages. Ignorance and disease killed many people, no doubt about it. But when you hear some historian talking about how industrialism and progress extended the length of human lives in our era, you need to really examine the fallacies in many of their arguments.” Clive looked over at Red Beard and smiled. “I’m not arguing with you, Pat, I’m just making a point, since we’re all just talking here.” Red Beard just nodded, encouraging Clive to continue. Clive did.

“High death rates in the Middle Ages were the product of a combination of about three things. One, the masses of people in Europe had moved to the cities. The cities were teeming with people, most of them trying to escape armies that had been crisscrossing Europe for a couple of hundred years, stealing crops and food and kidnapping young men to force them into military service. So the cities were packed full of people.” Clive shook his head and muttered, “It was a recipe for disaster.” He looked over at Pat to see if his friend was still tracking with him. Red Beard was.

“Two, the people in those cities were ignorant. Good information was kept from them. They were superstitious and oblivious to even the most basic understandings of cleanliness and hygiene. They threw their bodily wastes out of their windows and into the streets for heaven’s sake, and then drank from the rivers that the waste ran into!” Clive acted out this part of his story, and then ended by shaking his head and waving his hand as if something stunk in the bunker.

“This was all in the cities, mind you. Three, there was little to no knowledge of the part played by vermin in the carrying of disease. City people killed all the animals that preyed on vermin, and then the rats and such-like animals, multiplied out of hand in the cities. Just like today. People will kill a harmless snake in their yard because they’ve been trained to be afraid of snakes, even though humans are about a million times more likely to be killed by a disease that is carried by the snake’s natural food! That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with!” Clive threw his hands up into the air. “Have you ever heard a modern urbanite say, ‘the only good snake is a dead snake’? Well, those are the people who will destroy the world via disease!”

Clive looked at Calvin and Red Beard and realized that he’d raised his voice, and now he was shaking his finger. He put his hand down and started to laugh.