Michael Bunker - WICK

He frowned. “Oh ma’am, you can’t. It’s far too dangerous.”

Veronica waved him off. “Nonsense. I can and I will.”

Red Beard could see that it wouldn’t have made a difference to argue with her, so he didn’t. He turned on his heel and made a motion toward the door. “Okay, then. I’ll have Calvin saddle up another horse.” They walked out to the front steps of the house together and waited.

Clive’s RV was in the yard. The farm below them was spread out in beautiful rows, all white now and covered in snow that had fallen overnight. This is the way of Pennsylvania in winter. Snow lies on the ground for months, enriching the earth for spring. An imaginative watcher might imagine the scene in spring, rows of corn spread out in the field, lofty stalks pressing up into the lazy blue sky, with the white farmhouse and red barn in the foreground, and the rusty wheelbarrow, and the white and yellow chickens scratching about in the yard. The sun also rises over Amish country, and falls along the trees on the banks of the river rolling just on the western edge of the property. The creative mind could imagine the scene in its entire rural splendor—even now. Even with the smoke.

However, it was not spring. It was winter, and the fields were white, and the sky in the distance was heavy with smoke. Beauty enveloped in ugliness. On top of the strange looking RV blinked the only light that Veronica could see on the immediate horizon, save for the light of the sun and the sky, and the reflections off the water rolling by in the riverbanks. She stopped in her tracks.

On top of the odd-shaped RV was a small transmitter antenna, turning in a slow, robotic fashion to the north. From the lazy and unsteady movement, it was unclear whether the dish was turning by a motor, or whether it gained its motion by a manual, cranking action. The dish stopped for a moment, and the engine revved in the RV.

Clive Darling was on a phone call.

They placed the boy’s body, racked with pain, onto a stretcher and tied him down firmly with plastic wrap. They could not afford to have the boy jerk in a spasm and fall off either the stretcher or the horse. They would have to move quickly along the roads, though they didn’t have far to go. There was no telling what they would find once they got off Clive’s farm and headed down the river road. Veronica and Clive fixed the stretcher to a horse that was to going to be led along like a pack mule. As they tightened the straps and secured the litter, Veronica noticed that there were other packages tied underneath the stretcher. She noticed them but did not feel the need to ask what they were. She bent forward and awkwardly kissed her son and asked the horse that was carrying him to be careful with her “precious boy.”

Clive laughed, but in an affectionate way. His breath rose up in front of his face like a spirit when he did. “You think that animal understands you?”

Veronica stroked the end of the horse’s nose and dropped her head to look into its eye. “More than you know, Clive,” she said.

The two mounted the horses and pulled off across the snow. At the bottom of the hill, there was a little step-down onto the road. The road was covered by a patch of ice and one of the horses slipped for a moment, its hooves skidding outward, causing the saddle and its rider to slide backward and hang there precipitously for a moment. The horse caught itself, and, steady now, they continued on their way.

The traveling was uneventful. They saw no one on the road, and no dangers presented themselves. Still, the sound of this new world was eerie. There was the clop of the horses’ steel shoes on the slush of the pavement, the sound of plastic rubbing, and horses tossing their reins as Stephen tried to yell out, his jaw clenched in agony. These sounds echoed across the snow and rolled into the banks of the river. The riders were lost in the strangeness of it all, noticing the muted noises of the livestock and the sounds of an unexplained and undefined distant explosion. Everything seemed muffled , somehow.

As they rode, Veronica couldn’t help feeling as if someone were watching them—as if there were eyes peering at them from along the tree line by the river, or from the river itself, or from the ditch. It was as if the hills themselves had eyes. She rode in quiet awareness, watching to her right and northward along the river road. She reached to feel her pistol against her belt and a lightning bolt of understanding shot through her head. In all the excitement to get Stephen prepared, she’d forgotten to pack her pistol.

As they entered the road that led to the Stolzfus farm, they stopped. Clive made a little wave, and then the door to the farmhouse opened up, and Henry walked out into his yard. He made a little wave back, and the three then proceeded on horseback up into the barn, where the doors closed behind them. There was nothing particularly odd about it in the grand scheme of things. This was a friendly little neighborly exchange in Amish country, perhaps a visitation on a Sunday afternoon.

No, there was nothing extraordinary about the event taking place in front of Henry’s barn, except for the fact that everyone—the two riders on the horses, the boy strapped in the plastic on the other horse, and the man standing in the yard doing the waving, directing traffic—they were all wearing nuclear fallout gear.

The explosion rocked the restaurant in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, just as Ace was wiping up the last of the delectable meat sauce with a piece of buttery garlic bread. Mortars began landing around the area of the restaurant, and Ace could see by a quick-snap look at the owner Nick’s face that this attack was not normal. It was something in his eyes. Nick held his smile for the rest of the crowd, but Ace saw the truth in his eyes. He wondered if the others had also.

In seconds, most of the diners had bolted out of the front door and gunfire rattled here and there in the streets outside. Peter jumped up and took Elsie by the arm, pulling her gently but firmly towards the bar, where Nick already stood taking an accounting of the potential danger. Bullets began popping through the front glass of the restaurant, and the three travelers had just crawled along the floor to where Nick stood, when an explosion destroyed a third of the restaurant’s seating area. The table where they’d just been sitting was not the dead center of the explosion, but it was close. They watched as the roof collapsed in upon itself, pouring dust and debris on the very plates off of which they’d been eating only seconds before. They looked up at Nick for some reaction, but he only flinched for an instant, and then he went back to assessing the room.

Ace could see bodies falling over as patrons tried to make it through the bottleneck at the front entrance to the restaurant. He tapped Peter on the leg and motioned that they should stay behind the bar along the railing. Bullets began pouring in through the restaurants opening. Someone is shooting into the crowd. The plate glass windows that stood on either side of the front door shattered and began to disappear.

Peter saw the small boy crouched behind the bar, and Elsie saw him too and went over to the boy. Peter settled in beside them and saw that Ace was straining to pull Nick down behind the edge of the bar, forcing him to take cover for his own life. Nick struggled against him, but eventually he, too, crouched down. He pursed his lips in anger as he considered what was becoming of his thriving business.

“Those MNG bastards!” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Where’s the back way out of this place?” Peter asked Nick.

“You don’t want to go outside right now. If they’ve decided to hit this place, then they’ll be coming from all sides.”