Michael Bunker - WICK

Nick reached the landing and turned to the left, searching with his foot for the next step down. “A few of ‘em got it when that mortar took out the area where you people were sitting. I didn’t see any more around, and none of ‘em know about this place… only me.”

His son cleared his throat. “Me and Charlie,” Nick corrected himself.

When the whole group had arrived at the bottom of the stairs, they could see by the illumination from Nick’s Zippo that there was a heavy iron door, rusted but very solid, leading into the catacombs. To Peter, the door looked like a movie prop, or the gateway into an ancient dungeon.

Nick produced a heavy, iron skeleton key on a leather strap, and opened the door with a solid push.

“Built in the middle 1800’s, the catacombs served as everything from wine cellar and beer-aging vault, to a hospital during the Civil War, to a speakeasy and casino during Prohibition.” Nick talked like a tour guide, chatty to take their minds off the rage of bullets that seemed to be pouring into the building over their heads. Once everyone was in the cellar, Nick pushed the solid door closed, and lowered a steel piece of I-Beam into a cradle that received the heavy bar and locked it into place. The barricade served as ‘insurance,’ Nick said, in case anyone ever managed to find a way to unlock the door.

The subterranean room they were in was cold and dusty, and there were antique wooden shelves laden with goods stretching from floor to ceiling. The shelves curved along their tops, matching the arched ceiling, and the whole of it gave Peter the mental image of a wine cellar in France, maybe back during the Hundred Years War.

The feeling of stepping back in time was shattered, though, when Nick walked over and pulled a tarp off what turned out to be a stainless steel box. Nick flicked a switch, and the box hummed to life with a mechanical whirr, which increased in speed and intensity, until the room filled with the sound.

“What are you doing?” Elsie asked.

Nick ignored her question. He only held up a finger and smiled. He continued his movements, and from under another shelf, he pulled out a device that looked like a World War 2 era battlefield phone. He plugged a cord into the humming stainless steel box, and then he cranked a lever on the phone.

Charlie, for his part, walked around the cellar and lit lanterns. Elsie turned and watched him as he did so. Ace helped the boy reach one lantern that was a little bit out of his reach. The orange-yellow glow lit up the room and gave it a warmth that matched its antiquity.

Ace, Peter, and Elsie watched Nick go through the strange series of motions, and then they glared at one another with a look of intense curiosity. Young Charlie watched the three visitors with unrestrained amusement and just smiled a knowing smile.

A minute or two passed, and the only sound was the whirr of the stainless steel box, and the breathing of the five inhabitants of the basement. Before long, though, Nick spoke into the phone.

“Clive? This is Nick over in Mount Joy. We’ve had a breech. The MNG have surrounded the place! Heck, they’ve probably taken the whole town. If you’re coming to save the day, now would be a really good time!”

As Cole and Natasha sprinted through the snow, the frozen ground and the darkness made their running treacherous.

Still, they ran, darting through the forest and through clearings without any real thought as to what direction they ought to run. Their goal was just to get away . Away meant ‘away from the Carbondale camp.’ Away was an idea to them, just as escaping from any imprisonment is always an idea. Their escape was no different from that of a man, not long ago, who’d left his Brooklyn apartment to seek freedom from the stranglehold of the city. Or, that of a woman and her son who’d trekked out of the city just to get away from the mayhem.

They ran to save their lives.

Natasha breathed deeply as she ran, and for a moment, she even forgot that Cole was with her. His own strenuous gasping, coming from behind her and to her right, faded for a moment as memories flooded over her. In her mind, she was back with Lang—who was really Vasily—and he was also the man she’d loved, and she was sprinting across the open clearing of Highway 17; sprinting for her life and to escape a world of lies. Tears welled up in her eyes now, and her thoughts tumbled together, and she thought of the other family members and friends that she’d lost. She thought of Sergei, giving his life for her. She thought of Peter and Elsie, and she hoped that maybe they were still alive. Where could they be? Somewhere out there in the darkness. She looked out into the rolling hills in front of her and the tree line to the right and ran toward that nothingness.

She ran as if she were running from her bitterest recollections, and running towards all the things she’d loved and lost. That thought brought her mind back around to Cole, the only family she had left. She turned to look at her brother, and that was when both of them stumbled through a particularly deep drift, tripping over something buried under it. Together, they tumbled headlong into the snow, crumbling like Olympic decathletes who’d failed only steps from the finish line.

Lying on their backs and looking up into the darkness, their chests heaved in unison as their eyes flashed around the night sky in a jumbled mishmash of terror, sadness, elation, and hope. They each greedily, and wordlessly, took in the cold, night air—the air of life—and neither of them was prepared when a dozen armed men were suddenly all around them with guns pointed into their surprised faces.

Jay Watkins, former Sergeant in the Missouri National Guard, and now a Staff Sergeant in the Free Missouri Army, squatted down next to a large tree, leaning his back against it as he inhaled deeply from his cigarette. In the distance, there was sporadic gunfire coming from the direction of Carbondale.

“You two may have made it out of there just in time,” Watkins said.

“ Time? ” Cole mumbled, shuffling his boots in the snow. The rest of his sentence was a mumble.

“What was that?”

“Time is the father of truth,” Cole replied. He glanced up at the soldier, pulled off his glasses, and cleaned them on the filthy sleeve of his coat. He placed the glasses back on his face and snorted in disgust.

“That was Rabelais,” Cole said, matter-of-factly.

“Well, ain’t that a load of crap!” Watkins said. “And that was Jay Watkins, Staff Sergeant!”

“Time will tell,” Cole replied. “That’s all I can come up with right now. I suppose I could snort again if you’d like.” He straightened his back and looked at Jay Watkins.

Watkins laughed. The laugh was slow at first, but it grew in an increasing way, until the only way to describe the sound would be guffaws . Jay Watkins had large heaps of laughter pouring out him, coming from deep in his gut, and his whole body shook.

Cole laughed too, until he looked over at Natasha, and her face—frozen in anger, or maybe it was pain—put an end to the mirth.

Watkins took the last draw from his cigarette and threw the butt down into the snow. “As I was saying, it looks like you two made it out just in time. A dozen more made it out after you, but they got cut down by automatic fire in the clearing. You two beat the rush by a minute or two.”

“How do you know all this?” Natasha asked. Her hands were shaking, and her jaw was fixed and set.

“Our guys have been watching the prison for a week. We were in the final planning stages of an assault on the camp when you two blew the fence.”

“It wasn’t us,” Natasha said, looking down at her feet, before looking back up at Watkins. “It was a friend of ours.”