Michael Bunker - WICK

“No, Clay,” Clive said matter-of-factly. “I know it is imminent.”

“You know it is imminent — like when my grandmother knew it was going to rain—or you know it is imminent, like in… you have absolute knowledge that this is going to happen, that it is about to happen ?”

“Let me ask you a question, Clay,” Clive said, stopping for a moment and looking Clay in the eye. “When your grandmother said it was going to rain, not when she just kind of wondered aloud, but when she said to come inside because it was about to rain… was your grandmother ever wrong?”

“No.”

They walked on in silence for another mile before Clay could find the words to say something, anything, about what he had heard. “I guess we’ll know soon enough, won’t we Clive?”

“Yes, we will Ned Ludd.”

Clay looked at the old horseman who seemed to strain not at all against his heavy burden. More miles washed by as they walked in silence, and the older man didn’t tire in the least. Clay wondered how anyone could be so certain about anything in this life and after a while he didn’t care if Clive was right or wrong. It was refreshing to meet someone who plowed forward and who was certain of his direction and goal. There was a kind of inspiration merely from being in the presence of certainty.

Clay finally broke the silence. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t get that hybrid car I’ve been wanting, and that maybe I shouldn’t depend on my electric stove?”

They both laughed, and Clive winked at him, his eyes smiling like before. “I’m saying y’all don’t even call the power company to get the power back on!” The Savannah accent was back.

Just outside of Liberty, they left the highway, and Clive led with purpose through a copse of trees that brought them to the entrance of what looked like a Golf Course. Looking around, Clay saw the sign that read Grossinger Country Club and noticed that Clive seemed to know the grounds.

The place was eerily abandoned, and Clay figured that no one was playing golf with everything else that was going on in the world. They sat down near the driving range and talked and rested, and after about thirty minutes of chit-chat about things less important than the end of the world, Clay heard the thump-thump-thump sound of a helicopter coming towards them from the north.

The helicopter landed out in the open on the driving range. The chopper was a big one and expensive, a play toy of the rich and famous and of top-level bureaucrats. Clay had seen choppers like this on television shows—usually landing on some rooftop in Manhattan to ferry billionaires to airports and distant garden parties.

Clive held his hat down from the wash of the rotors and turned to Clay while he threw his bag over his shoulder. “You can come with me Ned Ludd. We’ve always got a place for our brothers.”

Clay looked at the helicopter just as a man in some kind of uniform got out and opened the rear door. Looking back to Clive, Clay shouted through the storm of noise, “I appreciate the offer Clive, really I do, but I’ve got to get home. That’s been my plan for some time now, and I want to see it through. Besides, I don’t want to be in that thing when the EMP hits.” He smiled at Clive as they shook hands.

“Well, neither do I, Ned Ludd, but I’m praying I’ll get home safely too.” As he said this, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to Clay. “When you get home… if things haven’t crashed before then, give me a call and let me know you made it safely.” Once again, the accent seemed to have vanished, but it was hard to tell with the whirr of the rotors. Clive turned to walk away, then turned back and said, “I like you Ned Ludd. I hope you do alright.”

Clay was going to answer him, but he was gone, and in seconds the helicopter lifted into a sky that had grown cloudy and gray in just the last few minutes. He waved instead, and Clive, looking out through the window, gave him a sharp salute as the chopper pulled away and headed north into the lowering clouds.

Two and a half hours later, as he walked alone northward on the highway, the sun was dropping into the western sky, and the temperature, which had been moderately cool throughout the day, sank with the sun. The weather had begun to turn right about the time that Clive had climbed into his millionaire copter, and the clouds had slowly lowered until they almost seemed to brush the tops of the trees.

Clay thought about that strange encounter as he walked along. Before flying off to his apocalyptic retreat, Clive had mentioned in passing that another storm was coming. He had, of course, spoken in those strange tones about a storm of political intrigue, but there had been something more, an actual weather report of a blizzard or something. Clay had taken out his radio from a side zipper pocket in his backpack, but he’d not been able to get any reception from the few radio stations that still seemed to be transmitting. For a very brief moment, he’d locked onto an AM station from the city, but all they talked about was the upcoming election and the damage on Breezy Point. Nothing of value to him now, nothing of storm movements and forecasts. The station bled away and he was left with scratchy silence.

He flipped up his collar and wiggled his toes inside his boots. It was getting cold now. His very thoughts were getting cold. The smooth, languid restfulness of the walk through the city, the warm seclusion of Veronica’s house, the heated intrigued of the luxurious cabin in Clive’s truck—all that was gone now. His thoughts became sluggish and brittle. He felt his blood move slowly to his extremities and back again to his heart, the movements growing shallower with each successive circuit. He felt the cold first in his fingertips, then his knuckles, then his digits, then his hands.

After Clive’s departure, he walked back to the highway from the Golf Course, heading north-northwest again along the eastern bank of the highway, passing walkers and worried hikers carrying gas cans and sacks and sometimes children. He passed more and more people along the highway. Where were all these people coming from? Some nodded a lukewarm greeting, but most just kept their head down, walking purposefully, their breath pouring out before them like spirits.

As the temperature dropped, and coinciding with the change of the weather and the impending darkness, the number of people on the road—in cars and on foot—had diminished as well, until only now and then did he see anyone else on the road. “I’m going to be cold tonight,” he said aloud, though there was no one around to hear him.

The animals are acting funny . The thought occurred to him, and he didn’t even know why he had the thought, or what it meant. He remembered having this thought a few days before Sandy hit, watching a group of swallows range through the sky, then land in a tree overhead and screech. Now he didn’t hear any birds at all. He could not even hear a dog bark anywhere in the distance. Maybe another storm IS coming .

He passed what might have been a very small hamlet on his right off the access road and, as he did, he hearkened back to Clive’s warning about how people were going to get edgy and dangerous on the roads as time went on. Veronica had said as much to him too, without all the political context. He knew that this was probably true, and not just because Clive and Veronica had said it. He had watched what happened in and around New Orleans only days after Hurricane Katrina, and many of the books he’d begun reading lately, books that fed his discontent with the city, had talked about what might happen in any urban society when people started getting restless after a major event. The line between order and chaos in society could indeed be a very fine one, and the threads that made up that line seemed increasingly strained already. If a blizzard did more to cut off access to gas and groceries and electricity and normal, it could put that social fabric near the breaking point.