Michael Bunker - WICK

Clay had never been a doomsday survivalist, or a doomsday anything, but he was interested in alternative viewpoints. As he had explored a number of these different viewpoints online, and in a bookstore around the corner, he’d been surprised at how many of them actually made some sense. Even Clive, with his apocalyptic vision, had said some things that seemed to resonate. Clay wondered why he was drawn to these kinds of outsider visions. For example, one particular book he’d read in the weeks before the storm had been written by a neo-Amish separatist. He knew that this was a stretch for a guy in Brooklyn. How could he have explained to his friends at the coffee shop that he was reading a book by this guy in Texas named Jonathan Wall who had suggested that a major disaster would eventually strike that would be the straw that would break the camel’s back? Wall stated that such a disaster could begin the precipitous tear in what he believed was an ‘artificial veil of civility’ that perilously held Western Society together. How could Clay even explain to his friends that he was reading a book that dared question the industrial and cultural foundations of the modern society?

No matter. He would be home soon in his farmhouse in Ithaca, and the world could crack open and swallow the city whole, using Texas for desert, and he would be secluded in his forest. He watched his breath form in front of his face and felt his brain congeal around this thought.

Clay decided that he should get off the road, if only to be removed from the possibility of meeting strangers that might be unpleasant. Walking on the back roads might take him several more days to get to his destination, but, in the end, his goal was to actually arrive at that destination, and now he figured his odds of doing so increased in direct negative proportion to the number of people he would encounter on the way. Leave yourself a way out, he thought, that lesson still in his mind. Don’t get trapped!

He walked another mile past the hamlet, then veered to his right to cut through a wooded greenbelt. As he did so, the cold wind began to blow more forcefully, and darkness fell around him like a cloak. He crossed over the northbound access road and headed into some woods that ran alongside the road.

He began to shiver. He wasn’t a survivalist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did know a few things he’d picked up here and there by watching survival shows on the Discovery Channel. He suddenly found himself thankful for those long hours he’d spent sitting in front of the television after Cheryl and the girls had died. He had never been out in the wilderness much, but he had imagined it happening, and he thought that this was half the battle.

In the backpack, he still had the rolled up woolen blanket that Veronica had stuffed in there, and the Mylar survival blanket, folded tight into a small square, still in its plastic wrap, was safely stowed in the side pocket of his pants.

His coat was supposed to be rain proof, and his boots were excellent for hiking. They should keep his feet dry, even if the weather did turn bad. He sent up a little thank you to the heavens for bringing the strange confluence of events to this point. He was truly out in the wilderness now, and he felt ready to face whatever came.

After another thirty minutes of walking northward and away from the highway, the darkness deepened as the heavy clouds dropped down and became fog. No light made itself available to assist him in his efforts to navigate the woods. He stopped, and reaching into his backpack he pulled out the small flashlight Veronica had thought to pack for him. He was so very grateful to have met her and to have talked with her. He made a mental note to send her a letter or postcard upon reaching home, to thank her for her kindness, and now—for likely saving his life.

The woods have been frightful for millennia. When Hawthorne wrote, he made them the seat of mysterious evil. Children’s fairy tales often take the protagonists deep into the forest to teach them a moral lesson in goodness. Thoreau went into the woods to redeem them, but he was only a stone’s throw from civilization and had a cleaning woman come round once a week to do his laundry. Now, as Clay walked deeper into the dark of the forest, he thought through the cold in his feet and the chill on his face that the forest could frighten as well as comfort. He held onto this thought as the cold made his thinking disjointed and his actions more mechanical and instinctive.

He looked around for some high ground and found some in a close growing copse of pine trees and figured that the bed of pine needles under them would make as good and comfortable a bedding as he might otherwise have concocted.

At that point, he got to work making a shelter, working mainly with scattered memories from books and television shows he’d read and seen over the last couple of years. From pine branches he built a shed roof lean-to, open to the south, covering the north wall thickly with more branches that were heavy with needles. When the lean-to roof was dense enough to block the breeze, he built another wall, this one straight up and down, about three feet from the open front of his little hut. He started with two stout branches, pounded them into the ground about four feet apart, and then wove thinner branches between them like wicker. Against this wall he leaned more greenery and branches to make it both a heat reflector and wind break should the wind shift around to the south.

Next he began digging a small trench with his hands and his pocket knife, and eventually a small scoop that he quickly carved from the wide end of a fatter branch with Veronica’s knife. The trench ended up being about ten inches deep, and almost a foot across, and it ran parallel to, and within eight inches of, his heat reflector wall.

Despite the dropping temperatures, he began to sweat from the exertion, and he reminded himself not to let himself get too wet. Hypothermia was now his most immediate enemy and could start very easily were he to get damp in these temperatures. By about eight or nine o’clock, he had the trench finished, and he figured it must be in the high 30’s Fahrenheit outside, and the air was damp and thick and the fog obscured anything from his view that was more than fifteen feet away. A stiff breeze began to pick up from the north as he walked around the campsite picking up rocks to fill in his trench.

He’d learned most of this method from reading the story of a survivalist (he could not recall the man’s name) who had been traveling in the mountains of Turkey during a winter storm. The survivalist had nine or ten locals with him who knew the area and who constantly laughed at him and ignored his warnings when he told them that a blizzard was going to come through the mountains overnight. The survivalist built what he called a “fire bed,” while the Sherpas (for lack of a better word to call them) laughed at him and called him names in their own language. The story ended with the man waking up in the morning after the blizzard and finding all of the Sherpas frozen to the ground and dead. While Clay didn’t expect it to get that cold on this night, he wasn’t taking any chances. It was November, and who knew what kind of storm might be heading his way.

Using the small box of matches he had put in his backpack and some lint pulled from the wool blanket, along with some dried leaves and pine needles, Clay soon had a roaring fire going in his fire bed on top of the rocks he’d spread in the trench. The fire would heat up the rocks, and eventually, when the coals were ready and spread over the whole trench, he would bury the lot again with six to eight inches of soil, pack it down, and on top of this warm ground he would make his bed.