Michael Bunker - WICK

He was pleased with himself and smiled and even laughed a little when the whole exercise of building the fire bed actually worked. As the fire crackled and snapped, causing one of the rocks to explode from the heat, Clay huddled in the wool blanket and warmed himself by the fire.

Despite the fact that he had walked a good portion of the day, he wasn’t overly hungry. He’d eaten the two turkey sandwiches in Middletown, which, though it seemed to be too much at the time, served him well to get him this far. He decided to bed down with the little hunger he felt from not eating supper, saving the two remaining energy bars for tomorrow.

After covering the trench with soil, he had packed it down, stomping it with his boots, feeling the heat from his soles come up into his toes. He took off his jacket and his pants (that’s what the books said to do), wrapped himself in the Mylar blanket, covered that with the woolen blanket, and then carefully placed his coat and pants over the top of that. Figuring that the more layers he had the better, he put his spare set of clothes (the set that Veronica had washed for him) on top of the whole pile to complete his heated cocoon. Twenty minutes later he was surprised by how warm he was. The night would grow colder, he was certain of that, but now he felt happy and content that he would make it through the night no matter how cold it got. If a guy can make it through a blizzard in the mountains of Turkey, surely he could make it through a gentle freeze in mid-state New York.

He closed his eyes and listened to the wind. It whistled through the treetops like a siren’s song.

He woke up during the night and didn’t have any idea what hour it was. He was still comfortable enough, but it was definitely getting colder and everything around him was damp. He couldn’t see in the darkness except to make out the shape of his shelter and the nearby wall of his heat reflector, but he could hear well enough. Only occasionally he would pick up the growl of a car going by on the distant highway, or the low rumble of a faraway train or truck. Once or twice he thought he heard an animal prowling around his camp, and for that reason alone he was glad he had not eaten anything for supper before lying down to sleep. The smells of his camp shouldn’t attract any predators.

He lay there for what seemed like an hour in the blackness thinking about Cheryl and the girls and camping trips with them up near Saranac Lake, or that one summer that they spent a miserable, rainy week in a campground near Niagara Falls when everything went bad and he and Cheryl had quarreled incessantly. He felt the familiar pang of loss and thought through the many things he should have said to her, and what he would give for just a moment of her telling him he was wrong.

As a boy, he’d camped and fished as much as most people his age, and once, at about ten years of age, he’d accompanied his parents on what was intended to be a long hike down the Appalachian Trail. The rugged adventure part of the trip had come to an abrupt end when he had haphazardly tossed a crab apple core at a distant tree, only to have a bear cub drop out of the tree, scaring them all nearly to death. His father had bravely and calmly backed the family slowly towards the car, all the while praying aloud that the cub’s mother wouldn’t show up looking for her offspring. She didn’t, and they spent the rest of the vacation playing “spoons” and “hearts” from the safety of a cabin overlooking the river. The cabin was close to the woods, but closer still to an old store where he’d convinced his mom and dad to take him to buy Dr. Peppers and Moon Pies. He imagined the taste of Moon Pies and wondered if they still made them.

Clay lay there in the dark and considered whether he’d already reached the extent of his camping and survival know-how. Maybe he’d blown his whole compendium of knowledge on the fire bed. He felt pretty confident that he could fish with the little survival fishing kit he’d found in the backpack (another thing for which he intended to thank Veronica), and he might be able to snare some dumb animal with his shoelaces (something else he’d learned on television), but his best bet was to find a backwoods store somewhere where he could use his ready cash to stock up on food. One fire bed did not make him Jeremiah Johnson . He tried to remember the plot of that movie but kept getting it mixed up with the one about Grizzly Adams.

His thoughts drifted over to his meager water supply, and he remembered that of all of the issues and categories of survival needs, water was always supposed to be the first and most important. Just as this occurred to him, he noticed that there was moisture covering the lean-to (and everything else), and he saw several places where, near the corners of the lean-to, water was dripping in constant drops. He pulled back his covers and reached into his backpack for the two empty water bottles he had stored there. Boy is it cold!

After setting the empty bottles to catch the drips, he decided to drink the third bottle of water completely down, since he felt sure the three bottles would fill up overnight, provided the thick, moist air didn’t freeze before morning.

With all three bottles emptied and catching water, he climbed back under his covers and pressed his body down as hard as he could against the warmth radiating up from the fire bed. What time is it? He didn’t know, and before long he was asleep again.

Friday

Morning came and he was up just as soon as the gray of daylight replaced the black of night. He figured it to be sometime between six and seven o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The air was clear of fog again, though the clouds were thick and threatening, and he noticed that the temperature must have turned freezing, or very near it. There was a thick frost on everything, and his water bottles had a paste of fog building on the inside. They had ceased to catch water. Of the three bottles he was able to combine them to fill two completely, with a swallow left over for breakfast. His work had netted him 32 full ounces of good drinking water. He was satisfied with that.

Everything was wet. Even his coat, pants, and his spare set of clothes were soaked completely through. He spent the next hour trying to start a fire but was unsuccessful due to the damp. Many of his now precious matches had simply crumbled as he struck them against the box, and the wooden sticks had torn along the strike side, leaving a dangerously small patch of grit. He knew there had to be a trick to starting a fire in the wet, but he had wasted half of his matches, and nothing he carried or could find would catch fire in the thick, humid air of the morning. Even the sticks of the matches wouldn’t burn, and when they did, he’d held them under a piece of wool or a corner of a leaf, until they’d burned down to his fingers. If only I knew more about survival…

His first plan was to put on the damp clothes and hike back to the road, but, deliberating on this idea, he talked himself out of it. He’d made a decision to leave the road for a reason, and that reason was still viable. It was likely that the highway would become increasingly unsafe as time passed, and he didn’t want to go back there. While he could not know what conditions were actually like back on the main highway, the logic of his original decision hadn’t changed. Clive had rambled on about other, less natural, disasters, and while he was skeptical of these, they’d left an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach. He decided that his trajectory should be away from, and not towards, other people.

Next, he decided that he would just stay put awhile, hoping that the day might clear up and that his clothes and coat and blanket would dry more as the day wore on. He shivered as he thought this. He wasn’t sure how much patience he would have if, after some time, the sky and weather showed no positive changes. As he pondered his situation, and, seeking any warmth he could find, he instinctively put his hand down onto the dry earth under where his bed had been, and he felt the faint heat still radiating from the ground.