Michael Bunker - WICK

“Just Todd. Good. The election’s in four days. Could go either way, don’t you think? It don’t matter much to me who wins, though. We’ll still be here doing our thing.” His voice trailed off, causing Clay to wonder whether he might have some deeper meaning. Then the man snapped to and said, more in command than suggestion, “Alright, get out of those wet clothes and I’ll go find you something dry.”

“Thanks again, Todd,” Clay said to the man’s back as he sat on the bed and watched the word “SECURITY” in bold yellow walk out of the cell and then turn to the right, only to take an immediate left and disappear down a darkened hallway.

A split-second later, just as Clay started to clutch at his clothes and the pain in his fingers shot through with warmth, Todd re-appeared in the light, the circular orb in the ceiling making his face look ominous and shadowed. He raised his voice to call Clay from the hall, through the window. “Listen, Clay. I’m serious. There’re some bad actors in here. Don’t go nosing around. Stay put. Don’t make me sorry I let you in.”

“No problem, Todd,” Clay nodded, even as he wondered why Todd felt it so necessary to stress the point.

Why so much security for children?

Clay stripped off his cold, wet clothing, and when he was naked he wrapped himself in the wool blanket. It felt good to have something against his skin that was not frozen and wet. He began to shiver again, and some of the shivers went down the whole length of his body and even hurt as his lower back shook furiously.

He sat for a moment and felt his heart pump and tried to inspect his fingers and toes for frostbite. As he did so, some faint but transient insight blinked on in his brain… what was it? What was that thought? His mind struggled against the cocktail mix of senses and emotions that churned inside him. Confusion, on the rocks, but with a warm radiant buzz, shaken, not stirred. He felt drowsiness and apathy and a strange sense of pain, comfort, and victory. Groggy, almost as if he had a concussion, and his brain hurt when he tried to focus too hard on one thing. He felt thrilled to be alive, but he was overwhelmed with worry and fear. Looking around again, he heard a small voice scream silently inside himself as the flash of insight clarified for him again. This is a cell! Don’t stay in here! You might be locked up, trapped, with no way out!

He dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed. He wasn’t here as a criminal or some offender. He was a guest. Even Dad would understand that. He pressed his fingers through his newly-grown beard. He could leave right now if he wanted to. Can’t I? Sure I can . But he didn’t want to. Not yet. He had almost died in that storm.

The room was of cinderblock construction, painted institutional white with light green trim that looked like someone had painted it in a hurry. Or maybe the workmen had painted it with their feet. That was something his dad always said when he’d done subpar work… Did you do that with your feet? It was sloppy in its lines and drips of paint were scattered along the edges of the floor. It made him feel claustrophobic so he moved over into the doorway and from there he took a step out into the hallway.

Across from him stood another locked doorway—like the exterior door through which Todd had brought him into the facility. The window on the door was also crisscrossed with chicken wire. The hallway adjacent, which Todd had walked down before disappearing into another set of locked doors, was dark except for some very low emergency lighting inset into the ceiling about every ten feet. The hallway was about twenty yards long. The hallway where he stood as he stepped out of his cell continued another twenty feet or so to the right, where it was bisected by another, similar door. Was this the door he had just walked through? He suddenly found himself disoriented. Through the glass he could see the hallway continued about twenty feet, where it terminated at a third door, from which light poured forth.

Ten feet from Clay’s cell, on the left, looked to be an office, the kind you could pass right through into another part of the building. Clay listened down the hallway but heard no noise emanating from there. He had presumed (with a cloudy head and very little real information) that Todd must have disappeared into a security office, and passing through it there must be a hallway that opened into another part of the facility. Standing in the hallway, the facility reflected and multiplied eerie silence. There was no sound, save the sound of his breathing.

Standing barefoot on the highly polished floor he tried to focus his thoughts, choosing for the moment to think of warm things—the sun on his face through the bay window in the old farmhouse, Hemingway at a bullfight in Madrid eschewing the more expensive “la sombra” (shade) seats, to sit in “el sol” (the sun)… his fire bed last night… was that just last night ? When had he seen Clive? Yesterday? Was that yesterday? It seems like a week ago, now. His brain hurt and confusion overwhelmed him again.

Hypothermia was funny, in an unfunny way. He could remember some things, things he didn’t even try to think of, with alarming clarity, and others were all scrambled up like eggs in his brain. He heard his father saying, “You have to play the cards you are dealt, but leave yourself a way out.” He tried to remember what Clive looked like. A moment later, after a struggle, he said, “Sam Elliot,” but no one was around to hear it.

He walked forward, unthinking, just moving in order to create some modicum of warmth. Unconsciously he started to jog in place, but doing that made him feel precariously balanced and he feared he might slip on the shiny surface of the floor, so he stopped and just rocked back and forth, trying to use his thighs to produce some element of heat for his blood. He looked up into the window across the way, and then his eyes focused for a second and he moved forward again, looking down the hall and through the second door towards the bright light in the distance.

As his eyes focused, he noticed that the emergency lights in the hallway were a little brighter than he had first thought, and as he focused his eyes on the distant light coming through the third door there was a slight modulation in the light and Clay thought to himself that the lights overhead had blinked, but then he stood and watched the modulation and suddenly became aware of a slight electrical hum coming from a light overhead.

Some faces appeared in the window in the distance. They had been there before, but he hadn’t seen them in the light. Now, as his senses returned, they came into focus and he could see, but not hear, that they were shouting and beckoning to him. His heart jumped. He felt the cold of the floor on his feet. He could not read their lips or hear their shouts, but he could see that a few of the faces seemed to be red from crying. Their hands were clawing at the window in exactly the same way that he had cried out and clawed at the window outside the facility only moments ago. This connection, though unidentified in his conscious mind, tore at his heart and soul. He blinked in incomprehension.

The people behind the glass motioned to him, and in his short-term memory he heard, conformed to the movements of their lips, his own voice screaming out for someone to hear him and save him. But, in reality, he could not hear the voices at all. He thought of the face staring out at him through the glass, and wondered if that is the way he had looked, pawing and beating on the glass to be let in. The juxtaposition of the wild gesticulations of the faces and the utter silence of the hallway was jarring, and his thoughts remained jumbled and confused.