Michael Bunker - WICK

Clay walked back into his cell and looked around. He had a flash of inspiration and reached deep inside his backpack and pulled out the small pocket camera he’d carried with him since he left. He had intended to use it to document his trip and had made some small efforts to do so early on. One can only shoot so many pictures of downed trees, however, and he’d simply pushed the camera deep inside the pack and forgotten about it. He saw now that he had several exposures left on the digital dial and he stepped out into the hall and quickly snapped some picture of the faces in the window.

Mindful that Todd could walk through the office at any moment, Clay didn’t give much thought to what he was shooting. He simply raised the camera and listened behind him as he rattled off the last of the camera’s memory. He was vaguely aware that there was a scuffle in the light of the window as the youths— were they youths? —began pushing their way into the window. He then walked quickly back into the cell and hid the camera in the deep recesses of his backpack and turned around and sat on the bed. He was vaguely proud of himself. If nothing else , he thought, I can show it to somebody when I get out of here. Maybe some news organization would be interested in the story. He tried to fight it, but he couldn’t help it—his mind drifted back to the moment when Cheryl was trapped in that car, the girls dead, their lifeless bodies ruined on the cruel pavement. No one had been there to help them. What if these young people are trapped?

He heard Todd return into the office, so he joined him, breathing deeply and trying to look pleased and excited at the thought of a meal.

“I cooked up your brown trout, Clay, and I didn’t have any tartar sauce, but I do have the bottom scrapings from a jar of mayonnaise and an ounce or so of dill pickle relish if you want to make something of that. I also found a half a packet of Saltines and a tomato.”

Clay nodded to him and said “Thanks.” He wasn’t sure if he could eat now that he thought there might be children starving only fifty feet away from him. He nibbled some on his fish, and he could feel Todd’s eyes on him as if the guard expected him to offer some kind of critical review of the meal.

“Do you all eat pretty well here, Todd? I mean… is prison food as bad as they make it out to be?” He snapped off a piece of cracker and choked it down before taking another sip of coffee.

Todd looked at him, amused, and then shrugged, “Well, usually we do alright, but things have been a bit tight this week. What with the storm and the lack of power and the disruptions and all. We’re a little low on manpower and most of our deliveries haven’t made it.” He rocked back in his chair, trying, and failing, to look nonchalant. “I suppose with this nor’easter, it might stretch on a little longer, but it’s not like we’re freezing and starving out in the blizzard like you were an hour ago.”

Clay took a larger bit of the fish, and he felt his stomach growl and he felt guilty for it, but he chewed with some intensity now. Todd took a long drink of his coffee then got up to pour himself another cup. “So what’s it like out there, Clay? How bad is it from what you’ve seen?”

Clay was happy for the diversion, and between bites of fish, filled Todd in on what he knew, at least all of the basics. He related his trip across the bridge, but left out the part about Veronica, offering only the parts that he had seen on her television. He told Todd about his ride with Clive, leaving out any details about Clive the man but sharing what he knew about the stores stripped of products, and about the gas lines, and about how the people walking on the highway seemed to be like zombies, their eyes dead like shark’s eyes… doll eyes.

“They weren’t zombies or undead or vampires or anything like that, they just looked like it, you know?” he said. This, he supposed, was the veil of civilization peeling back, the line of civility stretching ever thinner.

Just as Clay was finishing his story, and his fish, he heard a muffled sound coming from down the hall. THUMP. The sound seemed heavy, as if a body had been thrown against a wall or a bird had flown into a window. It was jarring. It reminded him of a tree falling in the woods in winter, after the crack, in that long, slow moment before the top slams into the snow.

THUMP.

Clay looked up at Todd, and he saw the guard’s countenance fall. Fear, mixed with anger and confusion marched across the tall security officer’s face, and he seemed to be frozen in place, unable to move.

“Todd? Um… What was that?” Clay asked, sitting up straighter in his chair.

THUMP. Louder. Somehow closer.

There seemed to be a loud clatter, off in the distance, like a car wreck a dozen blocks away on a foggy day in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and Clay could barely make out voices and screaming. The sounds were as if they were in a freezer or a coffin buried deep someplace and the vibrations were deeper than the clatter.

THUMP… Closer.

The last one was loud, and Todd jumped to his feet, finally motivated to action. He spun around to the cabinet behind him and pulled out a large bat, a stun gun, and a handful of handcuffs.

THUMP. Louder. The sounds of breaking glass and screams.

“Todd?”

“Get in the cell and close the door! I’ll lock it behind you!”

THUMP. The sound of wood splintering.

“What is this, Todd?”

“GO! NOW! Into your cell! They’re trying it! It’s a jailbreak! RUN!”

Clay hopped up from his chair, his tray spilling onto the ground and the coffee, thankfully cooled, landed down the front of his bright orange prison jumper, drenching him. He sprinted down the hall, his mind reeling, and as he turned towards his cell he could hear that the inmates had breached the second door with a loud crash of what sounded like wood and steel and glass, and now voices could be heard, yelling Russian words, and there seemed to be fighting and shouts and yelps.

Todd pushed him from behind and Clay landed hard on the concrete bunk, his shoulder smashing painfully into the cinder block wall. “Gonna turn out the light and lock you in, Clay! Don’t make a sound! They’ll kill you, man!”

The light snapped off.

He heard the lock click into place and the keys rattle in Todd’s hands and Todd’s panicked footsteps as he raced back towards the office. Clay stared up at the extinguished light, and the bulb, clad in heavy metal mesh, was visible now as the element faded to black. His mind connected it with the light in the entry vestibule that had clicked on to herald his safety and salvation and he heard the door across the way splinter and complain as the weight and pain of hunger and despair and freedom crashed against it.

For some men, the world is an autoclave. A steam engine bearing down upon them. A tumbling aerial swan dive into a lake of uncertain depth. There is no society that stands behind them, no motion to follow their leadership, no positive reviews in the daily papers. Life is merely, as Hobbes said, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Life for such men—for (perhaps) most men throughout history—varies little in substance from that of the animals. Cattle in their stampede, sharks in their chum-fueled frenzy, armies of driver ants with their smothering razor-sharp jaws lined in charging columns… each of these bears a striking resemblance to the worst expressions of human nature in its unbridled chaos. And in the long catalogue of such expressions, from war to neglect to terrorism, little compares to a prison riot.

Sitting in the darkness, back pressed hard against the cold concrete bunk, Clay felt a terror well up in him that he had only felt once before in his life. His mind, still addled from the sense of displacement brought on by the effects of hypothermia and shock, flashed back to that moment when he was on the phone with Cheryl after the crash. It was the only thing he could hold on to, and it was also the worst. That infinitesimal micro-second when he just absolutely knew that everything he loved had just been taken from him. That was it. That was the moment. Sheer terror. Helplessness. Fear.