Michael Bunker - WICK

“Yes,” Mikail said, “well, the truth shall set you free, I suppose.” He stood up and looked at the others.

Vladimir, the tall one, speaking for the first time, said, “Stumbling into this place was probably a bad deal for you. Might have been better if you died out there in the cold.”

“Maybe,” Clay said.

“No maybe,” Vladimir said. “This place eats people. It doesn’t spit them back out.”

Sergei interrupted. “What Vladimir Nikitich is saying, Clay, is that you need to work with us. Think of something to give them. If they don’t need you, you’re dead. Right now they’re probably at the cafeteria ripping it apart for packets of ketchup or rotten fruit. But they won’t be down there forever.”

Mikail picked up where Sergei left off, almost without missing a beat. “Just so you know, those guys aren’t geniuses. They’re not all idiots, but most of them are. They’re in here for being sociopaths, psychopaths, and rejects, your social castaways. Warwick has those things just like any other place in the world. Maybe even more so. You ever been in jail, Clay?”

“Yeah. Nothing too serious, though. You call this place Warwick?” Clay asked.

“That’s where you are. Not the prison here. The prison is part of Warwick. Warwick is the whole damned town.”

“What do you mean the whole town?”

“Clay,” Mikail continued, “Focus. What you’ve stumbled into is too big to get in your head, so you’re just going to have to get your head into what’s going on right here and right now. Everything else… you don’t need to know. What you need to know is that here in a bit—maybe in an hour, maybe in five minutes—those guys that wrecked this place and killed Todd are going to come back here, and you will need to give them something. We don’t have time to mess around.”

“Give them something? What can I give them? I don’t even know what’s going on,” Clay said in something approaching despair.

“If you’re working for someone, Clay—CIA, some faceless government agency, a joint task force, anything like that—you’ll need to tell them. That’ll keep you alive. You’ll have value to them then.”

“But none of those things are true!”

“Do you want to live, Clay?” Mikail asked, with an intense look on his face that seemed to mask a motive that Clay was not able to discern.

“Of course.”

“Then what are you really doing here?”

“I told you.”

“You told me nothing!” Mikail shouted angrily, before thinking better of his outburst and lowering his voice, “I’m trying to help you, Clay. That’s all. No one else needs to die. Who are you?”

That was it. Right there. That was the moment when Clay knew. Looking Mikail right in the face, he knew… and Mikail knew too.

“I’m just a guy who’s had a very bad day. I obviously ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m just trying to get home.”

Mikail nodded at the other two and they slowly moved toward the door, but before Mikail turned to leave, he knelt down and touched Clay on the shoulder, “I don’t think you’re going to make it home, Clay, not if I can’t tell those guys something other than that you’re just a tourist who stumbled into prison. That story doesn’t fly, so just think about it.”

With that, the three young men shuffled out of the Tank and the door closed softy behind them and Clay heard the lock turn and engage and the light clicked off bathing him once again in inky blackness.

Outside, somewhere, the blizzard still raged, if Mikail was to be believed.

Inside, the questions swirled through Clay like a tempest in their fury. How would a prisoner have even known all of this, Clay wondered, especially one who was an outcast among outcasts? If Mikail was under suspicion as a spy, how would he have known their motives, and his own role in carrying them out?

Clay sat on the floor in the dark and went over the conversation in his mind, trying to grasp at any straw that would help him solve the puzzle in a way that would allow him to give the three visitors the benefit of the doubt. He could find none.

He didn’t know what kind of place this was, this place called Warwick, but he knew that whatever storm was raging outside was nothing compared to the storm raging in here. Further, he knew that if he was so foolish as to allow himself to think for a moment that the three young men were being straight with him, he would certainly end up dead. Perhaps it was the weirdness of the encounter with others who, like him, were aliens in their own homeland, or maybe not that, exactly, since he’d experienced several such encounters over the course of the last few days. But it was something along those lines. He’d grown sensitive to the nuances of such meetings. Out of all of his uncertainties and confusions, Clay was absolutely sure of one thing…

Mikail had the keys .

These three young men were not innocent victims of circumstance, like he was. They were not “political prisoners” either. In fact, he was certain that these three were the ones really running this place.

Saturday

He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he figured it must have been way after midnight. He was so exhausted, though, that he eventually slipped into a very deep and fitless sleep. It was the kind of sleep that only attends to a man whose waking life is falling apart. When he awoke he could not remember tossing and turning at all.

Clay’s eyes (or was it “eye”, singular?) opened slowly when he heard a commotion in the hallway outside his cell. He sat up in his bunk and it took him some time to get his bearings on where he was. The dull aches in his body reminded him that things had not gone well the night before and his right hand found the lump near his eye and probed it, noting that he still didn’t have any feeling there at all. It was dark in the room, so he didn’t know if he’d regained any sight in that eye. A thought crept into his mind and slowly formed until it joined with memory and he realized that somewhere out there, according to Mikail, the prisoners were supposed to be deciding his fate. Apparently they were in no hurry.

Along with his pains and a dull ache coming from his lower back, he felt a gnawing hunger that reminded him that he had not eaten much at all since the turkey sandwiches at the restaurant just off the highway back in another life. The little bit of fish he’d swallowed right before the riot hadn’t amounted to much, and he felt the growl in his gut and the faintly pleasant tightness that reminded him of day three of a fast. Does the condemned man get a last meal around here? He suddenly remembered that food may not be the best topic of conversation with prisoners who have been starved for a week.

After an hour or so sitting quietly in the dark the light flipped on and he saw a face look in at him through the tiny window. With his one good eye and the crisscross of chicken wire he didn’t recognize the face at all. Clay sat up on the bunk and pushed his way along it to the far wall, not knowing if this was to be another interrogation or if they were actually coming to kill him.

The lock turned and the door swung open and a face looked in at him and smiled. It was the face of a boy who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, and then the rest of the boy came through the portal carrying a faded green plastic meal tray. The young man approached slowly, with some hint of fear on his face, and he tried to smile bravely as he handed the tray to Clay.

Clay looked down and he was startled at what he saw. For a starving people they surely ate well around here. His tray was loaded with four or five thick slices of some kind of rye bread slathered with butter. There were two hard-boiled eggs, peeled; a bowl of some kind of hot cereal grains (also slathered with butter); some sliced apples; a hunk of whitish cheese; and a mug of hot, black coffee.