Michael Bunker - WICK

The old man shouted “GO!” at the top of his lungs.

Time, in such moments, telescopes outward. Every moment, every motion becomes an infinity, an eternity. The reasons before you and behind you come into sharp focus in your being and you know what it is you are made of. Such moments are, perhaps above any other moments in one’s life, clarifying.

Clay was able to see in the darkness and he rushed forward to help Volkhov but it was too late and the gun fired and both Volkhov and the guard crashed to the ground.

Clay froze and heard Volkhov yell “GO!” again. This time it was weaker, less in bravery than in finality. He immediately knew that he did not want to waste the man’s sacrifice, and he pushed his way out the outer door and began to sprint along the south wall of the prison.

His right hand brushed lightly along the wall and the cold gripped him and he realized he was just in his prison garb. He could feel the cold assaulting his fingers through the cracks in the bricks where the mortar lines had crumbled and were now filled with flaking snow.

The gun fired again and when Clay looked back he saw the guard was backing out of the outer door and Clay felt himself sprinting as fast as he could run through the snow and down the gentle incline that led to the fence line. He lost one of his slip-on shoes in the snow, and then the other came off, and he fell down in a small snowdrift, but he clawed his way back up and kept running. He could see his breath rush out of his body like a spirit.

He ran for his life.

He broke towards where he knew the gap would be in the fence and was now running across the open field, struggling in his bare feet through the snow and from this point on things could only be called ‘surreal.’ He saw what looked like huge gray balloons floating all around him toward the ground and though he was confused he picked up his speed and looked over his shoulder to see if the guard was gaining on him.

He didn’t see the guard coming and thought perhaps that he had made it, and he ran toward the grey balloons floating beautifully out of the sky and he listened intently in the distance for a gunshot. But he didn’t hear any.

He didn’t hear any gunshots.

When he came up over the last rise where he expected to see the fallen trees, he noticed that there were no trees at all. He ran toward the nothingness. In fact, any clue that would tell him that the storm had destroyed any section of the fence at all was now gone completely. The fence that stood now was shiny and new, and the ground was disturbed around it evidencing the new construction, then his vision of the new fence was obscured by one of the gray balloons and then another and another.

Clay Richter stopped and stared in the middle of the pristine field of glowing snow and watched the forms fall downward in the crisp moonlight. His eyes focused intently on the billowing orbs as they hung in the sky and just gently swayed in the reflective glow of the nighttime. They contrasted sharply with the clear, black sky, filling up with air and glow from the snow’s bright light. They were beautiful and wondrous… and then Clay realized what they were.

Parachutes .

As he watched one of them down while it fell silently through the cold, he realized that hanging from the bottom of the round parachute was a paratrooper with a rifle.

His heart raced, and then he knew he was saved.

Clay ran in the direction of one of the men, waving his arms like a drowning man in the sea of snow. Collapsing into a snow bank, he struggled to move on all fours, shouting that he was an American and that he had been captured by escapees from the prison. Rising to his feet he stumbled forward thinking that the man was too far away for him to see Clay clearly, but the soldier looked around and noticed him, anyway. He heard the sound of Clay’s yelling and he started toward him, raising his weapon as he did.

What’s going on? Clay struggled in his mind to ask that question. Then he suddenly realized they could not know who he really was because he was wearing prison garb. They could not know him.

He put his hands above his head and dropped to his knees. He showed them he meant no harm. He repeated his story loudly as a soldier walked across the snow toward him. Another was making his way through the distance and Clay could almost see them, could almost read their faces.

Then his heart sank. He looked back up into the paratrooper’s eyes, and followed the intent gaze. Off to the left. The paratrooper was not looking at him at all.

Clay looked across the field of snow and saw his tracks leading backward, toward the prison, toward the figure of a man standing in the doorway. The man stepped into the light underneath the overhang and then was followed by another, and another, and Clay followed the paratrooper’s eyes to see Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei walking towards them.

He saw the paratrooper raise the gun and he wondered if the soldier was going to shoot the three unarmed young men right there in the snow.

The man shouted to the trio approaching on foot, but—and this fact took time to penetrate Clay’s mind—the soldier spoke in Russian.

He spoke in Russian?

Clay saw his life flash before his eyes. He saw the tree swing and the cabin, and the inside of his brownstone, and Veronica. And Cheryl. Lovely Cheryl. He swallowed and looked up into the nighttime sky.

Clay heard the shouts in Russian and saw the waving angry menace of the bulldog Mikail. The gun moved slowly, lazily towards Clay and then Clay…

…heard its bark and felt its bite.

He saw the flash at the muzzle and thought how beautiful it was, how much it looked like fireworks. He felt bullets ripping into him and sensed a jerking in his body. The breath ran through him and then out of him and he noticed the beautiful fog it made against the clear night air, rising up like a spirit.

He collapsed on the snow.

The last thing Clay Richter saw was his own blood in sharp contrast with the whiteness of the pristine snow. It ran in little rivulets along the fresh packed snow where his body had fallen and then sank into the white and beyond that into the ground he loved so dearly and from whence he’d come. The last thought he ever formed, which slowly gripped his fading mind, circling in and around his consciousness like a vise until it held in him for an instant like a thin point of light or like a star in relief against the midnight sky, was a sentence that never had its own chance to find its period.

Always leave yourself a way o

Vasily Romanovich Kashporov heard the gunfire, and then he heard it again, and then once again. Looking over his shoulder and up the hill he saw the outline in the dark sky of the silent paratroopers gliding down in and around the prison walls and its fence and its fields.

A half-dozen came down in the street, drifting past the grocery between the Church and the shops and the houses. Some others looked as though they might have landed on top of the gymnasium.

He shivered just a bit in the cold wind and ducked his head as he pulled the shoulder straps up on the backpack and tightened them slightly across his chest.

He set his square face towards Pushkin Street and the light brown house on the end which even at that very moment had a candle showing through the window.

He knew the house well. He’d often passed it on his errands in and around the village and many times he had stopped to admire its many raised gardens and unique landscaping.