Michael Bunker - WICK

Although Warwick was a town built to train spies, it had been obvious from the first that only a certain percentage of its citizens would ever be put into action. Like any people anywhere, there were sorting mechanisms put in place, devised around talent, intelligence, character, and other factors, and only a few select individuals were ultimately found suited to the task of espionage.

There had been two primary “routes” (for lack of a better word) for the lives traversed by the people of Warwick. At age ten, each citizen was tested and re-tested by the powers-that-be in order to determine which of the routes they would ultimately follow.

One route led to deployment, eventually, to Russia to live and work as a spy for America. Thousands of these Warwickians already lived and thrived in Mother Russia, smuggled in by whatever means necessary over the decades from then until now.

The second route was reserved for those citizens who failed the testing for some reason or another—or for those who possessed some other requisite talent or skill that gave value to the town and its mission. This route meant that, for those who did not make it as spies, they would remain to live and work and serve their country in Warwick for the entirety of a lifetime.

There was no getting out.

Being released into the general American population was out of the question, given the possibilities raised by divided loyalties and the particular kind of expert training that was the lifeblood of the community. Besides, Warwickians would never fit in to modern America anyway. They didn’t know American food or cigarettes or beer. They would have been utterly lost in a Wal-Mart. They’d not been raised on The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days or The Cosby Show or Saved by the Bell or Lost or Glee or any of the other television programs that had defined any particular generation.

They had received as much American culture as any normal Russian would have, but they knew America only by reputation and by propaganda and not in any real and experiential way. They read Pravda and Izvestiya and Novaya Gazeta and had never, or almost never, seen or read a USA Today or New York Times. It is possible that they might be accepted in a small, agrarian community where their more formal way of speaking and their cultural illiteracy might be considered closer to ‘normal,’ but otherwise, and anywhere else, they would be immediately suspect. And to be honest (if such a thing as honesty is acceptable in any examination of the mechanisms of espionage and other forms of professional lying), most of the citizens of Warwick—those that had lived and loved and died there since its inception—never really wanted anything more out of life. Historically, this is true of the bulk of humanity since, of course, we are now being honest.

In respect to the kind of life lived—the actual makeup of the society and culture—most people throughout history have believed that what they have is good and right, and they believe this because they’ve been told to. They love their system because they find it sufficient, even if they want more out of it like anyone else. This is a particular trait of the spirit.

But there are also traits of the flesh. Upward mobility and the desire for anything or anywhere else other than home is a particularly western phenomenon, most specifically identifiable in Americans of the last couple of centuries. Warwickians, insulated from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, had been spared this most American of characteristics.

A few people had escaped Warwick, as noted, during the “confusion” of 1992, and an occasional intrepid soul had abandoned the cause while living as a spy in his adopted country, disappearing into the maw of Mother Russia for some reason known only to time. However, for the most part, and for most citizens, life in Warwick was a closed loop. One was born there and lived there and died there, with only the occasional glimpse into the wider world being permitted. Such a glimpse was only allowed when it served the purposes of those chess masters who administered the pawns, and when it advanced the designs of the nation. Life in Warwick was pleasant enough, but that was mainly because, even if discontent arose, such a life was the only game in town.

Friday

Winter. Late fall by the calendar, but winter in almost every way that counts. The valley, with its dormant flowers and evergreen seedlings, was blanketed in snow, and throughout the surrounding countryside, the very air was crackling with frigidity.

Standing on a high ridge overlooking the valley in the cold of the afternoon, two men, and a pretty Warwick girl of twenty named Natasha, looked down from a tree line about three-hundred yards to the northwest of Warwick, and they had trouble assimilating what they were seeing. Warwick—the whole town and everything in it, and everyone from it that they have ever known—had become a burned-out corpse. Novgorod of America was dead.

The homes and church and school and fields, the memories they had of moving about and within each… all of it had become a long black scar on the terrain of the Catskill Forest Preserve. The streets and buildings of their memories were gone, replaced by the refuse and boulders and charcoal of annihilation. Even the snow had melted entirely from the heat, and the water and mud and debris remained in steaming piles of scattered destruction under the skeletons of charred trees.

What about the people?

Neither of the men—one very young, and the other middle-aged—could seem to imagine any hope that there would be anyone they knew still alive in the ghastly scene before them. The girl brushed away a tear and emitted an almost imperceptible sob.

How could the destruction be so complete?

How could anyone have made it out of there alive?

Where is my brother? Natasha wondered.

None of the three gave voice to those particular words—or any words at all—but the silence among them amplified the questions. They all knew that life as they once had known it, like the town they had grown up in and called home, would never be the same again. The girl grimaced again in pain and bowed down in silent grief. Unspoken emotion, though voiceless, swirled loudly in the air between them like the wind.

The young one called Lang was the first to speak. It should be noted before going further that this was not his real name. It was merely the identity he had assumed as he stood atop the ridge. In the world of espionage in which he’d been raised, a name was as easy to change as a passport. Easier even. There is a place inside a man where he knows who he really is, but when he searches that place he often finds it nameless, and maybe swept clean to the very corners. What, after all, is in a name? It was merely something he calls himself. The man decided to call himself Lang.

“It must have been the drones,” Lang said. “Exactly what we figured.”

The pilotless, remote-controlled militarized aircraft, five of them, somehow still operative after the EMP attack, had buzzed past the treatment plant like bees early that morning, low to the ground and in formation. Both Lang and the older gentleman at his side, a heavy-set man, 42 years old, who now called himself Peter, had seen them swoop overhead.

They’d heard the buzzing first and took cover in the shed, only to step outside as the drones passed by, to watch their trajectory as they rose smoothly up and over the mountain. Without even speaking, the two men had figured that the appearance of the drones certainly had something to do with the charm school.

After packing and securing all of their gear from the water plant, they’d hustled up the mountain, and, climbing through the snow and trees and brush, they had come to where they now stood. The snow deposited by the blizzard came up to their knees as they stood and looked out over the valley.