Michael Bunker - WICK

Below them, Warwick was a smoking ruin with not one stone left upon another. It looked like something from a war zone and, in fact, that is exactly what it was. Lang thought of the words of Tolstoy, “What a terrible, terrible thing…” The picture brought him in his mind to visions of Borodino, of Moscow as the Russians had left it for Napoleon, or of the 200 days of Stalingrad. Dark black curls of smoke rose here and there from the rubble like souls returning to their maker.

The jagged gash in the earth left behind by the drones’ payloads meant two things to Lang. First, that someone somewhere had known enough to shield their weapons of war from the EMP attack. Someone knew it was coming. Second, it meant that somewhere in the hills of Virginia, or Maryland, or perhaps even in Washington D.C., there was a control room—probably underground—that still operated with full power. That someone had launched and perpetrated the attack on Warwick left no doubt as to its conclusion.

Overkill.

This thought process led Lang to consider something that until then he had not contemplated. Someone obviously thought that Warwick was still a threat. Just that morning he’d been convinced that the town had escaped the worst of the damage, having survived the EMP. He’d even briefly considered returning one final time to make a last ditch effort to find Cole, or to maybe convince some more of the residents to flee.

As he stood on the ridge and looked down on Warwick’s apocalypse, this valley of Megiddo, he shuddered and was glad that the thought had only been a momentary one. The devastation was total. Not even a mouse could have survived this attack.

It wouldn’t do to have them catch us out here in the open, Lang thought. The drones have infrared capability too, and if they were to return, the three of them standing on the rise would be toast in just seconds.

Peter interrupted Lang’s thoughts. “It’s all gone,” he said, without any discernible emotion. “I can’t say I’ll miss it.”

“That was our home, Peter,” Lang replied, sadly. “Not to mention the people… the people. We grew up there,” he continued. “You’re older than me. I’m barely eighteen, but neither one of us has ever been anywhere else. We used to ice skate and play hockey on the pond behind the church there, just up on the ridge.” Lang felt like he needed to choke back a tear as memories overwhelmed him. “We used to have Christmas plays right there in the gym. How can you have no feelings for it at all?”

“It was a town of lies, Lang, and you know it,” Peter growled. “Warwick sent our parents off to Russia, mine these thirty long years ago, and we’ll never see them again. I lived there as an orphan. As an adult I was blessed enough to smuggle a son—my beautiful little Nikolai, and my wife with him—out of Warwick during the confusion.” Now Peter’s voice lowered to almost a whisper, though his anger still owned his words. “Warwick destroyed my life. If my family had not gotten out, this town would have eaten them too. I’ve never seen them again or spoken to them since that day twenty years ago.”

Peter looked at Lang, his eyes flashing fury, “So don’t tell me what to mourn, Lang.”

“I’m not telling you what to mourn, Peter, really I’m not. I’m just saying that the town didn’t do those things. Warwick was what it was, but for most of our lives it was just a home. I know what Warwick was. This place was a tragedy for everyone, but it was home, Peter. Blame the people who did this, the Americans or the Russians, but the people who lived in that town are not to blame.”

They stood for a moment in chilly silence. The cold in the snow began to hurt in their feet, passing through their boots and into their bodies. Lang shook his head, and then his boots, and shifted the straps on his backpack. Peter will calm down soon enough , he thought, but the older man had been in a foul mood all day. He heard the man breathing in the space beside him and noticed him clench his jaw and then release.

“Just don’t tell me what to mourn,” Peter repeated angrily, before turning and retreating the way they had come. Lang took another long look at the ruins of Warwick Village, and then followed Peter back down the hill.

Natasha stood for a moment longer, hoping to catch some glimpse, some vision of movement, there in the hopelessness of the rubble.

5 Days Earlier — Sunday Night

The candle’s flame twisted around the wick and hissed its tiny protest, sending up a small trail of smoke that curled around the motion of waves as the burly man stepped into the hallway and peeked through the peephole in the door. The warmth from the fire in the other room dissipated, trailing away from his body in invisible little traces. The blanket over his shoulders did little to insulate against the cold night air. The blizzard had passed, but it had left behind it the cold of winter and the promise of a harsh season ahead.

When Vasily Romanovich Kashporov walked up the stone steps that wound through the elevated gardens, he’d been unsure of what he would find. Life had taken a sideways jolt for everyone in Warwick, but his life, in particular, was spinning off madly into he knew not what.

The last few hours had been eventful ones. First there’d been the prison breakout, and then the show trial in the gym and a bloody execution. The gang of prisoners, led by Vasily’s peers, had first taken over the prison and then overrun the whole town of Warwick. Though Vasily had escaped in the first breakout with the rest of the prisoners, he’d not taken any part in the coup. The leaders thought of him as just a useful idiot.

After the mock trial, the leaders chose Vasily to be the keeper of two men they’d locked away in a jail cell as “enemies to the revolution.” They’d chosen Vasily specifically because they believed him to be loyal, and if not loyal, then too stupid to be of any harm. But he was neither loyal nor stupid.

He was, however, in danger.

He’d plotted an escape with the two men who, he hated to admit, were now almost certainly dead.

The first of the two men was an old citizen named Lev Volkhov. Lev had been his mentor, as well as a revered elder and teacher in the village. The other man was a friendly traveler he knew only as Clay.

The three of them had attempted their own prison break in order to escape the dangerous power grab that was evident in the town’s insurgent revolution.

After Vasily had set them free from their cell, the plan had been for Lev Volkhov and Clay to leave through an external door at the rear of the prison while he, Vasily, gathered Clay’s backpack and exited through the prison’s hallway system into the courtyard that led to the town.

At least, that was the plan. The second prison break, unhappily, had happened concurrently with the arrival of outsiders—paratroopers sent by someone to support the coup attempt in the town. It seemed like things might have gone horribly wrong for Volkhov and Clay.

Vasily had witnessed the show trial and the brutality of the takeover, and right then and there he’d made a decision. He was impressed by the old man and the traveler, and he’d decided that his best hope for freedom was to throw in his lot with them.

There were politics involved, as there always are. But there were also the sheer instincts for survival, and in that moment, the two had become fused into one force, and from that point the young man moved with a singular purpose.

He knew more about the kind of politics involved, and the way those politics linked to survival, than anyone in the village other than Volkhov. This was because Vasily—although almost no one knew it or suspected it—was probably the foremost expert on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in all of Warwick. He’d been introduced to the works of Solzhenitsyn during long tutoring sessions at the hands of Lev Volkhov and had taken the Russian author’s words to heart. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West , detailing the ongoing communist threat against the world, and this work, written by his countryman, he believed sincerely.