Michael Bunker - WICK

Vasily’s eyebrows arched. Hearing the danger that he knew was around him expressed in the words of another suddenly made it real, and he tried to push it away.

“Why would they come for me? I was out of the prison before it happened. Maybe they won’t know I was involved.”

“Don’t be silly, son. How did Uncle Lev and Clay get out of their cell, Vasily Romanovich? Think! How did they get out of the cluster? Who could have let them out?” As Pyotr spoke, his voice started to rise in anger.

“Well, they can’t know it was me. Maybe Lev or Clay got a key from somewhere else, or picked the lock, I don’t know.” He was searching in his mind for an explanation, anything… even as he knew he would find none suitable.

“Listen, Vasily. Those paratroopers you saw were probably Russian Spetznaz. Special Forces. Uncle told me that the EMP attack would probably come on Tuesday, during the election. The arrival of Special Forces troops in Warwick means that someone felt like there was a risk of something leaking out before the event. Or maybe there is someone here who they do not want to escape. Maybe Mikail contacted them as soon as his gang had taken over the town and told them he’d captured an American spy. Who knows? That’s the thing, Vasily, we don’t know anything.”

Vasily flinched at the name of the gang’s leader. Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov was the leader of the gang that had, just recently, taken the prison and overthrown the town. He’d been the one who had misjudged Vasily. Volkhov, before he died, had told the young Vasily not to trust anything that Mikail said.

“Well, I said that we don’t know anything, because we don’t have a clue what’s going on, but we do know one thing,” Pyotr said. Pyotr had been raised and trained by Lev Volkhov, and knew his old uncle’s mind backward and forward. He spoke steadily now, in perfect accentless English. “We know that we must get out of here right now. I know that’s what uncle wanted, and that’s why he risked himself to get you out of there first. If you go back up there to find out what’s going on, they’ll probably kill you. If you don’t go, they’ll come here and kill both of us. The only option is that the two of us leave right now.”

Flee? Vasily thought. It made sense, and that is what the outsider Clay had done. That is what Lev Volkhov himself had attempted. It was, of course, the best, or at least the most sensible, option. But the heart of valor has a stubborn fiber. There were too many friends and loved ones still in harm’s way for Vasily to flee just yet.

Didn’t everyone deserve a warning? Isn’t that what Solzhenitsyn had done? Warn people? Isn’t that what the Prophets had done? Isn’t that what Volkhov himself had done?

Vasily was no prophet. Nor was he a revered teacher. In fact, he was nothing more than a simple youth thought by his townsfolk to be a simpleton. But having recently been imprisoned with Mikail in the belly of the beast, the town’s prison where the brutal uprising had begun, he was determined, like Noah before him, to run to his town and tell the townsfolk what was coming, so they would at least have the option to leave.

Vasily shook his head. “No. No. No. We can’t just leave all of these people, Pyotr. These are our friends and our neighbors. We’ve got to try to get some of them out. What about the Malanovskys? What about Irinna? Do you remember Irinna, the pretty girl who works in the bakery? Are we going to just leave them all here on this battlefield? We have to do something to get as many of them out of here as we can.” He was speaking as much from compassion as from bravery. It wouldn’t even occur to him to leave without taking others, even as he had given no thought to trying to help the two prisoners escape. For him, there was no higher calling than answering the instinct towards one’s fellow man. No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends. Vasily, having lost his parents while still a very young boy, had no one in this world but his friends, and he was determined to try to save them

“What can we do, Vasily? What can we do if you go up there and get yourself shot? What can we do if we wait here and the Spetznaz troops come down here and shoot both of us for participating in Lev’s breakout?”

“I’ve got to go back, Pyotr. I have to,” Vasily said, shaking his head. The finality in that word hinted at both conviction and destiny. “You prepare yourself to go, and if I’m not back, or if you get spooked, or if you hear gunfire, you just go.” He spread his hands as if to answer any objections. He looked Pyotr in the eye and nodded to him. “Lev would have wanted me to at least try, Pyotr.”

Pyotr nodded back at Vasily. “Ok. If that’s your decision. Do not be deceived though. If it comes to the point that I think you’re dead, I’m gone.”

Vasily nodded and wondered when such a moment might come.

Together they made plans, and then Pyotr took Vasily down into the basement under the house. To be accurate, it wasn’t really a basement, but more of a root cellar that Lev and Pyotr had dug out by hand, many years ago.

Pyotr showed him that along the west wall, which had been concreted using trowels and coated with some kind of plaster or whitewash, there was a large, antique bureau that, upon very close examination, seemed to be attached to the wall. Pyotr pulled out the drawers of the bureau—all six of them—and then removed the wooden uprights and separators. As he worked, the dismantling of the bureau revealed an open space behind the wall. The entire piece of furniture was just an elaborate covering to a narrow entrance that led straight down into a tunnel.

Vasily stared, dumbfounded. Pyotr explained that the tunnel had been dug painstakingly over many years, and that it had remained a secret precisely because it had been known to no one. “Do you understand the significance of that statement?” he asked. “Uncle and I were the only ones who knew about it. The dirt was removed a bucket at a time, hauled up the stairs, and dumped into the multitude of steps and raised gardens and landscaping that surround this house. Uncle Lev had the idea, believing gardens were the perfect hiding place for dirt. Make no mistake though, Vasily. We didn’t even let our left hands know what our right hands were doing. And we told no one else about this. You need to know that the moment you ask others to come here, the secret will be out and we will have a very short time to act.”

Vasily pictured the gardens he’d just walked through as he climbed the stone walkway to the door, their boxed shapes and raised concentric circles now formed over with snow drifts and rounded to make it seem as if the house sat on a hill. He considered the truth in what Pyotr was telling him. Even if he remained intentionally blurry about the details when asking others to leave with them, it would not take long for them to figure out the truth. He nodded.

“The tunnel leads under the west perimeter wire and then comes up in a small copse of trees only meters outside the fence. From there it’s a couple of miles straight through the forest to the old water treatment plant,” Pyotr explained. He smiled at the young man’s amazement.

A cold wind whooshed through the tunnel and hit the two men in the face. It sounded like a mechanical nothing, a low audial hum, an ocean crashing endlessly upon a gasping needy shore.

Vasily and the older man stood in the cold and listened. The waves on the other side sounded like freedom.

Standing in the sparsely drawn cellar, Vasily remembered the backpack that he’d brought with him, and he ran back upstairs to retrieve it where he’d dropped it near the chair by the fire.