Michael Bunker - WICK

Grabbing the pack and an extra candle he found on the table, he returned to the tiny subterranean room and placed the pack down on the floor. He told the older man how he’d come into possession of the pack, and that it was supposed to have useful items, but that he did not yet know its contents.

As he kneeled to open the pack, he thought of the man who’d given it to him, the one called Clay, and he remembered the fear behind Clay’s eyes when he’d first met him, but how, when he saw him last in the prison cell, ready to escape, those eyes had become peaceful and resolved, as if something important had been settled in the man’s soul.

“This was given to me by a man who loved your uncle,” Vasily said.

Even as he said the words, they surprised him a little, but he remembered the way that Clay and Volkhov were talking together in the cell when he’d entered as their keeper. Although the two men had not known one another long, Vasily knew that his own words were true… Clay had loved Lev Volkhov as one loves his own flesh and blood. He knelt in the darkness of the cellar and turned the pack on its side, all the while thinking how it was all that was left of the man who had made such an impression on him.

Vasily and Pyotr opened the backpack and carefully examined what was in it, cataloging the items they found, and talking about the things they would still need. Pyotr removed a camera and a radio. If Volkhov was right that an EMP would be coming soon, these items would need to be protected from the pulse. Pyotr put both electronic items into an ammo can and left them on the bureau by the tunnel so that they could take them when it was time to leave.

They looked at the other items, including a knife, a few books, some clothes, a small blue box, a fishing kit, some blankets, and sundry other things. Vasily wondered at these personal effects, just as one does when finding some item that has been used by another life — maybe in another historical era. He felt like an archeologist, or anthropologist, searching through the lost tools of another culture. It felt peculiar, rifling through someone else’s property so soon after their owner had died. Vasily remembered something Clay told him in the prison cell before they’d attempted their breakout. He’d said that Vasily was the best spy in a whole town of spies. That was a kindness that had not been offered by many of the townsfolk—his own people. Warwickians had generally treated him like an idiot because he had not impressed them in the ways that they had demanded. It had taken this stranger to see his potential. He smiled and went back to his work.

After a short discussion, they agreed that Pyotr would continue to sort the items and work on their preparedness, while Vasily would return to the gym. The older man said that he would busy himself devising plans for escape and making sure the tunnel was secured and cleared and ready to be used. They could not know how many people might be willing to leave with them. The more that decided to come, the more difficult would be their escape.

In order to prepare for all contingencies, Pyotr said that he would put together some “go bags”—that’s what he called them. These consisted, he explained, of packs with some food, water, and other needful supplies in them, ready to take with you in case of emergency.

When he was ready to walk back to the gym, Vasily thanked Pyotr for waiting, and told him again how sorry he was about Lev.

“Perhaps,” Vasily said, “I can find out more about what happened.”

“Perhaps,” was all that Pyotr could say in response.

“I’ll be back, Pyotr.”

“I hope you will, Vasily.”

“I have to do this.”

“I know.”

They shook hands, and Pyotr promised to pray for Vasily, and with that, they headed back upstairs.

Vasily left Pyotr’s house, and as he walked, an omnipresent darkness seemed to sit upon him. It was brooding and heavy like the weight of ages. He was terrified and sad and angry all at the same time. He felt his rapid heartbeat in his throat, and he had the beginnings of a headache from the stress. The pain lay just behind the eyes and radiated outward to his temples. He felt as if he might be walking toward his own death, but then that thought was overwhelmed by his anger at what had happened to Lev and Clay, and what the gang had done to his town. He felt a sudden surge of adrenaline and a desire to fight. His emotions shifted with each step he took toward the gymnasium. Now he was curious and hopeful. Now he was angry. Now he was overcome by the terror of facing Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei and those Spetznaz troops and their machine guns.

He kept walking forward, because that is what he had to do, resolving to do what was before him despite his feelings. Heroism is sometimes an accident of circumstance more than it is a product of design.

The night felt surreal and dark, and the frigid wind spiked past his face and whipped at his coat. Lev had trained him to think in English—it helped with his English conversation, and to do away with his natural accent—but now he had to put that away and think in Russian. It would be fatal for him if he slipped up and gave anyone an indication that he spoke English at all, much less perfectly. Like a switch being flipped in his mind, he made the change to Russian, and he purposefully put on his Russian attitude and demeanor, even changing his walk. He became, step-by-step as he walked toward the gym, just stupid, harmless Vasily, the town idiot from Warwick, who nobody suspected because no one had ever bothered to walk in his shoes.

It is odd the way a major event, some birth or death or loss or change, can make one see the world through brand new eyes. It is as if the world is a snow globe, and occasionally it gets shaken up so that, while the pieces all remain in the same environment, the whole somehow fits together differently.

As Vasily walked through Warwick toward the gymnasium to face what could be his death, he noticed the intricately carved latticework on the eaves and rakes of the small wooden houses along his route. He felt the gravel crunch in the hard-packed snow under his boots as he listened to the moon’s stillness.

In the distance, he could hear shouting and fluttering of action, and through a window he heard a chair scoot. He had walked through this town so many times at night, and the sounds and sights had always washed over him like rainwater on the windshield of a fast moving train, merely forming impressions, without announcing themselves and demanding that he stop and pay attention. Now, as he walked, he felt everything new, as if waking from a dream and realizing that the material world mattered.

Here was the place that he and Arkady, a young boy who’d lived two houses down from him since the time of his birth, threw stones at a goat and the ricochet of their misses landed them in trouble with old man Kovalenko. Down Bunin Street, he saw the jutting façade of the home of the beautiful woman he knew only as Lyudmila, who paid him to gather stones in the forest, and to build a low-rising step for her door. Here was Irinna’s house, and there was the place he had first seen her, walking home from the bakery along a little side street toward her door, her arms full of bread that he could smell from across the street.

This town was the only place on earth that he had ever truly known, and as he walked through the snow toward the gymnasium, he was struck by the thought that he barely knew it at all.

Vasily was born to be a spy. Like some others of his age, this reality had always been clouded by the fact that he was born in a time when his personal value was questioned, not only by the people of his town who, as has been mentioned, saw him as having less than average intelligence, but also by the shadowy authorities who designed Warwick for the purpose of waging war with the Soviet Union. When that union dissolved, those authorities simply left the machinery of the charm school in place without giving it a discernible direction. Vasily, therefore, had grown up with a lack of direction, as if his existence mirrored the existence of the town. Not only was he a young man in a country that didn’t recognize him, and in a town that didn’t know him, but he was also a dreamer whose highest dream was almost certainly unattainable. He’d been, like all those who eventually did become spies and were caught out for one reason or another, abandoned to his fate and disavowed.