Michael Bunker - WICK

So he’d thrown himself into his studies, but quietly, behaving as a child does who is bullied by his peers. He received threats and intimidation on a daily basis from his classmates, and was ridiculed for his small size, and the delicate features he had inherited from his mother. Of those who’d bullied him, none had done so as prominently as the youths in the gang who had just seized power in Warwick.

Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov, Vladimir Nikitich Samyonov, and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev had, like him, been born to be spies, and like him, they had failed to achieve their ultimate goal of being picked by the Americans to spy in Russia. Though they had all been subjected to the machinery of the charm school’s training, they each were found unworthy of further commissioning into service—the latter two and Vasily because their performance on testing had resulted in less than optimal results, and Mikail because he was found too unstable to be acceptable.

They all had learned, in their turn, that they were destined to stay, live, and die in Warwick, and each had reacted in different ways. Mikail and his gang became more aggressive among their peers, lashing out at anyone weaker than themselves. Vasily became a watcher of windows, a dreamer who decided that his only hope in life was to bide his time and wait for something better to come along. While he waited, he’d read books.

Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei had noticed their younger cohort’s reticence to action from the earliest days in school and in the streets of their town. They saw weakness and timidity where there had been only Vasily’s hopes, and they saw stupidity where there was his tendency toward silent and internal contemplation. At some point they had decided that he was an easy mark, and they’d treated him as such. He was, they thought, a fool, but they had read the cover of his book all wrong.

Vasily never understood the gang’s need for aggression. He’d simply never felt the desire to belittle, or to rage, or even to be noticed. Well, that is not entirely true. He’d acted once before, and that action was the reason he’d been in prison when the coup erupted.

As he rounded the final corner along Tsentralnaya Street and looked up the hill toward the prison where only a few hours ago he’d plotted with the men he was assigned to oversee, he passed the Orthodox Church and looked beyond it to the cemetery. It was in that cemetery—the only one in Warwick—that he’d been sitting and drinking one night, not long ago in the big scheme of things. On that night, a group of younger boys had passed him on their way to somewhere, and one of them had sneered at him and called him stupid, and he’d simply had enough of ridicule to take it from those who were younger. He fought with the boy and had been arrested for drunkenness and brawling, and the arrest had landed him in jail. That series of events had set him upon his present course. His current situation had begun in that one moment of his life in which he’d stood up for himself, and, having had a moment of doing what had been neglected for far too long, he had taken his first step toward what might now be his undoing… or his freedom.

The Spetznaz troops were stationed around the gym, securing the perimeter as Vasily came over the sloping walkway. He felt his feet slide gently across the ice and snow, and the sounds seemed to be amplified in the chilly night. One of the soldiers raised a rifle and pointed it in his direction, and he held up his hands and stopped in his tracks for a moment, intending to show them that he was unarmed. From a commotion near the right of a little group of soldiers, he heard a familiar voice rise up, and as the soldiers parted slightly, he saw the images of Mikail and Vladimir appear and begin to walk toward him.

“You there. Vasily Romanovich! Get over here!”

There are moments one sees not from the perspective of an individual, but as if it were a movie, from a distance. If, from that perspective, one had watched and studied Vasily’s situation, one might’ve seen the two figures of the new bosses, Mikail and Vladimir, walk angrily toward the smaller youth in the distance. Their tones were insulting and angry.

“Where have you been?” was not a question but an insinuation.

“What have you done?” was not an inquiry but an invective.

One might have noticed, had one viewed it as a movie, the youth’s quiet, and understood it to be fear, and such a reaction would have been understandable. The mixture of bravado and accusation that the two figures were displaying as they were surrounded by guns in the foreground was rife with contempt and pregnant with threat. The youth simply stood there in silence.

There was a deeper reason for his silence, however. He was not simply cowering before the men who had terrorized him all of his life, and he was not merely carefully choosing his words. Instead, he was looking at four guards from the prison, guards he had known from his recent stay in one of its cells. They were blindfolded and lined up along the wall of the gymnasium. The Spetnaz soldiers were pointing their guns at them and waiting for an order to shoot.

Watching from that distance, one would have seen the taller of the figures approach the youth called Vasily and push him to the ground and the shorter man bend slowly down to whisper to him. A Russian soldier walked over at their bidding and took the youth into custody and tied his hands behind his back. He jerked the boy called Vasily to his feet and marched him, tripping and slipping, across a small patch of hard-packed snow toward the wall where the captured guards were lined up, standing blindfolded, shivering with cold and fear.

From the distance, one would have seen the two leaders approach the guards, and the youth near the soldier would have been placed beside the condemned men. One would have seen the taller of the figures, Vladimir, take out a pistol from a holster.

Vladimir moved slowly, methodically, walking down the line of shivering guards, placing a gun to the head of each. One by one, each condemned man, in turn, cried out for his life only to be cut off in mid-sentence by the harsh report of the gun in the crisp night air as it rang out across the town of Warwick, echoing in the valley and circling through the tops of the trees and then reaching up into the mountains before growing fainter as it faded into the nighttime sky.

From a distance, one would have seen the bodies slump to the ground, one by one, until there was only one left standing, and the two figures approached the shivering boy who was left standing in the midst of the bodies. They accosted him together.

The youth stood in silence, and the taller of the figures placed a gun to his temple and the youth felt his knees buckle and the world turned upside down like a snow globe.

That is when the world seemed strange and disjointed, that sublime and terrifying moment when it cracked open just a little beneath the feet of the shivering youth and then suddenly snapped back into place, and the familiar crept back into the sum of the parts.

Vladimir slapped Vasily on the shoulder. “You poor, dumb, boy. Why are you afraid? We know you didn’t do it on purpose. You’re too stupid to be complicit.”

“You should know that if you keep scattering the dirt willy-nilly like that, it’ll only take us longer when we have to put it back in.”

Vasily was standing waist deep in one of a series of seven holes. In each of the holes stood a pair of youths, and to the side of each hole was a growing heap of earth. This digging of holes was no easy task just before the onset of winter in the State of New York, but the ground was still workable, if only barely so, and if they’d been forced to dig these graves later into the winter, they most likely would have failed at the task.