Michael Bunker - WICK

“What backpack?”

“The guards saw you leave with a backpack.”

“The guards you just shot?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea what that means, Mikail Mikailivitch. You’d have to ask them.”

“But there was a backpack. It belonged to the man called Clay, the man you were responsible for overseeing before he broke out of prison…”

Vasily tried to keep his voice even. I’m just dumb Vasily, he reminded himself. If it can be said that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, it is perhaps equally true that in a camp where everyone is trained as a spy, the man who seems least capable is often the least suspect. He remembered what Clay told him when he’d said that no one thought Vasily capable of deception, and how that fact gave him an advantage in a world where deception was second nature. He played the only card he had to play. He told a lie and convinced himself to believe it.

“I don’t know, Mikail. Perhaps they lied in order to lead you off their trail. There is no backpack that I know of. Those two,” he said, indicating to the two nearest body bags, “were more worried about whether I would get them extra blankets than anything else.”

“Vasily, sometimes when you find yourself in a hole, the best way to get out is to stop digging.”

Vasily looked at him, and Mikail looked back, raising an eyebrow at him as if to suggest, for the second time in the space of a couple of hours, that he might soon find himself lying in a grave like those before him. Vasily made a face that suggested he didn’t know what he was expected to say next, and Mikail placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder as if to calm him.

“Listen, comrade, you go home and think about it, will you? It’s late. I worry that you are out of your depth. There is a rising tide in this place and it will drown you if you let it.” Mikail shrugged his shoulders when he said this, almost as if he was powerless in the town. “It’s possible that it will drown you even if you don’t let it, but go and get some sleep. Perhaps the walk will jog your memory. I have other things to think about right now, and Warwick has seen too much bloodshed for one day. But remember, Vasily, I’m somewhat limited in what I can do for you. I have to play the hands as they’re dealt, and, as with Todd, I have to make use of sometimes unpleasant means to serve the greater good. There is a man with a gun named Vladimir who is not as long-suffering as I am. I would hate for him to have to rummage around and find what you cannot.”

Vasily got up to leave, brushing the earth off the seat of his pants, and trying to decide if he should protest his innocence for one beat longer or whether he had already lost that opportunity. He decided to simply drop the whole matter and attempt to relate to Mikail as one human being to another. At that moment, his mind rested on a quote from Solzhenitsyn: “If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?” Vasily decided that, at this moment, the bravest thing for him to do was not to attempt to make a correct calculation about the likelihood of his being believed or not, but, instead, to simply show compassion to this man whom he had come to fear in his heart.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “No one deserves to have to live with that burden and to be held accountable for such a cost.”

Mikail seemed genuinely moved by his statement. “Yes, Vasily. Well… we all have our crosses to bear. Yours will be to carry yours for as long as you are able, while mine will be to raise Cain.” He paused. “I hope we are both up to it.”

Monday, Early Morning

Vasily walked hurriedly, but with purpose, along the side street to the end of the block, and then turned up the hill toward the house of Aleksei Gopchik. It was 4 a.m., and his mind was tired and his energy level was waning quickly. He’d spent the last couple of hours knocking on the doors of the people closest to him, waking them from their slumber, trying his best to convince them to pack a bag and come with him to an escape.

He hoped with all of the hope that he could muster in his breast that he might convince them that the town was unsafe, but that he, dull little Vasily, would be able to lead them to safety. As he should have expected, he’d been frustrated at every turn by the blank and unbelieving stares of his dearest friends.

The pattern had become painfully consistent. First there would be a sleepy shuffling as the inhabitant groggily made his way to the door, as if to confront a rude interloper. The door would open. Yawning incomprehension was followed by either a blatant display of skepticism or, in some cases, downright hostility. How old is the reluctance to heed the midnight warning? How many prophets have heard the same refrains?

“How can you dare to wake me up at this hour?” each one of them asked. “Do you have any idea how late it is?” He’d heard that last line so often that he’d taken to quoting Solzhenitsyn in response, “Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

None of his exhortations mattered. The story was always the same—albeit with different words—at each of the places he’d stopped. He was told that Warwick was indeed in turmoil, but that trouble had been coming for far too long. Volkhov’s lessons on the dialectic came to mind. On whatever side one was on, they were convinced that it was high time the other side learned a lesson.

Volkhov’s speech! From just a few hours before… The wisdom contained there might as well be buried in that body bag along with the old man’s corpse.

While the world chose up sides along false lines outside the fences of Warwick and around the world, the microcosm inside the wire matched it all perfectly. Nothing divides humanity, to its own destruction, quite as effectively as a false choice.

There were those who favored running the thugs at the gymnasium out of town on a rail, and others who favored falling into line with their petite revolution and teaching the old guard (“the powers that be!”) a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. There was talk of civil and uncivil war, and assumptions that the Spetnaz soldiers, who had parachuted in and who were now protecting the new government at the gym, would go along with whichever side showed up with the largest numbers. The ghosts of St. Petersburg in 1917 were never far from Warwick. Conflicts that had been brewing for a generation in Warwick were finally coming to a head, and his friends were not only unwilling to join in his exodus, they were hoping to get a scalp or two for their troubles.

“But don’t you see that this is no way to live?” Vasily had asked them.

They simply shook their heads in stubbornness and sorrow, for they couldn’t imagine any other way. “It has been coming to this, and they will get what they deserve,” they’d each said in their turn and in their own words. He’d heard that phrase so often, and with the definition of who “they” were changing to fit the exigencies of shifting opinion, that Vasily had simply come to expect its antipathy.

“But we don’t have to choose between two tyrants! We can go outside the wire and be free!” He’d sung, like a free bird singing to the masses in their chains.

“You can die just as easily out there as you can in here, Vasily.”

“Yes, I might die out there, but if I do, I will die on my own terms. At least I will have sought something higher and better than the false choices given to me by liars, by those who seek the power to coerce others. And look at the way we’re living now! The food will not keep coming from outside. This system is unsustainable. It is already interrupted. We don’t produce enough stuff in Warwick to feed and clothe ourselves. However our supplies got here before this trouble, they will eventually stop.”