Michael Bunker - WICK

“Yes,” Pyotr said, nodding, “most likely. When they do, they will certainly come here, but we will be long gone by then, Vasily. I have most of our provisions already packed. If things go as Volkhov said they should, the EMP could hit tomorrow.”

Vasily’s face dropped. He’d certainly felt the urgency to escape, and to save as many of his friends and neighbors as possible, but he’d forgotten about the electromagnetic pulse that Volkhov predicted would likely come on America’s election day. Was that tomorrow? Tuesday? He flashed back to the lessons sitting in Volkhov’s study, the time he’d spent with the old man in prison just before death. The imminence of the catastrophe that was about to strike braced him.

Volkhov had explained that an electromagnetic pulse (usually abbreviated as an EMP) is a destructive burst of electromagnetic radiation. An EMP could happen willfully and purposefully from the high-altitude explosion of a nuclear device, or it could come from any number of other, less diabolical sources, including as a blast of solar radiation emitted from the sun. It was hard to tell how Volkhov’s predicted EMP might be triggered, since most of the militaries of the world had done extensive research into EMP weapons, and he was unclear as to who the various forces were behind the scenes that might desire such an end.

An EMP of sufficient strength could destroy most sensitive computer parts and equipment, melt down power lines, blow up transformers, and destroy just about anything that ran on electricity that wasn’t shielded from such an attack.

The memory of Volkhov’s warnings, and the minute and scary details the old man had given about what could happen to any technologically advanced society if an EMP of significant strength were to hit, rushed over Vasily in a cold wave. Absolute Destruction. And the EMP wasn’t even the war.

“The EMP is just the trigger,” Volkhov had said, “what follows will shock even the wildest imagination.” Vasily looked over at the candle on the table, and at the shadow of the man on the wall, and thought of what the implications of an EMP going off in an America already spiraling into chaos might be.

Pyotr looked at Vasily, his face ashen and drawn, and then suddenly realized how harrowing the last several hours must have been for him, and how remarkably brave he’d been in standing up to the experience. He turned and walked Vasily down the hallway and into a small room with a mattress on the floor and a wash basin near a chair. He told him to get some rest and that he would wake him in a few hours. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, before thinking better of it and opening it up again to catch the younger man’s eye in the shadows and the dark.

“My uncle knew that you were going to be a great man, Vasily Romanovich.”

“That’s funny, because I am not even sure of that myself. But there is one thing of which I am certain, Pyotr. It is that I will die before I stop trying to be.”

“I’m sure you will, my young friend. I’m sure you will.”

And with that, Pyotr smiled and blew out the light.

Solzhenitsyn once wrote that the only substitutes we have for experiences that we have not lived ourselves are found in literature and art. While we may take his point with the consideration it requires, it is reasonable to object that, on this one point at least, the great man was partly wrong.

In dreaming, there are no boundaries of perspective or expectation. The uncontacted native in his hut hidden along the thickly-forested Amazon dreams with the same wild unconsciousness as the Queen in all her splendor, once they each gird their loins and dive into that deep, encompassing darkness. In dreams are found the ferocious beasts of our primitive nature and the angelic wings of our best aspirations. Though dreams are fueled by our waking experiences, in the netherworld of sleep, like death, our minds become universal.

Vasily, worn out from the turbulent day and night before, had fallen into a fitful sleep that quickly dipped into chaos and light. He dreamt of long, slow walks along Elysian streams, and then of plummeting, headlong flights through air as thick as water. He gripped himself and passed into a seamless world of dark foreboding. His unshackled mind flashed to beasts of burden in neon glow being torn by jaws of fury, and this he left unconsidered, as we often do in dreams, and instantaneously he passed through infinite waves of sound until he found a still, small island. There, he swam in the love of women he’d never met and basked in the praise of men who despised him.

In his physiological response, he merely laid on the thin mattress in the dark and his eyes fluttered under their lids while his muscles twitched on their stems. But in the caverns of his mind, he was magical and golden, not a soul tied to a body, but a star burning bright in its firmament. He slept the wondrous sleep of saints who have passed through the gates of hell to find their rest in the bosom of plenty.

If the young man’s sleep was a dream, the town of Warwick found itself waking at that very moment to a yawning, terrible nightmare. After Vasily had slept for only a couple of hours, the sun rose over the hidden valley, and with it, the world opened wide underneath him.

With the dawn, the sleeping animosities that had been whispered in the darkness of the previous night burst out in full-throated alarm into the full light of day, and the townspeople of Warwick began to gather in groups of like minds, wherein they convinced themselves to take up arms and begin a struggle. The spark struck, the long line of woven animosities had ignited, and the resulting conflagration had begun.

Civil war in this wick began as it does in all such conflicts, with physical violence initiated almost as an afterthought. Men, enraged that their rights had been taken, and women, inflamed that their futures were dimmed, lashed out in the only way they knew how. During the night there had been only rumors of war, but, illustrative of the age-old proverb, people had gone to bed with their anger only to find it more wicked and volatile in the light of the morning.

The sudden blinding clarity of long-held ideologies came into sharp (if deluded) focus as the people shook the cobwebs from their heads and wiped the sleep from their groggy eyes, and as they filed into the streets, their usual morning greetings simply retreated behind threats and assaults, as if the nighttime had spread a virus of war, and as if subtle and as yet undefined hatreds had become the currency of the realm.

While no one could have answered, if they had been pressed to do so exactly what those ideologies and threats and hatreds fully entailed, there was a palpable animosity that swept through the population of Warwick, driven by instinct and history and hate. It suddenly seemed as if lives too dangerous to be free had become too unbearable to live any longer. It was as if a political storm had arrived on the heels of the two very real storms the people had just experienced, and the townspeople had no recourse to shelter.

There was the matter of the overthrow of power. There was the reality of the remembrance of promises not kept. Something simply had to be done. It was conviction. It was destiny. No one could go on living this way, the town was heard to say in a collective and contradictory outburst. “To arms!” the townspeople shouted. And they grabbed their pitchforks and burning torches and rifles and hammers and knives, and marched into the street to vent their spleen on the “others.”

The first shot in the battle for Warwick roared forth from the barrel of a Spetznaz rifle on a group of young men near the church. It was not some kind of planned thing. A soldier had ordered the young men to disperse while they were standing around and developing their arguments, and they had simply refused, thinking that his order had been a request.