Michael Bunker - WICK

One of Leonid Timchenko’s sponsorships was about to pay off in a way that the rest of the world wouldn’t even comprehend. Three years earlier, he’d invested millions of dollars in the crazy attempt, by a daredevil named Klaus von Baron, to parachute to earth from space.

The plan was to launch from Roswell International Air Center in New Mexico (just a few miles from the place where the aliens had landed… or didn’t) a space capsule that was to be hauled over twenty-four miles into the stratosphere by a huge metallic balloon designed to carry Klaus von Baron into space. From his platform on his tiny capsule, in a spacesuit designed to perfection by a million of Leonid Timchenko’s dollars, Klaus von Baron would jump into the history books, plummeting faster than the speed of sound before opening his parachute and landing once again in the desert floor that had been the source of haunting, beautiful myth since long before D.H, Lawrence had written about it or Georgia O’Keefe had painted it or Billy the Kid had ridden through it or Coronado had “discovered” it.

From space the area looks like a giant fall leaf, or maybe the soft tissue of a brain, with its landforms folded on top of each other in a veiny, vascular web. Timchenko liked the idea of his brand, his bear, floating in the sky to land on its pink, dusty surface, after having sped ferociously through space. He liked the juxtaposition that this symbolized for his drink—the hard, fast rush coupled with the sweet soft landing.

From the outset, the magnificent attempt had been fraught with troubles and setbacks. In fact, if one were the suspicious or conspiratorial kind, the concerns that led to the many delays of the Red Bear Starjump might even seem planned or contrived. In 2011, von Baron and Timchenko were sued by a man in Massachusetts who claimed that he’d come up with the space jump idea first, arguing that the two foreigners had stolen his idea. That case was settled out of court, but it did delay the jump by almost a year. On another occasion, von Baron pushed the date back himself after having a concern over data that was the result, his team had found, of a misplaced zero in a set of velocity projections. In early October of 2012, a planned jump was aborted because of a forecast of severe weather at the launch site, only to find on that day a sunny lightness to the air.

All of these delays had been very public, and when Timchenko and von Baron filled out their permits and papers to re-attempt their jump in early November, there were many people in and out of government who had come to feel sorry for the pair. It was beginning to seem that someone was working to sabotage their plans, and then, in the last days of October, they came to wonder if that someone was God himself. This is because, only a week before the newly re-scheduled jump, Hurricane Sandy, and then the arctic nor’easter, had struck the northeast of America.

Those twin storms, and the havoc and social unrest that followed soon after them, made it seem like the Red Bear Starjump was going to be doomed forever. But, luckily for our intrepid daredevil and his financier, someone somewhere in the halls of power decided that perhaps having the whole world watch Klaus von Baron LIVE streaming on the Internet, as he jumped into the record books from space, would be just what a divided and beleaguered country needed. It may not be bread, the feeling went, but it was a circus, and what the country needed in the moment was release. So the jump was set.

Since the election had been delayed in most of the northeastern United States, and since many folks in those areas were suffering without power anyway, as a distraction, the Red Bear Starjump was rescheduled for the Tuesday of Election Day. America needed some good news, some unifying event that would encapsulate why these world changing feats and challenges were uniquely representative of the things that Americans stood for. Sure, the daredevil was a German who was being financed by a Russian billionaire, but the science! The science was purely American, and therefore it passed for religion. It would provide a balm in Gilead, so to speak, made with physical daring of the elements rather than grinding chemistry of nature’s bounty. But the point would be the same. It would give the country salve to ease its wounds.

Well, maybe that is a bit overdone, but it wasn’t altogether false either. And in any event, there was one thing that was undeniable and unstoppable. The feat was going to be accomplished over America and live via YouTube.

Far from being diminished by the initial burst of fury spent, the escalation of the battle in Warwick came in the intervening hours to fill the forest like wildfire.

The thin veil of law and civility that had governed relations between neighbors, bringing them along in the past so that they settled disagreements with compromise, was torn in two with a lawless spree. Not all of the crime was political, of course. The glass encasements of Kopinsky’s Jewelry were smashed as opportunists sought to profit from the madness. The longsuffering priest of St. Olaf’s church stood in the doorway and watched his chapel stripped of its treasures.

Men who had come to despise their wives gave them beatings without threat of reprisal, and women who were jealous of their neighbors’ good fortunes stood in the street and applauded the arson of their rivals’ homes. A cruelty that had been unimaginable only hours before suddenly announced that it had been silently brewing for ages.

In the battle lines that formed, there were rich against poor, and weak against strong, and young against old (but not the very old, for some odd reason that almost no one had recognized). In the forming and reforming of alliances, the battles ultimately descended into simply whoever happened to be in the proximity of reach against anyone who had anger and hatred to burn. There was no rhyme or reason to the ordering of the conflict.

Instead, there was simply breakdown and confusion, and double-crossing and intrigue. In such a situation, even the cooler minds had begun to flail in imagined wrongs that deserved redress. In this way, the Battle of Warwick was perhaps no exception to any battle that had ever been fought in a civil war in a community of humankind. It was like a nightmare born of chaos, sired by rumors and fueled by neglect.

If you had asked any one of the townsfolk what they were fighting for (or against) it would have been impossible to find a consensus. The answers would have been myriad. Country, pride, family, flag, brotherhood, freedom, jobs, religion, economy… anything. But in the innermost heart of that wide-ranging chaos, there was perhaps only one true note. Survival. Life itself descended into every man for himself and every woman for her interest. Bertrand Russell once wrote that war does not determine who has won or who has lost, but merely who is left, and this became the overriding ethic of the day’s developments.

The point had shifted from taking back the town or impressing upon others a central tenet or ideology, to one in which everyone simply wanted to live through it. Make it right, or make it good, became… just make it.

The fact that the expediencies of war quickly descended into brutality and disorder was not entirely, of course, due to a lack of effort on the part of the gang led by Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei. The triumvirate of power had spent the long previous night trying to put down the initial signs of uprising with the belief that, through a decisive show of force, they could convince their fellow townspeople to abandon their thoughts of war and reprisal and settle into their newly-established places under the leadership they hoped to provide. They believed that the control they exerted over the Spetznaz troops was a definitive advantage that they could use to put an end to the matter before it had even begun. However, here is where the differences in approach between Mikail and Vladimir came into play in perhaps its most crucial twist.