Michael Bunker - WICK

They talked as they carefully made their way in a circuitous route back to the gym to gather up Sergei and Vladimir and the remnant of their loyal forces. In passing, Irinna mentioned to him, since they were now discussing escape, that the young, dull boy… Vasily… had come to her house last night and had asked her to escape with him. Apparently, even the town dunce had a way out.

This surprised Mikail, and not just a little. The red scar on his forehead began to throb and his mouth twitched as he mulled the thought in his mind. As they drew close to the gymnasium, his rage began to build, and, although they had not reached a place of safety, he grabbed Irinna harshly by the hand and spun her around to face him, his rage to the point of boiling over.

“How were they getting out?” he demanded angrily.

“I have no idea, Mikail. He gave no details. He just said that they were going to be leaving and that he wanted me to go with him.”

“Oh he did, did he? Who was going with him?!” He spat the words. “Damned fool!” It was unclear from the way that he said this exactly to whom he was referring. “Dumb, little Vasily! He wanted to take the most beautiful girl in Warwick with him?! He had a way out! Maybe young Vasily wasn’t so dumb after all!” He said this not in a way of kindness or to flatter Irinna, or even Vasily. He said it in anger. The soldiers escorting the pair were growing wary of being out in the open with the town in rebellion, and they attempted to move the two arguing lovers along with them in order to get them as quickly as possible into the safety of the gym.

“I kept that little idiot alive when Vladimir wanted to kill him! I gave him life! And this is what he gives me!”

“Mikail, there was nothing! He seemed to be going house to house. There was nothing between us!” As she said this, the soldiers grabbed the two and forcibly moved them toward the gym, toward cover.

The soldiers were moving in formation, sweeping their guns in wide arcs, and as they did so, the chaos of the town opened up around them and the people formed in crowds and looked on, urging an offensive.

A sharp crack split the air, and the soldiers dropped to the ground instinctively. Mikail spun around and dropped to the ground with them, looking at the crowd to see if he could determine who had fired on them.

Just at that moment, the lovely Irinna stood still in the street. She reached her hand up to brush away the wisp of hair from her face and, as she did so she left a small trail of blood smearing across her fast-draining features. Looking up, Mikail reached for Irinna’s hand to pull her down with him, and only then did he see the blood running down her face, down her dress, circling the curves of the one he loved so. Her legs collapsed and she fell to the ground, falling into Mikail’s arms as he attempted to understand what had happened.

Mikail crouched over her, and the soldiers grabbed at them both and began to drag them, and then, seeing that the girl was dying, the soldiers dropped her and began forcibly to drag the unwounded Mikail towards the gymnasium, toward safety. Finally they broke out into a sprint as Mikail stumbled along in their midst. He gave a final look over his shoulder, over the shoulder of a soldier, and saw his lovely Irinna lying in the snow, bleeding into it. He turned his face toward the gym and picked up his pace with the soldiers, until they came into the warm embrace of their shelter.

In that look and in that moment, Mikail focused his mind on what was ahead of him. For now, perhaps for the first time in a lifetime of calculation, he found himself feeling an entirely new emotion. It was a feeling that he suddenly confronted but did not have any real way to account for in the way that he always calculated everything. It was feeling of overwhelming and ancient reckoning, a feeling of un-appraisable anguish.

Mikail now had a reason to hate.

Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day

It was nearing noon as Klaus von Baron stepped out onto the platform of his multi-million dollar Red Bear Starjump capsule and looked downward, 128,000 feet, toward the blue, grey circle of the earth. In its curvilinear contrast to the deep, black expanse of space, the planet splayed beneath his feet, looking mysterious and malleable, like a floating lump of clay waiting to be formed if only he could get his hands around it.

“Checklist, item seventeen,” Klaus heard through his headset from Starjump Mission Control in Roswell. “Engage capsule release timer. Near your left hand, Red Bear, down below the seat reconnect and next to the O2 injection port. Flip up the guard and throw the red switch.”

The command sounded like a faraway dream reaching into his conscience, the only other sound being the measured rhythm of his own thick breathing. Klaus looked down, as did the millions of people worldwide watching over his shoulder, over the internet, and took in the awesome scene, feeling his smallness against the massive earth.

With the bulky suit restricting his movement, he moved clumsily in response to the instruction. He thought about the millions of dollars that had gone into manufacturing the suit knowing that, in just a moment, he would be plummeting at greater than the speed of sound, the first human to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle, without a capsule or ship, in a tumbling, rotating freefall. The suit would be the only thing between him and death. In fact, without it, right now he would already be dead.

Klaus was already twice as high as the “Armstrong Limit,” which is the height at which the barometric pressure is so low that water will boil at room temperature. No human can live above the Armstrong Limit in an unpressurized atmosphere. The suit was his life, and it represented all such systems of human dependency. When man throws his life into the dead hands of the machine and counts on the inanimate to operate as it should, he becomes acutely aware of the tenuous miracle of creation. If the suit developed a rip or tear now, his blood would boil and the capsule would be his airy tomb. In that case (if he failed to complete checklist item seventeen), the Starjump capsule would float along, losing atmosphere, until it fell randomly somewhere, probably into an ocean.

If the suit failed at any time during the fall, traveling at 800 M.P.H. or around Mach 1.2, depending on the altitude, Klaus would either flash freeze, or he would pass out and be dead in seconds. Whether his chute opened or not at that point would be immaterial, because it would just be an instrument for delivering his body back to earth for burial.

Klaus knew that his jump was an historic one. He knew it was being played LIVE on YouTube. He knew that once he stepped off the platform and threw his body into space he would have a limited time to stabilize his fall and straighten out his body before he reached the point of no return where he would either have to pull the cord to his parachute and slow his all too rapid descent or push along in the slip of atmosphere until his body passed the wave field that would produce a sonic boom. He knew that only bullets and missiles and spaceships and meteors had ever achieved what he would now be doing with his own flesh and blood inside the mix of chemical-laced fabrics that contained the technology that would keep him alive like an umbilical cord inside a womb. He knew that over eight million people were watching him go through his egress checks as he slid to the edge of the capsule. Beyond that, he knew very little.

He did not know, for example, that when he engaged the capsule release timer that he was not actually activating the capsule’s controlled descent functions. He did not know that, in fact, when he flipped the switch he would set in motion the genesis event that would signal the end of the world as everyone knew it, and the beginning of a whole new era. He did not know that, by innocently throwing the red switch as he’d been commanded to do through the signal in his helmet from mission control, he would sign the death warrant of over 300 million people in the United States alone, and that of over six billion people worldwide. He could not have known that flipping a toggle switch would rip a tear in the pressurized space suit called “the grid,” an artificial system that was absolutely necessary to keep humans alive in the beginning of the 21st Century.