Michael Bunker - WICK

So Mikail met with the “peace” commission, and terms were arranged and agreed to, although he did not go completely quietly into the approaching, dark night. He had a word for them as they departed.

“The only thing you all have in common is your hatred of me!” Mikail shouted at the backs of the opposition commission as they turned to leave the gymnasium. They turned to look at him in contemptuous regard. He laughed out loud. “What will you have when I am gone?” he asked. “You will have civil war and strife until you are all dead!” He said this in the way that prophecies are often uttered, though perhaps even he didn’t realize that what he said was so prophetic. It was more of a statement of fact mixed with the slightest hint of wishful thinking.

“That is what we have now,” Konstantin Kopinsky, the jeweler’s son, shouted back. His anger was emphasized by the sound of the gymnasium door slamming itself shut, effectively ending Mikail’s reign over Warwick. Mikail was given twenty-four hours to cede control of the government and all of his forces to the coalition, at which time he would be arrested and taken to the prison, where he was certain he would be locked away for the rest of his natural life.

That was the deal that he agreed to, though he had no intention of hanging around Warwick long enough to honor it. He would not allow himself to be the subject of his own revolutionary dogma. He would not suffer the indignities of his own interminable crimes. He would not allow his indiscretions to result in the crowd’s recriminations.

On Tuesday morning, Peter announced to the other three in the tunnel that they needed to put a watch (or more accurately, a “listen”) back at the tunnel entrance, inside the tunnel but below the bureau in Peter’s basement. They would want to know, he said, if anyone came snooping around the basement and, by listening from the post below the bureau, a person could faintly hear the racket going on outside, in the town. Cole was the first to volunteer, saying he liked the opportunity to read the scene by the details coming from the imagination he applied to the noise.

The battle had raged through the night, and by the morning of Election Day in America, some of the fury and rage in Warwick had spent itself, but not all of it. Upon his return to the dugout, the pudgy intellectual gave a full report. “There is still sporadic fighting. It’s hard to hear from the tunnel, and we only get an idea of what is going on in that one area of town, but the tempest certainly isn’t as loud as it was last night,” Cole said. He took off his glasses and began to clean them. “I wouldn’t say it was all much ado about nothing, but I suppose all’s well that ends well.”

“Oh, you and your Shakespeare!” Natasha said. She shook her head, but you could see that there was the slightest hint of a smile on her face. She looked over to Lang and added, “I’ve had to put up with this my whole life!”

Kolya put his glasses back on to his face. “As you like it, dear sister.” He then turned to Lang and said, “my dearest blood-kin here is a shrew that needeth to be tamed.” He winked.

Peter glared at Cole, not entirely appreciating his humor in such a critical moment, but then his face softened and he smiled. “Well, I’ll not try to keep up with you measure for measure, so we’ll end the Shakespeare titles game and maybe you can give us the rest of your report?”

Cole smiled. “Well, it didn’t sound like anyone has been in the basement. The bureau is still there and secured, and the whole time I listened, I didn’t hear a thing, except for the occasional bark of a pistol or a shout from someone off in the distance.”

Peter nodded his head, but remained silent while Lang shifted his weight, giving an indication that he was uncomfortable just sitting around in the dugout.

“Why don’t we go find this water plant, Peter? We can’t just stay down here for days. Anyway, we can hide out there until things become less… cloudy.”

“I figured we’d just stay here until maybe Friday. It is safe and warm, and besides, we have such nice toilet facilities in here!” Peter pointed his thumb in the direction of the underground “outhouse.” In the dugout, which was at the midway point in the tunnel, Peter and Lev had dug a tiny (and short) little indentation into the dirt, which turned to the left so that the person using it could have a little privacy. The facility consisted of a hole dug three feet deep with a wooden box atop it. The box had a hole cut into it. There was a bucket full of sawdust next to the toilet so that after it was used, the waste could be covered with a thin layer of wood shavings. This kept the scent down. Lev Volkhov and Peter had used the toilet while building the tunnel, so that they didn’t have to go all the way back up to the house each time they needed to eliminate.

“The toilet is fine, Peter. A fine invention it is,” Lang said, smiling. “But I’m getting a bit batty just sitting around. Cole can read the same books over and over again, and I think he’s memorized The Poems of C.L. Richter, but since I didn’t find any Solzhenitsyn in Clay’s backpack, I need some fresh air and some trees over my head. I’m just getting tunnel fever.”

Cole shook his head and tried to change the subject, to divert his younger friend from his growing agitation. “Actually, I’ve come to really appreciate the poems of Mr. Richter, whosoever he is. They have a sort of charm that is lacking in a lot of poetry.”

“Self-indulgent nonsense,” Peter sniffed, kicking a clod of dirt across the dugout floor.

“Be that as it may, Peter,” Cole responded, “the poems are true, and sweet. They come from that place inside of us where everyone touches the poetic imagination. I think that, in a dark world that is crumbling on its rotted foundation,” he pointed upwards with his index finger, “sweet and true is nice to have around.”

Peter took a deep breath and thought for a moment in silence. It seemed that he had been unofficially elected as leader, and the other three younger members of the group seemed to want his approval even as they sought, as youth always does, to act as if their world didn’t hinge on receiving it. He nodded to Cole, as if in resignation, but he thought to himself how perhaps the book’s pages could be better used as an accessory kept near the tunnel’s toilet. He smiled at his own wicked humor.

“I suppose we can go check out the water plant, but if we go, everything needs to go with us. We’ll just stay there. We’ll have to find a way to obscure our footprints from the snow, and we’ll have to move quickly and silently. We’ll surface only meters outside the fence, and if there are patrols in Warwick, then they would see us. We’ll need to be ready to run for it.”

“This will be the most dangerous thing we’ve done yet,” Lang said, nodding his head.

“Well, I disagree with that, Lang,” Peter said. Cole nodded, agreeing with Peter. “Your trip from here back to the gym and then through the town door to door was extremely dangerous, and perhaps not a little stupid,” Cole gently agreed, and the three let Lang bask in that recognition for a moment.

Natasha smiled. “I’m glad you did it, Lang. I’d hate to be back there in Warwick, trying to hide from the mob or from Mikail’s goons.”

“Well, we aren’t out of Warwick yet,” Peter said. “Perhaps it is good that we leave now. We’ll get some distance between us and that stinking pit of a town.”

An unabridged retelling of the historic mad dash from the tunnel’s exit to the water plant might be in order someday, if the story ever gets told in its entirety. The escape was historic, because, as far as any of them knew, no one had successfully escaped Warwick and gotten away since the great confusion in ’92. It was mad because the four individuals who made the escape had no idea what awaited them on the outside. They did not know if anyone, perhaps even the Americans, still patrolled the forest. They did not know if the Russian Spetznaz had snipers or soldiers watching the perimeter to prevent escapes. They did not know if they would run into mayhem or violence in the forest from people escaping the cities, and they did not know if the water plant was occupied—if perhaps gangs of refugees were using the treatment facility as a hideout or headquarters. In short, they knew nothing, and that is what made their historic escape an act of madness. It was a rush into the unknown.