Michael Bunker - WICK

“Yes, well that’s a shame,” the red-haired man said. “It surely is. You know…,” the red bearded man nodded, as if they should know, “…when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he worked by candlelight until it was done.” The red-haired man looked at the crowd of faces around him to see if anyone understood his meaning, but he was met with only blank stares until someone in the gathered group told them all to hush. A woman waved her hand to silence the crowd. She was picking up some news on her radio. The news had interrupted their broadcast to go to live coverage of a man who was going to jump from outer space and parachute back to earth.

“What kind of thing is that to do while the world is going to hell?” someone asked.

“Shhh… quiet!” someone said. “I want to hear this!”

The crowd sat and listened as the radio announcer relayed the sequence of events and watched as a few remaining cars went weaving through the broken down traffic along the highway. The daredevil was plunging towards the ground, and they were all listening in stony silence when there was a loud explosion from a transformer down the street, and the cars and the radio and the red-haired man’s boombox stopped simultaneously, leaving the crowd waiting for a finish to the song that never came.

A groan went up among them. “Oh, what now?!” But the red-haired man did not ask this question. He seemed to know what was coming next, or maybe he just did not care, which to the observer looked like the same thing. He unstrapped the bungees that held his boombox to the handlebars of his bicycle and tossed the hunk of now useless plastic onto a pile of trash stacked near the road and mounted his bicycle and wished the crowd well.

He pushed off from the curb and headed up the highway with his bicycle, leaving the crowd open-mouthed as they watched him slowly pedal through the stalled cars and the snow and pedestrians, weaving slowly in and out until his image grew increasingly smaller in the distance.

And then, true to his word, he disappeared.

Mikail’s guards were now his captors. He had not been “officially” arrested yet. The cease-fire agreement supposedly allowed him twenty-four hours, until midday on Wednesday, to cede control of Warwick and to surrender to the coalition force that now had supremacy in the village. The coalition had neither great leadership nor any concrete plans for how to move forward or deal with the burgeoning crisis. What they had were the Russian Special Forces soldiers, and for now that would be enough.

In Warwick, there was a broad array of emotions; anger, regret, horror, sadness, even hope. This stew of feelings led the people to be weary from the day’s sudden and terrible events, and to hunger for a moment of rest. The coalition held, and the Spetznaz were able, for a time, to maintain an uneasy peace. People stopped battling one another and began to pick through the shattered homes and damaged storefronts. Bodies were being washed and prepared for burial, crimes were being catalogued, and some arrests were being made. There were apologies, accusations, and the promise of recriminations. The prison in Warwick once again held the unhappy losers in a long, grand, and sad social experiment.

“You will be held responsible for the actions of Vladimir and his team,” a coalition ‘advisor’ warned Mikail, as if his control over Vladimir had been anything more than nominal to begin with.

“I cannot be held responsible for the actions of people who have long since gone off on their own and who fail to obey me,” Mikail responded. He was being untruthful. While Vladimir certainly had a mind of his own, the young man was not entirely “off on his own.” Whatever were his private motivations, he was still ostensibly working for Mikail as his team made their way through town, searching for Vasily and the way out.

Just before noon, someone turned on the radio, and the guarded—along with the guards—listened to the world melt down in real time. After a quick rundown of the condition of America, including woefully rapid and undetailed reports of riots, economic collapse, stores being stripped to the very shelf lining, fuel shortages, nuclear plant shut downs, and impotent government responses, the news cut to the story of a German man jumping from a balloon in space.

Mikail was only half-listening to the broadcast, but he snapped to full attention when the radio buzzed and then zapped and then fell silent while simultaneously the lighting failed and the rumble of the generators gave way to a preternatural silence. A smile crossed Mikail’s face just as another messenger came through the door of the gymnasium with a message from Vladimir.

A strange-looking vehicle, something like an ill-considered hybrid between an RV and a highly hardened off-road vehicle, made its way through the winding mountain roads of northern West Virginia. From a distance, the vehicle looked like some kind of transformer vehicle created by Hollywood for a blockbuster summer movie. It was chaperoned by a contingent of black, military looking vehicles, Humvees, APCs, and SUVs. The lead vehicle was a large and heavily armored truck with what looked like a cattle mover or snowplow attached to the front of it. When necessary, this lead truck would push stranded and inoperative vehicles off the road.

“The warhead would have been delivered by a very small rocket,” the driver of the hardened RV said. “The amount of energy used to propel the craft containing the warhead would have been insignificant because the launch platform, the capsule, was brushing the stratosphere, and that means that it almost certainly did not trigger any warnings from NORAD or any of the other early warning systems. It was not a ground based launch. It wasn’t even a high-altitude launch from a Russian bomber…I mean most bombers have a service ceiling of around 50,000 feet, and we’re talking close to 130,000 feet here. And it wasn’t one of these mostly theoretical weapons that might be deployed from a high earth orbit satellite. No. No, this capsule was in the middle area, where no one was looking for it. It was perfect.”

The passenger of the RV stared forward out of the windscreen and nodded his head, but he didn’t interrupt with the questions that filled his mind as the driver spoke. The driver wasn’t finished talking, so the passenger just nodded his head as the man continued.

“The EMP probably will not have knocked out absolutely everything, and it was most likely ‘local’ to maybe a little more than a third of the U.S. It was just a first blow, opening the door for further strikes that will finish the job throughout the rest of the country. I am speculating, of course, but from our figures and the readings we gathered back at the base, I’d say the warhead was detonated high over eastern Ohio. We’d be totally guessing if we tried to declare a yield, but I’d say that more than 95% of the electronics, computer, and technological infrastructure on the eastern seaboard — from Maine to most of Florida, and from the Atlantic to as far as Nebraska, will have been fried. There are probably fires burning out of control in every major city in that area, and the fires will get worse as time goes on because there’ll be no water to dowse them. The trucks that put out fires won’t work, and the communications that control emergency response is now gone, and probably forever. The damage done will make the work of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow look like child’s play.

“The few vehicles that are operating, those that are older and therefore not susceptible to EMP, along with those that were accidentally or purposefully shielded—like these vehicles for example—will stop operating when they’re either unable to move about due to the blockages and mayhem on the roads, or as soon as they run out of stored fuel.” The driver looked over at the passenger and nodded his head, then leaned forward and looked upward through the windshield. “I reckon almost 3,000 planes have crashed, if that gives you any inkling of what’s happened so far today.” He looked back down at the dashboard and then at his watch. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and it all happened in a moment. In a split second of time.”