Michael Bunker - WICK

The passenger looked out at the country road, and, as he did, the old John Denver song about a country road in West Virginia came over the sound system in the RV. His mind flashed to a time not that long ago. Denver had died in the crash of a single person experimental aircraft. Sometimes the irony—or maybe it was the poetic symmetry—is particularly rich.

The man in the passenger seat thought of all those planes falling out of the sky, and realized that none of them were natural. He looked towards the driver, just as the man ended his dissertation on the EMP weapon that had just detonated over the eastern United States. All the while, the voice of John Denver sang on.

The passenger strummed his fingers on the armrest and thought about all those billions of miles of wire that had been strung across the landscape and buried under ground, and thought about how humankind had now hung itself with its own rope. Time had proven, as it inevitably must, that man had strayed too far from the dirt, which is his natural home. Like Icarus, he’d flown too close to the sun, and now he’d had his wings clipped. The forces of spiritual physics, and gravity, and inertia were likely to bring everything back to earth eventually, and it looked like that homecoming was now in the offing. John Denver was singing that he should have been home yesterday.

“So… how did you know? I mean, how did you absolutely know without a doubt that the EMP would actually be deployed, and when it would happen?”

The driver looked over to the passenger and smiled beneath his thick mustache, and his eyes betrayed just the hint of a twinkle that accompanied the smile. “Did your grandmother ever just know it was going to rain? And when she told you to come in before the rain started, did you know to listen to her?”

Tuesday — Afternoon

Vladimir and his team quickly returned to the gymnasium after it happened, interrupting their violent, but fruitless search of Warwick. Vladimir was the first to know something was wrong by picking up on a series of static crackles in the street as they were doing their door-to-door searches. He didn’t know what had happened, but for once the brutish fellow showed instincts that were adorned with something other than mindless force. He’d already sent a messenger to Mikail to tell him that his wild-goose-chase was going poorly and to ask for any further instructions, and now, sensing that something important had happened, he decided that he’d better return to the gymnasium himself in order to see what the power surge had been about.

He was flush from the thrill of the search, energized by the violent power he’d held in his hand, but frustrated that he’d not yet found his target. If truth be told, just at that moment, he was also a bit worried that his power—that one thing he craved so much—would be questioned because of his failure to locate Vasily and the rumored escape route out of town.

As he stepped inside the gymnasium, the doors creaked on their hinges, and he noticed the room had been darkened. He looked down on the swath of light thrown across the hardwood floors. He watched as his shadow preceded him into the space. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and he grimaced as he looked up at the blank round bulbs in the ceiling above his head.

Mikail and his guards were congregated in the center of the gym as Vladimir approached and began to share his report. Mikail and his people, who were discussing where next to search for Vasily, paused as Vladimir brought them up to speed on his failed hunt.

The group of men stood and talked around a table laden with a rudimentary mockup of Warwick, tracing with their fingers several possible alternatives. There was a quiet, scientific exactitude to their conversation, and just as they were beginning to argue about whether two crossing streets had been properly searched, and just as Vladimir was trying to assure them that they had, the doors to the gym burst open and events accelerated.

Thinking that he had more than half of his twenty-four hours left, and planning to use all of them before surrendering, Mikail was quite surprised when the Spetznaz leadership, along with the coalition spokesman, rushed into the gym and arrested everyone among the revolutionary leadership on the spot. “Gentlemen, surrender your arms,” said Yuri Belov, newly elected spokesman for the townspeople. In Russian, the words sounded like an overly harsh insult.

Mikail and Vladimir looked at the array of Special Forces, their guns pointed down toward the ground but their muscles tensed, ready to respond if coercion was needed. Mikail realized that it would be hopeless to resist. He glanced at Vladimir, fearful for a moment that, knowing no other language than power, he might attempt to fight his way out. He raised his hands to waive off this possibility and spread them calmly, as if in supplication. A Spetznaz solider approached and placed handcuffs around his upturned wrists.

The dismantling of Mikail’s team proceeded quickly, in a manner common throughout history to that of all failed revolutionary movements. Those few at the top were held accountable for the actions of the many beneath. Low-level gunmen and soldiers of the Youth Revolutionary Forces were only arrested if they were guilty of some particularly heinous crime. For the most part, the foot soldiers just switched sides. Most of them, in fact, were re-tasked as gophers and servants to the Spetznaz teams and their new coalition overlords.

If it seemed from this ceremonial display that the Spetznaz were now in the control of the people, a quick inspection of the entire gym would have put that notion to rest. At that very moment, the Russian officers in the basement kept up their work interrogating the oldlings, working with battery-powered lights that had been protected from the EMP. They worked their interrogations as if no change in regime had taken place at all, because for them, it had not. They cared not who was nominally in charge, since the interrogation of the old spies, the collection of intelligence, had been the only reason for all of this anyway. Front-men come and go… presidents, prime-ministers, magistrates, even revolutionaries, and they are deceived if they think that their power is anything other than illusory. The Russian agents were preparing their case, laying the predicate for what would eventually come. The broader war could not commence until the Russians knew the names and whereabouts of every Warwickian in Russia. In the Russian homeland, a thorough search through houses, a turning over of stones, and the intensive location of traitors who would be held accountable for their actions would take place one day based on their findings.

Recriminations.

Occasionally, or maybe intermittently, like the pause between swipes of a wiper blade across a windshield in a rainstorm, a body would be hauled up from the locker rooms. It looked like that moment of clarity between the blades, if only one could see it between the drops of rain that otherwise pummeled one’s vision and spread out on the protective glass leaving only an impression of reality. Two soldiers were walking upward on the stairs, struggling, lifting a body bag which they would then carry to the doors of the gymnasium, swaying from side to the side with the dead weight of a new corpse, hauling the contents to be buried in the field behind the gymnasium.

Meanwhile, administrations changed, and new leaders carried on with their elaborate charade.

Mikail, Vladimir, Sergei, and the rest of the revolutionary leadership were marched at gunpoint back up the hill to the prison they’d escaped less than a week earlier. It was a long and humiliating walk for Mikail, but he was not distraught. He was surprisingly reflective and focused.