Michael Bunker - WICK

The two larger men looked at him and nodded their understanding.

About thirty minutes later, there was a rattling of keys and the door slowly opened. A young man, one of Mikail’s recent Youth Revolutionary Forces, stepped into the room with a tray of food. Before he could even say a word, Mikail pounced, raising his hands quickly to knock the food trays upwards, throwing hot soup into the youth’s startled face. There was only a short squawk from the young man as Mikail took his pistol from its holster and clubbed the boy unconscious with it. He fell like a noodle to the floor.

Mikail walked calmly out into the day room, ignoring the two armed Spetznaz soldiers who were lounging somewhat carelessly near the front door of the cluster. They saw him, but his calm demeanor and the purpose in his gait threw them off for a few beats. In that interval, Mikail grabbed a cushion from the sofa and, turning quickly and gracefully, he shot the first soldier through the cushion and in the face. The second soldier began to lift his machine pistol but it was too late, and Mikail’s second shot burst through the soft padding and hit the man in the temple. Both soldiers, professional and experienced special force operators, hit the ground without firing a shot.

By the time Vladimir and Sergei came peeking out of the cell, Mikail was already taking the uniform off the smaller of the two Spetznaz men.

“Vladimir, this other one, he’s big like you. Put on his uniform. We’re going to escort Sergei out of the prison like he’s one of our prisoners.”

“But… what if we’re stopped, Mikail?” Vladimir asked, as he began to undress the larger man.

“We won’t be. Not if we walk with purpose. But if we are, we’ve got to fight our way to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house. That is our destination and we have to make it there no matter what.” He looked at the two larger men to make sure they understood. Then he could not help the boast that was welling up in his heart as he saw in their eyes a new servile feeling growing in theirs.

“I don’t think we’ll be stopped. I just disarmed three armed men by myself, and two of them were highly trained specialists. I assume that you fellows can keep up with me, can hold your own in a fight, if the need arises.”

God in heaven, looking down, would have seen three school boys on the playground, two larger bullies, all muscle and violence, and another, smaller young man full of ruthless intelligence. The pendulum had swung back and forth during the course of these men’s lives, and the weight of fists and sinew of muscle had never been far behind those shifts as they’d bullied their way across the streets of Warwick.

Now as they stood and made their plans to escape, Mikail turned away from his threatening physicality which had surprised his larger friends in the night, and now he turned to attack their pride in the way that only he, among the three of them, had ever been able to do. He called on their masculine brutality because he knew that they might need it for a fight, and he served as brain to their brawn, and focus for their force.

Mikail looked at the two of them, all potential and potency without direction. He spoke with an urgency that allowed no contradiction.

“We have to get to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house.”

And with that, he turned the dialectical force of common sense inside out and gave the point to ideology when used in the hands of capable leaders. He wielded his intelligence like a pen to the awful sword of their brutality.

Words… speak louder… than action.

Mikail placed the handcuffs on Sergei, loosely, so he could slip free if need be, and the three of them stepped out into the corridor.

Friday — Morning

Now Peter was in a very bad mood. Two days had passed, and Cole had not returned. They had every reason to believe that he’d been captured, and, if he’d been captured, then he’d probably been either shot or taken back into the village by the guards.

The two days living in the metal shed at the water plant hoping for Cole’s return had passed like weeks.

The three friends had no news from the outside world except the gossip heard on the shortwave radio the night before, and now, on Friday morning, the day of their planned departure, they faced the fact that Cole might be lost to them.

Natasha was distraught, as might be expected, but she was stoic nonetheless, and only occasionally broke down in whimpers, or felt the hot track of a tear as it escaped from her eye and dampened her cheek. Silly sibling rivalries aside, she loved her brother very much, and she still hoped that, by some miracle, he was still okay.

While they waited, they worked. They’d practiced making fires and sharpening knives and building shelters, and over the past forty-eight hours, Peter had spoken to them of tactics to be used while traveling. Between anxious moments when he’d looked out the door of the shed and back into the woods towards Warwick, he’d shown them hand signals they could use to communicate with one another without words. He’d talked to them over and over again about the horrors they would likely run across, and how they must stick together and constantly be focused on their survival.

Peter showed them the most basic rudiments of orienteering and shared some of his knowledge of tracking and woodland survival, and during most of this time he had maintained an attitude of patient instruction. But now Peter was no longer patient. He was growing angry and resentful at being so helpless to assist Cole. On this Friday morning, he seethed in silence.

The night before, after they finished their training and practice, Peter risked pulling the second radio from the ammo can in order to see if they could receive some information from the outside world.

They put the batteries in the radio, and for a long time they were unable to find any stations at all that were broadcasting. As the night wore on, and as Cole still did not appear in the shed, the buzzing of nothingness coming through the radio only amplified their feelings of sadness and fear.

Just before midnight, as Peter was about to give up on the radio altogether, he brushed past a very weak broadcast on the shortwave band. It was nothing more at first than a weak modulation as he swept across the dial, but as he tuned it finer, he got a slight signal, and as they leaned in and listened closer, they made out a man’s voice in amongst the electronic hum and static. They all sat up with excitement as they heard the voice speaking through the atmospheric interference.

The voice said that it was broadcasting from Montana. They could barely make it out, but the male voice relayed information that he said was derived from Ham radio reports from around the country and the world. The reports, the voice said, were spotty. Only radio operators from as yet unaffected areas, or those who had thought to shield their equipment, were still broadcasting.

Anger could be detected in the solitary voice, as the man reported that before and after the EMP attack, U.S. military units had moved unilaterally and without provocation against “innocent” militia and patriot groups. The voice speculated that the whole worldwide collapse had the distinct feel of a concerted and well-developed plan. “I am certain,” the voice said, “that this catastrophe could not have proceeded without the approval and planning of a central elite somewhere. It was too organized, over too great a distance, involving too many, to be simply the actions of a rogue few.”

Ham radio broadcasters reported that, subsequent to the first EMP over the east coast, several more high-altitude nuclear devices were detonated over the Western United States. America, the voice said, had retaliated against Russia, China, and North Korea with EMP strikes, but there had yet to be any reported low-level nuclear explosions, in the U.S. or anywhere else. So far, and for some reason, it seemed that the exchange had remained limited—directed at electrical and technological infrastructure. “It seems that governments have decided to cut off the head of the beast first,” the voice said. “Who knows how long that will last? You know… before they go to work on the body.”