Michael Bunker - WICK

As the voice on the radio faded and eventually the signal was lost, Lang remembered what Volkhov had said to him. He’d predicted that actual physically destructive nuke detonations over cities wouldn’t happen for two weeks.

Two weeks, the old man had said. That’s how long you’ll have. Then the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key-codes and fail-safes and guarantees, it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet on that. They want war, and there will be war.

That had been the night before. It had seemed a happy, if disconcerting, diversion as they waited for Cole to return from his trip to the tunnel. The news was not “happy,” but the fact that there was news was a good happenstance.

Now, early on this Friday morning, Peter stared angrily outwards from the door of the metal shed, and wondered how much longer they could wait. He was realistic. He understood that Cole had probably run into trouble with someone from the village. Perhaps he’d been seen by a guard at the fence line and been captured for interrogation. Whatever the case, Peter had told Cole that they would have to leave on Friday morning, with or without him, and Cole had agreed to that as a factor in his decision-making.

Peter cursed himself for letting Cole return in the first place, realizing that the younger man had probably traded his life for his need to see clearly. If youth could but see in the first place, Peter thought, but curses aside, he knew he could only wait a minute or two longer before they would have to abandon Cole and head off on their own.

At first, it sounded like a growl rising up from the throat, tiny and imperceptible, but with a slight menace even in its faintest whispering. The low hum magnified and grew louder and louder still, until it became obvious that something was coming and was nearby, and their initial reaction was to find somewhere to hide inside the shed. Lang, Natasha, and Peter heard the growl like one hears a hostile dog. The sound was muted, but angry with promise. They approached cautiously to see whether the source was aiming for them. They all stepped forward to the edge of the shed’s door, and there, in the space of the light that streamed in through the door, they saw the drones buzz by in formation, five of them flying low and near the ground, seemingly cognizant, as if guided by some inner intelligence. They noticed the drones’ silent shadows trailing along on the ground, rising up over the mountain, flitting through the trees, along the brush that peaked its head out of the snow, along the snow itself, as the shadows climbed, like the drones that cast them, up to the top of the mountain in the distance, and then disappeared in the horizon and the blue of the sky.

They were headed, it seemed, towards Warwick.

Friday — Night

On a low rise, just outside of Mt. Vernon, Virginia, an odd looking RV, flanked by black militarized vehicles, sat parked with the windshield pointed towards the northeast. It was fully dark and there was no moon to be seen, and the area in view of the RV, usually twinkling brightly with city lights and traffic, was mostly darkened. Mostly. Fires glowed all around the D.C. metropolitan area, and the white and red armies of vehicle lights that usually spread out like ribbons along the highways and byways of the darkened urban area did not march up and down as they had for more than a century.

There was only one area that was lit up as if nothing world-changing had happened, and it was to this area of illumination that the driver of the RV, a man named Clive Darling, pointed as he turned off the radio and flipped a switch on the dash that killed the array of blue and red and orange lights coming from the console. The darkness of the night invaded the RV and gave emphasis to the little lighted city in the distance.

“Andrews Air Force Base,” Clive said in his Savannah drawl. Something in the way he said it made the words sound like the most important thing that anyone had ever spoken.

The two men seated in the RV were surrounded by what amounted to a Faraday cage. The wire box that encompassed the driver and passenger area of the RV was grounded to the frame and, using proprietary wiring and chips and breakers, the RV was virtually completely shielded from any possible electromagnetic pulse.

In the distance, as the two men looked out over the little lighted island in the inky sea of darkness, an aircraft with blinking lights pushed back from a hanger and was being taxied to one end of the runway by a large tow truck with lights burning so brightly that it looked like a spotlight falling down from the sky.

“Somebody important is making a break for it,” the driver said, his words smooth and melodic. “Some group of influential people .” Somehow the way he spoke the words, he spit out the syllables so that the “flu” sound made the word sound like a virus. “People on that plane are partially responsible for all of this,” he said, indicating the darkness all around them. “And now, they are getting out of Dodge. Does that seem right to you?”

The airplane was released from the tow and started forward down the runway, picking up speed as it lumbered, until it evened off in a smooth flow of motion, and the front wheels left the ground as the pilot pointed the nose of the craft skyward.

“I don’t know what you’re asking me, Clive” the passenger answered, “but I suppose that the powers that be will always cover themselves. That seems to be the way it goes. It’s always the regular people that suffer at times like this.”

“Well,” the driver said, “not always.” He then reached up on the dashboard and flipped another switch that instigated a deep and roaring whush, heard instantly, coming from the back of the RV. The whush turned into an unearthly electric hum and grew until the vehicle itself vibrated and shook as if it were in an earthquake.

The plane left the ground and banked hard to the right, turning out over the Chesapeake Bay until its lights, the only lights in the sky save those from the heavens, began to rise into the night’s deep black. Just as the RV seemed like it might vibrate itself into pieces, the driver flipped up a switch cover and punched a red button. At that moment, the heavily electric hum turned into a sound not unlike a large wave hitting a beach, and there was the feeling of a flash as the lights on the base blinked out.

And as they did, so did the lights on the aircraft.

Moments later, there was a fireball over the horizon. The night sky briefly lit up like a strange reverse snowglobe, or a sunrise, or a rainbow, bursting brightly in a flash of light that rose up against the dark as the plane plummeted into the bay. The brief burst of light in the sky quickly disappeared as the plane’s cabin broke apart and the pieces and jet fuel and the cargo and the people slowly sunk under the murky depths of the water.

“Insufficient shielding.” Clive Darling pronounced with certainty. His drawl was even heavier now. “We warned them about it for years, but they didn’t want to listen. They just wanted to play politics, thought somehow they could reason with an EMP.” Clive reached down and turned the lights back on inside the cabin of the RV, and reached into his shirt pocket and took out a small note pad. He opened the pad and quickly made a few marks in it while the passenger beside him sat and looked out over the nighttime sky.

“What can you do, you know? You can’t reason with a man who has his reasons…”

In the distance, the fires around Washington, D.C. burned out of control as the driver of the RV flipped a few rocker switches on the dash, then started up the vehicle in earnest. The sound of John Denver’s voice once again came over the speakers, singing a song about how sunshine on a man’s shoulders can make him happy, how sunshine looks lovely on the water… The passenger looked out over the scene before him and thought that those words were true.