Michael Bunker - WICK

In the distance, there arose a mechanical growl of grinding machinery rolling over the boisterous frenzy, and the three turned their heads to see what could be making such a noise. Eventually they saw it. A line of military vehicles, evidently spared or shielded from the worst of the EMP, crawled clumsily up the highway from the south, and most of the vehicles had guns mounted on the top of them. Soldiers, probably National Guardsmen, perched on top of the vehicles, operating the guns. Quite often though, the gunners disappeared because they ducked down whenever gunfire erupted from some unseen attackers.

The convoy moved slowly but did not stop for anything, and groups of people ran alongside, pawing at the metal of the vehicles. Occasionally someone would try to climb up the outside of the armor, whereupon a shot would ring out from a trailing vehicle and, like a flea picked cleanly off the dog, the climber would slink to the ground and be trampled underfoot by the crowd.

The vehicles slowed a few times, and when they did, the crowds would clench around them, forcing the convoy to push forward again, clearing abandoned and crippled cars in their path by pushing them to the side as they advanced. This give-and-take uncertainty caused the mass of crowd and metal to be intermingled, and sometimes when the convoy picked up steam it would lurch quickly and run over something, or someone , lying in the road.

Heedless, or perhaps spellbound and in shock, other refugees along the highway kept up their march, heads bowed and gathered tightly in packs, their children huddled in the midst of them. These people didn’t even look up to notice the bodies of the dead and the dying. Screams broke through the cold air like glass breaking, but the packs of humans huddled even more closely together, shuffling like zombies into the coming night.

The trio sat under the cover of trees and watched the scene in its horrifying extremity. Lang looked down and wondered how they would ever get across the highway. It is odd where minds go for answers in such moments. Lang unsnapped his backpack and lowered it slowly to the ground. He wondered for a moment if there was anything in Clay’s bag that would provide them a solution, or perhaps comfort, in the present situation. Maybe Walt Whitman, or Hemingway, or C.L. Richter had some advice for crossing through a war zone highway… for passing through death, he thought.

Probably not…

Prophecy is a funny thing, but not for the reasons one usually assumes. Of course, there is the humorous aspect of it in the common mind, with its messengers in sackcloth, pulling the twigs out of their beards as they stand before the people like mad messengers of doom. That is funny as far as it goes. And it is funny that no prophet is received in his own homeland. It would seem that the people should be more likely to accept the word of someone they know rather than someone they don’t, perhaps especially so if they knew the courage required to stand up and warn one’s neighbors. However, this is distinctly not true with prophets. The people would rather they go warn somebody else and leave them be with their pesky opinions.

No. All of that is true, but none of it is the reason that prophecy is funny. Rather, it is funny because prophecy often tells us one thing, but we distinctly hear something else. It is as if God in heaven decided to give us a message, and chose to do it through one of our fellows. Somewhere along the line, the message is garbled, like in those games we played as children where we sat in a circle and passed some sentence around, so that the last person heard something totally different from the original intended message.

Couldn’t God, if he were inclined to give us a message, find a more suitable way than to pass it through gossip? Couldn’t the people be saved from their vices if they were simply inclined to listen a little better, perhaps to see with their own eyes?

Of course not . Because prophecy, by definition, is pointing to something that hasn’t happened yet. And we, in our moment, only see what affects us in our immediate space. Everything that hasn’t happened yet to us is speculative in our eyes.

That was the case with Lang as he sat as still as he possibly could, pressing his head against the stone wall, feeling its cold against his temple. His memory suddenly flashed to a prophecy given by his hero, the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “The next war…” Solzhenitsyn said, “…may well bury Western civilization forever.” That should have suggested to him the larger picture of the wider world. It should have made him remember the long talks with Volkhov in which the old man had told him of impending worldwide calamity.

Instead, as he sat nursing his bullet wound, trying not to cry out in pain, all he could think about was how “western civilization” had come, in his own mind at that moment, to equate with him— just him . That somehow he was the entire focus and culmination of history. Being wounded, and living through it, had a way of drawing a man inward, and as he sucked in his breath and felt the tug as Peter stanched the blood, he wondered whether the war that was around him would bury him like it seemed to be burying western civilization.

The crossing of Highway 17 hadn’t gone smoothly. They’d decided from their vantage point at the tree line overlooking the road that they would move as silently as possible up the highway access road, camouflaged within the thick stands of trees that pushed up against the clearing. They were looking for a better place to cross. Peter explained that they wanted to make their move sometime after dark, and they looked for a place where the clearing between the trees narrowed and the crowd thinned somewhat.

They found one, a place where the road was somewhat more destitute of refugees and obstructions. They walked a mile up the highway, toward the north, and as they walked they noticed that most of the traffic had stopped for the night. The road there turned straight westward and took a short dip to the south, and they found a little bend in the highway that they determined would be the best place for them to attempt a crossing.

As darkness descended like a curtain on the area, the three halted their plodding through the trees, hid among the bushes, and surveyed the scene before them.

The refugees on the highway huddled in small groups and started large bonfires from anything they could find that would burn in order to stay warm. While there was scattered violence here and there, the people down below them seemed to be intent on hunkering down for the cold night on the highway and its easement for some reason devoid of any appreciable logic. Misery loves company, but less often is it recognized that company, especially the wrong kind, often invites misery. As the three looked down on the scene, they saw that there was less company here perhaps, and therefore less attendant misery, so they determined that it was here that they would take their shot.