Michael Bunker - WICK

“Cool, mom. But first, can we have a little breakfast?”

Veronica laughed at her son’s bright humor. There’s that playfulness, even in the face of this calamity , she thought. She pulled a small box marked “Energy Bars” off the top of the pile, and pulled out a small penknife from her pocket and opened the tape. They’d just begun to sift through the box and catalogue its contents when they heard a scuffling down the hall.

At first, it sounded like the sound of their hands in the box, crinkling and sifting, echoing across the concrete. Veronica even thought that it was their hands for a moment, so she grabbed Stephen’s in hers and forced them to be still for a moment so she could listen closely. There. It was distinct now. There was a shuffling of boots across concrete, the noise muffled by the thick steel doors. There was the sound of an argument, bodies pushing and pulling against each other, and then, as certainly the sound began, it ended.

They stood in silence. Veronica wished she’d taken her gun from her bag and placed it in her waistband. She turned to go back to the front of the bunker and retrieve it when she heard a barbaric yawp , a bloodcurdling cry from outside the entryway, and what sounded like several bodies came crashing against the outside of the door.

Someone was trying to get in.

Saturday

Despite what Peter told him, Lang fell asleep easily, passing out from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. He slept through the night, even though the ground made his sleep restless and unsatisfying. The building was warmer than he had supposed it would be, and, for most of the night, the warmth from the earlier fire radiated from the stone floor and walls, and he appreciated that warmth. He even dreamed… in a fit of restless half-waking as the morning neared.

When he was fully awake, he realized that Peter had not come to bed, but had stood watch all through the night. Lang noted that the older man was doing everything he could possibly do to keep him and Natasha safe. He wondered whether, in Peter’s mind, because he’d been denied the presence and care of a real family of his own for most of his adult life, he’d adopted the two Warwickian youth as his children. He had now called Natasha “daughter” once and Lang “son” twice. He’d called them his “children.” This had happened naturally, but with a hint of reserve, as though Peter hadn’t thought about it when he’d done it, but didn’t want it to be commented upon now that it was done. This didn’t bother Lang at all.

It was evident that Peter had embraced their situation, and Lang noticed how the older man now seemed comfortable in his skin, as though his natural skills and human feelings at last had an outlet. After the initial blunt and angry outburst while they were looking out at the wreckage of Warwick from that hill in the distance, Peter had settled into this newfound father figure role admirably. He’d treated both Lang and Natasha tenderly, and he seemed to relish the responsibility he felt for both of them. This gave Lang a twinge of emotion he had not expected to feel toward the man, as he came to feel something that echoed his own long lost sorrow at never having had a father.

When Peter came by to check on the two that morning, he didn’t seem to be tired at all. He claimed to have fallen asleep for several hours leaning against a tree in the darkness, but both Natasha and Lang knew that this was not true. Peter had taken the gun and watched over them all night like a parent watches over his children when he feels they are in harm’s way. Somehow, Lang thought, looking at Natasha and seeing that she shared the sentiment without having to speak it, they had to find a way to get Peter some sleep.

Together they built another fire in the building, and again Peter filled the two holes with hot coals. This time he boiled water in both pans and then he went through the process of checking and re-dressing Lang’s wound. When he pulled the gauze out of the wound, Lang yelled out, and Peter calmed him and told him that the pain was a good sign. He gave Lang a small piece of leather, the sheath of the knife that Clay had once gotten from Veronica, to bite down on.

“That means the wound is healing and the gauze has dried into the wound,” Peter said. “Even though it hurts, ripping the wound open is actually good for it.”

Lang bit down and looked at Peter through bleary eyes. The older man spread his hands as if to indicate that he could not quite explain exactly how it was good, but Lang would just have to trust him. Lang leaned his head back against the now cold stone and blinked that he did.

After Peter was finished caring for the bullet wound, they boiled enough water to fill all of their water bottles, and Peter said that this was the best they could do in the moment as far as water purification.

“Does boiling the water guarantee that the water will be pure and free from any dangerous bacteria?” Natasha had asked.

“Nothing ever guarantees anything,” was all Peter had said to that.

After packing up their gear, by around 8 a.m., they were ready to continue their walk. Checking the map and the compass, Peter plotted a course for them, and they set out through the snow, feeling the weight and mileage in their legs from the previous day’s trek.

They continued their southwesterly advance, and they were surprised and pleased to discover that, for most of the day, they moved through empty forestland and not suburban tracts or areas thick with farms and their fences. They made good time, and kept up their cautious movement, advancing steadily until the day began to morph into evening.

As the darkness began to fall, they saw from a low hill a space in the distance where the forest seemed to end, and they noticed the long black shadows of some type of structures that rose above the trees. They couldn’t quite make them out at first, but in a moment they could see them, distinct in their regularly placed intervals and structurally different from the chaotic mass of limbs and branches reaching like tentacles into the nighttime sky. In the gloaming they looked like dinosaurs against the darkening heavens, sitting up on a ridge where their skeletons towered over the valley.

As they grew closer, the structures disappeared into the mishmash of branches and darkness immediately over their heads, and they began to hear the now familiar sounds of people and gunfire, first in the distance, and eventually in the foreground. They slowed their approach and wove through the trees, staying hidden among the trunks and the brush until they eventually stepped to the edge of a clearing and saw spread out before them what looked, for everything in the world, like a battlefield.

The clearing was now deserted. However, this desertion had only happened recently, because the fires of a large encampment—one that would have served a large group of families—were spread here and there throughout the long, clear-cut strip, and the fires still burned.

As they surveyed the damage and looked around for any signs of movement they heard a crackling overhead and one of the wooden dinosaur looking structures, burning at its base from a fire set near a group of tents around the foundation, came suddenly to groan and creak and then to give way. It crashed to the ground in a huge, roaring din, its tail, connecting it to the other structures, tightening from the weight of the fallen beast before the tension was too much. The fall of the dinosaur and the tension in its tail caused it to snap and whip back upwards, sending a high-pitched ricochet through the valley that made the hikers flinch and step back as the noise whistled down the valley.