Michael Bunker - WICK

Peter sighed deeply and looked at Lang. The two men raised their eyebrows at each other, and each waited for the other to speak.

Peter spoke first, and he spoke to his group.

“I suppose we should head straight west. We’ll have to find some way to cross Interstate 81, and that might be worse than Highway 17 was, but if we make it we can turn south. It’ll be a longer walk that way, but we’ll avoid a lot more trouble, and it seems to me like the farther we get away from Carbondale, the better.”

Lang nodded his head, and then turned back to the three men.

“You said we can see Carbondale from the top of that hill? Is it safe to take a look?”

“Probably,” one of the men said. “As I said, there are snipers here and there, or at least we have heard that there are. Hell, most of what we’ve just told you is hearsay, except for what we’ve seen with our own eyes, but what we did see was bad enough. So you prolly want to lie down and keep low and don’t stay on the ridge very long.”

“I’d like to check it out, if that’s alright with you, Peter?”

“Yes. I think I’d like to see it too, but, you go ahead. I’ll stay here with the ladies.” He looked at the three men and smiled, before adding, “No offense of course.”

“None taken.”

Lang walked up the hill, and as he walked, he noticed that the pain in his shoulder had increased. Perhaps it was the standing around. The constant walking gave him focus and took his mind off the pain, but the time spent standing and talking caused him to feel every movement of the wound. He could feel the ache throb through him like a knife. It pulsed with his heartbeat, and the pain spiked if he breathed too deeply.

As he reached the top of the hill, he dropped down on all fours in the snow and crawled the last bit until he crested the plateau. Looking down on the city, he inhaled sharply at the sight and felt the pain shoot through him, even down into his lower back.

Spread out before him was a landscape only seen, in our age, in the movies. There was an encampment consisting of thousands of large tents pooled in the middle of a low-slung valley. Sitting up on the hill was the highway that wound around a mountain and ran through the heart of what used to be Carbondale. The camp was bordered on all sides by trenches dug into the earth — scratched in, really — with razor-sharp wire strung along the borders and watchtowers being constructed at the four-corners by people being herded through their labors by men with guns. Along the outside of the fence, men and women were digging the trench deeper, and the occasional guardsman placed around the perimeter shouted orders to hasten the work.

The town was a direct likeness of a World War II era Nazi prison camp. There were tents stretching almost as far as the eye could see, and prisoners, most of them in clothes better meant for the city, were trudging through the gates and wandering aimlessly along the inner areas of the fence, as if they were plotting an escape, or hoping that the fences would hold fast against whatever terrors had attended their way to the camp.

Off to the east, placed, it seemed, so that the newly arriving refugees had to trudge through it on their way to the camp, was a fresh cemetery, a burial ground for the thousands of dead. Diggers worked feverishly in the snow.

Lang pierced his lips, blinked his eyes, and surveyed the scene. He thought about the two graves he’d already had to dig in the snow, and he knew that the ground was getting harder day by day. That wasn’t the only reason he felt sympathy for the people down below, of course, but it was one reason. He knew how hard their work was and how much harder it would become.

Pretty soon, he thought to himself, those people are going to have to find something else to do with the bodies.

“Hey, wait! Let me turn it up. That’s my jam!”

Calvin Rhodes ran across the painted concrete floor and slid the last four feet, the brand new leather soles of his Tony Lama boots sliding, almost frictionless, to a stop at the edge of the floor-length toolbox. He reached up, cranked the handle on the radio/CD player, and then swiveled on the pointed toes of his boots, grabbing a ratchet from an open drawer in the process and using it as a microphone while he broke into a rap that betrayed a hint of accent from his Chinese heritage.

“Yo, microphone check… one, two. What is this? The five foot assassin with the ruffneck bizness.”

His companion, the older man leaning over the engine of an old Ford pickup, looked up and wiped the grease from his hands on his jeans. He laughed as Calvin did a little dance across the floor, throwing his knee out to the side and then pulling his hips into alignment, waving his free hand above his head and giving a little hop. He looked like a bony windmill-like contraption, or one of those air puppets that you might have seen, not long ago, in front of party stores.

“Cal, you’re a clown. That song is older than you are! You got moves, though, I’ll give you that.” The old man changed his smile into a look of mock seriousness. “Okay, young man, we have to get busy. I’m fixin’ to see if I can get this thing started.”

Calvin stopped his dance and came over to the front of the truck, leaning in studiously to let the man tell him what he was doing.

“Now, this thing runs pretty simply. It’s four on the floor, and as long as you keep some coolant in the radiator and check your oil as you go, it should get you where you’re going. It’s not gonna win you any speed contests, and the only lights I have workin’ are the headlights, but if you’ll look here…” the man pointed down to the front of the motor and then traced with his finger towards the back of the engine compartment, “…I’ve been able to replace all the belts and spark plugs… put in new filters.” He paused. “And the tires are good. She should be fine.”

Calvin looked into the engine. He was like most young American men his age and had almost no idea what he was looking at or what the mechanic was talking about. He’d been brought up in a time when cars ran on computers, as if by magic, and he wanted to ask questions so he could know what to do if the engine stopped, but he didn’t even know where to begin. The man saw the doubt in his eyes.

Calvin looked at the man a little sheepishly. “I know that once upon a time men were both drivers and mechanics. Butmy generation…” Calvin was searching for the words when the old man helped him.

“Well, you’ve done the first poorly, and the second not at all.”

Calvin shook his head. “Yeah… They just became so complicated. I mean, if you can’t do it on a video game…” he paused and the old man thought, well, that won’t be a problem anymore…

“I’ve just never even tried to work on them.”

“Relax, Cal. Compared to those new machines, this ol’ dog is a bicycle.” He fiddled with a connection on the distributor cap until he was satisfied and then closed the hood.

“This here is the Ranger model of the 1965 Ford F-100. It was a new thing in its day, and they only made a handful of ‘em. This special model had bucket seats, which was pretty unique for a pickup truck back in them days.” The old man walked around the front of the pickup toward the toolbox, cleaning a socket wrench with a rag as he walked. “It had carpeting, which has since been worn out, and a curtain that covered the gas tank behind the seats.” He sorted through the open drawer, found the tool he was looking for, and then turned to Calvin. “She has a couple hunnerd thousand miles on her, but it didn’t get there by not being solid. Long as you keep gas in the tank and don’t get in a hurry, and don’t git y’self killed along the way, it’ll get you to Pennsylvania.”