Michael Bunker - WICK

“We don’t have much farther to go before we’ll be in an area where we can find shelter, and we have enough food to last a couple more days.” Mike was short and stocky. He was clearly the brains of the group of three men who’d initially headed out into the wilderness together. The third man, Steve, seemed to be mere window dressing. But not like in a clothing store. More like a mannequin you’d find on display in a hardware store or in outdoor gear store. The strong silent type, with a heavy emphasis on silent .

“Steve, would you like a little more stew? I think we have enough for everyone to have another bite.”

Steve nodded and held out his cup.

“Ken?” Val asked, offering him the spoon.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s Kent!” Kent was the fourth man. The outsider. He made a point of spitting the last letter off his teeth. “Kent. The ‘T’ is not silent. If we’re going to call each other by new names, the least you could do is try and get the name right,” the round-faced man said, his eyes burning with fire. It was clear that he didn’t like Val, and from the way the brute arched his back at the tone of Kent’s voice, one could tell that the feeling was mutual. Val turned to face Kent, squaring his shoulders as the smaller man sat forward on the log and seemed about to rise.

Mike smoothed their ruffled feathers. “Gentlemen! Give it a rest. We have a while still to travel, yet. Perhaps you can learn to get along better so that Steve and I,” he made a nod to the silent man to his left, “don’t have to douse the both of you.”

“I can’t help it, Mike. He burns me.” Val made a motion toward the smaller man as if he would slap him with the back of his hand if he didn’t have better self-control, and it wasn’t clear that he really did. The round-faced man didn’t flinch, and his eyes betrayed no fear. He simply sat and looked back at Val and spread his hands. He made them into fists and did a little punching motion into the air, and then, turning away, he looked with boredom into the fire. Reflexively, he reached up and removed his glasses and began to clean them.

Calvin Rhodes was born in Austin, Texas, in 1994, where his parents lived as they attended the University of Texas on student visas. His father, a Chinese pharmaceutical engineer, had come to the states to complete a graduate degree program, sponsored by the Chinese government in an ongoing effort to reform China’s national healthcare system. His mother, a musician, died giving birth to Calvin, and thus his father had to raise him alone.

When it came to being a single father and trying to maintain his course work at the university, Cal’s father was lost from the very start. In fact, he’d have simply withdrawn from the university and returned home to China to enlist his family’s help with the child, if it weren’t for the mildly aggressive way his embassy office had handled the news of his wife’s passing. Gently, but firmly, and with no room left for doubt, the consular attaché told him that he was to continue his studies. A small stipend was provided so that he could secure childcare, but nothing else was offered by way of help — certainly not understanding.

Cal’s father had done the best that he could. One of the things he’d done while he was looking for answers and for strength to face his struggles, was turn to the search for spirituality. He’d never been a particularly religious man, and he’d always made his way in the Chinese system by offering the kind of public acceptance of science as the supreme answer for everything that was expected of him. While he secretly admitted to an appreciation for traditional Chinese medical practices, and he had a deep and abiding faith in certain ancient Chinese cultural mores, he’d been successful in his career, to the point that some in the Chinese politburo were eying him for regional directorships. His success therefore, was precisely a result of his being seen as a man of industry and science and not of mythology. He’d been exactly the type of man the country needed as China moved toward more Western-style medical standards. At a minimum, he was good at managing business, a useful thing in a time when the pharmaceutical business in his country was on the ascent.

Still, there was the matter of the boy. Calvin was a fussy baby. From his very earliest days, he behaved as though he took it as a personal affront that his mother wasn’t there for him. This was understandable, but it didn’t make matters any better for the harried young father trying to raise him. The fact that Cal’s father had proved to be only a middling student made things even worse. In order to advance, he’d been forced to spend many hours reading and rereading texts that other students simply seemed to grasp at first glance.

Perhaps the turning point for Calvin’s father was the day he’d received, in the mail, from his family back home, a small book by a moral philosopher named Li Hongzhi. This philosopher had recently become famous in China for developing a movement founded on traditional Chinese physical exercises combined with the practice of certain moral beliefs. Chief among these beliefs were truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The book had changed Calvin’s father forever.

The pharmaceutical engineer became a member of the outlaw movement that eventually became known as Falun Gong.

Drawing strength from his new-found religion—if it could rightly be called a religion—Calvin’s father threw himself into his tasks. He took to his studies with a new vigor and seemed to grow in his role as a father in a way that surprised even his family back in China, as well as the few friends he’d made on campus. He became, in short, a zealot, and that zealotry infused him with energy.

All of this is by way of explaining why, on a day he’d taken to get out of the city and tour the beautiful hill country he’d heard so much about, he was doing his exercises in a small park next to the Vereins Kirch in Fredericksburg, Texas, and not caring a whit for the stares that he got from the people in that small Central Texas tourist town.

People were not used to seeing a Chinese man with a toddler at his side standing in the middle of an artsy Texas village next to an old Colonial-era Lutheran Church moving his body as if he were pushing the wind. The folks walking by stole their furtive glances and tried not to stop and stare. They were polite in their peering insouciance, but if one had stood to the side and watched, it would have been clear that their reaction was unimportant to Calvin’s father. He was impervious to even their walking amazement.

One young man in his later teens, standing in the park, did not steal furtive glances or peer through the side of his eyes at the Chinese man’s antics. That man noticed both the crowd and the man’s practiced disregard of them. He knew what it was like to be watched sideways and marginalized, and he figured that if you were going to look at a man, you should just go on and look at him.

His name was Jonathan Wall.

In the future, Jonathan Wall and Calvin’s father would become very close friends — and Mr. Wall would become even closer to Calvin.

“Stephen, we have a serious problem.”

Veronica looked at her son with her fists on her hips, frowning—not at him particularly—but at the problem.

“We have to ride south through Brooklyn, and that will be difficult enough, boy, but then we have to cross the Verrazano Bridge, and that could be next to impossible. The bridge will almost certainly be blocked by bandits; people who will want to take our bikes; people who will steal our food if we will let them; people who might want to take our lives.”