Michael Bunker - WICK

“You think it will be that bad, mom?” Stephen asked. He concentrated on making sure that his face showed bravery and masked his fear.

Veronica noticed Stephen’s efforts and she was pleased. Half of any hard victory consists of overcoming the fears that might keep us from the battle in the first place , she thought.

“I think it will be worse than I think it will be,” she said, smiling.

“What’s the plan?”

“Getting over the bridge is the first thing. We’ll take our battles one at a time. We need to be prepared to ride fast and yet carefully. Watch for trash on the roadways, son, nails in particular. A flat tire on your bike makes it as useless as not having one. I found spare tubes in the storeroom, but there will be no time or place to stop and change them. We need to avoid anything that will keep us from getting out of here quickly.”

Stephen looked at his mother, wanting to mention a thought that had occurred to him While she was sleeping, he’d been silently drumming because drumming always seemed to help him think clearly. As his hands worked the rhythm in his head, his mind flashed back to a day when he’d been riding the subway. Beating the heels of his hands like a madman on the tops of his knees, keeping time to a song playing in his ears, he’d looked up and noticed that people had slid away from him on the seats, leaving him alone at the end of the train.

“What if we put on the fallout gear now?” he said, smiling. “It will freak people out. They’ll think we’re scientists or something, or maybe from the government, or that we’re sick. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

“Boy,” Veronica said, placing her long thin fingers on his cheek and giving his nose a little tweak, “I knew some sense had crept into you. Yes. What a great thought! And the suits will keep us warm… and… and…. they’ll be one less thing we have to carry. That’s an excellent idea!”

Within half an hour, they had packed, dressed in the hazmat suits, and were ready to go. They opened the bunker door, and, checking the area carefully, they proceeded out into the night.

Calvin Rhodes climbed into the cab of the truck and put the key in the ignition. He turned it forward a bit and heard the slow, whining grind of the starter kick in, pumped the gas pedal slightly and felt the motor rumble to life.

Pulling out of the circular driveway, he waved to the small crowd of people standing at the foot of the porch, and then proceeded slowly along the gravel driveway, hearing the crunch of the tires underneath him, until he came to a stop where the driveway met the county highway. He looked both ways, although that wasn’t really necessary. His was the only vehicle moving on the road. He pushed the knob forward, finding his gear, and gave the truck some gas. Cautiously, he drove the first ten feet of a journey that he hoped would take him halfway across the country. Gently shifting gears, he settled his butt into the seat.

The first hundred miles were mostly uneventful. He stuck to the back roads, cruising through the rural scenery of the rolling hill country, passing family farms and churches and schools and small towns, or the burned out buildings that had once stood for them.

Mostly, there was an eerie quiet, although in some yards kids were still at play as their parents watched warily from the windows. In many places, the storefronts along streets were smashed, and the shelves were emptied, leaning over like dominoes one against another, tossed by looters or panicked citizens or both.

Coming to a stop at a rural junction, Calvin saw two corpses splayed out over the hood of a broken down car. Pockets were turned inside out, and the doors of the car stood wide open and the trunk was pulled up. The scene left little to the imagination, and it played before Calvin’s eyes in seconds in blue-black flickers, and ended just as he saw it now, in tragedy.

He slowed just enough to hope for peace upon the souls of the families of the dead, and to be grateful that he wasn’t the one lying there, perforated with bullets, stretched out like a deer across the hood of a car.

The advantage to being in the country during this moment was the benefit of not having as many people to dodge. The people in this neck of the woods were probably hurting and hungry, but they weren’t competing with millions of others for the rare materials of sustenance and survival. Statistically speaking, that was a very large advantage indeed. Calvin would drive along highway 79 almost as far as Memphis in order to avoid the Interstate highways, and he would pass, almost exclusively, through a few widely separated small towns—towns such as Hearne and Henderson and Carthage.

As he drove through the Piney Woods of Texas, he thought about all the places he’d seen and known and loved in the state. It was difficult for people who weren’t from there to understand it — how Texas had plains, mountains, mighty rivers, and woods and forests, as well as deserts, and oceans… and skies. Plenty of skies. Of course, the state also had its large cities and its little towns, and that was what made it special for him—as a native Texan who was also an outsider of sorts. Texas didn’t necessarily have the best in anything , but it had the bestof everything . It was self-contained in a way that other places weren’t. As the people often said, Texas is a whole other country . As he drove through the silent night, he looked up at the stars and saw that they were big and bright, and already he missed being deep in the state’s heart.

Outside of Shreveport, Calvin took gunfire. There was simply no other way around it. Shreveport, that is. The Louisiana city was a vexation that could not be avoided. Literally. He had to go through the town in order to reach the bridge that would take him over the Red River. The river, usually an afterthought, its muddy waters rolling lazily along as if the world and its affairs were none of its concern, had become a barrier that he needed to breach. Bridges, by nature, were bottlenecks, and danger always loves a bottleneck.

Calvin timed his approach so that he’d come to the crossing in the middle of the night. Winding his way south around the city, he came up to the bridge on 70th Street, running adjacent to the old skeletal structures of Hamel’s Amusement Park, which had closed down more than a decade ago when a tornado bent its Ferris Wheel in half.

He’d been thinking of the Ferris Wheel and comparing it in his mind to the recently destroyed one on Coney Island—the one from Hurricane Sandy— that he’d seen on the television and the Internet just before those forms of media had gone black forever. He was driving alongside the amusement park looking out over the rusty machinery, the steel and wood standing alone in its abandoned memories, remembering how the recent world had simply stopped in the wake of Hurricane Sandy when, out of the blue—or the black, actually—he heard a ping. Then another.

The shots ricocheted off the fender of his pickup, and he swiveled his head to see where they were coming from. He almost ran off the bridge just as he entered its mouth.

Somewhere back at the amusement park, he thought. Not amusing at all.

He hit the gas, tore across the river, and looked up into his rear-view mirror to watch the rusted old skyline disappear into the night.

“Why do you keep taking off your boots? Are you trying to slow us down?”

It was Val. He was standing over the round-faced man and sneering at him. The bespectacled young man, currently called Kent, peered into his boot and seemed to be searching for something that wasn’t there. He was a little drunk. They’d taken turns watching through the night, and Kent had spent most of his turn sneaking drinks of vodka from a flask he’d kept secretly in his pocket. In his mind, his life had turned to dung and the vodka made it almost, but not quite, bearable.