Michael Bunker - WICK

Now, he was packing and repacking the backpack, while mentally sorting through the small little disturbances in his system. He needed to maintain a tightly catalogued system to know what they had and what they lacked.

And he came across a small blue box.

The box was in the backpack that had belonged to the man named Clay.

He looked at the box, held it up and wondered what was in it. He’d said he would open it if ever there was a moment when the contents might be used to help them survive or to save a life. He’d not thought of the box when he’d almost given up on treating Lang with anything other than a parlor trick.

Peter did wonder if anything in the box could speak to the issue, but, just in the nick of too late, the sugar had come to the rescue, and now he felt like the sanctity of the box must remain intact. He could not have explained why , if you’d asked him to, but he trusted his gut. He placed the box back in the bag, sat, and thought.

Altogether, for Peter, it was a moment of perfect beauty, the placing of the sugar in the wound, and then the box in the bag. Like in some, perhaps even many, of our best moments, there was a connection, something tangible but also spiritual. He felt that there was direction in the confluence of events that was unknown because unknowable. There was something in not looking in the blue box, because that box had a purpose, and that purpose was not yet . If Natasha had not found the sugar, and then Peter had been searching the backpack, he’d surely have opened the box. But Natasha had found the sugar, and it was perfect. It was what was needful at the moment.

Sure. He’d be disappointed if, upon opening the box someday, it turned out that the box was full of childhood teeth, or Chiclet gum, or beads from some bracelet or necklace from long ago. That would be a downer, for certain, because Peter believed that whatever was in that box was important. It was for saving lives. It had to be, and it was for the sustenance of that crucial belief that he once again refused to open the blue box. This once… this one shining moment… Peter trusted his gut.

As the darkness gave way to gray, and then the gray in its turn succumbed to the brightness of the new morning, three of the travelers slept a little longer than they should have, and the fourth, Peter, hadn’t slept at all. He’d tried to maintain watch but had drifted in and out of deeper and deeper thought. Anything to keep his mind off of Lang.

For this reason, none of them were ready when the attack came.

It all started peacefully enough. Peter, eyes open, was slipping in and out of brain sleep as he leaned against a tree. He’d been looking down at the cabin from a small ridge to the southwest of the structure when some men rode up on horseback and said hello.

He never saw them or heard them coming.

Life often goes along in a stream. The details float by like a leaf on a river. The current is pushing and pulling the leaf, but we do not see it because we are standing on the banks of the river, attending to our lives. There are moments when the leaf is caught up in little eddies. Events pile up. They gather like twigs—like flotsam and jetsam—caught up in the stream of life. Time blocks and unblocks in little bursts at such places. Information pours through like water. The details crystallize. Various pressures and turbulences in the river, pouring into the sea of life, push and pull, but we do not see it. We do not see the leaf or the pushing and pulling.

Because we are standing on the banks, attending to our lives.

The leaf cannot be blamed for our missing it. Nor, from its perspective, should it care that we missed it. For its part, it is merely floating down the river on its back, caught up in swirling little curlicues of water, looking up at the stars. Perhaps, in the end, it is a matter of perspective after all. Perhaps if the leaf were to notice us, standing there on the shore,we would seem like mere details. Perhaps the leaf would think that we are just details among many other details, standing there along the banks, trying to be seen or to avoid being seen.

But sometimes even that is not the case.

Sometimes we are the leaf.

We get caught up in ourselves, in our own bodies, or in the stream. We are running, or driving, or riding, but almost always we are in motion. The details, the narrative flow of our lives, the events, they simply stream along past us. Drawing from the past, pushing toward an unknown future.

Perhaps we can be blamed for what we miss, we who are in perpetual movement. Perhaps not. We feel the miles roll by underneath us on the highway and feel them to be, like the stars overhead, endless, when they are not. We drift along on those details, noticing them as if they were standing on the river waving to us as we stream along. But we do not really notice them—the details—not really. Because we are on automatic pilot, just lazily floating down the river.

This happens even in catastrophes. We miss the signs.

It was almost midnight, and Veronica and Stephen had covered an incredible amount of ground on their bikes in two straight days of riding.

They’d ridden across Staten Island, and then into New Jersey, and on into Pennsylvania. If you had asked Veronica to tell you her plan—what she hoped to do—she would simply have pointed to the ground and said: “Get as far away from here as possible.”

After crossing the Verrazano Bridge, they’d passed through the destruction of the storm called Sandy on Staten Island. There were still boats in people’s yards, some sitting on roofs of houses, and rubble and debris were everywhere. The Island was all covered with snow now. Here and there, the rubble peeked up through the piles of snow, as if to remind the people that it—the rubble—was still there.

Veronica and Stephen rode along through the broken city and past the destruction, past the piles of snow. Here and there they dodged rats that skittered across their pathway. Their hazmat gear barely raised an eyebrow as they rode along the coastline, and they rode on through the frozen fog likes ghosts, their yellow suits shimmering with a light glistening of moist sea air.

They rode past the piles of broken boards, the twisted pieces of siding, the musty old couches, all frozen under snow piled high along the rubble’s edges in heaping white mounds. They passed by in silence.

They passed into New Jersey and into the suburbs and crossed bridges and hills and streams. They pushed forward like pilgrims, seeking a celestial city, or at the very least, a better country.

Closer to the cities, the people were fleeing. The crowds were fleeing. They were on the bridges and the byways. They pushed like cattle through a chute where the roads narrowed around the debris of cars and trucks strewn through the streets. Vehicles and obstacles caused the waters of humanity to bulge around them like boulders in a stream, and, at the overpasses, the humans would stack up and bubble and roil until the waters made their way to the narrowed passage where they would gain speed and pick up momentum before shooting out of the other side. The people streamed along as if they were being drawn out of the cities and into the countryside by gravity or some other force of physics. They all walked with purpose, heading… Where?

Veronica and Stephen had passed through the crowd as if in a protective bubble. Their hazmat suits worked like talismans. The crowds opened up around them as if they had the plague, as if they were aliens just landed on earth, and no one wanted to get too close.