WICK

CHAPTER 10

Warwick was a nice enough town, if one were merciful enough to forget, even for a moment, its purpose in the world. Nestled deep in a thick forest, in a sleepy little hollow shielded on all sides by ancient mountains cut through by dissecting rivers and grinding glacial ice, the town was beautiful in its way, like many New England towns.

In the spring and summer, its verdant plateau was adorned with the delicate purple blooms of the deadly nightshade and the brief yellows of lady slipper orchids. In the fall, the leaves of its towering canopy of yellow birch, black cherry, red oak, and white pine trees drifted lazily through the crisp mountain air and piled along the streets and in the forest bed in heaps of luscious reds and golds. It was a quaint place, shrouded in antiquity, despite its relative youth.

One might easily have found resting in those piles of leaves, for example, on a normal autumnal evening, a man who by dress and mannerisms resembled (if one didn’t know better) the image of a colonial Rip Van Winkle. Or a man looking like that mad monk Rasputin might have been found raking those leaves, gathering them into neat little piles to be composted as he nodded to the women passers-by, or watched the children playing Cossacks and Robbers in the street.

All in all, Warwick (often called Novgorod, as a nickname, by the locals) had the quality of a foreign town in a foreign land, as if the inhabitants had come from some other country and brought the bricks and stone and wood of their ancestral homes with them, along with their clothes and language and customs. It was the kind of place one rarely sees in the landscape of American modernity. This, in the particular case of Warwick, was especially convenient, since almost no one had ever seen it.

There was only one road leading into and out of Warwick and, in the recent twin natural disasters—the raging superstorm called Sandy and the even more powerful blizzard that followed in its wake—even that route had been cut off.

Where the town had drawn its sustenance, beyond the ample and well-worked vegetable gardens and the livestock that dotted its streets and lay hidden in its valley, had always been something of a mystery, even to those who lived there.

There had been no convoys of trucks along its lone corridor, no planes flying low and touching down on a secluded runway. Somehow the town had simply, since its inception in the late 1950’s, in a time when two superpowers were engaged in a cold war, been re-supplied through capillary action from some unknown source or sources. The Spar grocery and the smaller specialty markets—the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers—seemed to remain perpetually well stocked, though the selection was probably more limited than one might find in a land where competition thrived.

Most American towns, villages, and even tiny hamlets either grew or they died. Warwick, by contrast, just maintained. The same forces that multiplied or diminished growth in small town America were not at work in Warwick. Competition for labor from nearby cities, children escaping small town life for college or for excitement in the Metropolis, young adults fleeing the staid and boring village for… well… for anything else, even for war, these were not defining factors in Warwick.

Other American towns either provided a boon for encroaching modernity, enticing new and bigger businesses to come and build and supply the needs and dreams and lusts of modern life, or they suffered a drain of the young and dull or best and brightest. Because of the centuries-long culture war against the traditional home and multi-generational families, modern American small town life had become a fleeting thing for all but the old-timers, and this reality—outside Warwick—meant that the market forces that feed or starve a town were usually pretty evident to anyone who cared to look. By contrast, somehow Warwick lived and breathed and regenerated itself almost invisibly.

There had been rumors once of an underground passage, something like a Moscow Metro-2, but these rumors (like those about the very existence of Warwick) had never been confirmed by anyone who had ever been there and made it out alive. Sure, trucks delivered goods and supplies, just like in any other town. This isn’t, after all, a fairy tale; the shelves are not stocked by elves at night. But the trucks that carried the lifeblood of urban life to Warwick came from warehouses within town, and where those warehouses got their goods and supplies, very few people actually knew.

The town was a closed loop, but it had not always remained completely hermetically sealed. Alumni existed… somewhere. There had been such people, for example, a rare and storied few souls who had escaped the town during what was known as the Great Confusion in 1992 — when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the town’s nominal reason for existence had come into question. Later however, with guards and dogs patrolling its surrounding forest, and that forest extending out to a distance of five football fields and sometimes more, crisscrossed with listening and heat detection devices, the town’s topographical subterfuge had served its purpose well in keeping the residents in, and hikers or other curious onlookers who might stumble onto the place out.

Before the twin storms, even airlines didn’t fly over the area. Instead, they followed the dictates of the jet stream and the regulations for air traffic set down by military and intelligence planners. Like other strategically cloaked areas—one thinks of Area 51 or RAF Menwith Hill—the town of Warwick had been established and maintained in absolute secrecy, with every effort made to ensure that prying eyes were kept out. Any eyes that had crept in, and there had been a very few, were pried out, which is to say that any intruders that actually saw the town, and were caught, usually disappeared or met with some unfortunate accident in the forest. Electronic prying was equally difficult. Satellite photos and maps showed only an endless expanse of trees.

There was, in fact, in the same region of New York State, another Warwick — another village by the same name. However, even this was a diversion. That other Warwick, around since the beginning of American Independence, served as a convenient placeholder for anyone who ever had a question about rumors, or who made an inquiry concerning whereabouts.

This Warwick, this hamlet built during a war that was always expected but, like Godot, never seemed to arrive, was an anachronism. It was a wick, the archaic name for community, built for a war that was never a war.

War-Wick.

Like its sister village, its twin, it was an American city built in a year of freedom, but following the blurring of its purpose—as the conflict which threatened that freedom seemed to disappear—this Warwick had become an inscrutable enigma. It was a camouflage for a freedom, a force seeking purpose in shadows.

Contrary to the age-old wisdom, those who were responsible for the place had decided that this was good and proper enough. Therefore, despite its long-lost mission, Warwick had become, it seemed, a light kept discreetly under a bushel.

To be clear, and to remove any poetic obfuscation, Warwick had been, for many decades, a Cold War era spy school, or, as it was referred to by those who lived there, a charm school. This was its raison d’être, its reason for being. And while its purpose as a school was in some ways sinister, the town itself had maintained much of its charm.

Thousands of individual Americans had been born, raised, and trained in Warwick, all with the explicit purpose of eventually being sent to the Soviet Union to fit seamlessly into that society and, once there, to work to bring about its downfall.

On the surface, the project made sense. It was easier and safer to raise Russians from birth to spy in Russia than to recruit and turn (and then trust) a natural-born Russian.

A Warwickian spy turned loose in Russia was really a clean slate—a tabula rasa. His cover story might be that he was an orphan, or that he had transferred there from somewhere else in the country. He knew nothing of the overall program of which he was but a small part, so he was not such a tremendous risk. He knew no one else, other than his immediate superior, and he knew next to nothing about that superior except very general details of when and where he was to deliver his regular reports. If arrested, he could talk in vague terms of some spy school in America, but as to any specifics, he was ignorant, he was isolated, and his knowledge could not and would not destroy the whole system.

So, while it is admitted that the Warwick system was certainly not cheaper in a strictly economic sense than traditional forms of espionage, it was much less expensive in terms of risk. Turning natural-born Russians against their country, by definition, put the existing spy rings in that country at risk. Years and years of work could be overthrown with one bad bet. On whom would you gamble such expense and value? On someone who had already proved to be a traitor to his own country?

There was a joke that was quite common in Warwick: Are we men or mice? The question was usually asked as if to say, “Who are we to ask questions?” or “What are we in the grand scheme of things?” The punchline was: Who can tell the difference? The humor in the joke lay in an understanding of international spycraft. M.I.C.E. is an acronym that defines the main ways used in the traditional recruitment of foreign intelligence assets. The components include:

For millennia, whether through ancient palace intrigue, medieval religious chicanery, backwards third-world coups, or intricate and advanced intelligence operations, spy handlers and controllers have used many means to turn assets against their own people. All one has to do is to find a target who has access to the information, or people, or materials that one wants. Then you find out what drives them. Can they be bought with money? (Most can.) Can they be swayed by love of country? (Most can’t.) Are they pliable due to some particular ideology they hold that might be considered deviant to their overlords? Perhaps they can be put into some compromising position (honeypots are older than Winnie the Pooh). Or maybe they are just looking for the excitement involved with being a traitor and a spy? Whatever the case, espionage takes and receives all kinds. But… all of this entails great risks to the organization that recruits the spies. One missed call or false turn and the whole system can be in danger of being exposed. Double-agents are as famous as the singular kind.

So why not raise your own spies? That was the thinking that birthed Warwick.

In traditional espionage, any single one of the elements in this M.I.C.E. list could be the motive played upon in the recruitment of a particular human intelligence asset. But in Warwick, the people themselves had been bred to become assets. They were raised and trained to spy as a part of their culture and identity, rather than as a reaction to some perceived personal benefit. When money is the motive for a man to spy against his country, then more money can be used to turn him back against his new masters. The same can be said of most of the M.I.C.E motivations, and a traditional asset, once turned, could be caught out, especially by the sophisticated machinery of modern intelligence. In fact, another joke that was told in Warwick had to do with the notion that the trick was not to build a better mousetrap but, rather, to breed smarter mice. Warwick had been set up as a kind of maze for training better mice. In the process, the line between men and assets had become increasingly blurred.

That was the grand scheme and vision of the military and intelligence officials who’d first conceived of the town, and in accord with this design they built Warwick to look and feel and behave exactly as a typical Russian village might. Its citizens were fully American, but they were indistinguishable from any Russian man or woman on the street. They lived in Russian houses, and they slept in Russian beds. When they went to withdraw money from the bank, they walked into Sberbank and drew out crisp rubles, and when they looked at their wrists to tell the time, they saw a Poljot. These were American citizens, but they were Russians, by culture, habit of mind, and force of personality.

The obvious complications of developing such a people on American soil and giving them the tools of espionage as second nature became problematic once the cold war was believed to have ended.

Some intelligence wonks whose opinions mattered believed that Warwick had become a buggy-whip industry. Not that espionage itself was unnecessary, mind you. Whips still had their place. It was simply that those in the places of power began to question whether it was wise to devote whole factories to their production.

Throughout their history, all of these unique humans, raised and trained in Warwick, had been used as tools of war, in one way or another, amidst the great battles of ideology fought between men of opposing nations. They had been humans treated as a set of assets. They were pawns, played in a global chess game of power. But, when the game had suddenly turned, or seemed to have, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were not simply decommissioned or re-commissioned. They were sacrificed, as pawns will be, to the interests of those who had formed them in secret. Billionaire capitalists privatized the place and kept it under wraps in waiting for… what? Maybe they hoped and prayed for a return to cold war profiteering. (One could go hungry trying to live off of micro-wars.) Whatever the case, a decision was made to fund in private what was no longer feasible to fund from the public trough.

Warwick, though she was as authentically Russian as possible, and though she had been erected on a foundation of duplicity, was no Potemkin Village. In the fifty years since it had come into existence, life had taken its natural course there, as it had in other places, and as it inevitably will wherever people are gathered in groups.

People in Warwick, for the most part, grew up in loving families, raised children who loved, dated, ice-skated on Nizhny Pond, watched Russian movies at Pushkinsky-Cine, worshipped and wed one another in St. Olaf’s Church, and were buried in the cemetery behind it.

Although Warwick was a town built to train spies, it had been obvious from the first that only a certain percentage of its citizens would ever be put into action. Like any people anywhere, there were sorting mechanisms put in place, devised around talent, intelligence, character, and other factors, and only a few select individuals were ultimately found suited to the task of espionage.

There had been two primary “routes” (for lack of a better word) for the lives traversed by the people of Warwick. At age ten, each citizen was tested and re-tested by the powers-that-be in order to determine which of the routes they would ultimately follow.

One route led to deployment, eventually, to Russia to live and work as a spy for America. Thousands of these Warwickians already lived and thrived in Mother Russia, smuggled in by whatever means necessary over the decades from then until now.

The second route was reserved for those citizens who failed the testing for some reason or another—or for those who possessed some other requisite talent or skill that gave value to the town and its mission. This route meant that, for those who did not make it as spies, they would remain to live and work and serve their country in Warwick for the entirety of a lifetime.

There was no getting out.

Being released into the general American population was out of the question, given the possibilities raised by divided loyalties and the particular kind of expert training that was the lifeblood of the community. Besides, Warwickians would never fit in to modern America anyway. They didn’t know American food or cigarettes or beer. They would have been utterly lost in a Wal-Mart. They’d not been raised on The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days or The Cosby Show or Saved by the Bell or Lost or Glee or any of the other television programs that had defined any particular generation.

They had received as much American culture as any normal Russian would have, but they knew America only by reputation and by propaganda and not in any real and experiential way. They read Pravda and Izvestiya and Novaya Gazeta and had never, or almost never, seen or read a USA Today or New York Times. It is possible that they might be accepted in a small, agrarian community where their more formal way of speaking and their cultural illiteracy might be considered closer to ‘normal,’ but otherwise, and anywhere else, they would be immediately suspect. And to be honest (if such a thing as honesty is acceptable in any examination of the mechanisms of espionage and other forms of professional lying), most of the citizens of Warwick—those that had lived and loved and died there since its inception—never really wanted anything more out of life. Historically, this is true of the bulk of humanity since, of course, we are now being honest.

In respect to the kind of life lived—the actual makeup of the society and culture—most people throughout history have believed that what they have is good and right, and they believe this because they’ve been told to. They love their system because they find it sufficient, even if they want more out of it like anyone else. This is a particular trait of the spirit.

But there are also traits of the flesh. Upward mobility and the desire for anything or anywhere else other than home is a particularly western phenomenon, most specifically identifiable in Americans of the last couple of centuries. Warwickians, insulated from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, had been spared this most American of characteristics.

A few people had escaped Warwick, as noted, during the “confusion” of 1992, and an occasional intrepid soul had abandoned the cause while living as a spy in his adopted country, disappearing into the maw of Mother Russia for some reason known only to time. However, for the most part, and for most citizens, life in Warwick was a closed loop. One was born there and lived there and died there, with only the occasional glimpse into the wider world being permitted. Such a glimpse was only allowed when it served the purposes of those chess masters who administered the pawns, and when it advanced the designs of the nation. Life in Warwick was pleasant enough, but that was mainly because, even if discontent arose, such a life was the only game in town.

Friday

Winter. Late fall by the calendar, but winter in almost every way that counts. The valley, with its dormant flowers and evergreen seedlings, was blanketed in snow, and throughout the surrounding countryside, the very air was crackling with frigidity.

Standing on a high ridge overlooking the valley in the cold of the afternoon, two men, and a pretty Warwick girl of twenty named Natasha, looked down from a tree line about three-hundred yards to the northwest of Warwick, and they had trouble assimilating what they were seeing. Warwick—the whole town and everything in it, and everyone from it that they have ever known—had become a burned-out corpse. Novgorod of America was dead.

The homes and church and school and fields, the memories they had of moving about and within each… all of it had become a long black scar on the terrain of the Catskill Forest Preserve. The streets and buildings of their memories were gone, replaced by the refuse and boulders and charcoal of annihilation. Even the snow had melted entirely from the heat, and the water and mud and debris remained in steaming piles of scattered destruction under the skeletons of charred trees.

What about the people?

Neither of the men—one very young, and the other middle-aged—could seem to imagine any hope that there would be anyone they knew still alive in the ghastly scene before them. The girl brushed away a tear and emitted an almost imperceptible sob.

How could the destruction be so complete?

How could anyone have made it out of there alive?

Where is my brother? Natasha wondered.

None of the three gave voice to those particular words—or any words at all—but the silence among them amplified the questions. They all knew that life as they once had known it, like the town they had grown up in and called home, would never be the same again. The girl grimaced again in pain and bowed down in silent grief. Unspoken emotion, though voiceless, swirled loudly in the air between them like the wind.

The young one called Lang was the first to speak. It should be noted before going further that this was not his real name. It was merely the identity he had assumed as he stood atop the ridge. In the world of espionage in which he’d been raised, a name was as easy to change as a passport. Easier even. There is a place inside a man where he knows who he really is, but when he searches that place he often finds it nameless, and maybe swept clean to the very corners. What, after all, is in a name? It was merely something he calls himself. The man decided to call himself Lang.

“It must have been the drones,” Lang said. “Exactly what we figured.”

The pilotless, remote-controlled militarized aircraft, five of them, somehow still operative after the EMP attack, had buzzed past the treatment plant like bees early that morning, low to the ground and in formation. Both Lang and the older gentleman at his side, a heavy-set man, 42 years old, who now called himself Peter, had seen them swoop overhead.

They’d heard the buzzing first and took cover in the shed, only to step outside as the drones passed by, to watch their trajectory as they rose smoothly up and over the mountain. Without even speaking, the two men had figured that the appearance of the drones certainly had something to do with the charm school.

After packing and securing all of their gear from the water plant, they’d hustled up the mountain, and, climbing through the snow and trees and brush, they had come to where they now stood. The snow deposited by the blizzard came up to their knees as they stood and looked out over the valley.

Below them, Warwick was a smoking ruin with not one stone left upon another. It looked like something from a war zone and, in fact, that is exactly what it was. Lang thought of the words of Tolstoy, “What a terrible, terrible thing…” The picture brought him in his mind to visions of Borodino, of Moscow as the Russians had left it for Napoleon, or of the 200 days of Stalingrad. Dark black curls of smoke rose here and there from the rubble like souls returning to their maker.

The jagged gash in the earth left behind by the drones’ payloads meant two things to Lang. First, that someone somewhere had known enough to shield their weapons of war from the EMP attack. Someone knew it was coming. Second, it meant that somewhere in the hills of Virginia, or Maryland, or perhaps even in Washington D.C., there was a control room—probably underground—that still operated with full power. That someone had launched and perpetrated the attack on Warwick left no doubt as to its conclusion.

Overkill.

This thought process led Lang to consider something that until then he had not contemplated. Someone obviously thought that Warwick was still a threat. Just that morning he’d been convinced that the town had escaped the worst of the damage, having survived the EMP. He’d even briefly considered returning one final time to make a last ditch effort to find Cole, or to maybe convince some more of the residents to flee.

As he stood on the ridge and looked down on Warwick’s apocalypse, this valley of Megiddo, he shuddered and was glad that the thought had only been a momentary one. The devastation was total. Not even a mouse could have survived this attack.

It wouldn’t do to have them catch us out here in the open, Lang thought. The drones have infrared capability too, and if they were to return, the three of them standing on the rise would be toast in just seconds.

Peter interrupted Lang’s thoughts. “It’s all gone,” he said, without any discernible emotion. “I can’t say I’ll miss it.”

“That was our home, Peter,” Lang replied, sadly. “Not to mention the people… the people. We grew up there,” he continued. “You’re older than me. I’m barely eighteen, but neither one of us has ever been anywhere else. We used to ice skate and play hockey on the pond behind the church there, just up on the ridge.” Lang felt like he needed to choke back a tear as memories overwhelmed him. “We used to have Christmas plays right there in the gym. How can you have no feelings for it at all?”

“It was a town of lies, Lang, and you know it,” Peter growled. “Warwick sent our parents off to Russia, mine these thirty long years ago, and we’ll never see them again. I lived there as an orphan. As an adult I was blessed enough to smuggle a son—my beautiful little Nikolai, and my wife with him—out of Warwick during the confusion.” Now Peter’s voice lowered to almost a whisper, though his anger still owned his words. “Warwick destroyed my life. If my family had not gotten out, this town would have eaten them too. I’ve never seen them again or spoken to them since that day twenty years ago.”

Peter looked at Lang, his eyes flashing fury, “So don’t tell me what to mourn, Lang.”

“I’m not telling you what to mourn, Peter, really I’m not. I’m just saying that the town didn’t do those things. Warwick was what it was, but for most of our lives it was just a home. I know what Warwick was. This place was a tragedy for everyone, but it was home, Peter. Blame the people who did this, the Americans or the Russians, but the people who lived in that town are not to blame.”

They stood for a moment in chilly silence. The cold in the snow began to hurt in their feet, passing through their boots and into their bodies. Lang shook his head, and then his boots, and shifted the straps on his backpack. Peter will calm down soon enough, he thought, but the older man had been in a foul mood all day. He heard the man breathing in the space beside him and noticed him clench his jaw and then release.

“Just don’t tell me what to mourn,” Peter repeated angrily, before turning and retreating the way they had come. Lang took another long look at the ruins of Warwick Village, and then followed Peter back down the hill.

Natasha stood for a moment longer, hoping to catch some glimpse, some vision of movement, there in the hopelessness of the rubble.

CHAPTER 11

5 Days Earlier — Sunday Night

The candle’s flame twisted around the wick and hissed its tiny protest, sending up a small trail of smoke that curled around the motion of waves as the burly man stepped into the hallway and peeked through the peephole in the door. The warmth from the fire in the other room dissipated, trailing away from his body in invisible little traces. The blanket over his shoulders did little to insulate against the cold night air. The blizzard had passed, but it had left behind it the cold of winter and the promise of a harsh season ahead.

When Vasily Romanovich Kashporov walked up the stone steps that wound through the elevated gardens, he’d been unsure of what he would find. Life had taken a sideways jolt for everyone in Warwick, but his life, in particular, was spinning off madly into he knew not what.

The last few hours had been eventful ones. First there’d been the prison breakout, and then the show trial in the gym and a bloody execution. The gang of prisoners, led by Vasily’s peers, had first taken over the prison and then overrun the whole town of Warwick. Though Vasily had escaped in the first breakout with the rest of the prisoners, he’d not taken any part in the coup. The leaders thought of him as just a useful idiot.

After the mock trial, the leaders chose Vasily to be the keeper of two men they’d locked away in a jail cell as “enemies to the revolution.” They’d chosen Vasily specifically because they believed him to be loyal, and if not loyal, then too stupid to be of any harm. But he was neither loyal nor stupid.

He was, however, in danger.

He’d plotted an escape with the two men who, he hated to admit, were now almost certainly dead.

The first of the two men was an old citizen named Lev Volkhov. Lev had been his mentor, as well as a revered elder and teacher in the village. The other man was a friendly traveler he knew only as Clay.

The three of them had attempted their own prison break in order to escape the dangerous power grab that was evident in the town’s insurgent revolution.

After Vasily had set them free from their cell, the plan had been for Lev Volkhov and Clay to leave through an external door at the rear of the prison while he, Vasily, gathered Clay’s backpack and exited through the prison’s hallway system into the courtyard that led to the town.

At least, that was the plan. The second prison break, unhappily, had happened concurrently with the arrival of outsiders—paratroopers sent by someone to support the coup attempt in the town. It seemed like things might have gone horribly wrong for Volkhov and Clay.

Vasily had witnessed the show trial and the brutality of the takeover, and right then and there he’d made a decision. He was impressed by the old man and the traveler, and he’d decided that his best hope for freedom was to throw in his lot with them.

There were politics involved, as there always are. But there were also the sheer instincts for survival, and in that moment, the two had become fused into one force, and from that point the young man moved with a singular purpose.

He knew more about the kind of politics involved, and the way those politics linked to survival, than anyone in the village other than Volkhov. This was because Vasily—although almost no one knew it or suspected it—was probably the foremost expert on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in all of Warwick. He’d been introduced to the works of Solzhenitsyn during long tutoring sessions at the hands of Lev Volkhov and had taken the Russian author’s words to heart. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, detailing the ongoing communist threat against the world, and this work, written by his countryman, he believed sincerely.

This great man, this winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, this sufferer from the Soviet Gulag, had warned America—the stated enemy of his own country—to be wary of Russia. In the Warning to the West, Solzhenitsyn, speaking of the forces of social change in America, and of the ongoing threat of Soviet communist hegemony, had said, and Vasily knew it by heart…

“They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat—one which has never before been seen in the history of the world. Not only in the history of the country, but in the history of the world.”

Solzhenitsyn had warned America of everything that the old man Volkhov had said when he’d addressed the crowd gathered for his show trial, in the moments before being summarily convicted by the gang.

It was Solzhenitsyn who’d once said, “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Vasily had heard the old man speak that truth in the simple word… No.

Vasily had also read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, as had most of the boys in his school, but he hadn’t let it end there as most of the others had. Wanting more of this truth that outweighed the world, he dove deeper. He read more about his supposed country of Russia in The Gulag Archipelago, and in the Red Wheel books. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s short stories, like Matryona’s House, and unlike the other boys in his school, he had cried, only a few years back, when he’d learned of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death.

This was the secret life that Vasily Kashporov led, one of books and of the mind, and this is why he chose truth and freedom over any of the other options being offered to him by men of every age who wanted and abused power.

Walking away from the prison, he’d heard the gunshots, and he knew that he was now alone, save for the man who was in this house to which he’d been sent.

Lev Volkhov, before he was killed, promised Vasily that his nephew, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky, would ‘know everything’ and would know what to do next. Volkhov had ordered Vasily to go to Pyotr and not to look back. Vasily respected his old friend enough to do exactly what he’d been told.

He knew the house, and found it easily, and had climbed the steps with trepidation, not knowing whether the gang might have already arrived, or if its inhabitant had already cleared out. There was fear in his heart, cold and brittle like ice, as he raised his hand to knock on the door.

Pyotr opened the door and saw the young man standing there with his face pale from the cold and fear. He grabbed Vasily by the shoulders and guided him into the house and then through the hallway and into a tiny room near the back. An earnest fire snapped in a fireplace, sending shadows of the two men leaping onto the walls. Pyotr poured the young man a cup of coffee, black, bitter, and strong, from a pot on a stove, and pointed him to a chair by the fire. They made introductions as the cup was handed from one set of hands to the other, but such things were unnecessary. Everyone in the town always knew everyone else as a matter of course, or seemed to.

Pyotr had a million questions, and he spoke in rapid-fire Russian, but Vasily was too shaken to respond immediately.

“What was the shooting, Vasily?” Pyotr asked. “Who was shot? I heard so much shooting…” He let the implications of his question hang in the air like the cold. “The whole town’s been turned upside down since the trial. I cannot believe it! Mikail shot Todd point blank. And right in the head! And in front of everyone! And then these soldiers fall out of the sky. What kind of thing was that? I’m worried sick about Lev. How is Uncle Lev? Have you spoken with him? Is he ok?”

Vasily brought his eyes up to look at Pyotr, and in the look he tried to say what he feared he could not. He waved at the older man to slow him down, and then dropped his head to his chest. He drew in his breath slowly. He knew that the news that he carried was dark and would hurt Pyotr. “Only English, Pyotr. Only English now. Please. I’ve come from the prison. It’s not good. I don’t know it, but I do know it… Lev Volkhov and the man called Clay are dead. There would have been no shooting if they had escaped.” Vasily looked up again and into Pyotr’s confused eyes. “The shooting was too fast and too soon. They cannot have gotten to the fence. They are both dead, I know it.”

Pyotr sat forward, his eyes widened as a flash of despair crossed his face. He opened his mouth, but for a moment no words came out. He clenched his jaw, taking a deep breath through his nose. Vasily could see the man’s ribcage expand with the breath and then hold there for a moment, as if in pain, before a long, sad exhale, and the older man pushed his head back in resignation or supplication.

“Uncle Lev is… dead?” he asked, in English. The sound of the words was plaintive. His hand reached out and gripped Vasily’s shoulder, steadying himself.

“He is, Pyotr. He has to be. There is no other way for me to know, but he has to be. He cannot be alive.”

Vasily went through the story of the planned escape, telling Pyotr about Volkhov’s words, and how Vasily was to exit the front of the prison with the backpack, get to Pyotr, and then go to some water plant. He told Pyotr about how Volkhov and Clay were going to try to rush the guard at the back entrance and somehow make it through the destroyed fence line and then head to this same water plant.

“It was always 50-50, Pyotr. We all knew that. Either Lev and Clay would get the drop on the guard, or the guard would get the drop on them. And… and… just as they made their exit, the troops parachuted in on top of them and dropped down all around the prison.”

There were tears in Pyotr’s eyes as he listened, but he nodded his head and did not interrupt until Vasily had shared his whole story. Vasily told him how the soldiers had landed all over that end of town, and he told of the sound of machine gun fire coming from behind the prison. There was the sense of finality in his voice, a certainty gained not through witness, but certainty nevertheless, based on the only reasonable conclusion he could draw.

“That’s it then,” Pyotr said, choking back tears. “They’re dead.”

Pyotr stood and walked over to the ikons on the wall and, with tears in his eyes he bowed his head to the holy saints. “Now… Now I’ve lost everyone,” he said to the saints who were flat and long dead and who could not hear him.

Vasily sat and watched him and the twin of his shadow on the wall. Pyotr stood for a moment before exploding in anger and, ripping the sacred iconography from the wall, he smashed each frame individually against the table that held the candles. He hurled the broken frames against the opposite wall. They burst into a hundred separate pieces against the plaster, each one a tiny fractured narrative describing the man’s pain and anguish. Vasily flinched, but he understood Pyotr’s pain. He could hear the sound of humanity in his weeping, and he commiserated with the language.

Pyotr wept until he collapsed across a nearby table, his sobs coming in rolling, heaving waves, each gasp passing through his body and then out into the universe.

After a time, through some inner strength, Pyotr regained his composure, steadied himself and walked calmly back over to Vasily. He wiped the tears from his face. His eyes were red, and he seemed to have exhausted himself with the outflow of emotion.

“What do we do now, young Vasily?” he asked. “They will come for you.” Pyotr, it seems, was fully Russian. His attitude now reflected the millennia of Russian experience, which was to say… Enough of crying, I’m done with that, now what do we do?

Vasily’s eyebrows arched. Hearing the danger that he knew was around him expressed in the words of another suddenly made it real, and he tried to push it away.

“Why would they come for me? I was out of the prison before it happened. Maybe they won’t know I was involved.”

“Don’t be silly, son. How did Uncle Lev and Clay get out of their cell, Vasily Romanovich? Think! How did they get out of the cluster? Who could have let them out?” As Pyotr spoke, his voice started to rise in anger.

“Well, they can’t know it was me. Maybe Lev or Clay got a key from somewhere else, or picked the lock, I don’t know.” He was searching in his mind for an explanation, anything… even as he knew he would find none suitable.

“Listen, Vasily. Those paratroopers you saw were probably Russian Spetznaz. Special Forces. Uncle told me that the EMP attack would probably come on Tuesday, during the election. The arrival of Special Forces troops in Warwick means that someone felt like there was a risk of something leaking out before the event. Or maybe there is someone here who they do not want to escape. Maybe Mikail contacted them as soon as his gang had taken over the town and told them he’d captured an American spy. Who knows? That’s the thing, Vasily, we don’t know anything.”

Vasily flinched at the name of the gang’s leader. Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov was the leader of the gang that had, just recently, taken the prison and overthrown the town. He’d been the one who had misjudged Vasily. Volkhov, before he died, had told the young Vasily not to trust anything that Mikail said.

“Well, I said that we don’t know anything, because we don’t have a clue what’s going on, but we do know one thing,” Pyotr said. Pyotr had been raised and trained by Lev Volkhov, and knew his old uncle’s mind backward and forward. He spoke steadily now, in perfect accentless English. “We know that we must get out of here right now. I know that’s what uncle wanted, and that’s why he risked himself to get you out of there first. If you go back up there to find out what’s going on, they’ll probably kill you. If you don’t go, they’ll come here and kill both of us. The only option is that the two of us leave right now.”

Flee? Vasily thought. It made sense, and that is what the outsider Clay had done. That is what Lev Volkhov himself had attempted. It was, of course, the best, or at least the most sensible, option. But the heart of valor has a stubborn fiber. There were too many friends and loved ones still in harm’s way for Vasily to flee just yet.

Didn’t everyone deserve a warning? Isn’t that what Solzhenitsyn had done? Warn people? Isn’t that what the Prophets had done? Isn’t that what Volkhov himself had done?

Vasily was no prophet. Nor was he a revered teacher. In fact, he was nothing more than a simple youth thought by his townsfolk to be a simpleton. But having recently been imprisoned with Mikail in the belly of the beast, the town’s prison where the brutal uprising had begun, he was determined, like Noah before him, to run to his town and tell the townsfolk what was coming, so they would at least have the option to leave.

Vasily shook his head. “No. No. No. We can’t just leave all of these people, Pyotr. These are our friends and our neighbors. We’ve got to try to get some of them out. What about the Malanovskys? What about Irinna? Do you remember Irinna, the pretty girl who works in the bakery? Are we going to just leave them all here on this battlefield? We have to do something to get as many of them out of here as we can.” He was speaking as much from compassion as from bravery. It wouldn’t even occur to him to leave without taking others, even as he had given no thought to trying to help the two prisoners escape. For him, there was no higher calling than answering the instinct towards one’s fellow man. No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends. Vasily, having lost his parents while still a very young boy, had no one in this world but his friends, and he was determined to try to save them

“What can we do, Vasily? What can we do if you go up there and get yourself shot? What can we do if we wait here and the Spetznaz troops come down here and shoot both of us for participating in Lev’s breakout?”

“I’ve got to go back, Pyotr. I have to,” Vasily said, shaking his head. The finality in that word hinted at both conviction and destiny. “You prepare yourself to go, and if I’m not back, or if you get spooked, or if you hear gunfire, you just go.” He spread his hands as if to answer any objections. He looked Pyotr in the eye and nodded to him. “Lev would have wanted me to at least try, Pyotr.”

Pyotr nodded back at Vasily. “Ok. If that’s your decision. Do not be deceived though. If it comes to the point that I think you’re dead, I’m gone.”

Vasily nodded and wondered when such a moment might come.

Together they made plans, and then Pyotr took Vasily down into the basement under the house. To be accurate, it wasn’t really a basement, but more of a root cellar that Lev and Pyotr had dug out by hand, many years ago.

Pyotr showed him that along the west wall, which had been concreted using trowels and coated with some kind of plaster or whitewash, there was a large, antique bureau that, upon very close examination, seemed to be attached to the wall. Pyotr pulled out the drawers of the bureau—all six of them—and then removed the wooden uprights and separators. As he worked, the dismantling of the bureau revealed an open space behind the wall. The entire piece of furniture was just an elaborate covering to a narrow entrance that led straight down into a tunnel.

Vasily stared, dumbfounded. Pyotr explained that the tunnel had been dug painstakingly over many years, and that it had remained a secret precisely because it had been known to no one. “Do you understand the significance of that statement?” he asked. “Uncle and I were the only ones who knew about it. The dirt was removed a bucket at a time, hauled up the stairs, and dumped into the multitude of steps and raised gardens and landscaping that surround this house. Uncle Lev had the idea, believing gardens were the perfect hiding place for dirt. Make no mistake though, Vasily. We didn’t even let our left hands know what our right hands were doing. And we told no one else about this. You need to know that the moment you ask others to come here, the secret will be out and we will have a very short time to act.”

Vasily pictured the gardens he’d just walked through as he climbed the stone walkway to the door, their boxed shapes and raised concentric circles now formed over with snow drifts and rounded to make it seem as if the house sat on a hill. He considered the truth in what Pyotr was telling him. Even if he remained intentionally blurry about the details when asking others to leave with them, it would not take long for them to figure out the truth. He nodded.

“The tunnel leads under the west perimeter wire and then comes up in a small copse of trees only meters outside the fence. From there it’s a couple of miles straight through the forest to the old water treatment plant,” Pyotr explained. He smiled at the young man’s amazement.

A cold wind whooshed through the tunnel and hit the two men in the face. It sounded like a mechanical nothing, a low audial hum, an ocean crashing endlessly upon a gasping needy shore.

Vasily and the older man stood in the cold and listened. The waves on the other side sounded like freedom.

Standing in the sparsely drawn cellar, Vasily remembered the backpack that he’d brought with him, and he ran back upstairs to retrieve it where he’d dropped it near the chair by the fire.

Grabbing the pack and an extra candle he found on the table, he returned to the tiny subterranean room and placed the pack down on the floor. He told the older man how he’d come into possession of the pack, and that it was supposed to have useful items, but that he did not yet know its contents.

As he kneeled to open the pack, he thought of the man who’d given it to him, the one called Clay, and he remembered the fear behind Clay’s eyes when he’d first met him, but how, when he saw him last in the prison cell, ready to escape, those eyes had become peaceful and resolved, as if something important had been settled in the man’s soul.

“This was given to me by a man who loved your uncle,” Vasily said.

Even as he said the words, they surprised him a little, but he remembered the way that Clay and Volkhov were talking together in the cell when he’d entered as their keeper. Although the two men had not known one another long, Vasily knew that his own words were true… Clay had loved Lev Volkhov as one loves his own flesh and blood. He knelt in the darkness of the cellar and turned the pack on its side, all the while thinking how it was all that was left of the man who had made such an impression on him.

Vasily and Pyotr opened the backpack and carefully examined what was in it, cataloging the items they found, and talking about the things they would still need. Pyotr removed a camera and a radio. If Volkhov was right that an EMP would be coming soon, these items would need to be protected from the pulse. Pyotr put both electronic items into an ammo can and left them on the bureau by the tunnel so that they could take them when it was time to leave.

They looked at the other items, including a knife, a few books, some clothes, a small blue box, a fishing kit, some blankets, and sundry other things. Vasily wondered at these personal effects, just as one does when finding some item that has been used by another life — maybe in another historical era. He felt like an archeologist, or anthropologist, searching through the lost tools of another culture. It felt peculiar, rifling through someone else’s property so soon after their owner had died. Vasily remembered something Clay told him in the prison cell before they’d attempted their breakout. He’d said that Vasily was the best spy in a whole town of spies. That was a kindness that had not been offered by many of the townsfolk—his own people. Warwickians had generally treated him like an idiot because he had not impressed them in the ways that they had demanded. It had taken this stranger to see his potential. He smiled and went back to his work.

After a short discussion, they agreed that Pyotr would continue to sort the items and work on their preparedness, while Vasily would return to the gym. The older man said that he would busy himself devising plans for escape and making sure the tunnel was secured and cleared and ready to be used. They could not know how many people might be willing to leave with them. The more that decided to come, the more difficult would be their escape.

In order to prepare for all contingencies, Pyotr said that he would put together some “go bags”—that’s what he called them. These consisted, he explained, of packs with some food, water, and other needful supplies in them, ready to take with you in case of emergency.

When he was ready to walk back to the gym, Vasily thanked Pyotr for waiting, and told him again how sorry he was about Lev.

“Perhaps,” Vasily said, “I can find out more about what happened.”

“Perhaps,” was all that Pyotr could say in response.

“I’ll be back, Pyotr.”

“I hope you will, Vasily.”

“I have to do this.”

“I know.”

They shook hands, and Pyotr promised to pray for Vasily, and with that, they headed back upstairs.

Vasily left Pyotr’s house, and as he walked, an omnipresent darkness seemed to sit upon him. It was brooding and heavy like the weight of ages. He was terrified and sad and angry all at the same time. He felt his rapid heartbeat in his throat, and he had the beginnings of a headache from the stress. The pain lay just behind the eyes and radiated outward to his temples. He felt as if he might be walking toward his own death, but then that thought was overwhelmed by his anger at what had happened to Lev and Clay, and what the gang had done to his town. He felt a sudden surge of adrenaline and a desire to fight. His emotions shifted with each step he took toward the gymnasium. Now he was curious and hopeful. Now he was angry. Now he was overcome by the terror of facing Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei and those Spetznaz troops and their machine guns.

He kept walking forward, because that is what he had to do, resolving to do what was before him despite his feelings. Heroism is sometimes an accident of circumstance more than it is a product of design.

The night felt surreal and dark, and the frigid wind spiked past his face and whipped at his coat. Lev had trained him to think in English—it helped with his English conversation, and to do away with his natural accent—but now he had to put that away and think in Russian. It would be fatal for him if he slipped up and gave anyone an indication that he spoke English at all, much less perfectly. Like a switch being flipped in his mind, he made the change to Russian, and he purposefully put on his Russian attitude and demeanor, even changing his walk. He became, step-by-step as he walked toward the gym, just stupid, harmless Vasily, the town idiot from Warwick, who nobody suspected because no one had ever bothered to walk in his shoes.

It is odd the way a major event, some birth or death or loss or change, can make one see the world through brand new eyes. It is as if the world is a snow globe, and occasionally it gets shaken up so that, while the pieces all remain in the same environment, the whole somehow fits together differently.

As Vasily walked through Warwick toward the gymnasium to face what could be his death, he noticed the intricately carved latticework on the eaves and rakes of the small wooden houses along his route. He felt the gravel crunch in the hard-packed snow under his boots as he listened to the moon’s stillness.

In the distance, he could hear shouting and fluttering of action, and through a window he heard a chair scoot. He had walked through this town so many times at night, and the sounds and sights had always washed over him like rainwater on the windshield of a fast moving train, merely forming impressions, without announcing themselves and demanding that he stop and pay attention. Now, as he walked, he felt everything new, as if waking from a dream and realizing that the material world mattered.

Here was the place that he and Arkady, a young boy who’d lived two houses down from him since the time of his birth, threw stones at a goat and the ricochet of their misses landed them in trouble with old man Kovalenko. Down Bunin Street, he saw the jutting façade of the home of the beautiful woman he knew only as Lyudmila, who paid him to gather stones in the forest, and to build a low-rising step for her door. Here was Irinna’s house, and there was the place he had first seen her, walking home from the bakery along a little side street toward her door, her arms full of bread that he could smell from across the street.

This town was the only place on earth that he had ever truly known, and as he walked through the snow toward the gymnasium, he was struck by the thought that he barely knew it at all.

Vasily was born to be a spy. Like some others of his age, this reality had always been clouded by the fact that he was born in a time when his personal value was questioned, not only by the people of his town who, as has been mentioned, saw him as having less than average intelligence, but also by the shadowy authorities who designed Warwick for the purpose of waging war with the Soviet Union. When that union dissolved, those authorities simply left the machinery of the charm school in place without giving it a discernible direction. Vasily, therefore, had grown up with a lack of direction, as if his existence mirrored the existence of the town. Not only was he a young man in a country that didn’t recognize him, and in a town that didn’t know him, but he was also a dreamer whose highest dream was almost certainly unattainable. He’d been, like all those who eventually did become spies and were caught out for one reason or another, abandoned to his fate and disavowed.

So he’d thrown himself into his studies, but quietly, behaving as a child does who is bullied by his peers. He received threats and intimidation on a daily basis from his classmates, and was ridiculed for his small size, and the delicate features he had inherited from his mother. Of those who’d bullied him, none had done so as prominently as the youths in the gang who had just seized power in Warwick.

Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov, Vladimir Nikitich Samyonov, and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev had, like him, been born to be spies, and like him, they had failed to achieve their ultimate goal of being picked by the Americans to spy in Russia. Though they had all been subjected to the machinery of the charm school’s training, they each were found unworthy of further commissioning into service—the latter two and Vasily because their performance on testing had resulted in less than optimal results, and Mikail because he was found too unstable to be acceptable.

They all had learned, in their turn, that they were destined to stay, live, and die in Warwick, and each had reacted in different ways. Mikail and his gang became more aggressive among their peers, lashing out at anyone weaker than themselves. Vasily became a watcher of windows, a dreamer who decided that his only hope in life was to bide his time and wait for something better to come along. While he waited, he’d read books.

Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei had noticed their younger cohort’s reticence to action from the earliest days in school and in the streets of their town. They saw weakness and timidity where there had been only Vasily’s hopes, and they saw stupidity where there was his tendency toward silent and internal contemplation. At some point they had decided that he was an easy mark, and they’d treated him as such. He was, they thought, a fool, but they had read the cover of his book all wrong.

Vasily never understood the gang’s need for aggression. He’d simply never felt the desire to belittle, or to rage, or even to be noticed. Well, that is not entirely true. He’d acted once before, and that action was the reason he’d been in prison when the coup erupted.

As he rounded the final corner along Tsentralnaya Street and looked up the hill toward the prison where only a few hours ago he’d plotted with the men he was assigned to oversee, he passed the Orthodox Church and looked beyond it to the cemetery. It was in that cemetery—the only one in Warwick—that he’d been sitting and drinking one night, not long ago in the big scheme of things. On that night, a group of younger boys had passed him on their way to somewhere, and one of them had sneered at him and called him stupid, and he’d simply had enough of ridicule to take it from those who were younger. He fought with the boy and had been arrested for drunkenness and brawling, and the arrest had landed him in jail. That series of events had set him upon his present course. His current situation had begun in that one moment of his life in which he’d stood up for himself, and, having had a moment of doing what had been neglected for far too long, he had taken his first step toward what might now be his undoing… or his freedom.

The Spetznaz troops were stationed around the gym, securing the perimeter as Vasily came over the sloping walkway. He felt his feet slide gently across the ice and snow, and the sounds seemed to be amplified in the chilly night. One of the soldiers raised a rifle and pointed it in his direction, and he held up his hands and stopped in his tracks for a moment, intending to show them that he was unarmed. From a commotion near the right of a little group of soldiers, he heard a familiar voice rise up, and as the soldiers parted slightly, he saw the images of Mikail and Vladimir appear and begin to walk toward him.

“You there. Vasily Romanovich! Get over here!”

There are moments one sees not from the perspective of an individual, but as if it were a movie, from a distance. If, from that perspective, one had watched and studied Vasily’s situation, one might’ve seen the two figures of the new bosses, Mikail and Vladimir, walk angrily toward the smaller youth in the distance. Their tones were insulting and angry.

“Where have you been?” was not a question but an insinuation.

“What have you done?” was not an inquiry but an invective.

One might have noticed, had one viewed it as a movie, the youth’s quiet, and understood it to be fear, and such a reaction would have been understandable. The mixture of bravado and accusation that the two figures were displaying as they were surrounded by guns in the foreground was rife with contempt and pregnant with threat. The youth simply stood there in silence.

There was a deeper reason for his silence, however. He was not simply cowering before the men who had terrorized him all of his life, and he was not merely carefully choosing his words. Instead, he was looking at four guards from the prison, guards he had known from his recent stay in one of its cells. They were blindfolded and lined up along the wall of the gymnasium. The Spetnaz soldiers were pointing their guns at them and waiting for an order to shoot.

Watching from that distance, one would have seen the taller of the figures approach the youth called Vasily and push him to the ground and the shorter man bend slowly down to whisper to him. A Russian soldier walked over at their bidding and took the youth into custody and tied his hands behind his back. He jerked the boy called Vasily to his feet and marched him, tripping and slipping, across a small patch of hard-packed snow toward the wall where the captured guards were lined up, standing blindfolded, shivering with cold and fear.

From the distance, one would have seen the two leaders approach the guards, and the youth near the soldier would have been placed beside the condemned men. One would have seen the taller of the figures, Vladimir, take out a pistol from a holster.

Vladimir moved slowly, methodically, walking down the line of shivering guards, placing a gun to the head of each. One by one, each condemned man, in turn, cried out for his life only to be cut off in mid-sentence by the harsh report of the gun in the crisp night air as it rang out across the town of Warwick, echoing in the valley and circling through the tops of the trees and then reaching up into the mountains before growing fainter as it faded into the nighttime sky.

From a distance, one would have seen the bodies slump to the ground, one by one, until there was only one left standing, and the two figures approached the shivering boy who was left standing in the midst of the bodies. They accosted him together.

The youth stood in silence, and the taller of the figures placed a gun to his temple and the youth felt his knees buckle and the world turned upside down like a snow globe.

That is when the world seemed strange and disjointed, that sublime and terrifying moment when it cracked open just a little beneath the feet of the shivering youth and then suddenly snapped back into place, and the familiar crept back into the sum of the parts.

Vladimir slapped Vasily on the shoulder. “You poor, dumb, boy. Why are you afraid? We know you didn’t do it on purpose. You’re too stupid to be complicit.”

CHAPTER 12

“You should know that if you keep scattering the dirt willy-nilly like that, it’ll only take us longer when we have to put it back in.”

Vasily was standing waist deep in one of a series of seven holes. In each of the holes stood a pair of youths, and to the side of each hole was a growing heap of earth. This digging of holes was no easy task just before the onset of winter in the State of New York, but the ground was still workable, if only barely so, and if they’d been forced to dig these graves later into the winter, they most likely would have failed at the task.

Vasily’s hole was shallower than the others and his heap less high, although it still came up to the level of his eyes and was made taller, in relation to his small frame, as all the heaps were, by the fact that the fresh dug earth was piled upon the several feet of snow that blanketed the open field.

Vasily pushed the point of his shovel into the earth and stepped onto the foot rest with all his weight, giving a little hop and landing on the shovel until he felt the blade sink into the as-yet unfrozen soil. The handle in his hands felt solid as he leaned back and used his leverage to carefully lift the soil out of the hole and up and over his head. He emptied the dirt onto the heap, more gently this time, making sure it didn’t slide back into the hole on top of him.

The young man talking to him—his work partner in digging this hole—was named Kolya. He was older than Vasily and had a reputation for being a quirky intellectual. Vasily had never spent much time around him, but standing now in the hole with him he glanced at the intellectual’s pudgy round face and angular glasses and noticed his soft fleshy hands, red from the cold in the thinning moonlight, and he wondered silently to himself what Kolya’s interest was in being here at this moment. He had, like the rest of the youths who were now digging, volunteered for this duty.

Vladimir had asked for volunteers to follow him behind the prison in the immediate aftermath of the execution of the guards. There is a way that revolutionaries request volunteers, especially after a particularly brutal display of violence, which insures an adequate level of participation from those who otherwise might just be caught up in the riptide of events. Some volunteer out of a desire to curry favor with violent and powerful men, some do so out of fear or panic, and still others pitch-in out of curiosity, or merely from a lack of any other plan for the moment.

Kolya, standing with a large group of boys around the gymnasium and feeling voluntold to work, quickly stepped out of the crowd to follow the brutish Vladimir to the open field. Vasily, too, had gone along, not really as a volunteer, but mainly because he felt internally compelled to do so in order to remain, as much as possible, under the radar. Now he found himself with Kolya and the others digging holes in the ground in the crisp night air.

Had they been digging for treasure, there might have been a celebratory feel to it all, everyone joking and cutting up as they checked their maps to make sure that the spot where they were digging was likely to lead them to the gold, but there was no celebration in the air, and there were no maps either, and the frigid night was filled with diligent grunting without a hint of laughter. They were simply youths—most in their late teens, but a few in their early twenties—in the middle of a field laboring away with cold solemnity. The dead didn’t mind or protest, and so this somehow seemed the only appropriate response since, from the moment they had been handed shovels, they’d realized their purpose. They were there to dig graves for those who had departed from this night’s horrible events.

Kolya had spoken to him in English. Vasily was careful not to look at him or to give any indication that he understood. Best to just let them think I’m an idiot, he thought. He was still shaking a bit from the fear he’d experienced at the hands of Vladimir and Mikail, and that fear now jumped into his chest once more as he looked up with his next shovel full and saw the barrel of a gun at the end of Vladimir’s arm.

“He can’t understand English, you fool,” Vladimir barked at Kolya. “And get back to work. Morning will come before you know it and we have other work to do! Where did you learn to speak like that anyway? Where did you learn this phrase ‘willy-nilly’?” When Vladimir spoke the word it sounded like “will-he, nill-he.”

“I read… That’s how I know that phrase. Maybe I saw it in Shakespeare,” Kolya said.

Vladimir looked at Kolya through narrowed eyes.

“What?!” Kolya feigned surprise. “You think no one in our little hamlet reads Shakespeare?” He smiled at the corners of his mouth, waiting for some flash of recognition from Vladimir, but if the brute saw anything clever in what Kolya had said, he didn’t show it.

Vladimir switched to Russian. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Perhaps you should spend some time reading Marx. And before that, perhaps you should spend some time digging this grave or maybe I’ll decide to have you dig your own.”

“How very bourgeois of you,” Kolya answered in Russian. “Or is it me being bourgeois? Standing here and talking to you while I am possibly digging my own grave… and you there, shaking your spear at me!”

Vasily glanced up at him, to see whether Kolya was being insolent or clever. The young intellectual seemed to be doing neither and both. More so, it seemed that he was merely in love with the sound of the words. He waited again for a response from Vladimir, but only got a threatening snap of the gun against the brute’s side in response. Then the gun and the brute walked away and made their way down the line of graves, stepping gingerly around the series of body bags laid out near the holes.

Kolya bent his nose down to look at Vasily over his glasses and winked. He gave a faint little whistle and then took his shovel in hand and slowly began to press himself into service. As he did, Vasily looked up at the black bag in front of him and noticed the hastily scribbled name on the surface of the bag, shimmering in white against the black of the bag in the light of the moon and the snow.

Volkhov.

He felt a grip of grief and looked over quickly at his mate to see if the older youth had noticed, only to give a short dumb smile before he went back to his digging. He heard a grunt from the hole next to him and the plop of earth land at the top of that heap, followed by the shushing of the tiny aggregate as it separated and began to roll slowly down the small hill, willy-nilly.

There is a feeling of finality, mixed liberally with the morose recognition of the vibrancy and vitality of still being alive, when one is digging a grave for another human. Eyes peer into other eyes and declare firmly to one another that “we are still alive,” and answer back to one another without words the old question, “Why is there existence, rather than the lack of it?”

I dig and therefore I am.

Digging graves is an effective antidote to the most foolish of philosophies. Denying existence is for men who’ve never dug a grave for a friend.

They finished the digging part as the night settled into the a.m., and wearily climbed out of the graves and stood around waiting for whatever was to come next. They assumed the un-digging part would come next—the burying of the dead—but that part would have to wait.

What came next was the figure of Mikail, walking quickly across the snow, calling out to Vladimir who met him halfway along his path. The group could faintly hear what seemed to be an argument emanating from the two men as they approached. Vasily stood near the back of the group, farthest away from the two men, and watched as Mikail waved his hands at Vladimir’s head-shaking. Not from any words he could hear, but from the image of the two arguing, Vasily got the word picture of violent reason butting heads with reasonless violence.

As they drew closer, the argument ceased, and Vladimir commanded the youths to follow him. “We have to go to the church to address a disturbance,” he said, as if that statement fully briefed the group to his satisfaction.

Vasily began walking in the direction of St. Olaf’s, only to feel a hand grab his arm, his sleeve riding up on his shoulder, and when he turned, he found Mikail standing behind him.

“Stay with me a while,” said the stocky young man, pleasantly, and in Russian. “They’ll be back in a moment. I have no doubt that Vladimir will be persuasive.”

He led Vasily to one of the graves and indicated with a wave that they should have a seat on the pile of earth next to it. Vasily sat down, and Mikail sat beside him in an almost friendly way, as if they were old friends just relaxing on a break from their labors.

They watched the group of youths in the distance, trudging across the snow with Vladimir at the head, and Vasily reflexively inhaled the night air, waiting for whatever Mikail had planned for him. There has to be a plan. Mikail wasn’t here sitting with him next to an open grave just to chit-chat. Idle conversation was not the bulldog’s forte. Since they’d been boys, Vasily had come to expect that, while he could almost never predict what it was, Mikail always had a reason or a plan for whatever he chose to do. So when he finally spoke, Vasily was surprised.

“Did you know that I had a brother?” Mikail said, matter-of-factly, reaching down into the cold dirt with his bare hand and letting the soil sift through his fingers.

Vasily looked at him, his eyes indicating that this was new information, and puzzling at the sudden weariness in Mikail’s voice. He waited for him to go on, and in time, he did.

“Yes, comrade,” the bulldog said, nodding his head. “You and I, we have something in common… we’ve both lost loved ones. You, with your father when you were young… and me, with my brother when I was younger still.”

Vasily didn’t answer. The subject of his own father’s death to disease was common knowledge in Warwick, as was the fact that he’d been raised by a single mother until she, too, had died, but he didn’t even think about it much anymore, and he certainly didn’t speak of it.

Vasily never suspected that Mikail was anything but an only child—raised by a man with a love of drink and a woman without even the most basic of motherly instincts. He’d always thought this to be the root cause of Mikail’s aggression. Even as a boy, Mikail was known to lash out at everyone around him, probably because he’d never truly felt love at home, but maybe that was just more of the world’s philosophy that would disintegrate in the presence of an open grave. It just seemed to make sense to Vasily that, being treated like a bastard child by his parents, Mikail had inevitably become a bastard.

“Yes. It’s true. I had a brother. A twin. Not identical, but a twin nonetheless. My brother was born dead, after me, with the umbilical cord tight around his neck.” Mikail took a handful of dirt, and stared closely at it as he let it tip from the side of his hand. It shushed down the incline of the pile.

“I don’t think my parents ever forgave me.” He sighed. “They treated me as if I strangled him myself…” Mikail grabbed another fistful of dirt before continuing. “… And maybe I did. I don’t have the luxury of any memories of the time.”

Vasily looked over at Mikail and suddenly realized how small this bulldog was in stature, despite his obvious attempts to build himself up. He was heavier than Vasily, muscular and fit, but about the same height, and both were much smaller than almost every other youth in their circle. He had a tiny red scar at the base of his forehead, just above his left eye.

“My brother’s death was the reason my father began to drink,” Mikail declared with certainty. “Did you know that at one time my father was one of the most promising candidates here at the charm school?” Mikail lifted his eyebrows as if the thought of it was surprising. The dirt slid from his hands yet again. “Oh yes! Such potential lost to empty bottles. And my mother… well… I’m told she was lovely. Not loving, perhaps, but lovely. But that was back before the bottles began to fly.” Mikail scooped up two handfuls of the cold, cold dirt and rubbed them together in his hands.

“Then I came along, and then my brother did not, and somehow my parent’s whole world fell apart, and mine did as well. It was a shame, you know? To be born in amongst the pall and aroma of death, and to have life cut down in front of you before it’d even begun. Surely you know something of that.”

Mikail fidgeted with his hands, which were now empty of dirt, and contradictorily he now began picking at a string that had come loose on his shirt.

“It’s the reason I have to be so tough, you know. Being small, like you, like me, one has to fight all the time. Just to get people to pay attention, you have to throw a fit and raise hell.” Mikail punctuated this statement with a fist, clasped tight and brought up before his face.

“But not that damned Vladimir. All he has to do is walk into a room and everyone pays attention. I suppose it has its benefits, all this fussing. It makes you find other ways of bringing focus. Vladimir just won’t listen to reason. He just wants to shoot people. It’s all he knows, the use of force. But I don’t want to shoot people, Vasily. I would rather reason with them.”

Mikail kicked some dirt toward the graves, in the direction of the body bag with the name Volkhov. “Lev, there. Take him, for example. Do you think it was necessary that he died? Or this man Clay? Could they not have been reasoned with?”

Vasily looked at the bag in front of him, and then at the bag in the next grave over, and thought of the traveler he’d met in the cell with Volkhov. He remembered the light in the two men’s eyes as they had discussed plans for their escape; the clarity they’d had in that moment; a crystalline notion of who they were and what they were about. He’d not often been in the presence of men who seemed to their purpose so clearly. He remembered the way they’d taken him into their conversation and plans, and how they had treated him as an equal… or something close to an equal. And then he felt the grip of regret that they’d not been successful in their escape.

Mikail didn’t seem to notice that Vasily’s mind was elsewhere. “Todd… now he was another matter altogether. Do you remember how close he’d been getting with the outside guards? That was not a coincidence, Vasily Romanovich. He was dealing black market goods, having them bring drugs in from outside, giving our food and perhaps more to our captors. He was evil, Vasily. Believe me. I didn’t shoot him without cause. In reality, it was an act of mercy. You weren’t there when I discussed Todd’s crimes with Vladimir. He wanted… no…” Mikail paused. “There is no way he would have been so merciful. If I’d left the decision to him, Todd’s whole family would be dead right now. Believe me, executing Todd was a merciful act. Sometimes…” Mikail paused for another moment, choosing his words.

“Sometimes you have to manage events and men in a way that serves everyone in the best way possible.” His voice trailed off for a moment, and Vasily wondered why he was telling him this. He was just about to ask that question, almost feeling as if the young man was reaching out to him for understanding, when Mikail interrupted his thoughts.

“Where is the backpack, Vasily?”

Vasily swallowed, and tried not to show on his face that he was going pale. He wondered whether, in the limited light, the nervousness in his features could be detected. He remembered something Volkhov once told him in one of their long afternoons together back when the old man was teaching him English. That was when Lev had slowly taken him under his wing, showing him kindness that few others in the town ever seemed to. He’d said, “Never answer an open question with anything but a question when there is danger at hand.” Solid advice that seemed to apply to the current situation. He turned his head slightly towards Mikail, attempting a blank, dull expression on his face.

“What backpack?”

“The guards saw you leave with a backpack.”

“The guards you just shot?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea what that means, Mikail Mikailivitch. You’d have to ask them.”

“But there was a backpack. It belonged to the man called Clay, the man you were responsible for overseeing before he broke out of prison…”

Vasily tried to keep his voice even. I’m just dumb Vasily, he reminded himself. If it can be said that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, it is perhaps equally true that in a camp where everyone is trained as a spy, the man who seems least capable is often the least suspect. He remembered what Clay told him when he’d said that no one thought Vasily capable of deception, and how that fact gave him an advantage in a world where deception was second nature. He played the only card he had to play. He told a lie and convinced himself to believe it.

“I don’t know, Mikail. Perhaps they lied in order to lead you off their trail. There is no backpack that I know of. Those two,” he said, indicating to the two nearest body bags, “were more worried about whether I would get them extra blankets than anything else.”

“Vasily, sometimes when you find yourself in a hole, the best way to get out is to stop digging.”

Vasily looked at him, and Mikail looked back, raising an eyebrow at him as if to suggest, for the second time in the space of a couple of hours, that he might soon find himself lying in a grave like those before him. Vasily made a face that suggested he didn’t know what he was expected to say next, and Mikail placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder as if to calm him.

“Listen, comrade, you go home and think about it, will you? It’s late. I worry that you are out of your depth. There is a rising tide in this place and it will drown you if you let it.” Mikail shrugged his shoulders when he said this, almost as if he was powerless in the town. “It’s possible that it will drown you even if you don’t let it, but go and get some sleep. Perhaps the walk will jog your memory. I have other things to think about right now, and Warwick has seen too much bloodshed for one day. But remember, Vasily, I’m somewhat limited in what I can do for you. I have to play the hands as they’re dealt, and, as with Todd, I have to make use of sometimes unpleasant means to serve the greater good. There is a man with a gun named Vladimir who is not as long-suffering as I am. I would hate for him to have to rummage around and find what you cannot.”

Vasily got up to leave, brushing the earth off the seat of his pants, and trying to decide if he should protest his innocence for one beat longer or whether he had already lost that opportunity. He decided to simply drop the whole matter and attempt to relate to Mikail as one human being to another. At that moment, his mind rested on a quote from Solzhenitsyn: “If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?” Vasily decided that, at this moment, the bravest thing for him to do was not to attempt to make a correct calculation about the likelihood of his being believed or not, but, instead, to simply show compassion to this man whom he had come to fear in his heart.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “No one deserves to have to live with that burden and to be held accountable for such a cost.”

Mikail seemed genuinely moved by his statement. “Yes, Vasily. Well… we all have our crosses to bear. Yours will be to carry yours for as long as you are able, while mine will be to raise Cain.” He paused. “I hope we are both up to it.”

Monday, Early Morning

Vasily walked hurriedly, but with purpose, along the side street to the end of the block, and then turned up the hill toward the house of Aleksei Gopchik. It was 4 a.m., and his mind was tired and his energy level was waning quickly. He’d spent the last couple of hours knocking on the doors of the people closest to him, waking them from their slumber, trying his best to convince them to pack a bag and come with him to an escape.

He hoped with all of the hope that he could muster in his breast that he might convince them that the town was unsafe, but that he, dull little Vasily, would be able to lead them to safety. As he should have expected, he’d been frustrated at every turn by the blank and unbelieving stares of his dearest friends.

The pattern had become painfully consistent. First there would be a sleepy shuffling as the inhabitant groggily made his way to the door, as if to confront a rude interloper. The door would open. Yawning incomprehension was followed by either a blatant display of skepticism or, in some cases, downright hostility. How old is the reluctance to heed the midnight warning? How many prophets have heard the same refrains?

“How can you dare to wake me up at this hour?” each one of them asked. “Do you have any idea how late it is?” He’d heard that last line so often that he’d taken to quoting Solzhenitsyn in response, “Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

None of his exhortations mattered. The story was always the same—albeit with different words—at each of the places he’d stopped. He was told that Warwick was indeed in turmoil, but that trouble had been coming for far too long. Volkhov’s lessons on the dialectic came to mind. On whatever side one was on, they were convinced that it was high time the other side learned a lesson.

Volkhov’s speech! From just a few hours before… The wisdom contained there might as well be buried in that body bag along with the old man’s corpse.

While the world chose up sides along false lines outside the fences of Warwick and around the world, the microcosm inside the wire matched it all perfectly. Nothing divides humanity, to its own destruction, quite as effectively as a false choice.

There were those who favored running the thugs at the gymnasium out of town on a rail, and others who favored falling into line with their petite revolution and teaching the old guard (“the powers that be!”) a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. There was talk of civil and uncivil war, and assumptions that the Spetnaz soldiers, who had parachuted in and who were now protecting the new government at the gym, would go along with whichever side showed up with the largest numbers. The ghosts of St. Petersburg in 1917 were never far from Warwick. Conflicts that had been brewing for a generation in Warwick were finally coming to a head, and his friends were not only unwilling to join in his exodus, they were hoping to get a scalp or two for their troubles.

“But don’t you see that this is no way to live?” Vasily had asked them.

They simply shook their heads in stubbornness and sorrow, for they couldn’t imagine any other way. “It has been coming to this, and they will get what they deserve,” they’d each said in their turn and in their own words. He’d heard that phrase so often, and with the definition of who “they” were changing to fit the exigencies of shifting opinion, that Vasily had simply come to expect its antipathy.

“But we don’t have to choose between two tyrants! We can go outside the wire and be free!” He’d sung, like a free bird singing to the masses in their chains.

“You can die just as easily out there as you can in here, Vasily.”

“Yes, I might die out there, but if I do, I will die on my own terms. At least I will have sought something higher and better than the false choices given to me by liars, by those who seek the power to coerce others. And look at the way we’re living now! The food will not keep coming from outside. This system is unsustainable. It is already interrupted. We don’t produce enough stuff in Warwick to feed and clothe ourselves. However our supplies got here before this trouble, they will eventually stop.”

“Dull, dull Vasily. Don’t be such an alarmist! We don’t need conspiracy theories when we have an enemy closer to hand. We’ll deal with them first, and then everything will get back to normal.” And one by one they had closed the door on him and gone back to bed until morning. As Volkhov had often said, “anything that one does not want to believe can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.”

Vasily had become desperate. He’d decided within himself that he would not give up until he found at least one other person to come along with him. He had to do it. There was that conviction, that destiny, again. He had to do it if only to restore his faith in the power of reason. He was sensing that the world had gone mad, and he was growing angrier in response to that madness surrounding him. “How can they not see this?” he wondered. “How can they not understand that Mikail will kill them all before he is done?” And then, he thought, if Mikail does not do it, then time and the crushing weight of facts will finish them off in due time. This is the way it always is—one might choose to live in delusion, but reality is stubbornly persistent, and will assert itself at the most inopportune times.

After all of that, he now walked up the hill to Alyoshka’s house in the hopes that, at long last, he might find a reasonable man.

As he approached the house, he heard a voice behind him. “Why so grave, mate?” Vasily stopped in the street and turned around to find Kolya walking a few feet behind along the darkened path. “Don’t worry,” Kolya said, “it’s only me, your most holy digging friend. And, I might add, that it was very unfriendly of you to leave me to bury that old man by myself. When we returned to the site, everyone else had a partner but poor Kolya. He had to do all the work himself.”

Vasily hesitated, not knowing what to say. So he said what one always does in such cases. “I’m sorry, Kolya. I didn’t mean to. It was beyond my control.”

“That’s ok. I figured as much. When I saw that bulldog pull you to the side, I figured you would not have an easy time of it. In fact, I halfway expected we’d have to dig another hole when we returned from our little adventure with Vladimir.”

“Yes,” Vasily said, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “What was that about, anyway?”

“Oh, just some punk kids fighting over something the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said. Shockingly inconsiderate the ancestors of our ancestors were, leaving us with so much unfinished business. You may not have heard, but our little town is headed for a civil war.”

Vasily relaxed. Something in Kolya’s jovial indifference made him feel that he was safe talking to him. He laughed a little to himself. If the man were not indifferent, I wouldn’t trust him. In a land seething with dialectically opposed agendas, the safest man turns out to be the man without one.

“Yes, I’ve heard. In fact, I am trying to get people to opt out.”

“What do you mean? Not fight? But how can they avoid such a fight when the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said thus and so?” Kolya took off his glasses and winked at Vasily. “But, seriously. What do you mean?”

“I have a way out. I mean literally, an escape route. I am leaving today with a friend, and I’m trying to persuade people to follow… a thankless and fruitless task. Perhaps it’s the hour, or maybe I’m not as persuasive as I would like to be, but so far I have been thoroughly unconvincing.”

Kolya cocked his head to look at Vasily in that way one does to see if someone is pulling his leg. “You say ‘literally’ and, unhappily that word is often used today when ‘figuratively’ is actually intended. An escape route? Do you mean to say that you have a real live escape route, one that leads outside of these fences? Or… are you being metaphorical? I don’t see you as a politician, Vasily, or at least not as a very good one. I may be the only one in this town that likes you.”

Vasily smiled. “That is not only what I mean to say. It is what I am saying,” he replied, then watched as the young man straightened his head and carefully cleaned his glasses and then slowly put them back onto his face. He smiled through his rounded features, and Vasily suddenly became aware of him rubbing the blisters on his hands. He dropped his hand to his side.

The world spun on as sleepers slept in their beds, but in the street in front of Alyoshka’s house, there was suddenly an undeniable awareness by two men who in that singular moment were fully awake. Vasily had found his twin, his brother at arms. Kolya looked down and glanced at the earth still caked to his boots and shook it off, sending its tiny granules shushing across the lane’s hard-packed snow.

“Can I bring my sister?”

The spark of the match punctuated the still black night, and a flame shot up and along the stick and illuminated Pyotr’s fingers as he placed the tip of the flame against the wick of the candle. He opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief as he quickly ushered Vasily into the hallway and then closed the door and the curtains behind them.

“I had almost decided you were dead.”

“I might still be,” Vasily said. “But it seems that at the moment we’re free to go about our business.”

“Good, and what did you find out?”

“The town is in turmoil. It’s madness. We may have a civil war on our hands when we wake up to have our breakfast. People are choosing up sides.” Vasily exhaled deeply and shook his head at the waste and futility of it all.

“Four guards were executed and… your uncle… ” Vasily caught himself. There was no need to relay such news without compassion. “I’m sorry, Pyotr. He’s dead. It’s sure now. I just left off talking to the man who helped me dig his grave.”

“Wait, they had you digging graves?” Pyotr asked, narrowing his eyes and leaning his head to one side.

“Yes,” Vasily nodded, “Mikail is out of control, and Vladimir may even be worse. They’re now the little Lenin and Stalin of Warwick. They commandeered a group of us and made us bury the murdered men. They threatened my life several times. It’s just entirely unsafe to stay around here much longer.”

Vasily rubbed his hands together to warm them, and in doing so he recalled the weight of the shovel and the full night knocking on doors. “I’ve spent the last several hours trying to find someone, anyone, to come along with us,” he stopped, shaking his head. “The young man who lives on Gagarin Avenue named Kolya is the only one who agreed. He and his sister, Natasha, are going to come over at dawn and help us pack so we can leave.”

“Fine. Best to travel with a small group anyway, and we’ll have work to do before we can set out. Did anyone ask about me?”

“No, not yet. They did wonder about the backpack, and I’m certain they’ll eventually figure out where I’m staying since I didn’t sleep overnight in the gym. They know that you’re Lev’s nephew, or at least they should, and they just haven’t thought about it all yet. It’ll all come together for them at some point. I also visited enough houses since I left to fill a small phone book so, while I didn’t mention any specific names, it’s only a matter of time, as you said, before we’re found out.” Vasily exhaled deeply, looking at Pyotr to see how he was receiving the news. Pyotr looked back, calmly, and did not interrupt.

“Everyone I told was disinterested in our plans, Pyotr. They didn’t care to leave. They all prefer to join this senseless conflict that’s in the air…” Vasily dropped his hands, as if in defeat, “…rather than take a moment—just a moment—to face the bare facts of their unsustainable existence. Still, I talked to a lot of people on both sides, and once those people begin to talk to one another, our plan will become public knowledge.”

“Yes,” Pyotr said, nodding, “most likely. When they do, they will certainly come here, but we will be long gone by then, Vasily. I have most of our provisions already packed. If things go as Volkhov said they should, the EMP could hit tomorrow.”

Vasily’s face dropped. He’d certainly felt the urgency to escape, and to save as many of his friends and neighbors as possible, but he’d forgotten about the electromagnetic pulse that Volkhov predicted would likely come on America’s election day. Was that tomorrow? Tuesday? He flashed back to the lessons sitting in Volkhov’s study, the time he’d spent with the old man in prison just before death. The imminence of the catastrophe that was about to strike braced him.

Volkhov had explained that an electromagnetic pulse (usually abbreviated as an EMP) is a destructive burst of electromagnetic radiation. An EMP could happen willfully and purposefully from the high-altitude explosion of a nuclear device, or it could come from any number of other, less diabolical sources, including as a blast of solar radiation emitted from the sun. It was hard to tell how Volkhov’s predicted EMP might be triggered, since most of the militaries of the world had done extensive research into EMP weapons, and he was unclear as to who the various forces were behind the scenes that might desire such an end.

An EMP of sufficient strength could destroy most sensitive computer parts and equipment, melt down power lines, blow up transformers, and destroy just about anything that ran on electricity that wasn’t shielded from such an attack.

The memory of Volkhov’s warnings, and the minute and scary details the old man had given about what could happen to any technologically advanced society if an EMP of significant strength were to hit, rushed over Vasily in a cold wave. Absolute Destruction. And the EMP wasn’t even the war.

“The EMP is just the trigger,” Volkhov had said, “what follows will shock even the wildest imagination.” Vasily looked over at the candle on the table, and at the shadow of the man on the wall, and thought of what the implications of an EMP going off in an America already spiraling into chaos might be.

Pyotr looked at Vasily, his face ashen and drawn, and then suddenly realized how harrowing the last several hours must have been for him, and how remarkably brave he’d been in standing up to the experience. He turned and walked Vasily down the hallway and into a small room with a mattress on the floor and a wash basin near a chair. He told him to get some rest and that he would wake him in a few hours. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, before thinking better of it and opening it up again to catch the younger man’s eye in the shadows and the dark.

“My uncle knew that you were going to be a great man, Vasily Romanovich.”

“That’s funny, because I am not even sure of that myself. But there is one thing of which I am certain, Pyotr. It is that I will die before I stop trying to be.”

“I’m sure you will, my young friend. I’m sure you will.”

And with that, Pyotr smiled and blew out the light.

CHAPTER 13

Solzhenitsyn once wrote that the only substitutes we have for experiences that we have not lived ourselves are found in literature and art. While we may take his point with the consideration it requires, it is reasonable to object that, on this one point at least, the great man was partly wrong.

In dreaming, there are no boundaries of perspective or expectation. The uncontacted native in his hut hidden along the thickly-forested Amazon dreams with the same wild unconsciousness as the Queen in all her splendor, once they each gird their loins and dive into that deep, encompassing darkness. In dreams are found the ferocious beasts of our primitive nature and the angelic wings of our best aspirations. Though dreams are fueled by our waking experiences, in the netherworld of sleep, like death, our minds become universal.

Vasily, worn out from the turbulent day and night before, had fallen into a fitful sleep that quickly dipped into chaos and light. He dreamt of long, slow walks along Elysian streams, and then of plummeting, headlong flights through air as thick as water. He gripped himself and passed into a seamless world of dark foreboding. His unshackled mind flashed to beasts of burden in neon glow being torn by jaws of fury, and this he left unconsidered, as we often do in dreams, and instantaneously he passed through infinite waves of sound until he found a still, small island. There, he swam in the love of women he’d never met and basked in the praise of men who despised him.

In his physiological response, he merely laid on the thin mattress in the dark and his eyes fluttered under their lids while his muscles twitched on their stems. But in the caverns of his mind, he was magical and golden, not a soul tied to a body, but a star burning bright in its firmament. He slept the wondrous sleep of saints who have passed through the gates of hell to find their rest in the bosom of plenty.

If the young man’s sleep was a dream, the town of Warwick found itself waking at that very moment to a yawning, terrible nightmare. After Vasily had slept for only a couple of hours, the sun rose over the hidden valley, and with it, the world opened wide underneath him.

With the dawn, the sleeping animosities that had been whispered in the darkness of the previous night burst out in full-throated alarm into the full light of day, and the townspeople of Warwick began to gather in groups of like minds, wherein they convinced themselves to take up arms and begin a struggle. The spark struck, the long line of woven animosities had ignited, and the resulting conflagration had begun.

Civil war in this wick began as it does in all such conflicts, with physical violence initiated almost as an afterthought. Men, enraged that their rights had been taken, and women, inflamed that their futures were dimmed, lashed out in the only way they knew how. During the night there had been only rumors of war, but, illustrative of the age-old proverb, people had gone to bed with their anger only to find it more wicked and volatile in the light of the morning.

The sudden blinding clarity of long-held ideologies came into sharp (if deluded) focus as the people shook the cobwebs from their heads and wiped the sleep from their groggy eyes, and as they filed into the streets, their usual morning greetings simply retreated behind threats and assaults, as if the nighttime had spread a virus of war, and as if subtle and as yet undefined hatreds had become the currency of the realm.

While no one could have answered, if they had been pressed to do so exactly what those ideologies and threats and hatreds fully entailed, there was a palpable animosity that swept through the population of Warwick, driven by instinct and history and hate. It suddenly seemed as if lives too dangerous to be free had become too unbearable to live any longer. It was as if a political storm had arrived on the heels of the two very real storms the people had just experienced, and the townspeople had no recourse to shelter.

There was the matter of the overthrow of power. There was the reality of the remembrance of promises not kept. Something simply had to be done. It was conviction. It was destiny. No one could go on living this way, the town was heard to say in a collective and contradictory outburst. “To arms!” the townspeople shouted. And they grabbed their pitchforks and burning torches and rifles and hammers and knives, and marched into the street to vent their spleen on the “others.”

The first shot in the battle for Warwick roared forth from the barrel of a Spetznaz rifle on a group of young men near the church. It was not some kind of planned thing. A soldier had ordered the young men to disperse while they were standing around and developing their arguments, and they had simply refused, thinking that his order had been a request.

One of the youths, alive with revolutionary fervor, turned to the soldier and told him to go back to wherever he’d come from, and then turned back to the group of his peers in order to revel in their laughter. It was an understandable boast, perhaps, the young man’s reply. There had been an air of lawlessness in the town since it had been overrun by the gang from the prison. However, in the un-codified law of unintended consequences, those consequences likely became inevitable in the face of anarchy, distrust, arrogance and fear.

Until this morning, the Spetznaz soldiers had seemed somehow unreal, merely props in a movie that the people had been rehearsing for all of their lives. When the young man told the soldier to get lost, he was merely feeling the vigor of youthful rebellion and was attempting to clear his throat using rebellion’s howl. Intentions and motivations aside (because who among us can completely judge those?), the facts, as they are wont to do, reasserted themselves. The gun had been pointed into the crowd and had barked its reprimand, and the offending youth from Warwick’s last generation had fallen silent before he had even entered the debate.

The shot rang out across the hamlet, and the sound of it congealed in the air as a confirmation to the various sides that the time had come to fight. And within moments, like the bursting of a dam, the town’s fury was unleashed, and the citizens of Warwick did fight.

In moments, the air was punctuated by the sounds of smallish clashes that grew into the ageless clatter of revolt. There was the sound of footsteps in the street and the sounds of anger in the peoples’ voices that always follow the first sign of battle’s confusion.

Excitement and release of pent-up frustration is always the first cause as well as the first casualty of war. In Warwick it was no different. Anger, like opportunity, came knocking at the door and, after waiting a perfunctory beat, had decided to kick the door in.

We should mention here that in most civil wars, with few exceptions (and most of those are Russian), tangible lines that can be seen and felt are established almost at the outset. The people divide themselves to the north and to the south, or perhaps it is to the east and to the west… or maybe they are bifurcated along racial, religious, or economic lines. This civil war, like most things Russian, was not as simple as that.

Mirroring the growing battle they knew not of, one that was at that very moment just beginning to rage outside the fences of Warwick village and across the whole of America, in this civil war it was much harder to tell the players without a program. Opinions, motives, hostilities, and friendships were more fluid. There was a loose and undefined picture of those who might be considered pro-Russia, and those who could, so long as details were not discussed, be considered anti-Russia. But, even within that false dialectic, there were conflicts and boiling volatility. As Malcolm X said, when you fill your house with barrels of gunpowder, and you play around with things that spark, it is very likely that your house will explode. Warwick was a house filled for generations with gunpowder, and the sparks were now beginning to fly.

Vasily had continued in his slumber as the earliest stages of the battle formed in ever-widening circles, but when it did widen, his dreams became more intense. He saw the oceans filled with lava and smelled air filled with sulfuric explosions.

His sleep, confusing the beginnings of actual sensory intake with the unreality of his dreamlike state, filled in the details of the clatter with a wild and fanciful narrative. Had it been possible to enter his dreams and shake him out of his slumber at that moment, one would have found the mind of Vasily Romanovitch searching for a shelter from a hailstorm of meteors. One would have found him climbing through the rubble of destruction, calling out into the darkness for a friend, any friend to whom he could cling.

In his dream, he happened upon a hill piled high with ashes and cinders, and he scrambled up the hill in order to get a look at the surrounding landscape. As his feet slipped through the ashes, and as he fell into pile upon pile, he came to taste the ashes in his mouth, the grit filling into the spaces between his teeth, and his calling out for help became choked and muffled. Then, in that micro-instant before he awoke, with a crashing of noise emanating from the street and resounding through his wall, he suddenly saw a brightly-plumed Phoenix rise up into the sky like a capsule lifted aloft by a great balloon, and it began to spin like a whirling dervish.

Heart racing, and in the gray middling between wakefulness and sleep, he clawed to the summit of the ash heap. He spit out the ashes and felt his eyes burn. In that particular way that the helplessness of dreams inspires, he tried to wake himself fully, to connect his dream to his body. He tried in vain to raise his arms from his side. He tried to force the sound from his lungs.

It was in that moment that his eyes popped open, and he sucked in his breath in a gasping lunge. His body shot upright and out of bed, and he suddenly became aware of the knock at the door.

Pyotr had risen at the first sounds of conflict and had begun to busy himself around the house, making coffee in the slanting early light that peered from behind and around the curtains. As he did so, he listened to the growing sounds of mayhem, and he wondered at the state of his world.

He heard people come out of their houses, and he made out the rough substance of their shouting and imagined the violence of their movements. He listened to the scuffling from between the houses near his own and sat quietly as neighbors set upon neighbors, and siblings attacked their parents, as the proverb manifested itself in Warwick that a man’s enemies were often those of his own household.

As the coffee reached its boiling point, he quietly slipped into his clothes and looked at the pictures on his mantle. He remembered the day now twenty years past when he’d said goodbye to his family as he secreted them out of the town on a truck that he’d arranged with the help of his uncle. He looked at the stove and listened to the street and wondered whether his family was still alive and whether he would ever see them again.

Pyotr Bolkonsky had always been a quiet man, rarely letting people into his thoughts, but as he sat and listened to the growing chaos from the street, he wondered aloud to the point that he blushed at the immediacy of his thought. “How can these people fall upon their neighbors in this way?” he wondered. “I would give anything for a moment to be with my loved ones.” As he thought this, he heard stirring from down the hall, and he walked over to the stove and poured two cups of coffee.

There is a contradiction in the Russian soul, Gogol and Turgenev identified it, where a man both accepts his plight dutifully as payment for his sins, and rejects all of the individual elements that make up that reality as products of chaos and evil. As Pyotr brought his coffee to his lips and poured the burning liquid down his throat, he thought of this contradiction.

As is the case in peculiarly Russian civil wars, and as has been mentioned previously, in the earliest moments of the conflict, it had been unclear where the battle lines were bound to be drawn. The war that was raging was not two dimensional, but it jutted into the third dimension, and intersecting axes of conflict could probably only be seen and understood from space… or heaven.

There were bubbles of conflict that developed in the street, only to drift until they burst, spilling their contents into the wider community. Men who had no interest in the fight suddenly found themselves engaged in fisticuffs because they had happened to be wearing red, or blue, or yellow when they left their homes that morning.

Women, who were making their way to the market as they might have on any other day, were accosted in the lane for their opinions, or lack thereof, and were immediately drawn into the heat of battle. One might easily pass a neighbor on the street only to decide at a glance that he was not with you (or that he might become one who is against you), or one might remember that an insult had once been received at the hands of a friend and use the war as cover for revenge. Reason had taken flight with the dawn and had left behind only brute and animal feeling. Actions may speak louder than words, but reaction speaks loudest of all.

The personal combined with the political, and both were soon lost inside the immediate. It was dangerous to walk outside of the house, and in some homes it was dangerous to walk outside of one’s room, and truth be told, even in one’s room it had grown perilous to climb out from under one’s bed. There was simply no telling who stood where in those early moments of societal rage.

The people who raged in this battle, the townsfolk of Warwick, could not have known that in the America outside the wire, the microcosm of their struggle had followed an identical course, and the seeds of it had taken firm root. In both cases, like two twins who are separated at birth only to be reunited later in life to find that they have the same taste in food and the same interests in music, the town of Warwick and the nation generally had become inflamed by the threat of collapse. In both cases, the people had been blinded to this reality by the immediacy of their comforts, and by the seeming reality of their delusions. Now that comforts and reality seemed to be lost to the reign of chaos, everything changed.

It was surprising to find, therefore, that passing through the growing chaos in that earliest light of morning was a specter of nonviolence in the form of a soft young man with a secreted supply of reason and a critical eye. He wove in and out of the pockets of turbulence around him like an aircraft passing through a storm looking for good air. He slid by the commotion at the bakery, and walked straight through a crowd fighting at the bank, bumping shoulders with the combatants as if he were one of them, all the while not catching anyone’s attention. He moved toward his destination with skillful avoidance of the crowd, becoming lost in plain sight like a benign and pleasing blip on the radar. And all the while, as he piloted through the crowd, he watched with a watchfulness that was complete, as his sister followed along in his slipstream. The two were going to the house of Pyotr Bolkonsky.

Kolya and Natasha Bazhanov ascended the steps of the winding garden, being careful not to attract any unwanted attention. They knocked at the door and were immediately let in by the large burly man in the faded khaki hiking gear. The door shut immediately behind them, and they stood in the hallway and stomped their feet. They took off their thick winter jackets before offering a quick exchange of greetings.

“Hello, Pyotr. It’s good to see you again,” Kolya said cheerily. “Perhaps you know my sister, Natasha. We were told that this is the place to meet Vasily.”

“Yes. And hello to you both. Is the situation out there as dire as it sounds?”

“Yes, well, you know. The fog has descended. Brother against brother, that sort of thing.” Kolya waved his hand dismissively, paused, and took in the room and its surroundings.

Vasily stuck his head out of the door down the hall and called, “Kolya, is that you? Good. Hello, Natasha. I am just getting out of bed, give me a moment and I’ll be out to see you.” He nodded good morning to Pyotr, and went back inside his room to get dressed.

Pyotr spoke. “Natasha. Vasily told me that you were coming along. I see that you and your brother have come dressed for a hike. Excellent. I cannot tell you how ill-prepared some people can be when setting out for a journey. This is good. We’ve a long road ahead.”

“Yes, Pyotr, we’re grateful for the opportunity to get out of Warwick at last. My brother here was so excited that he never even went to bed,” she smiled.

Pyotr looked over at Kolya, who had now bowed his head as if he were in solemn reflection, and his hand rubbed his pudgy chin, and his brow was down in honor of his thoughts.

“Well, we’ll find a place after a while where we can hunker down and get some rest. I don’t know what Vasily told you, but there is likely to be an electro-magnetic pulse event tomorrow that will be terrible in its extremity. Given what we already understand to be the social disruptions in the eastern seaboard, it will be a shock to the system that will likely never be overcome. Did you hear my uncle’s speech?”

“Yes, sir,” Natasha replied respectfully. “We paid close attention. But we weren’t sure what could be done about it, with all the guns surrounding this place. Honestly, Kolya and I had essentially decided we would just gather whatever information we could glean and then either hide out in our house or make some kind of desperate suicide run for the fence.”

Pyotr nodded his head, and as he looked over to Kolya again, he noticed Kolya looking at the blank spots on the wall where the holy ikons had been.

“Suicide is exactly what it would have been. Uncle Lev told me that Mikail will never let anyone escape as long as he has influence over the Russians.”

“As long as he is one of the Russians,” Kolya corrected him, without glancing away from the wall. Pyotr looked at him, not certain whether he appreciated the correction, but understanding its point.

“Yes, well, anyway, I have go-bags in the basement—packs prepared for a long journey. We’ll go down shortly and prepare for departure. Would you like some coffee to warm you up?” He walked into the kitchen and took down a couple of additional cups. The cabinet doors thudded with a light finality, emphasizing not the warmth of the coffee, but the word departure.

Natasha followed and quickly gestured that she would appreciate some coffee, while Kolya reached up to cover a yawn and then to straighten his glasses. “Yes, I was afraid you would never ask. I don’t suppose you would have a Pravda on hand or, better yet, a New York Times?” He looked at Pyotr to see whether this request registered any notice. It didn’t.

As Pyotr poured the coffee, Kolya’s eyes seemed to still be on a distant thought, and Natasha watched her brother as the thought solidified and was formed into words that then came forth from his mouth.

“I noticed something odd during our walk here, and it only now has occurred to me what it was. I don’t know what it means, but it was odd, and I thought I’d tell you.” He took the coffee as it was offered, and lifted the cup to his nose, where he smelled it and took in the rich aroma. “The whole town of Warwick is up in arms. They’ve all come out into the streets—all kinds—and they can all be seen running to and fro; and there are battles and meetings and shouting and all of the things you’d expect in a societal meltdown—”

“Yes, we know, Kolya,” Pyotr replied, prompting him to further his thought. “Is this the thought that has finally occurred to you?”

“No. The thought is this… where are the oldlings? What I mean by that is, where are the oldest Warwickians, the people who have been here since the beginning? I saw them all in the gym during the trial. And I’ve seen several of them since then, but it is not what one would expect. Walking here with Natasha I saw people of every kind and age and economic class, and of every ideology, all out there marching or fighting or fleeing. But the old people are… well… they’re just gone.” He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee, before adding, “It’s strange.”

“That is strange,” Pyotr replied. “What do you make from it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think on it. Where could they be?”

He took his coffee to his lips for another sip and let the liquid, like the warmth of his contemplation, flow through his tired body.

The four of them descended the stairs to the basement, and Pyotr pointed out the packs lined along the wall. He described the materials he’d placed in each, and they quickly discussed a game plan.

He was going to carry the ample medical supply kit that Lev Volkhov had gathered together over the years through some contact in the outside world, and he would also carry the gun—a Ruger 9mm pistol—that the old man had gotten somehow on the black market prior to the takeover. The rest of the supplies he’d divided among the bags by weight and what he thought the individual hikers could carry.

In just a moment they would climb into the tunnel and traverse it on their hands and knees until they reached a spot about fifty yards in, where he and Lev Volkhov had constructed a small dugout that they could use as a way station until the EMP hit.

“There is no sense coming out to the surface until that event takes place,” Pyotr informed the team. “All kinds of strange and wild things might happen once the electromagnetic pulse is unleashed. We’ve never seen planes fly over Warwick, but who knows what will happen when over three-thousand aircraft, a goodly percentage of them at any one time flying over the eastern seaboard of America, come plummeting to the ground when they lose power all of a sudden.” At that, the four of them each stopped and pondered the loss of human lives involved in that scenario, and though none of them had ever been on an airplane, they’d seen them on Russian television, and each could not help but imagine, even for a split-second, what it might be like to be on one of the doomed flights.

“When the EMP hits, if it does, there may be fires, and there will certainly be panic, and one never knows what the outcome will be, so we can’t stay here. But there’s no need, once we’re hidden away in the tunnel, to come out until the air has cleared a little.

“Lev said that there will be massive disruptions, and the power plants will go offline—probably forever—and maybe the nuclear plants, not able to shut down properly or use generators to cool their cores, may melt down as well. It’s hard to know.

“Most vehicles, any that still have fuel and are still running after the recent storms, will stop right where they are in that micro-second when the burst hits, and the highways and cities will become death traps. This is what we face when we head out there outside the wire. Form that thought clearly in your mind. Life becomes a challenge, once the end of the world as we know it comes about.”

“Fine, Pyotr. We will treat it with the reverence it deserves. But if I may be so bold, can we cross that bridge when we come to it? I have a more immediate concern. I have some reading to do. Will we have light there, in the tunnel, in case we need it? Or will the EMP knock those out, too?” It was Kolya with his questions, again. Pyotr was already coming to realize that the young man’s penchant for questioning was something he would have to learn to appreciate in the man.

“I’ve packed flashlights that we can use. I have no idea how well the flashlights will weather the EMP, or if the pulse will penetrate the tunnel. Just in case, I’ve packed a few extras with batteries into the ammo can with the radio we got from the man named Clay’s backpack. We have to be careful about starting any fires in the tunnel since that would both endanger us from the carbon monoxide and threaten to give our position away should any smoke escape the tunnel. I’ve brought thick woolen blankets to cover both ends of the tunnel and block out the air so we will stay warmer throughout the night.

“Since we only have four of us, we should be comfortable in the dugout. If Vasily had succeeded in convincing more to come along, I was beginning to worry how we would accommodate many additional people.”

Kolya looked at Vasily and winked. “Probably a good thing you weren’t a bit more persuasive then.”

Natasha chided her brother, quick to pick up on the hurt look on Vasily’s face, and eager, as always, to tone down her brother’s idea of humor. “Yes, Kolya, but lucky for us that he was persuasive, at least a little.”

“What can I say?” Vasily replied. “My life is a two-edged sword. I’ve spent most of it allowing people to think I am a fool and they’ve begun to believe it.”

“Ahhh, a fellow of infinite jest, caught in his own mousetrap,” Kolya replied.

“Perhaps, Kolya” said Pyotr, “but he did make the effort, which is more than any of us did. It’s bad form to jab at one’s hero. And besides, we are men now, not mice.” He smiled at his own rare joke.

“And women,” added Natasha. “Women, not mice. Don’t forget me.”

“Wow, sister,” Kolya rolled his eyes, “you always know how to kill a good punchline.”

She playfully punched him on the shoulder and they all had a good laugh. “Yes,” all three of the males added in a good-humored unison. “We expect that you won’t soon let us forget you.”

“Oh, and Vasily?” Kolya said.

“Yes?”

“I knew you spoke English. Even before, when we were digging the graves.”

“Well, good thing you didn’t tell Mikail and his thugs. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I like to talk, and I didn’t want you interrupting.”

“Ahhh!” Vasily said, nodded his head and laughed.

With that the four set off on their journey. There was camaraderie among them already as they stood in the cellar on the precipice of adventure. They strapped their bags to their backs and climbed down into the tunnel. They all moved as one in making their way out of the home that had been their only world and into the tunnel that would lead to a world they’d never seen.

Somewhere in the mists of time, in an alternate universe, in another record of the times, there was a memory of a traveler named Clay Richter standing next to a red-haired man on a bridge talking about life and love and loss, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“This storm is going to wake a lot of people up,” the red-haired man had said. “There are going to be a lot of people who are homeless now.”

That was then. This is now.

CHAPTER 14

Red Bear energy drink was founded by Leonid Timchenko while he was on his way to becoming a billionaire oil magnate in Eastern Europe. Needing something better than coffee to keep him awake during all-night trading and gambling binges, he’d searched the world over looking for the perfect elixir. He’d found it on a busy street in Bangkok, and, before long, he’d purchased the rights and the formula. He had it altered to satisfy European tastes and, within a dozen years, Red Bear energy drink was within reach of almost everyone who could afford one anywhere in the world.

To build the brand and to capitalize on the net number of eyes that might be tempted by his advertising for the product, Timchenko had invested millions and millions of dollars in sponsorships, supporting sporting events and concert tours, and other similar venues. He had a preference for anything that seemed dangerous, crazy, or suicidal. For this reason, one might find the angry Red Bear that graced his packaging on the hoods of racing cars at Daytona and Baja trucks in San Felipe, or on the gas tanks of motorcycles as they flew over school buses and water fountains in Las Vegas. One might even find the Red Bear on the wings of solar-powered aircraft that flew experimental technologies and touched the edges of space.

One of Leonid Timchenko’s sponsorships was about to pay off in a way that the rest of the world wouldn’t even comprehend. Three years earlier, he’d invested millions of dollars in the crazy attempt, by a daredevil named Klaus von Baron, to parachute to earth from space.

The plan was to launch from Roswell International Air Center in New Mexico (just a few miles from the place where the aliens had landed… or didn’t) a space capsule that was to be hauled over twenty-four miles into the stratosphere by a huge metallic balloon designed to carry Klaus von Baron into space. From his platform on his tiny capsule, in a spacesuit designed to perfection by a million of Leonid Timchenko’s dollars, Klaus von Baron would jump into the history books, plummeting faster than the speed of sound before opening his parachute and landing once again in the desert floor that had been the source of haunting, beautiful myth since long before D.H, Lawrence had written about it or Georgia O’Keefe had painted it or Billy the Kid had ridden through it or Coronado had “discovered” it.

From space the area looks like a giant fall leaf, or maybe the soft tissue of a brain, with its landforms folded on top of each other in a veiny, vascular web. Timchenko liked the idea of his brand, his bear, floating in the sky to land on its pink, dusty surface, after having sped ferociously through space. He liked the juxtaposition that this symbolized for his drink—the hard, fast rush coupled with the sweet soft landing.

From the outset, the magnificent attempt had been fraught with troubles and setbacks. In fact, if one were the suspicious or conspiratorial kind, the concerns that led to the many delays of the Red Bear Starjump might even seem planned or contrived. In 2011, von Baron and Timchenko were sued by a man in Massachusetts who claimed that he’d come up with the space jump idea first, arguing that the two foreigners had stolen his idea. That case was settled out of court, but it did delay the jump by almost a year. On another occasion, von Baron pushed the date back himself after having a concern over data that was the result, his team had found, of a misplaced zero in a set of velocity projections. In early October of 2012, a planned jump was aborted because of a forecast of severe weather at the launch site, only to find on that day a sunny lightness to the air.

All of these delays had been very public, and when Timchenko and von Baron filled out their permits and papers to re-attempt their jump in early November, there were many people in and out of government who had come to feel sorry for the pair. It was beginning to seem that someone was working to sabotage their plans, and then, in the last days of October, they came to wonder if that someone was God himself. This is because, only a week before the newly re-scheduled jump, Hurricane Sandy, and then the arctic nor’easter, had struck the northeast of America.

Those twin storms, and the havoc and social unrest that followed soon after them, made it seem like the Red Bear Starjump was going to be doomed forever. But, luckily for our intrepid daredevil and his financier, someone somewhere in the halls of power decided that perhaps having the whole world watch Klaus von Baron LIVE streaming on the Internet, as he jumped into the record books from space, would be just what a divided and beleaguered country needed. It may not be bread, the feeling went, but it was a circus, and what the country needed in the moment was release. So the jump was set.

Since the election had been delayed in most of the northeastern United States, and since many folks in those areas were suffering without power anyway, as a distraction, the Red Bear Starjump was rescheduled for the Tuesday of Election Day. America needed some good news, some unifying event that would encapsulate why these world changing feats and challenges were uniquely representative of the things that Americans stood for. Sure, the daredevil was a German who was being financed by a Russian billionaire, but the science! The science was purely American, and therefore it passed for religion. It would provide a balm in Gilead, so to speak, made with physical daring of the elements rather than grinding chemistry of nature’s bounty. But the point would be the same. It would give the country salve to ease its wounds.

Well, maybe that is a bit overdone, but it wasn’t altogether false either. And in any event, there was one thing that was undeniable and unstoppable. The feat was going to be accomplished over America and live via YouTube.

Far from being diminished by the initial burst of fury spent, the escalation of the battle in Warwick came in the intervening hours to fill the forest like wildfire.

The thin veil of law and civility that had governed relations between neighbors, bringing them along in the past so that they settled disagreements with compromise, was torn in two with a lawless spree. Not all of the crime was political, of course. The glass encasements of Kopinsky’s Jewelry were smashed as opportunists sought to profit from the madness. The longsuffering priest of St. Olaf’s church stood in the doorway and watched his chapel stripped of its treasures.

Men who had come to despise their wives gave them beatings without threat of reprisal, and women who were jealous of their neighbors’ good fortunes stood in the street and applauded the arson of their rivals’ homes. A cruelty that had been unimaginable only hours before suddenly announced that it had been silently brewing for ages.

In the battle lines that formed, there were rich against poor, and weak against strong, and young against old (but not the very old, for some odd reason that almost no one had recognized). In the forming and reforming of alliances, the battles ultimately descended into simply whoever happened to be in the proximity of reach against anyone who had anger and hatred to burn. There was no rhyme or reason to the ordering of the conflict.

Instead, there was simply breakdown and confusion, and double-crossing and intrigue. In such a situation, even the cooler minds had begun to flail in imagined wrongs that deserved redress. In this way, the Battle of Warwick was perhaps no exception to any battle that had ever been fought in a civil war in a community of humankind. It was like a nightmare born of chaos, sired by rumors and fueled by neglect.

If you had asked any one of the townsfolk what they were fighting for (or against) it would have been impossible to find a consensus. The answers would have been myriad. Country, pride, family, flag, brotherhood, freedom, jobs, religion, economy… anything. But in the innermost heart of that wide-ranging chaos, there was perhaps only one true note. Survival. Life itself descended into every man for himself and every woman for her interest. Bertrand Russell once wrote that war does not determine who has won or who has lost, but merely who is left, and this became the overriding ethic of the day’s developments.

The point had shifted from taking back the town or impressing upon others a central tenet or ideology, to one in which everyone simply wanted to live through it. Make it right, or make it good, became… just make it.

The fact that the expediencies of war quickly descended into brutality and disorder was not entirely, of course, due to a lack of effort on the part of the gang led by Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei. The triumvirate of power had spent the long previous night trying to put down the initial signs of uprising with the belief that, through a decisive show of force, they could convince their fellow townspeople to abandon their thoughts of war and reprisal and settle into their newly-established places under the leadership they hoped to provide. They believed that the control they exerted over the Spetznaz troops was a definitive advantage that they could use to put an end to the matter before it had even begun. However, here is where the differences in approach between Mikail and Vladimir came into play in perhaps its most crucial twist.

The brutish Vladimir never had any sense of the nuances or subtleties of leadership that Mikail had tirelessly attempted to show him. He’d always believed and ceaselessly relied upon the unerring superiority of physical force as a means of proving his point, and, as a result, there had been perhaps a natural split between the two and between those who were inclined to see the points that the two were each attempting to make in their own way.

Vladimir had influenced a certain contingent of the Spetznaz, even through their very brief association, to shoot first and ask questions later, while Mikail had likewise argued for a more long-term, circumspect, and perhaps more patient approach in which the influence of power could be used without actually having to resort to its display. This had resulted in the Spetznaz being divided between those who were ready to fight the townsfolk immediately in order to secure the perimeter of the battlefield, and those who were more content to simply watch and wait until the action seemed to reach its own conclusion.

The end result was that, as the townsfolk of Warwick descended into chaotic strife, and as the battles became less organized at every turn, it became less and less clear throughout the day for whom (or what) the governing authority, the group with the majority of guns, was fighting for.

Even less clear, as the townspeople grew increasingly agitated that their superior force might win the day, was the outcome that would result from the fact that the power of the government had been turned upon the people at large. To be clear, there were Spetznaz operatives who entered the battle and, as a result, there were people lying in the street bloodied and bullet-riddled. But this reality caused greater, not lesser, agitation among the people, and in those moments when the citizens forgot their differences for a moment and set their sights on conquering the soldiers, it became a question of how likely a soldier or two with a limited magazine clip could defend against an army of shovels and hammers and farm implements in the hands of people who were willing to charge into the face of danger and use them.

In short, the battle plan, if there had ever been a coherent one, was lost, as all battle plans eventually are, to the madness of conflict. The soldiers came to embrace the same survival instinct that the population did, and some simply decided that the best way to survive would be to lay down their weapons and refuse to enter a conflict that was, in the final analysis, against people not unlike themselves.

This reality, too, mirrored what was happening in many other corners of America.

The unraveling of what might loosely be called “the government” came to show, like the loosening of the bonds of civility that kept neighbor in careful compromise with neighbor in the first place, that the glue that holds society together proved itself to be thin indeed.

At some point during the day, Mikail and Vladimir and the others realized that their dreams of revolution were spiraling out of control because those dreams had not been shared in the hearts of a conclusive majority of their fellows. The fact that this is an age-old story in the history of the world made it no less true on that day in Warwick.

It was Kolya who suggested that they change to “English names.” The four had arrived successfully at the mid-point of the tunnel after having crawled into the dugout through the tunnel from the house. They’d spent a considerable amount of time covering their tracks inside the house, even going so far as to reassemble the bureau entrance and pull the drawers in after them so that the tunnel could not be easily seen from the cellar.

Then they’d prepared the dugout for comfort and settled in for a brief stay while they waited for the day’s events, and those of the following day, to unfold.

They each unpacked their packs and took out blankets and a little bit of food and lights and such. Vasily carried the backpack that belonged to the traveler named Clay, and for the first time he actually spent some time examining the contents. He found the items that he’d seen already — the fishing kit and the knife and other items — but in the thin light available to them now, he began to thumb through the books that were in the backpack, and once he did so, Kolya became very excited.

“Oh my, this is Whitman and Hemingway! I’ve been unable to get hold of these books for so long,” Kolya said, smiling broadly. “Everything good in Warwick, I was led to believe, came only through the black market, and I was told that I might be able to get things there that we couldn’t get in the stores. But, I never could figure out exactly to whom I should talk about this. I suppose that is one of the huge negatives to being considered a bookworm. People are suspicious of you if they think you might know more than they do. Believe me when I say that one of the reasons that I sought out such back alley subterfuge was that I wanted to find out who could get me more books from the outside. Ahh… these… these are two books that I dearly wanted.” Kolya’s eyes shone like diamonds as he asked Vasily if he could hold them, and when the books were passed to him he lovingly caressed them as one does a talisman. He ran his fingers across the slightly embossed lettering on the Whitman book’s covering, thumbing randomly through the Hemingway, and reading passages aloud to the others. The others sat and watched him as he turned his head away for a moment, and they noticed his faint shadow on the wall reach up and wipe a tear away from its eye.

Kolya reached inside the pack and drew out a thin volume with the title The Poems of CL Richter, and he asked what it was. Pyotr harrumphed that it was a load of self-indulgent garbage. He didn’t know who C.L. Richter was, but the words, according to Pyotr’s judgment, read like the elementary school musings of a spurned lover. Briefly looking through the volume, Kolya had come, more or less to agree, but with certain exceptions.

“Well, it is certainly not Shakespeare,” he concluded. “Still, it has its own little moments of beauty and truth. After all, those are the primary things we should seek in poetry. If it is true, then it can be beautiful.” He paused, thumbing through the book. “Like here… I like this one,” he said, and he read it aloud to them.

Kolya began to go on about how the poem generally lacked a certain central structure that was hinted at in that title, but, he said, it had never been fully developed, and he told the other three how the poem was merely a kind of list of emotions that the fellow had felt in his obvious loss, so there was truth there, and how the poem had a sad sweetness to it, and how it was like the honey in the first line. It needed, Kolya said, only to be tasted, it would not suffice for an entire meal—and it was then when Natasha had begged him please… please… to just stop. He was killing her with his endless analysis. Sisters and brothers don’t always agree on the merits of art, but the one thing they have no trouble agreeing upon is the need to silence one another.

Kolya had stopped, and then he noticed a poem folded into the first page of the volume, a poem by the Harlem poet Langston Hughes. That was when he suddenly looked at the others and decided that they should all assume new names.

“Look,” he said. “We’re about to enter a world that does not know us and does not accept us, even though we are as much a part of it as anyone else. There are certainly likely to be those who will be unfriendly. We would do well to make ourselves fit as closely as possible. We’ve already enough going against us. Though Lev taught many of us how to speak perfect, accentless English, he taught us all too well. We are not good at the vernacular, and slang… we know almost nothing of it. We were not raised to live in America. We were raised to live in Russia. If anyone were reading us… say… in a book… they would say, why do the characters speak so awkwardly? And by awkwardly, we would know that they actually mean correctly.”

Pyotr nodded. “I agree completely. That’s why Lev told us to flee to Amish country. He said we would not stick out there so obviously. Anyone who hears us there will think that we speak painfully awkward, though precise, English.”

Vasily, too, decided that he approved of the idea and said that he really liked the ring of the name from the poem that was folded into the volume. He decided he would call himself Lang. Kolya, for his part, decided to call himself Cole, partly because, he said, he had always liked the jazz musician named John Coltrane. “He played a Russian lullaby that was simply spectacular,” he said, as if that settled the matter for him.

Pyotr liked the suggestion overall, but wasn’t willing to take it much further than he ought, so he decided simply to be known as Peter, the English version of his Russian name. And Natasha—was it the unwillingness to give in to her sibling?—had refused the entire matter.

“Well, you guys can do what you will,” she said. “As for me, I will live with the name my mother gave me.” And with that, and a firm nod of her head, the matter was settled for her, too.

Following this, the newly titled Lang began to dig through the backpack some more and found a small blue box inside. He asked Peter what was in it.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It rattles when you shake it. That is all that I know of that box.”

“What?! What?!” Cole asked. “You didn’t open it to find out?”

“No. It belonged to a man who has just died,” he said. “I believe in letting things be. In showing some respect for the departed.”

This was too much for Cole. “But aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

“No,” Peter said. And the sound in his voice suggested that he was unwilling to budge on the matter.

“What if it’s important? What if it has something in it that will aid our survival?”

Peter looked at Cole, unblinking. “Then we will still have it, won’t we? If we end up in dire need of something that is in a box and rattles, we’ll open it then.”

Lang and Cole looked at each other, and then at Natasha, who gave them no sign of help, and then they looked back at each other as younger men do in the presence of their seniors. They decided to let the matter drop. They placed the box and the books and the other items back in the backpack, and then placed the pack along the wall.

They were satisfied that they had seen everything the pack had to offer, but God from His omniscient seat in the heavens knew that they had not. In a small, zippered pocket near the strap of one of the handles was a weathered, crumbling business card that had been given to the traveler who had carried the pack into their community. It was perhaps best that they did not see it. If they had, they might have considered it trash and thrown it on the floor of the dugout to be lost forever. But they did not see it and so they did not throw it away. Instead, they simply sat and talked quietly while they waited for sleep to overtake them. That was a blessing, like most blessings are, in the way it happened without their effort or notice. The card, like the rattling in the box, would indeed be there still if, as Cole had innocently said, it was ever needed to aid their survival.

In his sleep, Lang dreamt of the town of Warwick. He dreamt of the people that he left there, of the way they’d passed through thick and thin together, how they’d come through holy and perverse. His dreams were in color and then black and white. He saw the others faintly through the moonlight, on the far side of the shore, heard the clamor of their uprising, and mourned for the loss that he felt in leaving.

One face in particular haunted him in his dream. The face of the sweet girl from the bakery named Irinna. He’d always loved her in secret, and he’d hoped that she might one day love him, too. He’d stood and watched her pass through the town as she made her deliveries for the baker. He’d watched her gently sweep away a wisp of hair from her lovely brow, leaving just a gentle trace of flour at times, which she would then wipe away with her sleeve and smile in embarrassment. He’d hoped that someday he might convince her to go on a date with him, but he’d never had the courage to ask

Her house was the one he’d gone to first when he was asking people to come along on their journey, and for a brief moment he’d hoped she would come. She’d seemed curious and receptive, asking questions about where they would go, how they would get there, when they would leave. He’d laid the plans out in hopes that she’d follow, but in the end she’d shaken her head and declined. She didn’t give a reason, simply saying that she wished him well, but that she just couldn’t go. He’d left in sorrow, and as he slept that sorrow returned.

Had he been able to extract himself from that dream at that moment and spirit away to the town of Warwick, and if he could have hovered there to view the village where the chaos had overtaken even the premise of any workable resolution, he wouldn’t have been so inclined to feel that way. For as the town fell into complete and utter disrepair, the lovely Irinna was indeed inside her house making her own plans for escape. She was readying her belongings. She watched out the window to see whether there was any hope that the Spetznaz soldiers would bring the town back into some kind of order, or whether a coalition of the people would rise up and turn the tide in a decisive way.

As she watched, it became clear—it became clear to everyone, even the gang from the prison that had begun the trouble—that the cause was lost, and without it, so was the town. She sat quietly and waited until she heard a predetermined knock at the door that her escape route had arrived.

As the chaos descended and the town crumbled, she heard the knock. Rushing to the door in breathless anticipation, she found standing there a man whom she had come to love dearly. The match was made secretly as she made her bread deliveries in and around Warwick. She’d passed his house many times, and one time she stopped for a moment to chat, and then eventually stayed too long and then eventually wanted to stay even longer. And now she was ready to leave with her love.

She rushed to the door to find him standing there, just outside the window in the door. She looked up and saw him motioning silently through the glass to her. And with that, she grabbed her belongings and opened the door and took the hand of the stocky bulldog named Mikail Brekhunov.

Mikail had a few of the loyal Spetznaz soldiers with him, and the small group had decided that the cause was indeed lost in Warwick, and they were going to make a break for it and try to leave before some form of authority was restored and recriminations started.

They talked as they carefully made their way in a circuitous route back to the gym to gather up Sergei and Vladimir and the remnant of their loyal forces. In passing, Irinna mentioned to him, since they were now discussing escape, that the young, dull boy… Vasily… had come to her house last night and had asked her to escape with him. Apparently, even the town dunce had a way out.

This surprised Mikail, and not just a little. The red scar on his forehead began to throb and his mouth twitched as he mulled the thought in his mind. As they drew close to the gymnasium, his rage began to build, and, although they had not reached a place of safety, he grabbed Irinna harshly by the hand and spun her around to face him, his rage to the point of boiling over.

“How were they getting out?” he demanded angrily.

“I have no idea, Mikail. He gave no details. He just said that they were going to be leaving and that he wanted me to go with him.”

“Oh he did, did he? Who was going with him?!” He spat the words. “Damned fool!” It was unclear from the way that he said this exactly to whom he was referring. “Dumb, little Vasily! He wanted to take the most beautiful girl in Warwick with him?! He had a way out! Maybe young Vasily wasn’t so dumb after all!” He said this not in a way of kindness or to flatter Irinna, or even Vasily. He said it in anger. The soldiers escorting the pair were growing wary of being out in the open with the town in rebellion, and they attempted to move the two arguing lovers along with them in order to get them as quickly as possible into the safety of the gym.

“I kept that little idiot alive when Vladimir wanted to kill him! I gave him life! And this is what he gives me!”

“Mikail, there was nothing! He seemed to be going house to house. There was nothing between us!” As she said this, the soldiers grabbed the two and forcibly moved them toward the gym, toward cover.

The soldiers were moving in formation, sweeping their guns in wide arcs, and as they did so, the chaos of the town opened up around them and the people formed in crowds and looked on, urging an offensive.

A sharp crack split the air, and the soldiers dropped to the ground instinctively. Mikail spun around and dropped to the ground with them, looking at the crowd to see if he could determine who had fired on them.

Just at that moment, the lovely Irinna stood still in the street. She reached her hand up to brush away the wisp of hair from her face and, as she did so she left a small trail of blood smearing across her fast-draining features. Looking up, Mikail reached for Irinna’s hand to pull her down with him, and only then did he see the blood running down her face, down her dress, circling the curves of the one he loved so. Her legs collapsed and she fell to the ground, falling into Mikail’s arms as he attempted to understand what had happened.

Mikail crouched over her, and the soldiers grabbed at them both and began to drag them, and then, seeing that the girl was dying, the soldiers dropped her and began forcibly to drag the unwounded Mikail towards the gymnasium, toward safety. Finally they broke out into a sprint as Mikail stumbled along in their midst. He gave a final look over his shoulder, over the shoulder of a soldier, and saw his lovely Irinna lying in the snow, bleeding into it. He turned his face toward the gym and picked up his pace with the soldiers, until they came into the warm embrace of their shelter.

In that look and in that moment, Mikail focused his mind on what was ahead of him. For now, perhaps for the first time in a lifetime of calculation, he found himself feeling an entirely new emotion. It was a feeling that he suddenly confronted but did not have any real way to account for in the way that he always calculated everything. It was feeling of overwhelming and ancient reckoning, a feeling of un-appraisable anguish.

Mikail now had a reason to hate.

CHAPTER 15

Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day

It was nearing noon as Klaus von Baron stepped out onto the platform of his multi-million dollar Red Bear Starjump capsule and looked downward, 128,000 feet, toward the blue, grey circle of the earth. In its curvilinear contrast to the deep, black expanse of space, the planet splayed beneath his feet, looking mysterious and malleable, like a floating lump of clay waiting to be formed if only he could get his hands around it.

“Checklist, item seventeen,” Klaus heard through his headset from Starjump Mission Control in Roswell. “Engage capsule release timer. Near your left hand, Red Bear, down below the seat reconnect and next to the O2 injection port. Flip up the guard and throw the red switch.”

The command sounded like a faraway dream reaching into his conscience, the only other sound being the measured rhythm of his own thick breathing. Klaus looked down, as did the millions of people worldwide watching over his shoulder, over the internet, and took in the awesome scene, feeling his smallness against the massive earth.

With the bulky suit restricting his movement, he moved clumsily in response to the instruction. He thought about the millions of dollars that had gone into manufacturing the suit knowing that, in just a moment, he would be plummeting at greater than the speed of sound, the first human to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle, without a capsule or ship, in a tumbling, rotating freefall. The suit would be the only thing between him and death. In fact, without it, right now he would already be dead.

Klaus was already twice as high as the “Armstrong Limit,” which is the height at which the barometric pressure is so low that water will boil at room temperature. No human can live above the Armstrong Limit in an unpressurized atmosphere. The suit was his life, and it represented all such systems of human dependency. When man throws his life into the dead hands of the machine and counts on the inanimate to operate as it should, he becomes acutely aware of the tenuous miracle of creation. If the suit developed a rip or tear now, his blood would boil and the capsule would be his airy tomb. In that case (if he failed to complete checklist item seventeen), the Starjump capsule would float along, losing atmosphere, until it fell randomly somewhere, probably into an ocean.

If the suit failed at any time during the fall, traveling at 800 M.P.H. or around Mach 1.2, depending on the altitude, Klaus would either flash freeze, or he would pass out and be dead in seconds. Whether his chute opened or not at that point would be immaterial, because it would just be an instrument for delivering his body back to earth for burial.

Klaus knew that his jump was an historic one. He knew it was being played LIVE on YouTube. He knew that once he stepped off the platform and threw his body into space he would have a limited time to stabilize his fall and straighten out his body before he reached the point of no return where he would either have to pull the cord to his parachute and slow his all too rapid descent or push along in the slip of atmosphere until his body passed the wave field that would produce a sonic boom. He knew that only bullets and missiles and spaceships and meteors had ever achieved what he would now be doing with his own flesh and blood inside the mix of chemical-laced fabrics that contained the technology that would keep him alive like an umbilical cord inside a womb. He knew that over eight million people were watching him go through his egress checks as he slid to the edge of the capsule. Beyond that, he knew very little.

He did not know, for example, that when he engaged the capsule release timer that he was not actually activating the capsule’s controlled descent functions. He did not know that, in fact, when he flipped the switch he would set in motion the genesis event that would signal the end of the world as everyone knew it, and the beginning of a whole new era. He did not know that, by innocently throwing the red switch as he’d been commanded to do through the signal in his helmet from mission control, he would sign the death warrant of over 300 million people in the United States alone, and that of over six billion people worldwide. He could not have known that flipping a toggle switch would rip a tear in the pressurized space suit called “the grid,” an artificial system that was absolutely necessary to keep humans alive in the beginning of the 21st Century.

No, Klaus von Baron was innocent when he flipped the switch that started the timer that in four minutes would silently launch a small ultralight craft, no larger than a breadbox, that carried a miniaturized “super-EMP” warhead, that would glide completely undetected through space to its designated vectors. There, when it detonated, it would change the world forever.

Klaus was innocent. At least… he was as innocent as anyone can be who gives his life and the lives of his fellow humans over to be governed and maintained by the machines.

“Checklist, item seventeen. Check.”

It will take Klaus about eight minutes to complete his historic jump into the record books, and eight minutes hence, when he stands up and raises his hands in victory on the desert of a pink, dusty New Mexico badlands, he still will not know that he has landed on a completely different world than the one he left only that morning, the one he saw from his perch twenty-four miles up in space.

He does not know, and he will not know, that the moment of his greatest triumph is the moment of humankind’s end… at least, an end to the world the way almost everyone alive has ever known it.

Perhaps it is not too much to say that Klaus von Baron’s jump was one small leap for man, but one giant leap backwards for mankind.

In Warwick, the very un-Civil War raged on. While neighbor continued to fight neighbor and ancient rivalries flared back up into contemporary reasons to kill and harm and maim, a search was on.

Sergei Dimitrivich, Vladimir Nikitch, a handful of their Youth Revolutionary Forces, and six Spetznaz soldiers were going door to door in the town looking for Vasily Romanovich Kashparov and whatever other traitors to the Revolution could be found. Truth be told, they wanted Vasily mainly so they could find out what he knew about an escape route out of Warwick.

Frankly, the Spetznaz and their Communist bosses who had sent them to Warwick in the first place could not care less about Vasily Kashparov. They wanted the oldlings, and they wanted all of them. To the Russian Special Forces operatives, capturing the oldlings was the entire reason that they were going through any of this. That was why they had parachuted into Warwick before the planned attacks on the U.S. and the West. Mikail, the Youth Forces, all of them, were just tools—useful idiots—mechanisms used to bring about a necessary end.

Their orders from their commanders in the GRU had been clear. Support and stabilize the town so that the oldlings of Warwick—the ones who had been there since the very beginning—could be intensively interrogated.

The new leaders of the New Soviet Union, after they were done brushing America and the West off the map for eternity, wanted to be able to track down every American Spy in Russia, and Warwick had been the main supplier of authentic Russian American spies since the 1960’s. Every one of those agents of capitalist America would need to be rooted out, and, within the aged minds and feeble memories of Warwick’s oldlings, those names would be stored like they were in a computer databank. Eighty of those oldlings were already being questioned in the locker rooms under the Warwick Gym. There were more out there, at least there ought to be.

Lacking any better options, the Spetznaz troops had thrown their weight behind Mikail in the battle for Warwick. That decision wasn’t turning out well, and they were beginning to have doubts about his ability to deliver on his promises, but for now their primary function took priority over their personal feelings. In addition to the large contingent of troops “manning the walls” so to speak—guarding the village to keep the people in and the rest of the world out—there were specialists involved in the interrogations in the basement of the gymnasium. There were also soldiers still involved in trying to police the town and stop the fighting. These were the units traveling with Vladimir, trying to root out all resistance and end talk of revolution or escape.

To the Russians, if this Vasily Kashparov knew a way out of the Charm School, then he would also know if any of the oldlings had already escaped, or if any more were hidden in the town’s many root cellars and basements. They wanted to find Vasily merely so they could find any oldlings hiding from this new Inquisition.

The search for Vasily, like the revolution itself, was not going well. Two of the Youth Forces, untrained and lacking in military skills and tactics, had already been killed executing the searches. That fact had angered Vladimir to no end. The young man, already a brutal sadist, became doubly efficient and intensive in his application of whatever means he deemed necessary to extract information from the people of Warwick.

A proper search, meant an everywhere search, and that meant a systematic, door-to-door examination, even while a pitched and rolling battle was taking place in the town. Warwick was not a normal, modern village. The people were Russian, and mostly agrarian. They liked to dig, and almost every house had storm cellars and basements and even vegetable larders formed of concrete, or crafted from old freezers buried in the backyards. There were a lot of places to hide and therefore, a lot of places to search, to coax the earth to give up her secrets.

Vladimir’s brutality had grated on the Spetznaz soldiers, who, though they were certainly not humanitarians or choir boys in their own right, recognized that if this young Stalin ever intended to lead people, there might need to be some people left to lead. His tactics were more akin to an extermination than a systematic search of the village. They noticed, but did not question (yet) his brutish methods, mostly because they needed him to guide them through the town and its maze-like structures.

Coldly, and violently, the team went from house to house on their mission.

In the Warwick Gymnasium, Mikail was doing his best to hold together both his crumbling coalition and his relationship with the Spetznaz soldiers who nominally had the most firepower in the town. The civil war was turning against Mikail, mainly because the splintered and fragmented opposition was starting to coalesce into a loose affiliation of those whose only unifying tenet was their opposition to Mikail and the Communists.

The tide had turned sometime during the mid-afternoon. Mikail couldn’t precisely pin down the moment his short reign in Warwick had come to an end, but he increasingly recognized the signs. Hitler had experienced such a turning point, as had Robespierre and other failed revolutionaries. In fact, almost all agitators who advocate for a takeover of power, unless their cause is backed by consent of the people or sufficient force to ignore such consent — almost all such would-be dictators in their turn come to the realization that all is lost. As a student of history, Mikail knew that there was only one avenue possible once his grip on power released, and that was… recriminations.

Recriminations. That’s a very nice word for “payback,” and such a fancy word does little to describe the awful meting out of revenge that can follow tyrants like a shadow follows a man on a sunny afternoon. Mikail knew his moment in that sun had passed as he felt the fiery orb setting over his small, troubled town.

There was a look in the eye of the Youth Revolutionary Forces, and that look began to evolve and spread, and soon a unit of Spetznaz forces approached with the inevitable official announcement that Mikail was very earnestly encouraged to meet with representatives of the coalition forces in the village. He knew this meant he would be asked to arrange his own surrender for trial.

This was how it had to be. It was destiny. History tends to impress this fact on the mind for those who care to venture into books to learn of the spiritual physics of such things. Mikail had done so, and he knew the implications.

So Mikail met with the “peace” commission, and terms were arranged and agreed to, although he did not go completely quietly into the approaching, dark night. He had a word for them as they departed.

“The only thing you all have in common is your hatred of me!” Mikail shouted at the backs of the opposition commission as they turned to leave the gymnasium. They turned to look at him in contemptuous regard. He laughed out loud. “What will you have when I am gone?” he asked. “You will have civil war and strife until you are all dead!” He said this in the way that prophecies are often uttered, though perhaps even he didn’t realize that what he said was so prophetic. It was more of a statement of fact mixed with the slightest hint of wishful thinking.

“That is what we have now,” Konstantin Kopinsky, the jeweler’s son, shouted back. His anger was emphasized by the sound of the gymnasium door slamming itself shut, effectively ending Mikail’s reign over Warwick. Mikail was given twenty-four hours to cede control of the government and all of his forces to the coalition, at which time he would be arrested and taken to the prison, where he was certain he would be locked away for the rest of his natural life.

That was the deal that he agreed to, though he had no intention of hanging around Warwick long enough to honor it. He would not allow himself to be the subject of his own revolutionary dogma. He would not suffer the indignities of his own interminable crimes. He would not allow his indiscretions to result in the crowd’s recriminations.

On Tuesday morning, Peter announced to the other three in the tunnel that they needed to put a watch (or more accurately, a “listen”) back at the tunnel entrance, inside the tunnel but below the bureau in Peter’s basement. They would want to know, he said, if anyone came snooping around the basement and, by listening from the post below the bureau, a person could faintly hear the racket going on outside, in the town. Cole was the first to volunteer, saying he liked the opportunity to read the scene by the details coming from the imagination he applied to the noise.

The battle had raged through the night, and by the morning of Election Day in America, some of the fury and rage in Warwick had spent itself, but not all of it. Upon his return to the dugout, the pudgy intellectual gave a full report. “There is still sporadic fighting. It’s hard to hear from the tunnel, and we only get an idea of what is going on in that one area of town, but the tempest certainly isn’t as loud as it was last night,” Cole said. He took off his glasses and began to clean them. “I wouldn’t say it was all much ado about nothing, but I suppose all’s well that ends well.”

“Oh, you and your Shakespeare!” Natasha said. She shook her head, but you could see that there was the slightest hint of a smile on her face. She looked over to Lang and added, “I’ve had to put up with this my whole life!”

Kolya put his glasses back on to his face. “As you like it, dear sister.” He then turned to Lang and said, “my dearest blood-kin here is a shrew that needeth to be tamed.” He winked.

Peter glared at Cole, not entirely appreciating his humor in such a critical moment, but then his face softened and he smiled. “Well, I’ll not try to keep up with you measure for measure, so we’ll end the Shakespeare titles game and maybe you can give us the rest of your report?”

Cole smiled. “Well, it didn’t sound like anyone has been in the basement. The bureau is still there and secured, and the whole time I listened, I didn’t hear a thing, except for the occasional bark of a pistol or a shout from someone off in the distance.”

Peter nodded his head, but remained silent while Lang shifted his weight, giving an indication that he was uncomfortable just sitting around in the dugout.

“Why don’t we go find this water plant, Peter? We can’t just stay down here for days. Anyway, we can hide out there until things become less… cloudy.”

“I figured we’d just stay here until maybe Friday. It is safe and warm, and besides, we have such nice toilet facilities in here!” Peter pointed his thumb in the direction of the underground “outhouse.” In the dugout, which was at the midway point in the tunnel, Peter and Lev had dug a tiny (and short) little indentation into the dirt, which turned to the left so that the person using it could have a little privacy. The facility consisted of a hole dug three feet deep with a wooden box atop it. The box had a hole cut into it. There was a bucket full of sawdust next to the toilet so that after it was used, the waste could be covered with a thin layer of wood shavings. This kept the scent down. Lev Volkhov and Peter had used the toilet while building the tunnel, so that they didn’t have to go all the way back up to the house each time they needed to eliminate.

“The toilet is fine, Peter. A fine invention it is,” Lang said, smiling. “But I’m getting a bit batty just sitting around. Cole can read the same books over and over again, and I think he’s memorized The Poems of C.L. Richter, but since I didn’t find any Solzhenitsyn in Clay’s backpack, I need some fresh air and some trees over my head. I’m just getting tunnel fever.”

Cole shook his head and tried to change the subject, to divert his younger friend from his growing agitation. “Actually, I’ve come to really appreciate the poems of Mr. Richter, whosoever he is. They have a sort of charm that is lacking in a lot of poetry.”

“Self-indulgent nonsense,” Peter sniffed, kicking a clod of dirt across the dugout floor.

“Be that as it may, Peter,” Cole responded, “the poems are true, and sweet. They come from that place inside of us where everyone touches the poetic imagination. I think that, in a dark world that is crumbling on its rotted foundation,” he pointed upwards with his index finger, “sweet and true is nice to have around.”

Peter took a deep breath and thought for a moment in silence. It seemed that he had been unofficially elected as leader, and the other three younger members of the group seemed to want his approval even as they sought, as youth always does, to act as if their world didn’t hinge on receiving it. He nodded to Cole, as if in resignation, but he thought to himself how perhaps the book’s pages could be better used as an accessory kept near the tunnel’s toilet. He smiled at his own wicked humor.

“I suppose we can go check out the water plant, but if we go, everything needs to go with us. We’ll just stay there. We’ll have to find a way to obscure our footprints from the snow, and we’ll have to move quickly and silently. We’ll surface only meters outside the fence, and if there are patrols in Warwick, then they would see us. We’ll need to be ready to run for it.”

“This will be the most dangerous thing we’ve done yet,” Lang said, nodding his head.

“Well, I disagree with that, Lang,” Peter said. Cole nodded, agreeing with Peter. “Your trip from here back to the gym and then through the town door to door was extremely dangerous, and perhaps not a little stupid,” Cole gently agreed, and the three let Lang bask in that recognition for a moment.

Natasha smiled. “I’m glad you did it, Lang. I’d hate to be back there in Warwick, trying to hide from the mob or from Mikail’s goons.”

“Well, we aren’t out of Warwick yet,” Peter said. “Perhaps it is good that we leave now. We’ll get some distance between us and that stinking pit of a town.”

An unabridged retelling of the historic mad dash from the tunnel’s exit to the water plant might be in order someday, if the story ever gets told in its entirety. The escape was historic, because, as far as any of them knew, no one had successfully escaped Warwick and gotten away since the great confusion in ’92. It was mad because the four individuals who made the escape had no idea what awaited them on the outside. They did not know if anyone, perhaps even the Americans, still patrolled the forest. They did not know if the Russian Spetznaz had snipers or soldiers watching the perimeter to prevent escapes. They did not know if they would run into mayhem or violence in the forest from people escaping the cities, and they did not know if the water plant was occupied—if perhaps gangs of refugees were using the treatment facility as a hideout or headquarters. In short, they knew nothing, and that is what made their historic escape an act of madness. It was a rush into the unknown.

But they made it, and, in reality, the whole escapade went off without a hitch. They poked their heads up into the clear cold air outside the fences of Warwick, and they saw neither soldiers nor gangs. The first sprint into the deeper forest was accomplished purely on adrenaline, a pounding heart terror that embraced and squeezed the mind. After the four of them were clear of the open and lightly treed area, they moved slower and more circumspectly. They used branches to try to obscure their direction, and several times they doubled back in order to hide their intended path.

They didn’t know how successful they’d been, and wouldn’t know for some time, but they did make it to the water plant, and, once there, they did a thorough reconnaissance of the plant before digging in for a stay that they figured to last four or five days.

“I say we stay until Friday,” Peter said. “By Friday, we’ll know more about if the EMP has actually taken place, and what its ramifications are.”

“You’re the leader, Peter,” Cole said, as he walked around the sheet-metal covered work shed that they’d chosen as their temporary home.

“Yes, Peter,” Natasha said, nodding. “We’re with you, so you tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”

“Ok, then,” Peter said, “we’ll need to gather up some wood for a fire. This place is ventilated up near the roof, and it’ll be cold at night, but we can use several different tricks to stay warm. The EMP, if it is coming, hasn’t happened yet, so our main threats, if they come, will come from Warwick. After the EMP, it won’t get any worse immediately, so we shouldn’t have to worry about strangers hiking through the woods quite yet.”

“Well, Peter,” Cole said, scratching his head, “if what you are saying is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t, then why don’t we head out on our walk now? Wouldn’t that give us a few more days lead time before things get bad?”

“Not really, Cole,” Peter said. “The EMP is supposed to happen today. That means all sorts of things can happen, including planes dropping out of the sky, explosions from power lines and transformers, fires, and all sorts of things that remain unknown to us. In addition, the violence could break out almost immediately when the EMP hits—not here, but out there—and it will grow over several days. We’re hoping that the biggest brunt of the effects—after people realize that they are in big, big trouble—will happen in the first three days. After that, it won’t be much better, but at least we will be able to watch where we are, where we are going, and what is ahead of us. If we go now, we could find ourselves in the middle of trouble in unknown territory when the match strikes the fuse. I just think we should wait and then make our way once we have more information.”

“Like we said, Peter, you’re in charge,” Cole responded with a smile. In his smile, he hinted at the smallest bit of doubt.

Peter opened up his pack and pulled out one of the radios he brought from the house. He left Clay’s radio in the ammo can, just in case, but he wanted to listen awhile, to hear what life was like outside, and gather whatever intelligence they could while they still had the opportunity.

Lang, Natasha, and Cole crowded around Peter as he tuned the radio, and before long he found a station that was on the air. The newswoman went through a litany of stories about the recent “troubles.” There were reports of riots and looting in the cities, places like Boston, and Philadelphia, but most of it was less dire than the Warwickians had heard from inside the village. Lang reminded them that one of the last things Lev Volkhov had told him was that they shouldn’t believe anything they hear, especially from the “authorities.” Governments will lie about the extent of unrest and violence, if only to keep that violence from spreading to as-yet unaffected areas.

It seemed from the news broadcast that the authorities were trying to make the recent troubles and turmoil out to be purely economic. As of this morning, the reports said, the stock market had crashed in a magnitude unseen in history. Despite what seemed to be obvious attempts to minimize the extent of the disruptions, the reporter mentioned riots and street disturbances in most of the big cities of America, civic unrest and citizen complaints about delays in food relief efforts, and they were now speaking openly of an event they were calling “The Crash.” The fact that many of the riots had preceded the stock market collapse seemed all but forgotten, and the fact that Election Day was postponed in the northeast was not even mentioned. You would think that something so monumental might be in the news on that first Tuesday in November. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

If a mission to Mars had landed on that undiscovered planet and the astronauts had descended onto its barren rocky surface only to find that their radios were tuned to a broadcast from Olympus Mons, the effect wouldn’t have been any stranger than it was on the four Warwickians who sat and listened to the details of a news broadcast from a place they had only known through reputation. They crowded around the small radio there in the water plant and listened to a report about some crazy German who was about to jump out of a capsule that hung from a parachute on the edge of space. Apparently, with all that was happening in the world, somebody, somewhere, someone of great importance, had decided that a man perhaps jumping to his death for notoriety was newsworthy, while the society crumbling around them was not.

The reporter breathlessly turned away from the description of the day’s and week’s events, of the tales of hunger and societal breakdown, of the scrambling of the governmental elites to contain the situation, to speak of a daredevil, a Mr. Klaus von Baron, who at that very moment was stepping onto a platform and seeing the wide world float through space beneath his feet. The reporter described it all. Millions of people were watching the event all over the world on YouTube, the newswoman reported. After completing what the reporter called “his egress checks,” Klaus von Baron stepped off the platform and threw himself toward the ground, and the reporting paused as he began his awesome free-fall.

There were gasps and oohs and aahs coming from the newsroom as the newswoman described the event. “Klaus von Baron has begun to spin slightly. From the deck of his capsule we can see that he is disappearing into the haze of atmosphere and distance. There is, of course, a fear that he might go into an uncontrollable flat spin that could cause him to pass out.” The reporter relayed these facts as though the audience perfectly understood the machinations of velocity and turbulence, but it was necessary to say them anyway, just as a record for the times. The audience was informed that von Baron had a special parachute that would automatically activate if the g-forces came to be too much and he lost consciousness.

The four sat and listened. The reporter was openly speculating about whether or not von Baron was going to break the sound barrier, when the four Warwickians, listening around the radio, heard a loud pop, and the radio went dead.

Simultaneously they heard an intense, buzzing hum, and from the doorway of the water plant they saw an old transformer atop a power pole, one that was no longer even operating, blow completely off the pole. As it did so, they heard a frightening explosion from the power junction box about twenty feet inside the building. It suddenly burst into flames.

Peter knew immediately what had happened. Somewhere, up in the atmosphere, and probably not too far away, a “super-EMP” warhead had detonated sending a wave of supercharged electrons piling up on one another until they had burst outward, like when the sound barrier is shattered. The resulting massive wave of electromagnetic energy had spread throughout the atmosphere and imploded the grid of electric energy, and with it the comforts and hopes and aspirations of the world’s long climb to what modern man recognized as civilization.

At the moment, Peter was one of the few people in the entire world to know that everything had changed. For everyone. Forever.

CHAPTER 16

Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day

The etiology of disaster’s onset and the projection of its effects are never easy things to pin down, but history does provide examples for our consideration. On March 4, 1918, in a small town in Kansas, a cook at an army training camp called in sick. Within a week, over 500 men in the camp had contracted the illness, and the virus had spread all the way to Queens, New York. Within a year, approximately fifty million people worldwide had died of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Up to 30% of the world’s population contracted the disease. Coupled with the concurrent devastation visited upon the world in the four short years of World War One, wherein sixteen million people died and another twenty million were seriously wounded, you can see how quickly things changed in the four short years between 1914 and 1918. The lesson for us is that history can turn on a dime. All the sophisticated machinery of modern civilization is no match for the wild rampage of nature and the brutality of human ingenuity.

While this may seem like an extreme example—as if a wartime virus is worse than the collapse of the electrical grid upon which modern society is built—consider the fact that when the lights go out, there is no medical equipment for use in treating disease. There is no transportation to get food or people or supplies from one place to another. There is no telephone to call the police when the criminals show up at your door. There is no Internet, no security alarms, no heating or air-conditioning to tame the elements. In a grid-down situation, and especially if that situation is caused by a massive electromagnetic pulse, there is no gasoline, and there are no automobiles to need that gasoline. There is no refrigeration to cool food in the concrete jungles that house most of the world’s population. When this disaster occurs, there will only be darkness, and stillness, and whatever you hold in your hands, head, and heart to face down the long night.

The EMP strike over Ohio on Election Day in America was the crime of this and perhaps any century, and it would lead—eventually—to over 300 million deaths just in the United States, and many billions of deaths all over the world, but no one knew that yet.

At the very beginning, it was like the call coming in to the kitchen staff saying that a cook won’t be in that day. It was like a woman who was involved in a car wreck and broke her neck, but she didn’t know it yet. An hour later, she was talking to a cop, and she turned her head to point out to him exactly where the collision occurred, and the cop heard the snap, and her head fell to the side, and the body fell limp to the ground.

There is a delay between the moment when a trigger is pulled, and the moment when a target is struck. That interim—that delay, however long it lasts—is when the world continues to move and decide based on the old reality and on facts that are now immaterial. It is in that interim that decisions are often made that will eventually determine who lives and who dies.

No one had yet figured out what had happened, although people knew from the fires and the smoke and the already eerie noise of the gnashing of teeth in the stillness, that something had gone terribly wrong. But no one yet had recognized its permanency.

Still, in that moment, a few kept their heads.

Veronica D’Arcy was sitting in her kitchen in her warm house in Harlem, writing in her journal, when the lights went out.

She’d been thinking a great deal lately of her late husband John, a gem of a man, gone too soon due to a heroic attempt to save a woman who’d fallen on the tracks from a subway platform years ago. The woman was saved, but her husband had not survived, leaving Veronica to raise their son by herself.

In the way that thoughts sometimes seem to tumble or intermingle like towels in a dryer, or how one thought brings us inexorably to another, Veronica’s thoughts about her husband, and heroism, and the life of responsibility, led her to recall the man named Clay Richter who’d recently stayed at her house for a night. Apparently, Clay had lost his whole family in an automobile accident. The simple, sweet man had touched her life through an act of kindness towards her son, and now, as she sat thinking about Clay and his escape from the city and his search for liberty and peace, she began thinking about family and the loss of it and the need to protect her own.

Her son, Stephen, was in their living room working on a laptop. He was staying home from school for yet another day, as all New York students were. The compounded troubles from several successive natural and unnatural disasters were taking a toll on the city. First there was the hurricane, then the blizzard, and now there was increasing civil disorder resulting from the canceling of the national elections.

Veronica herself hadn’t been able to return to work since Sandy hit. She was a landscape designer at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and with everything going on post-hurricane, there’d been no need for her to go to work. She’d been told to stay home, and now she and Stephen had been inside for days on end. She thought about it and then counted on her fingers. It was exactly a week ago Tuesday that Clay Richter had helped her son and had stayed the night in the guest room. It seemed longer to her.

She’d grown up in the house of a man who believed in preparation, like his father before him had, a vestigial leftover from colonial-days thinking in Trinidad, when life was uncertain and one had to always be ready to take whatever steps were necessary to maintain it. An aware mind and a preparedness mentality were some of the values that had attracted her to John, who was a survivalist in his own right.

She and Stephen had been protected from the civil unrest raging outside by her foresight in planning for emergencies. They had a generator, and they had always stockpiled food, and had acquired over the years, through self-education, the means to protect themselves from the kind of madness that had increasingly gripped the city. Still, she was getting antsy to get out of the house, and Stephen, too, was looking for diversion.

He was in the living room when the lights flashed and blinked out and the power died. He’d been watching on the laptop at that moment as a daredevil jumped out of a weather balloon and plunged over twenty-four miles toward the earth.

I wonder if he lived, is what Stephen thought as the computer and the room went dark. Strange, he thought. I wonder why the computer didn’t keep running on battery power?

The click of the lights and whirr of the winding-down machinery had been the first signs that there was trouble. Then Veronica heard an explosion down the street, followed by numerous collisions and grindings and blasts. Thinking about the laptop, and why the thing had just instantly shut down, Stephen had been the first to ask why the sounds of cars in the streets had stopped if only the electricity had shut down. Just as Veronica was about to answer, they heard a whistling grow above their heads.

Veronica ran to the door with Stephen just a foot behind her, and they stuck their heads out the door and saw in the space above their street an airplane crossing through the blue sky. It was spooky the way the craft simply hung in the air without the sound of engines whining as it made its descent. It was all Doppler Effect of gravity and the atmosphere pushing against the hunk of metal in the sky. The plane turned in a slow, lazy arc and settled into a pocket of air, which made the whooshing noise they’d heard as wind rushed around its wings.

The crashing noise could not have been more than half a mile away. Veronica could have sworn that she felt the ground rumble under her feet before they heard the awful explosive clatter of the plane crashing into the city. Her thoughtful eyes scanned down to the street and noticed the cars clogging up the main artery of the street down the block, and the people running toward the sound of the crash. Images and fragmented memories of 9/11 flashed through her head. Veronica pushed her son back into the house, and the young man looked at her his eyes full of fright, and he asked her what was happening.

Veronica answered with a single sentence. “Stephen, you see de animal, but you don’t see de beast.” And with that, she sprang into action.

The mother directed her son to go down to the basement and grab two black bags she’d packed with survival gear for a journey. Without hesitation, she ran into their rooms and pulled out warm clothing, changing her own clothes at the same time, all in a flash.

Coming up from the basement with the bags, Stephen asked what was in them. “Don’t ask questions, child,” Veronica said. “Act.” She directed Stephen to change into the clothes that she’d just pulled out for him—hiking gear in layers and warm boots—as she went into the kitchen to gather food and water. Within fifteen minutes, they’d left their house and were setting out on foot through the city… toward Brooklyn.

At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge was an almost unknown cold war era nuclear fallout bunker. Veronica had come across it while working at the Brooklyn Bridge Park because it was adjacent to a storage facility where she kept all of her tools. She remembered reading about the discovery of the bunker in 2006, when city workers had stumbled upon it during the course of routine inspections. It had been long forgotten, and as soon as it was discovered, it was forgotten again, but Veronica had not forgotten about the bunker at all. She’d previously wheedled her way into getting a key to the bunker from a city clerk who was easily confused by the numbers on a blueprint. Now, the two of them, mother and son, wound their way through the city toward the stone enclosure in the hopes that they would find it still functional.

Having a goal and a plan has a huge impact on the mental state when things fall apart. As they walked, she saw people moving in circles, running heedlessly, or sometimes just standing and gaping with their mouths open and their eyes blank in horror, confusion, or indecision.

The city had been wreaked by havoc in the past week, and now havoc had turned into a conflagration. Fires and destruction were everywhere around them, and Veronica and Stephen took advantage of the mayhem to move silently and purposefully through the city. They moved along the side streets, dipping into Central Park, and then back along the thoroughfares that would lead them downtown, making their way so that they avoided as many people as possible. Before leaving the house, Veronica had slipped a small pistol into her waistband, a gift from her husband on the Christmas before he died, and she hoped that she would not have to use it.

As Stephen followed her, he tried to ask her questions about why they were leaving so quickly, and where they were going, but Veronica simply kept his mind occupied by telling him stories of his father.

“You know, your grandfather was a man who was admired by everyone who knew him. He was an engineer, and he built buildings in Trinidad that were not as tall as these you see here…” she motioned to a building that was ablaze in the distance, its giant face perforated by the wings of a second aircraft that had fallen from the sky only moments before, “…but they were impressive nonetheless.” She focused on blocking out the horror, and directed her mind towards that which she had to do to eliminate panic in herself and her son. There was no shaking in her voice, only calm and certainty.

“When he met your father, he asked him what he’d do if he ever found himself in trouble. You know — what he’d do if things fell apart. He was a cantankerous man, your grandfather, and I was his baby, and he wanted to say a little something that might scare John a little, to see what he was made of. Well, if that is what he wanted to do, he failed. Your father answered with an old Trini proverb that immediately won over your grandfather. Your father said, ‘When yuh neighbor’s house on fire, throw water on yours.’

“Do you understand, Stephen?” She looked over at her son as they hustled through the city, reading his thoughts as they passed people who seemed to be crying out for help.

“There are times when we need to be good citizens and help others out. But in moments when it is life and death, we should take care of our own. Do you see what I’m saying?” She paused and saw in his eyes that he was doing the best he could to follow. “There is something terribly wrong here, son. I’m not sure what it is, but I have an idea. Now is not the time to question and fret. Just move your feet and keep your head down. We have to make our way to safety.”

Stephen nodded and tried to keep pace as they wound their way through the city. They passed through the crowds and around the puddling of slushy ice water that was beginning to pour into the streets from the numerous fires that sprang up around them. They headed as straight as they could manage past the infernal turbulence that was the city, toward the safety of the bunker in the bridge.

By evening, they had reached it.

From a distance, one could hear the faraway strums of the guitars slowing growing. The distinctive clattering echo of the twang-twicka-twang was matched by the chunky percussion. As the man on the bicycle came closer to the small group of people gathered by the entrance of a parking lot on the Lincoln Highway in Trenton, New Jersey, the group looked up and heard the wailing urgency of the opening lines of a U2 song.

Although they had only moments before been wondering aloud when this waking nightmare would end, when the government would get its act together and deliver food, where the police were in all of this, they happily stopped their grousing for a moment and watched as the bearded, red-haired specter rode up into their midst, and asked if they knew where he could buy some balloons.

“Balloons?!” asked one of the loudest complainers in the group, incredulously. “Have you flipped your gourd, bro? What in the world do you want balloons for? You should be worrying about finding a new coat to replace that nasty thing you’re wearing. And food… you should be worrying about food. And safety. You do know that we’re in the middle of a national emergency, right?”

Looking at the man, they thought they’d sized him up. Perhaps he was a lunatic, flittering along the highway on a bicycle in the snow, heading who knows where. Maybe he didn’t even know, they thought. The red bearded man just smiled and did nothing to dispel this notion.

“Oh, it’s ok,” he said. “I’m not worried about safety. I know how to make myself invisible. But I need some balloons. I’m going to build a rocket ship and float on out of here.” He reached down and turned down his boom box just as U2 was singing about a place where the streets have no name, as if in answer to where he was going. He changed the subject off of himself. “How bad is it out here, anyway?”

They stood together for a moment and talked about the conditions around them, how the grocery stores had been stripped bare since the blizzard, and how the streets had become dangerous in the last few days, and not only at night. One trucker who’d just driven up from Mississippi before the storm told him how he’d run out of gas and his rig had been stranded for a week.

“Yes, well that’s a shame,” the red-haired man said. “It surely is. You know…,” the red bearded man nodded, as if they should know, “…when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he worked by candlelight until it was done.” The red-haired man looked at the crowd of faces around him to see if anyone understood his meaning, but he was met with only blank stares until someone in the gathered group told them all to hush. A woman waved her hand to silence the crowd. She was picking up some news on her radio. The news had interrupted their broadcast to go to live coverage of a man who was going to jump from outer space and parachute back to earth.

“What kind of thing is that to do while the world is going to hell?” someone asked.

“Shhh… quiet!” someone said. “I want to hear this!”

The crowd sat and listened as the radio announcer relayed the sequence of events and watched as a few remaining cars went weaving through the broken down traffic along the highway. The daredevil was plunging towards the ground, and they were all listening in stony silence when there was a loud explosion from a transformer down the street, and the cars and the radio and the red-haired man’s boombox stopped simultaneously, leaving the crowd waiting for a finish to the song that never came.

A groan went up among them. “Oh, what now?!” But the red-haired man did not ask this question. He seemed to know what was coming next, or maybe he just did not care, which to the observer looked like the same thing. He unstrapped the bungees that held his boombox to the handlebars of his bicycle and tossed the hunk of now useless plastic onto a pile of trash stacked near the road and mounted his bicycle and wished the crowd well.

He pushed off from the curb and headed up the highway with his bicycle, leaving the crowd open-mouthed as they watched him slowly pedal through the stalled cars and the snow and pedestrians, weaving slowly in and out until his image grew increasingly smaller in the distance.

And then, true to his word, he disappeared.

Mikail’s guards were now his captors. He had not been “officially” arrested yet. The cease-fire agreement supposedly allowed him twenty-four hours, until midday on Wednesday, to cede control of Warwick and to surrender to the coalition force that now had supremacy in the village. The coalition had neither great leadership nor any concrete plans for how to move forward or deal with the burgeoning crisis. What they had were the Russian Special Forces soldiers, and for now that would be enough.

In Warwick, there was a broad array of emotions; anger, regret, horror, sadness, even hope. This stew of feelings led the people to be weary from the day’s sudden and terrible events, and to hunger for a moment of rest. The coalition held, and the Spetznaz were able, for a time, to maintain an uneasy peace. People stopped battling one another and began to pick through the shattered homes and damaged storefronts. Bodies were being washed and prepared for burial, crimes were being catalogued, and some arrests were being made. There were apologies, accusations, and the promise of recriminations. The prison in Warwick once again held the unhappy losers in a long, grand, and sad social experiment.

“You will be held responsible for the actions of Vladimir and his team,” a coalition ‘advisor’ warned Mikail, as if his control over Vladimir had been anything more than nominal to begin with.

“I cannot be held responsible for the actions of people who have long since gone off on their own and who fail to obey me,” Mikail responded. He was being untruthful. While Vladimir certainly had a mind of his own, the young man was not entirely “off on his own.” Whatever were his private motivations, he was still ostensibly working for Mikail as his team made their way through town, searching for Vasily and the way out.

Just before noon, someone turned on the radio, and the guarded—along with the guards—listened to the world melt down in real time. After a quick rundown of the condition of America, including woefully rapid and undetailed reports of riots, economic collapse, stores being stripped to the very shelf lining, fuel shortages, nuclear plant shut downs, and impotent government responses, the news cut to the story of a German man jumping from a balloon in space.

Mikail was only half-listening to the broadcast, but he snapped to full attention when the radio buzzed and then zapped and then fell silent while simultaneously the lighting failed and the rumble of the generators gave way to a preternatural silence. A smile crossed Mikail’s face just as another messenger came through the door of the gymnasium with a message from Vladimir.

A strange-looking vehicle, something like an ill-considered hybrid between an RV and a highly hardened off-road vehicle, made its way through the winding mountain roads of northern West Virginia. From a distance, the vehicle looked like some kind of transformer vehicle created by Hollywood for a blockbuster summer movie. It was chaperoned by a contingent of black, military looking vehicles, Humvees, APCs, and SUVs. The lead vehicle was a large and heavily armored truck with what looked like a cattle mover or snowplow attached to the front of it. When necessary, this lead truck would push stranded and inoperative vehicles off the road.

“The warhead would have been delivered by a very small rocket,” the driver of the hardened RV said. “The amount of energy used to propel the craft containing the warhead would have been insignificant because the launch platform, the capsule, was brushing the stratosphere, and that means that it almost certainly did not trigger any warnings from NORAD or any of the other early warning systems. It was not a ground based launch. It wasn’t even a high-altitude launch from a Russian bomber…I mean most bombers have a service ceiling of around 50,000 feet, and we’re talking close to 130,000 feet here. And it wasn’t one of these mostly theoretical weapons that might be deployed from a high earth orbit satellite. No. No, this capsule was in the middle area, where no one was looking for it. It was perfect.”

The passenger of the RV stared forward out of the windscreen and nodded his head, but he didn’t interrupt with the questions that filled his mind as the driver spoke. The driver wasn’t finished talking, so the passenger just nodded his head as the man continued.

“The EMP probably will not have knocked out absolutely everything, and it was most likely ‘local’ to maybe a little more than a third of the U.S. It was just a first blow, opening the door for further strikes that will finish the job throughout the rest of the country. I am speculating, of course, but from our figures and the readings we gathered back at the base, I’d say the warhead was detonated high over eastern Ohio. We’d be totally guessing if we tried to declare a yield, but I’d say that more than 95% of the electronics, computer, and technological infrastructure on the eastern seaboard — from Maine to most of Florida, and from the Atlantic to as far as Nebraska, will have been fried. There are probably fires burning out of control in every major city in that area, and the fires will get worse as time goes on because there’ll be no water to dowse them. The trucks that put out fires won’t work, and the communications that control emergency response is now gone, and probably forever. The damage done will make the work of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow look like child’s play.

“The few vehicles that are operating, those that are older and therefore not susceptible to EMP, along with those that were accidentally or purposefully shielded—like these vehicles for example—will stop operating when they’re either unable to move about due to the blockages and mayhem on the roads, or as soon as they run out of stored fuel.” The driver looked over at the passenger and nodded his head, then leaned forward and looked upward through the windshield. “I reckon almost 3,000 planes have crashed, if that gives you any inkling of what’s happened so far today.” He looked back down at the dashboard and then at his watch. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and it all happened in a moment. In a split second of time.”

The passenger looked out at the country road, and, as he did, the old John Denver song about a country road in West Virginia came over the sound system in the RV. His mind flashed to a time not that long ago. Denver had died in the crash of a single person experimental aircraft. Sometimes the irony—or maybe it was the poetic symmetry—is particularly rich.

The man in the passenger seat thought of all those planes falling out of the sky, and realized that none of them were natural. He looked towards the driver, just as the man ended his dissertation on the EMP weapon that had just detonated over the eastern United States. All the while, the voice of John Denver sang on.

The passenger strummed his fingers on the armrest and thought about all those billions of miles of wire that had been strung across the landscape and buried under ground, and thought about how humankind had now hung itself with its own rope. Time had proven, as it inevitably must, that man had strayed too far from the dirt, which is his natural home. Like Icarus, he’d flown too close to the sun, and now he’d had his wings clipped. The forces of spiritual physics, and gravity, and inertia were likely to bring everything back to earth eventually, and it looked like that homecoming was now in the offing. John Denver was singing that he should have been home yesterday.

“So… how did you know? I mean, how did you absolutely know without a doubt that the EMP would actually be deployed, and when it would happen?”

The driver looked over to the passenger and smiled beneath his thick mustache, and his eyes betrayed just the hint of a twinkle that accompanied the smile. “Did your grandmother ever just know it was going to rain? And when she told you to come in before the rain started, did you know to listen to her?”

CHAPTER 17

Tuesday — Afternoon

Vladimir and his team quickly returned to the gymnasium after it happened, interrupting their violent, but fruitless search of Warwick. Vladimir was the first to know something was wrong by picking up on a series of static crackles in the street as they were doing their door-to-door searches. He didn’t know what had happened, but for once the brutish fellow showed instincts that were adorned with something other than mindless force. He’d already sent a messenger to Mikail to tell him that his wild-goose-chase was going poorly and to ask for any further instructions, and now, sensing that something important had happened, he decided that he’d better return to the gymnasium himself in order to see what the power surge had been about.

He was flush from the thrill of the search, energized by the violent power he’d held in his hand, but frustrated that he’d not yet found his target. If truth be told, just at that moment, he was also a bit worried that his power—that one thing he craved so much—would be questioned because of his failure to locate Vasily and the rumored escape route out of town.

As he stepped inside the gymnasium, the doors creaked on their hinges, and he noticed the room had been darkened. He looked down on the swath of light thrown across the hardwood floors. He watched as his shadow preceded him into the space. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and he grimaced as he looked up at the blank round bulbs in the ceiling above his head.

Mikail and his guards were congregated in the center of the gym as Vladimir approached and began to share his report. Mikail and his people, who were discussing where next to search for Vasily, paused as Vladimir brought them up to speed on his failed hunt.

The group of men stood and talked around a table laden with a rudimentary mockup of Warwick, tracing with their fingers several possible alternatives. There was a quiet, scientific exactitude to their conversation, and just as they were beginning to argue about whether two crossing streets had been properly searched, and just as Vladimir was trying to assure them that they had, the doors to the gym burst open and events accelerated.

Thinking that he had more than half of his twenty-four hours left, and planning to use all of them before surrendering, Mikail was quite surprised when the Spetznaz leadership, along with the coalition spokesman, rushed into the gym and arrested everyone among the revolutionary leadership on the spot. “Gentlemen, surrender your arms,” said Yuri Belov, newly elected spokesman for the townspeople. In Russian, the words sounded like an overly harsh insult.

Mikail and Vladimir looked at the array of Special Forces, their guns pointed down toward the ground but their muscles tensed, ready to respond if coercion was needed. Mikail realized that it would be hopeless to resist. He glanced at Vladimir, fearful for a moment that, knowing no other language than power, he might attempt to fight his way out. He raised his hands to waive off this possibility and spread them calmly, as if in supplication. A Spetznaz solider approached and placed handcuffs around his upturned wrists.

The dismantling of Mikail’s team proceeded quickly, in a manner common throughout history to that of all failed revolutionary movements. Those few at the top were held accountable for the actions of the many beneath. Low-level gunmen and soldiers of the Youth Revolutionary Forces were only arrested if they were guilty of some particularly heinous crime. For the most part, the foot soldiers just switched sides. Most of them, in fact, were re-tasked as gophers and servants to the Spetznaz teams and their new coalition overlords.

If it seemed from this ceremonial display that the Spetznaz were now in the control of the people, a quick inspection of the entire gym would have put that notion to rest. At that very moment, the Russian officers in the basement kept up their work interrogating the oldlings, working with battery-powered lights that had been protected from the EMP. They worked their interrogations as if no change in regime had taken place at all, because for them, it had not. They cared not who was nominally in charge, since the interrogation of the old spies, the collection of intelligence, had been the only reason for all of this anyway. Front-men come and go… presidents, prime-ministers, magistrates, even revolutionaries, and they are deceived if they think that their power is anything other than illusory. The Russian agents were preparing their case, laying the predicate for what would eventually come. The broader war could not commence until the Russians knew the names and whereabouts of every Warwickian in Russia. In the Russian homeland, a thorough search through houses, a turning over of stones, and the intensive location of traitors who would be held accountable for their actions would take place one day based on their findings.

Recriminations.

Occasionally, or maybe intermittently, like the pause between swipes of a wiper blade across a windshield in a rainstorm, a body would be hauled up from the locker rooms. It looked like that moment of clarity between the blades, if only one could see it between the drops of rain that otherwise pummeled one’s vision and spread out on the protective glass leaving only an impression of reality. Two soldiers were walking upward on the stairs, struggling, lifting a body bag which they would then carry to the doors of the gymnasium, swaying from side to the side with the dead weight of a new corpse, hauling the contents to be buried in the field behind the gymnasium.

Meanwhile, administrations changed, and new leaders carried on with their elaborate charade.

Mikail, Vladimir, Sergei, and the rest of the revolutionary leadership were marched at gunpoint back up the hill to the prison they’d escaped less than a week earlier. It was a long and humiliating walk for Mikail, but he was not distraught. He was surprisingly reflective and focused.

He’d been angry before, and he still held on to the hatred he now felt for the people who had taken his love, Irinna. He’d also grown angry at Vladimir’s recklessness. He fumed at being played by that idiot Vasily.

Mistakes. Catalogued. Never to be made again.

His anger now gave him purpose and a larger view of what had happened and what was now occurring around him. He looked at the Spetznaz soldier walking in front of him, gun pointed toward the ground, and he thought how only a few hours ago he might have successfully ordered that soldier to fire into the crowd that was now lining the street.

The crowd. Boos and hisses could be heard coming from the mass of Warwickians gathered for the procession.

Mikail felt the red scar on his forehead throb, and he reached up with his handcuffed hands and brushed the hair on the back of his arm across the slope of his brow. He felt his temples pound, and glanced up into the sun. It was hard to imagine that only a week had passed since the Hurricane had ripped through the area. He’d gotten an education in that week. He readily admitted that.

Tuesday morning, a week ago, he’d been a prisoner trying to win over converts in his cell to help his cause. He’d used the time during the storm to convince even Todd, the guard of his cell block, to play along with his plans. The nor’easter had gone through just a few days later, and then there was the breakout and the coup. Now the EMP had been released right on schedule and everything should have fallen into place perfectly. However, rather than be on top and running this part of the operation for the new Russian government, he’d been abandoned by the troops sent to guarantee his authority and position.

Mikail thought about that for a moment as he walked, whether there was anything that could have been done to avoid this. He wondered whether he’d been too bold, too delicate, too reasonable, too extreme. Then he pushed these thoughts from his mind, and was about to turn them toward what came next, when a woman stepped from the crowd and placed herself squarely in his path. He barely had time to notice her and to look up into her eyes when she spat in his face. The crowd roared their approval as a soldier gently guided the woman back into line with the crowd.

In a way, Mikail’s rapid removal from power had been the fourth storm to hit Warwick, once the natural and human disasters were accounted for. If someone had asked him, he would have said that only one of them—the EMP—had been expected. Each of the others had occurred, in its turn, as an opportunity, and he’d merely taken advantage of the situation, using what seemed to be acts of God to hasten plans he’d been making with his secretive contacts in Russia for several years. Now he realized that this storm had caught up with him, and he began to wonder whether there might be some opportunity to be discovered even here. One thing felt certain: as a student of political movements, and a firm believer in the inevitability of his ultimate cause, he was sure that there’d be a fifth storm. He just didn’t know when or where it would strike. He determined within himself to be ready when it did.

The glint of gunmetal contrasted against the white of the snow, and Mikail’s brown boots made an indentation in the slushy, worn path just beginning to melt in the heat of the sun as he trudged up the hill. He noticed the heavier footprint of Vladimir, who was being marched along a few paces in front of him, and wondered what was going through his comrade’s mind, before he returned again to his own thoughts.

The coalition was going to seek his execution, this he knew. And if he was right about them and their need for blood in exchange for blood, the recriminations would start soon. Still, he had no fear. The newfound clarity in his thinking gave him a sort of certainty that his position and purpose in this world had not passed. Failure and humiliation can be crippling to most people, but Mikail wouldn’t trade what he’d gained from this experience for anything in the world. He was actually thankful that his efforts had failed, because success would have only left him naïve and foolish and weak. He knew now that when the time came someday for him to take power again — because even in that moment, he was determined that such a day would come — he would have valuable insight and experience that would suit him to the task. He rolled his shoulders in their sockets, feeling a hump form along his back, and he stretched and looked toward the ground and the melting snow and thought of the coming spring.

As they passed through the fences and slid back up the icy walks towards the prison, Mikail sought to put together all of the different and disparate pieces of information he’d gathered while he was in charge.

There was a way out, and it looked like Vasily, of all people, had been the one to find that way out. But Vasily would not have been working alone. Someone was helping that stupid boy. It simply had to be. But who could it be?

As the prisoners were escorted into the facility, the wide double doors swung outward into the courtyard, casting a shadow on the open snow, like two giant jaws opening to devour a prey. The prisoners stepped shamefacedly into the same corridor that they had emerged from only days before in cocky self-assurance. Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei walked into the darkened corridor and focused their eyes to the compact blackness. They were led down the maze of hallways toward the pod of cells that would be their new home, the locks tumbling and the pins clicking with each successive door they stepped through, until they were pushed into their chamber. The thick prison doors swung open and closed with the expected thuds and clanks. All of these familiar sounds served to focus Mikail’s attention on the problem at hand.

He was thinking through the situation more linearly now, and walking into the prison had a way of clearing his mind. Thoughts he should have had, and memories forgotten in the clash and fog of war, were now occurring to him in crystalline clarity. As they were left alone in their prison cell, he turned to regard his larger comrades and noticed for the first time that his friends were white with agitation.

“Vladimir Nikitich, did you check through the family ties as you searched the village?” Mikail asked his aide, as the three shuffled into the corners of the cell.

“Vasily had no family, Mikail Mikailivitch.”

The young men stood in the dark of the cell. It was the same cell that had once housed the stranger named Clay, and old Lev Volkhov. The surroundings and the ghosts of the place caused Mikail’s mind to clarify even further. As the lock snapped on a door down the hall, he turned to Sergei and smiled, and then turned to Vladimir again with the smile still spread out on his face. “Not Vasily. Remember, there were two men housed in this cell. Vasily left here with two things, one from each of his cellmates.”

Mikail moved very close to Vladimir, so he could see the large man’s reaction, and as he spoke again he moved even closer. The cell was in almost complete darkness, and only a faint light came in through the glass window, criss-crossed with chicken wire. His voice was very low, and it was tinged with a certainty that it had not had for a few days. “Our little friend had a backpack that he received from the traveler named Clay.”

“This we know, Mikail,” Vladimir answered, “but we were unable to find Vasily or the backpack.” There was a slight tremor of fear in Vladimir’s voice as he said this, and that almost indiscernible hitch spoke loudly and clearly to Mikail. Mikail knew that it was his proximity, and his certainty, that was frightening his friend, a man who previously had shown no fear at all. He paused, to let that fear take its full effect.

“The other thing he had, comrade Vladimir Nikitich,” Mikail said, as he slid another half step toward Vladimir, “the other thing he carried with him when he left this very cell, was a plan. You see, old man Volkhov had a nephew. I’d not thought of it until just now, and perhaps it is too late, but I think that it is not. Volkhov’s nephew lives in a very peculiar house, in a very peculiar spot in the town.”

“How is that, Mikail?” Again, the tremor in the voice. Vladimir shuffled his foot on the floor, as if looking for someplace to go, but there was nowhere else to go.

“His nephew is Pyotr Bolkonsky,” Mikail said softly, “and Pyotr Bolkonsky lives on the very edge of town. In fact, his house is probably closer to the perimeter fence than just about any other house in Warwick.”

“I know that house, Mikail. It is the one with all of the raised gardens and strange landscaping. But we searched it and found nothing.”

Mikail’s right fist caught Vladimir in an uppercut to the solar plexus that doubled the larger man over just as Mikail’s knee came up and hit Vladimir directly in the face, breaking his nose. Vladimir fell to the ground and Mikail stomped him brutally until he was unconscious and bleeding.

The violence happened so fast, and was so unexpected, that Sergei shrunk silently into the darkness until his back hit the far wall of the cell. He saw only shadows, and heard only the grunts that came from Vladimir until he saw that the bigger man was out cold on the ground. Even after what he had seen in the last few days, Sergei was shocked at the brutality of the beating.

When it was over, Mikail stood over Vladimir like a bulldog over a bone and spoke to the unconscious man in flat, low tones. “You are correct, Vladimir. You found nothing. And no one. I had not wondered, until just now, where all the dirt came for those peculiar gardens and all of that strange landscaping. But now I have wondered, and I think I might know how our comrades, Vasily and Pyotr Bolkonsky, have escaped Warwick.”

“I left my glasses in the tunnel,” Cole told Peter privately. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I took them off before we left, perhaps when I was using the privy. I didn’t even think about them with all the excitement of leaving the tunnel. It was dark. I couldn’t see anyway. What can I say, Peter? I’m sorry.”

“Well, you cannot go back for them, Cole.”

“I must. I’m not heading out into this broken world as a blind man.”

“Are we to risk everyone’s lives, even your own sister’s life, because you forgot your glasses? Don’t be a fool!”

“Well, I feel somewhat like Gloucester without them.” He looked at Peter, to see if the older man understood his reference. Sometimes a man makes references to prove to others how clever he is, and other times he makes them because they give his life meaning. For Cole, it was almost always the latter. Before he could decide whether Peter’s frown indicated understanding or not, he continued, as a way of explaining. “I’ll be helpless without them, and every one of you will be at risk if I cannot see, so don’t sit there like a king, leering at me.” Nothing. Maybe a half-smile. “I have to go back. And besides, we need to know what’s going on back there, anyway,” Cole said.

Peter shook his head. “It’s too big of a risk. I can’t let you go.”

“Listen, Peter, if Lang had not come back through town in his heroic attempt to save people, I wouldn’t be here anyway. And you wouldn’t be worrying about me, would you? I’m not going back into town, friend. I’m just going to the tunnel. I can be back in a few hours’ time.”

Peter wanted to argue with him, but the older man knew that Cole had made up his mind. He tried to recruit Natasha and Lang to help him dissuade Cole from the trip back to the tunnel, but they’d both, surprisingly, been on the younger man’s side.

“He’ll need his vision if he’s going to survive long out there, Peter,” Natasha said. “Who knows when, or if, such glasses will ever be available again in our lifetimes? We will need every tool we can muster if we’re to make it to safety.”

Cole looked at Peter and saw the seriousness in his face. “Please, Peter.”

Peter sighed in resignation. “Ok,” he said. “But if one person is going back, then we all go back.”

Cole protested. “No. I’ll go alone. It is my responsibility and I will manage it.” He was respectful, but he persisted. “I can see fine during the bright daylight, and it would be silly and foolish for all of us to put our lives in danger just because I was stupid enough to forget my glasses. It was my mistake, and I need to fix it.”

“But if we all go, Cole, then we can protect each other and cover for one another if something happens.”

“If something happens, Peter, then that means that things have gone horribly wrong, and we will have the whole group at risk.” Cole knew enough to appeal to Peter’s leadership feelings and his responsibilities. “I know you would admit that, in a worst case scenario, you would rather lose one unimportant member rather than the whole group. Be reasonable. You have Natasha and Lang to think about. I need to go alone.”

Lang chimed in with his agreement. He also believed that it was a bad plan to travel back as a group. They were more likely to be seen with four of them trying to make it back into the tunnel, he suggested. Peter considered the case and saw the reasonableness of this conclusion.

“I see your logic, Cole, but please do not say that you are unimportant. I don’t think that you are unimportant to your sister, and you are certainly not unimportant to me or Lang. I’ll allow it, but you should at least wait until tomorrow. It’s late in the day now, and it’ll be getting dark soon.”

“Ok, Peter,” Cole said, smiling.

“And if you don’t make it back, I’ll be very upset with you—and with myself for giving in to you.”

“You’ll see me again, Peter. Never you worry. In the end, you’ll see that this is much ado about nothing.”

“Yes, well, let’s hope. So far it seems more like a comedy of errors, with very little to laugh about.”

Cole smiled at this, and gave his friend a thankful squeeze on the shoulder. He looked at him and suddenly felt overwhelmed with the warmth of emotion.

In short order, it was arranged, and on mid-morning the next day, Cole started off on his retreat back to the tunnel.

Wednesday — Morning

Mikail stood by the door in the darkness and waited, staring single-mindedly out of the glass window. He’d not said many words to Sergei through the night, and when Vladimir finally came to and began to stir, there’d been an unspoken agreement that the issue had finally been settled once and for all. It is common with violent men like Vladimir that, like chickens or dogs or wolves, once they are put in their place, they become loyal followers pretty quickly. It is the bully that is the pose in such men. The truth of the bully lies in their cowardice.

As the silence built up, piling upon itself in the cool of the early morning, Mikail’s certainty and resolve grew. He turned to his comrades and barked out orders.

“When I make my move, you’ll know what to do,” he said, brusquely and without emotion.

“Yes, Mikail,” the other two men replied as one.

Although he was not there when the traveler named Clay, Lev Volkhov, and Vasily had broken out of this same cell, he imagined that their planning had gone much differently--and their plan had failed. He was assured in his own mind that his plan would not fail.

“I will expect you to move quickly. I will not…” he paused, to let the implication of that word sink in, “…tolerate failure.”

The two larger men looked at him and nodded their understanding.

About thirty minutes later, there was a rattling of keys and the door slowly opened. A young man, one of Mikail’s recent Youth Revolutionary Forces, stepped into the room with a tray of food. Before he could even say a word, Mikail pounced, raising his hands quickly to knock the food trays upwards, throwing hot soup into the youth’s startled face. There was only a short squawk from the young man as Mikail took his pistol from its holster and clubbed the boy unconscious with it. He fell like a noodle to the floor.

Mikail walked calmly out into the day room, ignoring the two armed Spetznaz soldiers who were lounging somewhat carelessly near the front door of the cluster. They saw him, but his calm demeanor and the purpose in his gait threw them off for a few beats. In that interval, Mikail grabbed a cushion from the sofa and, turning quickly and gracefully, he shot the first soldier through the cushion and in the face. The second soldier began to lift his machine pistol but it was too late, and Mikail’s second shot burst through the soft padding and hit the man in the temple. Both soldiers, professional and experienced special force operators, hit the ground without firing a shot.

By the time Vladimir and Sergei came peeking out of the cell, Mikail was already taking the uniform off the smaller of the two Spetznaz men.

“Vladimir, this other one, he’s big like you. Put on his uniform. We’re going to escort Sergei out of the prison like he’s one of our prisoners.”

“But… what if we’re stopped, Mikail?” Vladimir asked, as he began to undress the larger man.

“We won’t be. Not if we walk with purpose. But if we are, we’ve got to fight our way to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house. That is our destination and we have to make it there no matter what.” He looked at the two larger men to make sure they understood. Then he could not help the boast that was welling up in his heart as he saw in their eyes a new servile feeling growing in theirs.

“I don’t think we’ll be stopped. I just disarmed three armed men by myself, and two of them were highly trained specialists. I assume that you fellows can keep up with me, can hold your own in a fight, if the need arises.”

God in heaven, looking down, would have seen three school boys on the playground, two larger bullies, all muscle and violence, and another, smaller young man full of ruthless intelligence. The pendulum had swung back and forth during the course of these men’s lives, and the weight of fists and sinew of muscle had never been far behind those shifts as they’d bullied their way across the streets of Warwick.

Now as they stood and made their plans to escape, Mikail turned away from his threatening physicality which had surprised his larger friends in the night, and now he turned to attack their pride in the way that only he, among the three of them, had ever been able to do. He called on their masculine brutality because he knew that they might need it for a fight, and he served as brain to their brawn, and focus for their force.

Mikail looked at the two of them, all potential and potency without direction. He spoke with an urgency that allowed no contradiction.

“We have to get to Pyotr Bolkonsky’s house.”

And with that, he turned the dialectical force of common sense inside out and gave the point to ideology when used in the hands of capable leaders. He wielded his intelligence like a pen to the awful sword of their brutality.

Words… speak louder… than action.

Mikail placed the handcuffs on Sergei, loosely, so he could slip free if need be, and the three of them stepped out into the corridor.

Friday — Morning

Now Peter was in a very bad mood. Two days had passed, and Cole had not returned. They had every reason to believe that he’d been captured, and, if he’d been captured, then he’d probably been either shot or taken back into the village by the guards.

The two days living in the metal shed at the water plant hoping for Cole’s return had passed like weeks.

The three friends had no news from the outside world except the gossip heard on the shortwave radio the night before, and now, on Friday morning, the day of their planned departure, they faced the fact that Cole might be lost to them.

Natasha was distraught, as might be expected, but she was stoic nonetheless, and only occasionally broke down in whimpers, or felt the hot track of a tear as it escaped from her eye and dampened her cheek. Silly sibling rivalries aside, she loved her brother very much, and she still hoped that, by some miracle, he was still okay.

While they waited, they worked. They’d practiced making fires and sharpening knives and building shelters, and over the past forty-eight hours, Peter had spoken to them of tactics to be used while traveling. Between anxious moments when he’d looked out the door of the shed and back into the woods towards Warwick, he’d shown them hand signals they could use to communicate with one another without words. He’d talked to them over and over again about the horrors they would likely run across, and how they must stick together and constantly be focused on their survival.

Peter showed them the most basic rudiments of orienteering and shared some of his knowledge of tracking and woodland survival, and during most of this time he had maintained an attitude of patient instruction. But now Peter was no longer patient. He was growing angry and resentful at being so helpless to assist Cole. On this Friday morning, he seethed in silence.

The night before, after they finished their training and practice, Peter risked pulling the second radio from the ammo can in order to see if they could receive some information from the outside world.

They put the batteries in the radio, and for a long time they were unable to find any stations at all that were broadcasting. As the night wore on, and as Cole still did not appear in the shed, the buzzing of nothingness coming through the radio only amplified their feelings of sadness and fear.

Just before midnight, as Peter was about to give up on the radio altogether, he brushed past a very weak broadcast on the shortwave band. It was nothing more at first than a weak modulation as he swept across the dial, but as he tuned it finer, he got a slight signal, and as they leaned in and listened closer, they made out a man’s voice in amongst the electronic hum and static. They all sat up with excitement as they heard the voice speaking through the atmospheric interference.

The voice said that it was broadcasting from Montana. They could barely make it out, but the male voice relayed information that he said was derived from Ham radio reports from around the country and the world. The reports, the voice said, were spotty. Only radio operators from as yet unaffected areas, or those who had thought to shield their equipment, were still broadcasting.

Anger could be detected in the solitary voice, as the man reported that before and after the EMP attack, U.S. military units had moved unilaterally and without provocation against “innocent” militia and patriot groups. The voice speculated that the whole worldwide collapse had the distinct feel of a concerted and well-developed plan. “I am certain,” the voice said, “that this catastrophe could not have proceeded without the approval and planning of a central elite somewhere. It was too organized, over too great a distance, involving too many, to be simply the actions of a rogue few.”

Ham radio broadcasters reported that, subsequent to the first EMP over the east coast, several more high-altitude nuclear devices were detonated over the Western United States. America, the voice said, had retaliated against Russia, China, and North Korea with EMP strikes, but there had yet to be any reported low-level nuclear explosions, in the U.S. or anywhere else. So far, and for some reason, it seemed that the exchange had remained limited—directed at electrical and technological infrastructure. “It seems that governments have decided to cut off the head of the beast first,” the voice said. “Who knows how long that will last? You know… before they go to work on the body.”

As the voice on the radio faded and eventually the signal was lost, Lang remembered what Volkhov had said to him. He’d predicted that actual physically destructive nuke detonations over cities wouldn’t happen for two weeks.

Two weeks, the old man had said. That’s how long you’ll have. Then the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key-codes and fail-safes and guarantees, it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet on that. They want war, and there will be war.

That had been the night before. It had seemed a happy, if disconcerting, diversion as they waited for Cole to return from his trip to the tunnel. The news was not “happy,” but the fact that there was news was a good happenstance.

Now, early on this Friday morning, Peter stared angrily outwards from the door of the metal shed, and wondered how much longer they could wait. He was realistic. He understood that Cole had probably run into trouble with someone from the village. Perhaps he’d been seen by a guard at the fence line and been captured for interrogation. Whatever the case, Peter had told Cole that they would have to leave on Friday morning, with or without him, and Cole had agreed to that as a factor in his decision-making.

Peter cursed himself for letting Cole return in the first place, realizing that the younger man had probably traded his life for his need to see clearly. If youth could but see in the first place, Peter thought, but curses aside, he knew he could only wait a minute or two longer before they would have to abandon Cole and head off on their own.

At first, it sounded like a growl rising up from the throat, tiny and imperceptible, but with a slight menace even in its faintest whispering. The low hum magnified and grew louder and louder still, until it became obvious that something was coming and was nearby, and their initial reaction was to find somewhere to hide inside the shed. Lang, Natasha, and Peter heard the growl like one hears a hostile dog. The sound was muted, but angry with promise. They approached cautiously to see whether the source was aiming for them. They all stepped forward to the edge of the shed’s door, and there, in the space of the light that streamed in through the door, they saw the drones buzz by in formation, five of them flying low and near the ground, seemingly cognizant, as if guided by some inner intelligence. They noticed the drones’ silent shadows trailing along on the ground, rising up over the mountain, flitting through the trees, along the brush that peaked its head out of the snow, along the snow itself, as the shadows climbed, like the drones that cast them, up to the top of the mountain in the distance, and then disappeared in the horizon and the blue of the sky.

They were headed, it seemed, towards Warwick.

Friday — Night

On a low rise, just outside of Mt. Vernon, Virginia, an odd looking RV, flanked by black militarized vehicles, sat parked with the windshield pointed towards the northeast. It was fully dark and there was no moon to be seen, and the area in view of the RV, usually twinkling brightly with city lights and traffic, was mostly darkened. Mostly. Fires glowed all around the D.C. metropolitan area, and the white and red armies of vehicle lights that usually spread out like ribbons along the highways and byways of the darkened urban area did not march up and down as they had for more than a century.

There was only one area that was lit up as if nothing world-changing had happened, and it was to this area of illumination that the driver of the RV, a man named Clive Darling, pointed as he turned off the radio and flipped a switch on the dash that killed the array of blue and red and orange lights coming from the console. The darkness of the night invaded the RV and gave emphasis to the little lighted city in the distance.

“Andrews Air Force Base,” Clive said in his Savannah drawl. Something in the way he said it made the words sound like the most important thing that anyone had ever spoken.

The two men seated in the RV were surrounded by what amounted to a Faraday cage. The wire box that encompassed the driver and passenger area of the RV was grounded to the frame and, using proprietary wiring and chips and breakers, the RV was virtually completely shielded from any possible electromagnetic pulse.

In the distance, as the two men looked out over the little lighted island in the inky sea of darkness, an aircraft with blinking lights pushed back from a hanger and was being taxied to one end of the runway by a large tow truck with lights burning so brightly that it looked like a spotlight falling down from the sky.

“Somebody important is making a break for it,” the driver said, his words smooth and melodic. “Some group of influential people.” Somehow the way he spoke the words, he spit out the syllables so that the “flu” sound made the word sound like a virus. “People on that plane are partially responsible for all of this,” he said, indicating the darkness all around them. “And now, they are getting out of Dodge. Does that seem right to you?”

The airplane was released from the tow and started forward down the runway, picking up speed as it lumbered, until it evened off in a smooth flow of motion, and the front wheels left the ground as the pilot pointed the nose of the craft skyward.

“I don’t know what you’re asking me, Clive” the passenger answered, “but I suppose that the powers that be will always cover themselves. That seems to be the way it goes. It’s always the regular people that suffer at times like this.”

“Well,” the driver said, “not always.” He then reached up on the dashboard and flipped another switch that instigated a deep and roaring whush, heard instantly, coming from the back of the RV. The whush turned into an unearthly electric hum and grew until the vehicle itself vibrated and shook as if it were in an earthquake.

The plane left the ground and banked hard to the right, turning out over the Chesapeake Bay until its lights, the only lights in the sky save those from the heavens, began to rise into the night’s deep black. Just as the RV seemed like it might vibrate itself into pieces, the driver flipped up a switch cover and punched a red button. At that moment, the heavily electric hum turned into a sound not unlike a large wave hitting a beach, and there was the feeling of a flash as the lights on the base blinked out.

And as they did, so did the lights on the aircraft.

Moments later, there was a fireball over the horizon. The night sky briefly lit up like a strange reverse snowglobe, or a sunrise, or a rainbow, bursting brightly in a flash of light that rose up against the dark as the plane plummeted into the bay. The brief burst of light in the sky quickly disappeared as the plane’s cabin broke apart and the pieces and jet fuel and the cargo and the people slowly sunk under the murky depths of the water.

“Insufficient shielding.” Clive Darling pronounced with certainty. His drawl was even heavier now. “We warned them about it for years, but they didn’t want to listen. They just wanted to play politics, thought somehow they could reason with an EMP.” Clive reached down and turned the lights back on inside the cabin of the RV, and reached into his shirt pocket and took out a small note pad. He opened the pad and quickly made a few marks in it while the passenger beside him sat and looked out over the nighttime sky.

“What can you do, you know? You can’t reason with a man who has his reasons…”

In the distance, the fires around Washington, D.C. burned out of control as the driver of the RV flipped a few rocker switches on the dash, then started up the vehicle in earnest. The sound of John Denver’s voice once again came over the speakers, singing a song about how sunshine on a man’s shoulders can make him happy, how sunshine looks lovely on the water… The passenger looked out over the scene before him and thought that those words were true.

Clive Darling thought so, too. He softly began humming those words to himself as they pulled away into the enveloping night.