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.