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.