The Unit Read online

  I’m not happy to be walking in the same direction as the ambushers, but there’s no choice in it. I pick up the pace. I glance back over my shoulder and their faces show resentment, but they keep up. The kids were angry at me at first, for not letting them walk a straight line down the road, but they don’t say anything now. We only have what we have, no more and no less, and we have no choice but to walk our careful rays and obliques, hoping they lead to something better.

  We’ve gone maybe five hundred yards when we see the bodies. They’re below us in the road in their large, medium, and small sizes. I don’t want to look, but I have to look, because we need to scavenge, too. Susan and Scotty cover me from the trail. Melanie moves to my side as if she’s made up her mind to go with me. She’s standing stiffly upright and her fists are clenched. Her mother helped her with her hair this morning, and she shakes her head, and her red ponytail writhes against her back. She’s never been one to shy away from doing what needs to be done. She looks as if she wants to find survivors and nurse them back to health. She looks as if she needs to find someone alive, to somehow give the gift of life in the midst of all this taking.

  “Trust me,” I say. “They’re worse than dead.”

  I don’t have to pretend that I’m pleading. Her eyes are forest green, darker than her mother’s, but flecked with gold. When she feels strongly about something, the flecks are very bright, but I don’t look away now. I know it could go either way, my daughter deciding to obey or defy. I’ve never been good at predicting the outcome of our battles of will. I try to put my arm around her but she sidesteps and squats and I stand like an idiot, looking down at her, wanting to make things better. I stand with her until my silence is too pathetic to bear, then I turn to the task at hand.

  I scramble down into the roadcut, my knees bitching all the while. I tell myself I’m checking for survivors, but I hope I won’t find any. I feel naked when I step onto the freeway. Dark smears descend from the crown of the northbound lanes. Blood on shaded asphalt is the color of blackberry jam. I look for the wild woman who screamed her righteous cry into the face of death, but there’s no way to pick her out of the motionless crowd. The bodies are fanned out like blown-down timber, dead adults shielding dead children. They’ve been shot to pieces, nineteen bodies, all present and accounted for. The coats and shoes and socks of the adults are gone. The pockets of their pants are turned inside out. They’re traveling light now, without the blessings and nuisances of their corporeal husks.

  The monsters have won again, if one can make the assumption that mortal sin will no longer be punished. The east-side drainage ditch is lousy with 5.56 brass. I pick up three of the empties and put them in my pocket. Maybe someday I can present them as evidence. I can’t deny that I’m pissed off enough to kill. If I were in charge of this sector, I’d insert Force Recon teams into these hills so the ambushes would go the other way, and peace would break out due to a general lack of freelancers.

  I look down and see scraps of bubble wrap from the airdropped package, but the package itself is gone. There’s a group of bloody footprints. I follow them. They lead to a big ponderosa pine. A body is stretched out, its head propped against the base of the tree. It’s one of the ambushers; I’m sure of it. It’s a big bastard and it has a single, center-mass shotgun wound and two gold coins weighting its eyes. There’s another bullet hole in the center of its forehead. The body has a baby face. It’s the body of a big kid, and it’s smiling.

  There isn’t a blood trail from the road to the tree, only footprints and spatters of blood. I guess the bastard got hit on the road and walked under his own power to the tree. The shot between his eyes came later. I remember the final pistol shot we heard, and it could’ve been this headshot. It’s a reasonable assumption and I tuck it away.

  The body’s hands are knuckle-down at its sides, and there’s a pint bottle of whiskey lying atop its open right palm. It’s a bottle of Jim Beam. I pick it up. It’s three-quarters full. I unscrew the top and take a sip to rinse my mouth. Maybe I’d meant to spit it out, but I don’t. I swallow and a small warmth flares around the edges of my soul. It brightens the sky and makes my shadow stronger. I take a bigger drink and it’s one good thing in a world of bad ones.

  There’s an open pack of Marlboros on the dead ambusher’s chest. I drag a pack of MRE matches from my pocket and light up. Holy God Almighty and the Angelic Host, it feels good to stand on the road and smoke a butt. I get a headrush and smoke the cigarette down to a stub, then I use my knife to lift the gold coins away from the dead boy’s eyes. I use water from my canteen to rinse them and then I wash my knife. The blood leaves dark fans on the road. I pocket the coins and whiskey and smokes, and then I turn to search the bodies of the victims. I try not to look at what’s left of their faces. I run my hands into their pockets, feeling the last warmth of their flesh. My hands are thick with coagulating blood, but I force myself to check them all. My anger makes me strong, and I don’t want to puke up the whiskey, so I don’t.

  All I find is a shot-to-pieces folding knife and a bloody pack of Beeman’s gum. I can’t waste any more water, so I walk to the drainage ditch and scrub my hands with cold mud. I find a vine maple and wipe my hands on its leaves. I walk uphill to my family. I don’t have any food for them or news of the outside world, but the whiskey is a warm gift inside me, and damned if I’ll feel guilty about it.

  I get back uphill and I hold up the coins and the smokes. I’m breathing hard. Susan’s nose twitches.

  “Anything else?”

  I shake my head. I start to feel guilty despite myself, but I’m committed now, so I put on a poker face.

  “Give it to me,” she says.

  I pull the pint bottle from my pocket. She takes it from my hand and I let it go. Her face is hard. She did a stint in rehab two years back, and she’s still on the higher path, and she still has zero tolerance. She lifts the bottle. She measures the fill level with addiction-calibrated eyes, then passes the bottle to Melanie.

  “We might need this. I’ll know if any is missing, and I’ll know if it’s watered, too.”

  Melanie says okay. She says, Don’t worry, Mom, then she gives me a look of disappointment to add to the other looks of disappointment she’s given me over the years.

  They’re doing the right thing, of course. A group of Marines or soldiers in this situation would pass the bottle around, a lucky find, a small vehicle of escape, but Melanie correctly puts the bottle in the hip pocket of her jeans.

  Susan

  We enter a small clearing. It’s very cold. I feel more nude than naked. The sky is a mixing bowl of death, but I think up less unpleasant names for its colors. It’s sepia with swirls of russet, and our faces are golden in its light.

  Jerry walks us south from the ambush. He seems to be towing us against our will. He rarely looks back at us, and I wonder what would happen if we stopped, Jerry chugging away like a locomotive unhooked from its burden and purpose.

  The weight of my pack makes my shoulders burn. I bear it. I’ve borne worse. The underbrush is thin but riddled with poison oak. I point it out to the children. I whisper, “Leaves of three, let it be.” They roll their eyes. It’s long been their most common response to my words, and I’m glad they can still do it.

  We skirt the poison oak as best we can. The trees are gray-green and I remember how I used to love walking beneath California pines at dusk, flying at low altitude, hushed and safe, and the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. I try to keep my eyes on the trail, but my neck aches from turning and looking back at Melanie and Scott. Their faces are tight and their eyes have a bulging look. It’s very slight, and maybe no one else would notice it, but I do.

  I make eye contact with Melanie. She looks away, but then she looks back. I think she’s trying to share her horror about our now, and thereby dilute it. I’m grateful that she’s reaching out, and I return her gaze with the full strength and power of motherhood, and just for an instant I’m no longer pretending t
o be strong.

  Scott sees that I’m not watching where I’m going. He says Mom in that serious way of his and he points to a branch in my path. I’m about to walk straight into one of nature’s impersonal ambushes. I push it aside with the barrel of my shotgun. I whisper a thank-you, and it’s for my son and my daughter and any supreme being within earshot, in gratitude for everything that hasn’t been taken from me. I tell myself to be thankful for what I have, even though the molecules of my childhood home are probably circling the globe as fallout, and my own children are on foot in a place where people get shot and robbed, but nobody gets buried.

  But still I try to appreciate the Northern California forest, with its half-serious cover and dry, open places. It’s nothing like the land of my upbringing, western Oregon, where Douglas firs reach into the clouds and nurse the devil’s own blackness below. The underbrush in Oregon will take your skin off—blackberry patches and sword ferns and tangles of vine maple and stinging nettles and God knows what else, nature’s barbed wire.

  Here, there’s some underbrush and a bit of poison oak, but it’s only for decoration. It’s as if someone prepared the way for us, and provided places of cover and concealment stretched out before us like stepping stones, and I can’t help but think that He did it, in His infinite wisdom, as part of His perfect plan.

  We walk for two hours before I decide to say something. I catch up with Jerry. He’s walking fast again, but I was a race walker and I can catch him, even though he was a Marine. I pull alongside. I nod back at Melanie and Scott.

  “They need a break.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  He winces as soon as he says it. Maybe he wasn’t trying to sound bitter, but it’s too late.

  “Am I annoying you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  He stops. He wipes his face on his coat sleeve. I can smell the tobacco on his breath and the alcohol evaporating from his pores. He reaches for my shoulder, but I slip away.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  I know what liquor does to him. When he’s first had a drink, he’s the sweetest man on earth. It’s as if he wants to share the pleasure he receives from intoxication with all the world, but it’s all downhill from there. Either he drinks himself wild, or he stops drinking and grows sullen and resentful. I know the highs and lows of it, because for many years we were a perfect match, drinking-wise.

  We move into a field of low boulders and slip out of our packs. Melanie and Scott sit down. They’re both in good shape, but they’re not sure we’re doing the right thing, walking out. They think we might be better off holing up and waiting for the government to save us. But Jerry and I both know better. We’ve seen enough failed federal disaster responses to know that we’re better off walking into a future of our own choosing.

  Our children, in their new adulthood, don’t know whether they should trust us. They’ve passed beyond the automatic rebellion of adolescence, but they move with reluctance, each step a dragging doubt. I don’t want to make things harder for them, so I fight down my urge to quarrel with Jerry. I keep my back to him. I make a show of taking out MRE crackers and a packet of pasteurized cheese spread.

  We chew and wash down the thick, military nourishment with drinks from our canteens. A red-tailed hawk circles above. A breeze gives the pines a steady sigh. A large tree branch cracks and falls to the ground. It hits with the sound of a falling body. We reach for our guns. We stand ready, our canines gleaming, our nostrils flared, until we’re sure we’re not under attack. We put down our guns and sit until the fringes of our sweaty clothes take on a hint of ice glitter, then we resume our march.

  The first terrorist bombs were detonated two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. Back before people became so untrustworthy, we heard news reports on a survivalist’s radio. The survivalist’s name was Roger Romain. Nobody thought he was paranoid, under the circumstances. His eyes were blue and sometimes they sparkled. He carried a pistol in plain sight and shifty people came to him for advice about guns and tactics and food storage techniques and improvised explosives, and he must’ve been in survivalist heaven.

  Every morning Roger Romain used his old Underwood manual typewriter to print out what he’d heard on his radio. The government claimed its investigation had uncovered all the answers. Al Qaeda terrorists had manufactured the bombs with enriched uranium from North Korea. The bombs were thermonuclear devices of Pakistani design. They were smuggled into the country in the holds of oil tankers. They were loaded onto trucks and detonated at ground level. All the facts were so quickly and clearly laid out that nobody believed them. But we believed the government reports about its overwhelming counterstrikes overseas, because the clouds steadily grew thicker and swollen with death.

  The cycle continued. We hit them. They threatened us. One day, Roger Romain nailed this note to a tree:

  Seattle, Portland, San Francisco? Scratch them off the list.

  And then people went all to pieces. There were plenty of guns and not enough food, and so here we are.

  But just after the cars stopped, I thought that everything would be okay. Jerry would retire, as we’d planned, and we’d take cruises to Alaska and Mexico and the Caribbean, dancing and dining and walking alone to private cabins that held no kids but plenty of time. The sky was clean and sweetly blue before everything circled back around. I couldn’t believe anything bad had happened. There weren’t any mushroom clouds and the trees were picture-postcard green, but Jerry was adamant.

  “Only one thing could’ve caused this.”

  “There’s only one thing that can make cars break down?”

  “All of them? All at once? Yeah, pretty much.”

  Melanie said she’d watched a show on the History Channel about mega-disasters. She said we could’ve been hit by a small gamma-ray burst, flying at us from outer space, but her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything when she said it.

  “I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “And listen, what we need to do now is watch the people around us. We need to be ready to defend ourselves when they start going bad.”

  “You’re such an asshole,” Melanie whispered, and I was thinking it, too. Jerry winced, but he didn’t respond. We sat without talking, nursing our glares, and I didn’t want to believe that people couldn’t be trusted.

  In the beginning, the people were fine. It was as if we’d all arrived at a party that didn’t have enough parking places. We pulled our coasting machines onto the shoulders of the freeway and we set about helping one another, families emerging from minivans and SUVs, mothers handing out snacks, fathers helping their sons and daughters into their Christmas coats. So many little girls in red and green. Boys in jeans and holiday sweaters. Mothers with freshened lipstick. We were all somehow formal, even the truckers, who slicked back their hair and tucked in their shirttails and offered to help people with their luggage.

  All the voices and introductions and smiles. It felt as if we were waiting for something, a church service or a wedding. It caused me to remember scenes of my youth, my mother dressing for a Christmas service. The rustle of her dress. The smell of her perfume and her industrial hair products and the hasty precision of her walk. Our clear, formal purpose. It was then and now and all those times together, but we were all so worried that our politeness seemed like a sweet act of bravery.

  I told myself I wasn’t worried in the least. The walk to Yreka was long but cheerful. Our numbers grew as we neared town. People streamed into that freeway-elongated town from north and south. Melanie and Scott were perfectly well-behaved. They were no longer merely pretending to be adults. They joked with small children and took turns helping burdened mothers carry suitcases, blankets, boxes of formula and juice packets, and even the silly things that didn’t work anymore, worthless digital cameras and iPods and video game players. Christmas presents were opened on the road to placate the children, and the freeway was littered with ribbons and bright wrapping paper. We joked about our early Ch
ristmas. We didn’t have to merely make the best of it, because it was a lovely day and we didn’t believe otherwise.

  Jerry was carrying something wrapped in our traveling blanket. I learned later that he was carrying three guns: the shotgun, his Beretta pistol, and Scott’s .22 rifle. The long guns were disassembled and rolled into the blanket we’d brought to keep our children’s legs warm. The pistol was loaded, and Jerry carried it at the small of his back. All that sunlight. All those jokes and smiles. All that solidarity and politeness and kindness. Jerry knew it wouldn’t last, but he chose not to rain on our parade. He smiled and pitched in with the carrying and sharing and encouragement. He tousled Scott’s hair and said we were some pretty fine-looking refugees. We laughed because we didn’t believe we were refugees. But Jerry was watching everything and everyone. He’s not a naturally trusting man. Not since his time in Beirut. He was armed and ready during that entire walk, and I don’t hate him for it.

  He’s hell-bent to get us to a safe place. I can see the fight in his brown-black eyes. He holds his rifle in a natural way that I can never quite match. He walks very quietly, just as he must’ve walked on the training patrols of his youth. This must be a nightmare for him now, to be older and softer and walking here with us. And for the first time ever, I’m glad he served in the Marines and went through the trials and tribulations of Beirut. It’s one of the reasons he’s suspicious and quick to anger and prone to binge drinking, even in the best of times, but everything has a purpose, and I’m a fool if I don’t believe it.

  The road climbs again and cuts deeply into the mountains. A rock wall rises on one side, and a cliff falls on the other. Jerry has no choice but to take us onto the road. It feels fine to have hard asphalt under my boots, and we make good time until we come to a tunnel. It’s a hole of darkness set in an impassable ridge. A few scrubby pines grow at uncertain angles around it.