The Unit (10 page)

He changes course and takes a good look at my rifle.

“Nice AR. Can it shoot like a machine gun?”

“That would make it illegal.”

The kids get a big kick out of that. They’re all armed with military M-16s and M-4 carbines. They stand behind Bill Junior and have a good laugh, but Bill Junior doesn’t laugh.

“
Nothing
is really illegal anymore, is it?” he says.

“Some things always are.”

“Yeah? Maybe you’re right.”

“I hope so. When people can do anything they want, some of them tend to do the wrong things.”

“But what if they’re only hungry? Is it still wrong to take what you need to live?”

“I’m still working on that one.”

The kid nods and relaxes a bit more. I notice the shoes. Gray walking shoes. All of them.

The big one offers me a cigarette. I shake my head no. Bill smiles and says, “Naw, Luscious, you don’t get old by smoking that shit.” The kids are smiling, but there’s a predatory sharpness to it, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m standing face-to-face with the monsters that shot up the families on the interstate and the people at the farmhouse. I’m a father and a career man and I’ve learned how to keep emotions from my face, but I feel rage rising inside me. I remember the road ambush, and the woman’s high scream, all the horror of loss and the true promise of killing it held. I don’t say anything else, because the time for talking is over.

I take mental snapshots. The posture of each of them. The way they hold their weapons. The weapons are filthy, and that tells me something. The kids are wearing serviceable coats, but they’re stained dark in places. They’re wearing layers of clothing, torn and dirty. They’re dirty. We’re dirty and the whole world is filthy and stinking, as far as I know. Long hair and as much beard growth as their ages will allow.

One of the new ones looks like a teenaged Jesus. He has hard booze on his breath, and not from last night. The smile on his face contains the opposite of mirth. All of them are smiling and it won’t be long now.

They seem to think my silence is a sign of weakness. I can see it in their eyes and in the way they’re moving around me. Three more of them come into the store. More gray walking shoes. They stand close to me. Too close. I look over at Susan and give her the look.
Get ready.
She is ready, God bless her. She gets a good cheek weld on the stock of her shotgun and she dials in on one of the new ones. The kids broaden their wolf smiles, and I back up two steps to improve my position. All the fights of my life coalesce into this one.

One of the kids comes at me with a horizontal butt stroke. He’s very fast. I backpedal, but he whacks the butt of his rifle across my face. I roll with the blow, and I take a glancing hit. I go down on my back, but I manage to get the rifle up between my knees and I go to work. I’m in the cocoon of it, muzzle blasts going like flashbulbs, and I have no choice but to serve my purpose. I hear only the voice of my own weapon. Susan and Scott are firing, but I don’t hear their shots or the shots coming at me. I don’t know if I’m hit, but it doesn’t matter because I’ll keep fighting until I win or die.

Lord help us. I fire the shotgun and work the pump, and my life is boom, pump, boom, pump. I’m shooting and some of the boys are hit and some are running. Jerry’s on his back but he’s banging away with his black rifle. All but two of the little monsters are running away. The two that stay are hit and hurt, but they’re on their feet, holding their rifles out like lifted crutches and trying to shoot back. Their faces are twisted and older, as old as they’ll ever be, and they’re shooting and we’re shooting and they’re wilting and it’s horrible, horrible, horrible.

Bullets pull at my clothes, but I ignore them, and then the two boys are down and I’m outside, chasing the others. The leader and the big kid and a half dozen more of them make it into the parking lot. Boom, and another one is down. Three of them peel off and get behind a minivan and start shooting back at me. Rack, pump, rack,
click
. Running out of ammunition is like running out of oxygen. I kneel in the parking lot and pull shells from my coat pockets. My hands are clumsy but I force them to slide four fat shells into the shotgun’s loading gate. Bullets smack the ground around me. I make the shotgun ready to fire. I raise it to my shoulder, but then I hear a snapping sound and feathers fly up from the sleeve of my down jacket.

My left arm stops working. It drops of its own accord to my side. The shotgun swings down and hangs in my right hand. My breath is stuck inside me. I feel very small. When I try to move my arm, it’s like lightning hit me there, just below the elbow. I can’t move it and I don’t want to move it, but then Scotty comes out of the market, firing the pistol. One of the boys lifts his head from behind the minivan. He has brown hair and wide brown eyes and his thin lips are moving. He says something and the three boys stand up and point their black rifles at my Scotty.

I don’t remember loading the shotgun. Did I load it? But then I’m up again. I still have one good arm. I walk wide around the minivan to get a better angle. I’m on a mission to kill roaches. I’m bringing insecticide to a hive of vermin, but they keep the car between us. Scotty comes around the back of the minivan and shoots one of them in the chest. I hold out the shotgun with one hand and shoot the thin-lipped boy. The shotgun bucks itself out of my hand and Scotty’s pistol is out of ammunition, but the last surviving boy runs away, the gray soles of his shoes flashing left right left. He run across the road and out of sight.

I want to sit down on the asphalt. I want to hold still for a while, but I find the energy to pick up the shotgun and get my boy back inside the market.

I’m sick. There’s blood everywhere. I knew Mom and Dad and Scott could be assholes sometimes, but
damn
.

Mom and Scott come inside. One of Mom’s arms is bleeding down over her hand and onto the floor. There’s nothing on her face. No fear or anger or horror. Nothing. She’s pale as death, and she walks over to me and runs her good hand all over me. It grosses me out, but then I realize she’s checking me for wounds, and I let her. She starts to do the same to Scotty, but Scotty pushes her away and says he’s fine, dammit, just give him some space.

Dad is sitting up. His face is dripping blood. When he sees Mom he smiles, and his teeth are bloody.

“Are we okay?”

“We’re alive,” Mom says.

“Are you okay?”

“Everything’s okay now.”

“Let me look at that arm.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Yes, it is.”

Mom sits down hard on the floor and squeezes her eyes closed. Dad goes to her.

“Help me get her coat off,” he says.

I kneel and unzip it. I get warm blood on my hands. Mom hisses when Dad rolls the coat down over her shoulders. She screams when he pulls the sleeves from her shot arm, and then she passes out. I catch her head and lower her face to the floor, where it’s bound and determined to go.

Dad tells me to get some first aid supplies. I stand up and look down. It’s the wrong place to look. The bodies of two boys are on the floor. I make the mistake of looking at their faces, and my stomach goes crazy. The store smells like burned gunpowder and blood and shit. I run to the back of the store. I get sick. My ponytail swings around and Mom isn’t there to hold it back. I barf up the mass-produced food that brought me such happiness only a few minutes ago.

I have no idea what will happen to us. I have no idea what we deserve.

Maybe I shouldn’t be happy, but I can’t help it. We stood face-to-face with the little shits, and we’re still alive. I know for sure that I centerpunched one of them. My 9mm slug must’ve hit his off switch, because he dropped like the sack of shit he was. No tears for him. Not from me.

And Mom was a savage. She did what she had to do, and more, but she looks like hell now. I feel guilty for pushing her away when she was checking me for wounds, so I go to her and put my coat under her head. I want to give her a hug, but she wouldn’t know about it. I’ve never felt so happy and so sad. I hold back my tears, but Dad squirts a few. He pats me on the back, then he goes to work on Mom’s arm.

I look out at the parking lot. Nothing is moving. No moans. Only bodies. Life’s a bitch, right? But I think we’ve earned a right to stay here. We should take whatever we want. Maybe camp here for a few days.

I pick up a bottle of booze and crack it open. It’s Crown Royal. Dad watches me take a sip, then he holds his hand out. I pass him the bottle and he takes a big mouthful, swishes it around, and swallows it. He gets that look in his eyes, the one that gives away the pure pleasure he gets from liquor, as if it’s okay that the world has gone to shit, just as long as he can still get his drink on.

I pick up Mom’s shotgun. I pick up her bloody coat and pull a handful of shells from the pockets. I top off the shotgun, rack the slide, and stand behind the store’s cash register. The Beretta is loaded and riding in the small of my back. I probably look like the last guy standing after a takeover robbery. But I can cover Dad and Mom from here, and I can also cover the door, so it doesn’t matter how I look.

Mom opens her eyes. Dad offers the bottle to her. She shakes her head but she doesn’t give him any shit when he puts it to her lips. She takes a sip and then another one, then Dad puts down the bottle and cuts her sleeve away. He pours whiskey over the tiny entry wound and over the bigger exit wound, and wipes the blood away. Mom’s arm is floppy and loose. It’s broken. Mel brings a bunch of stuff from the first aid section of the market, and Dad goes to work with it.

Mel comes behind the cash register with me and grabs a bottle of vodka from the wall of booze behind me. She rinses her mouth and sets the bottle on the counter. She spits and it splatters on the face of one of the dead fuckers. Her pale face goes green, and she runs to the back of the store and does her yerching thing again.

“No need to feel sorry for these cum stains,” I say. “Mel?”

She doesn’t answer, but I hear her crying, and I don’t understand it. Myself, I feel like I’ve just hit a big lotto. Maybe later I’ll feel guilty about this shit, but right now I’m very happy—so happy that the word “very” doesn’t describe it. We’re alive and none of us got killed and we took some bad people out of the world and we have all this stuff. If Mom hadn’t been hit, there wouldn’t be any downside at all.

I take another sip of whiskey. It goes to my head, but it’s not just the booze that’s causing every hair on my head to celebrate.

I’m very tired. I start going over everything that happened. I think I’d be feeling a lot better about myself if I’d have shot more of them. My brain won’t stop playing it back to me. If only. Why didn’t I? What if? Next time I’ll have to shoot straighter, and sooner. Those thoughts go through me again and again until I want to lie down and go to sleep. I want to get wasted on whiskey and go to sleep and dream about nothing at all.

I’m tired as hell, but Dad has work for me to do. Blood keeps running into his eyes, and he asks me if I can bandage him. He has a deep cut above his right eyebrow. I pour booze over it, and the red-gold shit runs all over Dad’s face and over his lips, but he doesn’t try to drink it. I dry the wound with a paper towel. Part of the paper sticks to the blood, and it’s like a huge shaving cut. I put a big white bandage over it, and wrap it with tape. I wrap the tape all the way around his head, and it’s just above Dad’s eye, so it looks like an eye patch that missed its target.

Dad takes the pistol from me and makes sure it’s loaded. He gives it to Mom and she braces herself against a pyramid of motor oil and covers us as we drag the bodies out of the store.

Blood trails. I’ve never seen a real one until today. Not all blood trails are the same color. Some of them are strawberry-colored. The worst ones are the color of blackberry jam.

I don’t look at the faces. I don’t feel sorry for them, but I don’t hate them either. They lost and we won, and it’s as simple as that. We were in the right and they were in the wrong, and now they’re dead. Life’s a bitch. I don’t look at their faces but I’m curious about the wounds. Maybe I watched too many TV shows about crime labs and medical examiners. Maybe I just want to know how well our guns work on live targets.

We drag them feetfirst. Their shirts roll up when we drag them and they show off their new decorations. Mom’s shotgun really messed these dudes up. Her buckshot gave them zits from hell. But it’s the little holes from Dad’s rifle that are the most interesting. Tiny holes in front. Pinpricks. Icepick wounds. But the exit wounds are the size of lemons, tangerines, baseballs. He’s shooting hollowpoints. I know my little .22 wouldn’t do anything like that. The .22 rimfire is supposedly the Mafia’s weapon of choice, but I’d rather be carrying something that blows chunks out of motherfuckers.

We go after the other two bodies behind the minivan. The dude I killed with the Beretta has straight black hair. The one Mom shot doesn’t have a face. We drag them over with the others.

I gather up the kids’ guns. All four of the dead guys had rifles, but one of them is different. It looks like Dad’s AR, but with a shorter barrel and a collapsible stock. That’s more like it. I grab four loaded magazines. Dad sees me with the rifle. He holds his hand out and I give it to him. He points at the rifle, but I can’t take my eyes away from his bandage.