The Unit (24 page)

“I’m sorry,” Pastor Jim says. He picks up a bar towel and wipes a drink puddle from the bar. “Sacramento was a great town and, being a religious man, I’ve always been partial to its name.”

Mom sputters or coughs and Pastor Jim holds out his hand to her. She looks confused for a second but then she pushes her mug at him and he fills it with coffee and hands it back.

Five guys come downstairs. They’re carrying long guns. One by one they hand their weapons to Pastor Jim. He stacks them behind the bar. One of the guys is my age. His hair is short, like the jarhead haircut Dad wore in the Marines. He sees the whiskey bottle on the bar. He motions to Pastor Jim for a shot, and Pastor Jim pours him one.

“Life’s a bitch, huh?” the young guy says to me.

“It’s not so bad right now.”

“Yeah? Is that your mother beside you?”

I nod. He chugs down his beer.

“Nice-looking lady. My mom’s over there.”

He turns his back to the bar. He waves a hand at one of the tables across the room, but I can’t tell which lady is his mother.

“It’s kinda funny. She used to run her own business. That café across the street? She made the best chili in Nevada. Nobody hardly ever ate the crap they serve in here.”

The guy gets a weird smile, like he’s crazy or he’s about to get into a fight. He leans in close. “But that’s all over and done with. Right now, my old lady is one of Pastor Jim’s whores, and she’s not his favorite whore, either, if you know what I mean.”

The other guys who came downstairs close around the young guy like magnets to steel. The young guy smiles really big and turns to face the bar. Pastor Jim reaches out and snatches the shot glass from his hand.

“Why not try to be friendly, Sam?”

“Oops. I guess you didn’t tell ’em what’s goin’ on here.”

I put my mug on the bar and move closer to Mom. Pastor Jim’s face goes blank, but it’s a lousy poker face. He’s killing mad. He nods and three of the upstairs guys grab the Sam guy, one on each arm, and a huge dude grabs Sam by the shirt and twists it until the buttons start to pop. Sam is yelling something about “You’re no more God’s prophet than I am.” He says, “Phony, phony bastard,” and Pastor Jim’s hand flicks over the bar and backhands Sam in the mouth.

The other people stay at their tables. They look down and around and anywhere but at the action that’s happening. Some of them look at each other and some of them shrug.

Sam takes the pastor’s knuckles hard across the mouth. A line of blood runs down from his lips to the tip of his chin and drips onto the floor, but Sam smiles and asks for another whiskey. I like the guy, then. Pastor Jim smiles back at him and pours another shot, but I get the impression he’s granting Sam a last wish. He pours shots for all the upstairs guys and they belly up to the bar, all but the big guy, who stays close behind Sam. Pastor Jim nods and the big guy puts a meaty hand on his belt knife and clicks open the retaining snap.

I bump my shoulder against Mom and she takes the hint and we slide toward the door. We try to move without seeming to move, but it feels like we’re standing on a stage with a spotlight on us. The people at the tables see what we’re doing, and they look like they’re desperate to tell Pastor Jim, but they don’t say anything. They make weird expressions and point their faces at us and a fat man in coveralls goes into a fake coughing fit that turns his big cheeks red, but Pastor Jim’s attention isn’t on us.

We back away until I can put my hand on the doorknob. It’s cold. It’s kind of dark in the saloon and kind of light outside, and I hesitate to open the door, but then Mom wraps her hand around mine and we turn the doorknob together. We shoulder the door open and fall outside and it’s like we got pulled into a big snow globe, because the stuff is falling like crazy all over us. It’s the weirdest snow I’ve ever seen, because it’s gray, mostly, with something like charcoal in it, and it smells like a crackhouse fire.

We run up the street and turn into an alley. We take a side street for a while and then we get ourselves completely lost in the gray blizzard. We hear shouts and swearing and a few wild shots, but we’re gone, baby, gone. The gray snow is blowing and we can’t see anything, but we manage to jog onto the highway and north out of town. I’m scared shitless, and it sucks to be unarmed. We can’t see more than ten feet in front of us. The road has ditches on both sides and that’s how we manage to stay on it. We slow to a fast walk, then a slower one. I’ve never been this cold before. I don’t know how many degrees below zero it is, but it’s a lot. We seem to walk forever, and maybe it’s only all in my head, but the snow all of a sudden is up to our ankles and then it’s up to our shins and then I don’t know how deep it is. We push our feet into it and through it, walking until walking in the open would be a death sentence, even if there wasn’t any radiation in the snow.

Mom is praying. She’s praying straight into the storm and we stumble onto something man-made. It’s a hollow thing sticking up like a yellow shoebox in the middle of the road. We stop and kick our boots against it. I lean down and clear away some snow and pound my frozen hand against it. It makes a hollow sheet-metal sound. I brush away more of the dirty snow, and my hand is smeared black, but I start to dig.

It’s an overturned school bus. Mom yells a prayer of thanks into the wind. The snow is drifted against everything that hasn’t blown away, and it’s a miracle we found the bus instead of walking straight past it into frozen hell. The bus is lying on its driver’s side, so we dig until we find the passenger door. I push against the door’s long hinges but my frozen hands can’t make anything happen. I pull and push and Mom pulls with me, but the door won’t open and I’m starting to feel warm all over. I know it’s not a good thing to be warm now, but it feels pretty good. I tell Mom I want to lie down, but she doesn’t hear my voice in the wind.

So I do lie down. I curl up on the door and wipe away the crappy snow and I look through a window into the interior. Mom lies down, too, and wraps herself around me. The snow is burying us and we’re kind of warm but then I get an adrenaline rush that makes me stand up. I’m about to pound my head against the glass when our combined weight causes the door to move. The door opens a crack and I put my hand in the crack and Mom helps me and we use our weight and the leverage of our forearms and the last of our energy to make the crack big enough, then we fall into the bus. We’re maybe only prolonging the inevitable by falling out of cold death and into dark purgatory, but it feels good to be out of the wind.

The man on duty that night is one of the boozers. He’s about fifteen and I call him Dog, because he gets a really funny hangdog look on his face when he realizes that he’s chugged down all the booze in sight. When he knocks on the door of my motel room, he’s only slightly buzzed. It’s the armpit of the night, and I answer the door with the Ruger .44 held behind me.

Dog tries to stand up straight, like a fake soldier standing at attention in a movie, but he’s swaying back and forth.

“They took off,” he says.

“Who did?”

“The girl and her old man.”

I let the Ruger hang down beside my leg. Dog tries to keep a straight face, but he’s practically pissing himself. He stands at attention and I think he’d sell his mother for a bottle of Jim Beam, but I’m cool with him. I don’t tax him or have him whipped, and he’s grateful as hell. He says it was on account of the snow. He says he’s sorry. He says that if there’s anything he can do for me, he’ll do it, and I tell him I know he will.

It’s snowing outside. The bonfire is smoking, or something, because I’m about to puke from the smell of it. I’m not in any hurry. I get back into my warm bed and it feels good to think about what I’ll do next. I’m pissed, yeah, but part of me is happy to have something fun to do. Dog is still hanging around my room and I tell him that we’ll give the rabbits a good head start before we do our thing. I tell him we’ll be like tigers playing with rabbits, and we’ll have more fun if we give them a little more time to run. He says okay, and he looks relieved, but when I tell him not to talk about it to anyone, he looks scared again, and that’s okay with me.

I get up early in the morning. Everything is covered with something nasty. It’s the snow. It stinks and it looks like it came out of the sky’s asshole. I get the men up, walking through the stinking snow and whooping it up to get the show going. I put together a crew to shovel walkways to the firepit.

The morning crew uses gasoline to get a fire going. I tell them to make something special for breakfast. Lots of kids who end up in juvie have experience in the food industry and it comes in handy sometimes. The men on breakfast crew do a kick-ass job of it. They get eggs from the chicken coop and some milk from our new cows and they use some of the hippie cheese to make us omelets.

The snow smells like shit, but we eat our hot omelets and drink our strong coffee to get ourselves going. When I finish my breakfast, I light a cigar, and the men who have smokes light up with me. I feel like a rich man. My stomach doesn’t feel so good, but then it mellows out. Some of the men barf up their breakfasts. I don’t say anything, because either it’s their own damned fault for drinking too much last night or the snow has radiation in it—and there’s shit-all I can do about that. Anyhow, if we’ve only got a few days left to live, we might as well do what makes us happy.

My stomach cramps up and some of the men run back to their motel rooms. I spit for a while, but then the sick time passes. We get mostly better, and the men pretend to be all worked up about the hunt. Before they can start bitching about their little tummyaches, I give a direct order. I tell them to make snowshoes out of whatever they can find. Luscious divides them into teams, one team to get stuff and another team to make the snowshoes. They use hacksaws to cut metal from cars. They use hand drills to bolt together frames from the seat brackets of SUVs, then they tie on laced strips of upholstery, then they tie their creations to their boots.

By the middle of the morning, the sun shines strong enough through the overcast that we can almost see our shadows. There’s too much snow for our trucks, so we’ll be carrying everything on our backs, our food and shelter and weapons and ammo. Four of the men are too sick to go with us. I tell them to stay, and to post a guard while we’re gone.

The others load themselves up like pack mules. They walk all hunched over, like they’re trying not to shit themselves, but they don’t bitch about anything. They’re like dogs before a hunt. It’s like they changed from apes into human beings, over thousands and thousands of years, to do just exactly
this
.

She hasn’t let me hold her hand since she was four years old. We walk carefully into a blizzard that smells like fire. We have a new enemy now, and we shouldn’t be breathing it into our bodies. I unzip my coat and tear off a strip of the lining and wrap it around Melanie’s nose and mouth. It’s thin protection, but it’s all I can give. She lets me do it, and she waits while I cover my own face. Then we walk hand in hand, as if I’m a new father again, and she’s still learning the trick of walking in wide-open places. It’s like we’re crossing a huge parking lot together, exposed to the threats of the world, and trusting only each other.

There’s not enough wind to make a Hollywood-style blizzard, but visibility is less than ten feet. It’s a weird dreamscape and it causes me to doubt that we’re really here, and free. I listen for shouts or gunfire, but I only hear the sound of the wind and our breathing and our feet shushing through the snow. I’m full to the brim with adrenaline, and I feel sick to my stomach, and the pain in my head is throbbing at different beats than the pain in my ribs.

I pray for wisdom and luck and protection from alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. But I’ve done too much praying lately and I don’t want to wear out my welcome on high, so I give it a rest. There’s no telling which way we’re traveling. Our only chance is to find the road and try to figure out our north from our south. But no. This isn’t about escaping anymore. We need to find shelter, no matter how close we are to our enemies. I’m tired and I let my mind drift into smartass territory. I pray for Him to guide us to a hotel that has a roaring fireplace and an open bar with hot coffee drinks and a buffet table piled high with hot chow. I pray for a bubbling hot tub and maybe a jazz quartet with a stand-up bass and a vibraphone and a clean hollow-body guitar and a wicked technician on the skins. I try to smile and I hope God is laughing with me, rather than at me, but there’s no way to tell.

My skull feels like the shell of a dropped hard-boiled egg. I walk for minutes at a time without knowing which way we’re going. My stomach cramps with nausea, but I hold my gorge back with the undependable power of my mind. Melanie seems to be okay. She stumbles sometimes, and it’s not her normal way of walking, but the girl has been through things I don’t want to think about.

I feel bad for her, because she must think I have a plan. She’s trusting me to lead us to safety and I can’t let myself stagger, and mostly I don’t. The snow makes the air feel warmer, but that can’t be true. I don’t let myself trust the warmth that seeps up my arms and legs, closer to the core of me.

After a long, unreal time, I walk into a mile marker. I brush the snow away to get a better look. It’s a white sign against gray snow and it has a black “5” on it. I have no idea what the number represents, but I know we’re standing next to the highway. I pull Melanie along faster, her frozen hand in mine. She follows me without comment or complaint, and that starts to worry me, and then I walk straight into an invisible wall. But it’s not really a wall. It’s the aluminum skin of an RV. I feel along the flank of the great metallic beast until I find the door. It’s not locked. I pull it open but then I close it again. I try to brush the snow from Melanie’s clothes, but it feels like I’m smearing mud into them. We’re contaminated, but it’s too damned cold to do without clothes, so the best I can do is pray.