The Unit (26 page)

I’m fully awake and too nauseated to fall back into dreams, so I pull out our last MRE entree. It’s Tuna in Pouch.

“You should eat,” I say.

“I can’t. I’m sick. It’s why I woke you up.”

“Oh no.”

Scott flinches when I say that, but then he leans over and holds the chemical light to my face.

“You’re sick, too, aren’t you?” he says.

I turn away from the light. My gums are tender. My head itches and hurts at the same time. The skin on my face itches like I’ve been in the sun too long.

“Oh, God,” he says.

I know I should pray. I should say a prayer and then tell a mother’s lie to reduce my son’s worries, but the horrible unfairness of everything overwhelms me. I don’t want to communicate with the one who allowed this to happen. If I prayed, it would be like paying homage to a murderer. But I’m still a mother, and I’m still alive.

“You should eat,” I say.

I don’t have any heat tabs, but I push the MRE entree at Scott. I wish I could find a way to make it special for him, set a table and light candles, but I don’t have a way to do that.

Scott takes the meal, but he drops it. The dirty snow has drifted over us and I can’t tell if the wind is still blowing. We’re wrapped in our stinking vinyl nest that might end up being our shroud, and there’s a dead little girl behind us, and the green glow of the snaplight makes everything thick and slow. If radiation was visible to the naked eye, I’m sure it would look like the hazy green syrup of a chemical light.

I pick up the meal again. I remember the prayer my father used to say at dinnertime, “Dear Lord, please bless this food to our bodies.” I always thought it was a strange thing to ask for. Why
wouldn’t
God allow our bodies to digest the perfect meals my mother cooked? Wasn’t my father insulting my mother’s cooking when he said that prayer? I never really understood it until now.

I give the meal package back to Scott. He takes it this time. He opens it and dips his finger into the tuna and puts it in his mouth and immediately retches. When he’s finished, I stretch my coat over us and reposition our nest. We’re back to back, and there’s enough heat to allow us to sleep. The bus is our submarine, our snow cave, our irradiated time capsule, and I hope there’s enough oxygen to keep us alive until the storm passes.
Lord bless this oxygen to our bodies.
I hope He will, because the sleep is on us now. Scott falls asleep. I listen to him breathe in and out. He’s had something to eat and he’s warm and safe and sleeping, so I close my eyes and go in search of my dead mother’s kitchen.

It gets warm in the RV. We smell bad, but for a while the warmth outweighs the bad things in the world. We dry our clothes. We’re sick for most of the night, but the nausea finally passes. I’m very weak now. Dad looks like hell. We don’t want to leave the RV, but the boys will be after us soon, and the crazy idea of leaving is our only sane choice.

We go back outside just as it’s starting to get light. The snow is only dribbling from the clouds, and the new snow doesn’t smell so bad. When my eyes adjust to the light, I can see that most of the new flakes are white, and the new stuff is burying the dirty stuff. I can finally admit to myself that the dirty snow is
fallout
. I might as well call it by its true name.

The wind is dying down, but it still cuts right through my coat and into the core of me. Dad says we have to walk a few miles while it’s still snowing, so we won’t be as easy to track. He’s carrying the silly little gun he found, but he’s wearing socks on his hands instead of gloves, and I don’t think he can pull a trigger that way. Anyhow, it won’t be long until his fingers are frozen again, and then he won’t be able to shoot anyone, even if it’s the thing he wants most to do in all the world. Maybe when the boys find us, their hands will be frozen, too, and nobody will be able to shoot their guns. And if that happened we’d have a footrace, maybe. I would pull ahead, and Dad would fall behind, and the boys would get him. Yeah, that’s exactly what would happen, so never mind.

He’s in bad shape. He’s running on the invisible energy of love and hate. I walk behind him and I catch whiffs of sweat and smoke and puke and blood. His scalp wound opened up again. When the morning sun makes the overcast glow, I see that his coat is spattered with blood. His head is leaking again and it’s leaving pinkish marks in the snow. We’re leaving a trail that even a blind person could follow. We have to stop to rest every few minutes. The boys will be on us soon, but I won’t run away from my dad.

It isn’t long before I feel their eyes on us. I can’t see them yet, but I know they’re coming. Dad must feel it, too, because he picks up the pace. We’re not moving very fast, and we’re out on the open plain. I feel naked. We’re fighting through snow that’s up past our thighs. It’s like one of those nightmares where your legs and feet don’t work very well, and there’s something big and fast coming after you. It’s like we’re about to be lynched, which probably isn’t far from the truth. But there’s an upside to all this snow, too. It’s too deep for the boys to use their trucks to run us down.

I’m starting to freak out, so I push my thoughts somewhere else. If it hadn’t snowed, we probably couldn’t have gotten away. But if we had escaped on a clear night, we’d either be in the woods, where Dad could maybe lose the boys, or we’d be shot dead. Dad might say that the snow was a gift from heaven, but he’d only say it to get my mind away from the fear of what it contains.

Mom would most definitely say that God sent the snow, radiation and all, and that it’s His will, so there isn’t anything to be afraid of, because no matter what our fears might be, God’s
will
is the thing that matters. It used to drive me crazy to see the way she gives her life and her freedom over to her imaginary friend. But now I’m almost jealous of the way she can stay so calm when shitty things happen. I know she’s not naturally a brave woman, and sometimes I’m jealous of her ability to accept whatever happens, the good with the bad, because she thinks it’s part of some great and mysterious plan, so there’s no point in being afraid of what is Meant To Be.

We hear the boys behind us. They give a little whoop when they come out onto the plain. There’s a house in the distance. It’s a white house with green trim. We’re breathing hard. Dad’s eyes look kind of wild. He glances at the abandoned cars and trucks all snow-covered in the freeway, and I think he’s trying to figure out a way to use them to keep us alive, but he shakes his head and keeps up the pace. We walk toward the house. It doesn’t seem to be too far away, but it takes us half an hour to get there.

When we get close, Dad is breathing like a woman in labor. His face is bright red and he’s not sweating as much as he should be. I’m getting pretty close to the first level of exhaustion I used to reach during a gymnastics workout. There’s a tickle in my lungs from the cold and I’m not getting quite enough air, but I know I can get past this first level and push hard for a good while more.

We make it to the house. There aren’t any trees or shrubs around it. Dead birds are scattered on the snow in the front yard. Most of them are crows. The breeze lifts their blue-black feathers up and then puts them down again. The windows of the house are dark and they have a layer of dust that’s turned to grime. The house looks like someone wants it to look abandoned. There’s a picket fence, but the snow is deep enough to allow us to step right over it. We stagger to the front door. We don’t have time to knock. The boys are running now. They’re only about a quarter mile back, and they’re howling like wolves, but they aren’t shooting yet. They’re running on top of the snow, so they must be wearing snowshoes. The farmhouse is dark and there’s no smoke coming from the chimney and none of the snow at the door has been shoveled.

The door is half buried. Dad digs down to the doorknob. He tries to turn it, but it’s locked. He puts his shoulder into it, but it’s a strong door and he’s too weak to break it down. He goes to a window. It’s the front window of a breakfast nook. I get a flashy kind of fantasy of us sitting in the breakfast nook on a sunny morning. We’re all there, Mom and Scotty, too, and we’re eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee and sharing sections of the newspaper, but the vision pops, and I’m looking at the sorry reflection of us in the window.

The snow is so deep that Dad has to bend down to look inside. He reaches out with his stupid little gun and he’s about to break the glass when a man appears in the window. Dad takes a shooting grip on the gun. He points it at the man and looks into his eyes. I can’t see Dad’s expression, but there’s probably enough desperation in it to tell our story. The other man’s face is pale, but his eyes are steady. His hands are empty and he keeps them in plain sight. He shakes his head at Dad. He says, “Go around to the back,” and his voice is muffled. I get the idea that he’s more offended that Dad was about to break one of his windows than he is from having a gun pointed at his face. It’s more like an annoyance. He motions and says it again, “Go around to the back,” and his voice is strong, and it doesn’t sound like the voice of an enemy.

He could be a serial killer and it wouldn’t matter; we’d still do what he said. We push through the snow. The patio at the back of the house is shoveled and sprinkled with rock salt. The man opens the door for us. He’s fifty or sixty, a big man, more muscular than Dad, but he’s clean-shaven and dressed in clean Levi’s and a tucked-in button-down shirt, and his dark hair is slicked back.

He holds up his right hand, and we stop. His left hand comes up. It’s holding something long and thin, and Dad almost shoots him, but he’s only holding a broom.

“Gotta get that contaminated snow off you before you come inside.”

Dad puts the revolver in his waistband, grabs the broom, and brushes me down. He’s coughing and bleeding and weaving on his feet, and the boys are coming fast, but he does his usual thorough work. My brain is screaming for him to hurry, to not be such a perfectionist for just once in his life.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I grab the broom and give Dad a quick cleaning. I move toward the door, but the man shakes his head. I brush more snow from Dad, but apparently I don’t do a good enough job, because the man comes outside and grabs the broom and finishes up.

When we go inside I have to pass very close to him. He smells like old-time grooming products. He smells like my maternal grandfather used to smell, like Brylcreem and Old Spice, and I hope he’s half the man my grandfather was. I hope he’s half as wholesome and kind and generous and regretful as my Vietnam War–surviving granddad.

The man leads us through a laundry room and into the living room. Sandbags are stacked against the walls and around the living room windows. There’s a pile of sandbags in the middle of the living room floor. The man lights a kerosene lantern, and lifts it like a ghost who wants us to follow it. He leads us through a door and down a narrow staircase and into the cellar. He holds the lantern close so it lights our faces. I remember the exaggerated way my grandfather used to talk. You look a
sight
, he would’ve said.

“Name’s Bob Wickersham,” says the man.

Dad’s still whooping in big breaths of air, but he manages to say our names. Wickersham nods at us.

“Your radiation sickness, how bad is it?”

Dad doesn’t have the breath to answer.

“We were sick last night, but I think we’re getting better,” I say.

Wickersham opens his mouth to say something more, but the boys start shooting. They shoot out some of the upstairs windows. Mr. Wickersham winces, then calms his face.

“Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” he says. “Don’t feel guilty about gettin’ me involved. Those boys knew I was in here, sure enough. This fight’s been comin’ for a long time now.”

Mr. Wickersham’s voice is kind of high for such a big man. He has the local country accent I recognize from the other times we passed through Weed and Yreka.

“To tell the truth, I’m glad it’s finally comin’ to a head.”

He pulls back a black curtain that stretches across one wall of the cellar. He does it like he’s on the stage of an old game show, showing us what we’ve just won. He reveals a big gun safe. He works the combination and opens it. He takes out something heavy. It’s a machine gun, I think. Dad gives a low whistle and it surprises me because I don’t have any control over my lips, so how could he?

Mr. Wickersham asks Dad if he knows anything about M-60s, and Dad tells him he was a Marine and he knows plenty about M-60s. Mr. Wickersham smiles in a mean way that probably doesn’t look like his usual smile. He pulls another machine gun from the safe.

“I had me a gun shop, once. Got me a Class Three license from the Feds, and all. When it seemed like the world was goin’ to hell, I collected a few things I thought might come in handy.”

He pops open a green metal can and pulls out belts of ammunition. He gives a belt to Dad, and Dad wraps it around himself. Mr. Wickersham takes a belt for himself and they stand all clattering and clinking in their new bullet shirts. Dad’s still weaving back and forth. Mr. Wickersham says, “Let’s get this show on the road, huh?” His voice sounds almost happy. He’s either a psychopath or he’s scared shitless and tired of waiting for the boys to attack, and so he’s showing off his manly, dark humor.

“I’ll take the front; you take the back.”

“Sure thing,” Dad says. His voice is rough, and it tells me that he’s holding back a ton of pain.