The Unit (32 page)

She’s looking straight at my face. My freak-show face. I turn it away from her and we head to the center of town.

I put on my best pace. The snow in town is packed hard, and I’m really moving. Mom has trouble keeping up. I slow down. I can’t wait to see Dad and Melanie. I can’t wait to see the little assholes who brought us so much hell, and return the favor. I believe some of them are alive, and I want to see them through my rifle scope.

But Mom is still skinny from the radiation, and I’m not exactly in the best shape of my life, either. We lean against a building to catch our breath. We turn to watch the rescue. The helicopters are still on the ground, and their rotors are still turning. The pilot of the first helicopter motions for people to hurry. The dark visor of his helmet is down, so we can’t see his face. I try to imagine what it would be like to be him, but I can’t.

When the people from town get right into the whipping rotor wash, soldiers jump out of the second helicopter and point their rifles. They shout something and the people drop what they’re carrying and lie down with their hands straight out from their sides. My tongue gets really cold because my mouth is open. Sam tries to run back to town, but the soldiers shoot into the snow around him. The snow flies up and sticks to his clothes and clouds of it swirl around him. Mom makes a little strangled sound. Sam stops. He drops the Mini-14 he had slung over his shoulder. He looks right at us and gives us a nod, and we crouch down behind the building. The building has old gray wood siding. It’s the café that Sam’s mother used to run. It has a wooden boardwalk in front of it, all snowdrifted, and I go prone in the snow and watch the rescue turn into a mass abduction.

The soldiers put plastic zip ties on people’s wrists. They drag them to the helicopters and lift them inside. Engines wind up and rotors beat harder and they make a big mushroom cloud of snow. When the helicopters lift out of the top of their cloud, they’re dark and loud and they fly with their doors open. The faces of the good townspeople are down against nonskid floors as they’re taken away to God knows where.

We walk south. I borrowed something from a tourist shop in Virginia City. I’m wearing a pair of badass Oakley sunglasses. They feel like armor for my eyes, but Mom is squinting in the snow-glare, so I offer her the sunglasses. She refuses, but I say, “We’ll trade off wearing them,” and she takes them. They look good on her.

The cold numbs my patchwork face, and almost makes it feel bulletproof. I break a trail in the snow that leads straight down the middle of the road. I know what I need to do, and I’m not worried about anyone stopping me. I’m not afraid of ambushers or soldiers because I’m following the still, clear voice of God. The ambushers will be like fruit on the vine when I find them, and so shall I reap them.

I have no fear of man or beast. The soldiers might be running wild, but I don’t think so. I think they’re just being careful. They probably got shot at in some of the other towns, so they’re just taking precautions. The people of Virginia City are good people, and the soldiers shouldn’t have treated them like assholes, but like Jesus said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

No. The soldiers aren’t the enemy. At least not yet.

I’m the only one left. I shot those other two. They were shooting at Melanie and I had to stop ’em, didn’t I? Captain Bill was pretty surprised when I popped him with his own fucking Beretta. Blood came out of his neck. It squirted like a hose. He put his hand over it, but he couldn’t stop it. He smiled at me, and his teeth were bloody like a vampire that just bit someone. He tried to say something, but I don’t know what. Probably one of his little speeches about pirates. Then he fell and didn’t move anymore.

I don’t remember shooting Luscious, but he’s dead as shit, too. It’s no use trying to bring them back to life, so I pick up their guns and go back inside the house. It’s quiet and maybe it’s safe, but I don’t like being alone. Maybe it’s stupid, because people always do bad things to me, but I like to have some people around. Especially Melanie. But I think she got hit. I know she did, and her old man took her away and I’ll probably never see her smile again.

Life is a trip. There’s nobody to boss me around now. No skanky mom to bring her johns home and no drunk assholes putting their cigarettes out on me and no lying social workers making up stories about me then sending me to get ass-fucked in juvie. My ass is mine for the first time in my whole life. I’m not sorry I shot those other two, but I wish I had someone to talk to.

It’s cold in the house because we burned up all our firewood in the night. I bring in the firewood that Luscious chopped up before he got killed. I build a hot fire in the woodstove, then I go upstairs and tear apart the room Captain Bill stayed in. He had some cans of food stashed under his bed. I open a can of pork and beans and eat it cold. My belly gets full and tight, and I like the way the sauce coats my mouth with a brown sugar taste. I sit and listen to the wind in the trees. Branches creak and snow falls from them in big clods, but it doesn’t scare me. It makes me kind of sad, because no one else can hear what I’m hearing.

I sleep until first light. When I wake up, I know exactly what I need to do. I need to go find Melanie and her old man. I’m still Melanie’s doctor, and I need to check on her. I don’t think her old man would shoot me just for trying. It didn’t seem like he hated me enough to kill me. I
had
to shoot him with my slingshot that time, or Bill Junior would’ve killed me. I hope he knows that.

Anyhow, they’re the only people in the world I give two shits about, and I want to see them again.

Only three rules are left: Start the breathing, stop the bleeding, and treat for shock. But she’s lung-shot and I have to seal the hole first. Her skin is slick with blood. I’m wired on adrenaline and I’m sick to my stomach, so it takes me a while to get her sealed up, but I finally get the entry and exit holes covered with duct tape. I have to breathe for her at first, but then her left lung inflates and she’s breathing on her own, thank God. But her breathing is labored, and then blood comes from her mouth. It’s choking her. I roll her onto her side and I put my knee into her back and pull her into it, trying to put pressure on the bleeder. I pray
please, please, please
, praying that pressure will stop the bleeding, but she’s coughing blood everywhere and I know I’ll have to unplug the patches and find the leak. Find a way to pinch it closed.

Her coughs grow weaker and my arms are about to fall off from the effort of holding pressure against her chest. I’m as cold as I’ve ever been in my life, but I can see dust in the air. We’re in a pool of blood and the fibers of the floorboards expand like tiny ropes as they drink it in. It’s no use. I’m losing her. I need to try something else.

I roll her onto her stomach so she won’t choke on her blood. I run to the kitchen. I searched it when we first arrived, and I remember finding a drawer filled with miscellaneous possibles. I open it, and yes, yes, yes, it’s just what I need to tie off bleeders. A small pair of yellow-handled needle-nose pliers and a roll of six-pound-test fishing line.

“I found it, Mel,” I say. “We’ll be okay now.”

But when I get back to her, she’s gone quiet. I give her CPR again, my breath wheezing into her lungs and my numb arms pushing contractions against her ribcage. The universe is black and there’s only this, the grunting of one alive and the quiet fighting of one on the brink.

I try to bring her back until I’m neither here nor myself. I stop only when my arms refuse to move. I’m angry at my arms. I shake some blood into them and try to resume the compressions, but I almost pass out. It’s very quiet. The front door is open, and a gust of wind gives the trees a good shake.

I look at her face. Something pops inside me, and I fall to the floor. I don’t understand how I failed her. I had her in my arms and my body was shielding hers, so how did she get shot? And that’s when I look down and see the blood pulsing from my side. The blood is dark, almost black. It’s a high liver hit, probably, and it doesn’t hurt until I see it, then the pain powers against the horror, and I’m almost glad for it.

I’m saying no, no, no, and then I’m floating somewhere in rusty water, and then I come back to living hell. I look at her face again. I ask her how she’s doing. She’s being very quiet, but I think I see her eyes sparkle, so maybe she’s up to something. I slide across the bloody floor and stretch out beside her. I listen for the slightest sound, but there’s nothing. She’s very good at this game, so I join her. I don’t move a muscle, holding as still as possible, seeing how long I can last before the game comes to its natural conclusion.

We walk through time and space and random humanity. We crest Donner Pass and continue southwest on Highway 80 in order to move north on I-5. Pine woods. Cabins on the hills, some of them puffing woodsmoke into the weak sky. Gun muzzles track us from time to time, but we’re serving God’s purpose and we pay them no heed. We pass plywood-patched convenience stores. Some of them are open for business, with few saleable goods and astronomical prices and nodding clerks and alert armed guards.

I use one of the gold coins to buy six cans of ready-to-eat chicken noodle soup. A thin man sees the coin. He follows us out of the store and we unsling our guns and he goes back inside. I stand watch with my shotgun while Scotty lights a fire and heats two cans of soup. The glorious smell of hot food rises into the air and my stomach clenches. We sit back to back with our weapons at the ready as we slurp it down. We burn our mouths tasteless, and the feast is over too quickly, the warmth fading from our bellies as we walk, but hope no longer seems like a fool’s errand.

Every turn of the road is a mystery. The radiation was concentrated in certain places, and we cover our faces and pass pools in the river fouled with rotting trout and corpses of deer and bobcat and skunks and porcupines and opossums. Human corpses are rare but not absent, the expressions of their final pain preserved by the cold.

We walk until I no longer need the sling for my arm, and I toss the filthy thing away in the snow. The exit wound is a puckered anus, but it seems to be sealed against the world’s infections. The muscles are wasted thin and the skin of my forearm is itchy from its confinement, but it feels fine to swing both arms as I walk. It makes me feel wider, somehow, and more substantial as I march with restored symmetry

We walk down the middle of unplowed mountain roads, the lichen hanging thick on mason-built retaining walls, the rust growing Rorschachs on green bridges. The sun sends its rays through flocked trees, but the sun has no heat and we walk in strobes of glare and shadow, paying no mind to people sitting on porches, calling out to us for food or news but offering us nothing in return. We’re armed, but our weapons remain on our shoulders until we stop in the nights, shivering together in abandoned houses, not standing watch. The soup lasts a week, then we eat whatever scraps we find in strange cupboards, but most often we eat nothing at all.

We pass through abandoned mountain places. We grow very weak, but then Scotty manages to shoot a deer. We roast the meat in fireplaces and atop woodstoves and over open fires, and then we’re down in lower country, winter-fallow fields, and there aren’t any deer, so we fall to scavenging from the frozen carcasses of cattle and sheep and llama, hoping they died of thirst or starvation and not radiation or disease.

Walking downhill out of the Sierra and onto the floor of the long Central Valley, the road hidden beneath its blanket of snow, but with power lines and fences and abandoned vehicles to define its path. The big sky of the valley is high and inscrutable because of the fallout that hasn’t yet fallen. The valley is warmer than the mountains, but not by much.

We merge onto I-5 North at our top speed of three miles per hour. We trudge through the snow, and the only sound is of our trudging, and then vehicles approach us from the rear. We move away from the road, plunging through the snow-filled ditch and up onto its western bank. A fleet of all-terrain tow trucks is powering through the snow. They clatter up from the south with the industrial smell of diesel exhaust, their tire chains ringing like steel crickets. They feed on the cars abandoned on the highway, all the tow trucks left in the state, maybe. Men joke in the cold air and attach heavy chains to the cars and hoist them onto flatbeds and lift them by their tow hooks. One of the men stands at the ready with a rifle as we pass, but all of us are here with a purpose other than killing, and our weapons remain unfired. We trudge ahead. The men get into their trucks and clatter back to the south. I can see their flashing red lights for many miles behind us.

More vehicles rise up out of the snow. We stop to watch a big orange snowplow approach and, behind it, a truck belonging to the United States Postal Service. The drivers of the trucks blow their horns at us as they pass, but they don’t wave, and we don’t, either.

After days of walking, the air seems to be warming. Maybe it is. Sometimes the snow feels like wet concrete beneath my boots. Sometimes I think I see gleams of liquid water in the highway ditches, and the climate of people seems to be warming as well.

We begin to see other people on the road. A woman standing alone on the road’s shoulder who shows us wallet-size pictures of her family, and then turns and walks southbound over her northbound footprints. A boy with no hair or teeth walks out of the ruins of an old roadside fruit stand and joins us, begging with plaintive gestures of hand to mouth at first, but then just walking. He seems fascinated by Scott’s torn face. Scott gives him a good look at it, then pulls the hood of his coat over his head. The bald, toothless boy at least pretends to fall beneath the trance of our mission, though we tell him nothing about it. I become accustomed to his presence, wondering what he might talk about, and then one day he turns west on a coastbound road and leaves us without a word.