The Unit (33 page)

Military convoys pass, trucks and humvees loaded with soldiers who look as if they should still be in high school. Scott watches them, and maybe he already thinks he’s one of them. Other cars and trucks pass, one or two groups per day, their occupants holding their gazes fixed on whatever lies ahead but watching us from the corners of their eyes.

We haven’t heard gunshots for many days, but we stay on the freeway through Red Bluff and Redding, staying well clear of the manned barricades that block their freeway entrances and exits. We walk past the highway signs for their amenities, their closed restaurants and burned hotels and looted supermarkets, and we don’t look back.

I once had pleasant memories of Redding, summer road trip memories from when the kids were young and Jerry drove with his hand on my leg, in times when we were free to stop anywhere we chose. Music and air-conditioning and frivolous snack foods and the life-affirming backbeat of quickly resolved bickering. Above it and through it and all around us was the unwinding thrall of the road.

I try to remember what a pleasant journey feels like, but I can’t conjure up those silly old emotions. I’d always been grateful to leave the rote of homebound responsibility behind me, and so all the world seemed new and lovely. I once had an almost absurd fondness for the places we’re passing, the Redding boat dealerships and retail outlets stretching to the foothills, but now I walk armed on the ribbon of interstate that once symbolized freedom, and I can’t look back.

We cross the bridge over Lake Shasta, the lake frozen below us, and we climb into the Siskiyou Mountains. The airspace over Dunsmuir is filled with carrion birds. We pass through the steep, valley-shaped town, the smell of bodies making our eyes water. Some of the vultures are too fat to fly, and some of them take runs at us. Scott shoots one of them and it explodes meat and black feathers across the filthy snowscape and we walk up a steep grade to put Dunsmuir behind us.

It’s time for me to go. I should bring some presents with me. Maybe Melanie’s old man won’t shoot me if I bring presents. I grab a suitcase from a closet upstairs and I fill it with the food stashes that the others were hiding in their bedrooms—sliced peaches and pork and beans and chili and beef enchiladas. I don’t bring any cans of green beans or peas or creamed corn because I don’t see how anyone can eat that shit.

I’ll bring the first aid kit, for sure. The rich people that owned this house had a
huge
first aid kit, and a big jar of penicillin in the fridge, and even a few vials of morphine. I found the drugs before those others could, and I took them out of the cold refrigerator and hid them in the snow. I was saving them in case it got too dangerous here and I had to shoot up those other two with morphine and make a run for it. So yeah, I have enough shit to doctor up just about anyone.

I bungee cord the first aid kit to the suitcase, then I see the guns. Should I bring a gun? I won’t shoot at Melanie or her old man, even if they shoot at me, but what if I run into a bear or wolves or some human assholes? So yeah, I’ll bring a gun, but only the pistol, and I’ll keep it jammed down next to my dick and covered by my coat.

I open the door and pull the suitcase into the snow. It’s colder than a witch’s tit outside. The suitcase has a handle, and I pull it out and get a good hold on it. The suitcase has little wheels on it, but they don’t do shit in the snow, so I pull it behind me like a sled.

I walk to where Melanie’s tracks got closest to the house. I follow them to where they meet her old man’s tracks. A few feet past that, there’s blood in the snow. I follow the blood and tracks into the woods. I hope they aren’t too far away, because this fucking suitcase is heavy. I walk and drag my shit behind me, and the suitcase gouges our tracks and mostly wipes them away.

It takes less than half an hour to find out where they went. It’s a log cabin, like the log cabin on maple syrup bottles. Their tracks lead into the cabin and don’t come out again. The front door is open. I drop the suitcase and say, “Hey, it’s Donnie. I brought you some presents.”

They don’t answer. I look around. Nothing is moving but me. I’m alone and I don’t think anyone is watching me, but all that quiet creeps me out. I want to pull the pistol out of my pants, but I don’t. I walk onto the porch. The snow is kind of slushy and I move my feet forward like I’m ice-skating, even though I haven’t ever really ice-skated before, except with shoes on frozen mud puddles.

I knock on the open door, but there’s a whole lot of nothing talking back to me. I walk into the cabin and see them lying on the floor. There’s blood everywhere and they’re not moving. I want to run away, but my legs won’t move. I want to run away, because I don’t want to get blamed for this shit. But then my legs take me over to them. The blood is slick, and I have to ice-skate again.

I’ve seen dead people before, and this is what they look like. I wasn’t ever sad when I saw dead people before, but I think I’m sad now. Melanie’s eyes are open and I reach down and close them. Her face is still pretty and I wish she’d say something to me, something nice or just something kind of ordinary, but I know she won’t.

Her old man’s eyes are open, too. He isn’t pretty at all. He’s got cuts all over him, for one thing, and for another thing, he’s making a face like he died needing to take a massive shit. I reach down to close his eyes, too, but they turn and look at me. I just about piss my pants. I back away and he lifts his head. He says, “Shhhhh. Can’t you see we’re playing a game here?”

He’s got no blood inside him and he’s crazy as a shithouse fly, but that doesn’t stop me from getting into my doctor way of thinking. I run outside and grab the first aid kid from the suitcase. I’ll patch up his holes, neat as anything, and if I can’t save him, it won’t be because I didn’t try.

We pass the sign that welcomes us to Norris, California, but nobody is home. It kind of freaks me out to see the blown-up food market. The sight of it makes my head hurt, and it pisses me off. We check it out, but there’s nothing we can use in there. Nothing but blasted lumber and broken glass and maybe some DNA evidence of our family blood, all mixed together.

We walk in wider and wider circles around the store, looking for anything that might help us find them. I’m not afraid of running into an ambush, because God would tell me if I was about to. I’m not afraid. Mom doesn’t seem be afraid, either. She’s wearing the Oakley sunglasses and carrying her twelve-gauge shotgun at the ready. She looks like a female Terminator. I probably look like shit, with my cut-up face and skinny body, but I’ll look like a nightmare to anyone who tries to fuck with us.

We search the empty houses along the main road. We knock at the first few places, but then we don’t say anything before I kick in the doors. No one is home.

The Golden Eagle Motel is trashed, and it’s no mystery who trashed it. All the rooms are filled with random, rotting things, food and stinky clothes and stains of all kinds on the sheets and walls and carpets. But the motel is empty.

We search both lumber mills. One of them has a line of rail cars beside it, and it used to make real lumber. The other mill made these little wooden fenceposts that people use for landscaping projects. We walk like hunting animals inside the buildings and all around them, the Chamber of Commerce building and the Mexican restaurant and the junkyard and the Moody Brews coffee shop, but there’s nothing. We find a workshop in one of the buildings that’s full of leather and leather-working tools and custom-made horse saddles. The saddles look awesome, and I wouldn’t mind meeting the person who made them, but there’s nobody home.

We walk around and around, our orbits getting bigger, taking nearly the whole day to search a town with a population of a thousand. The sky is starting to go pale when we find ourselves climbing up into the hills on the north side of town. The town is below us on the edge of a big bowl that looks like it used to be full of water. The light is going away, but my rifle scope is very good, and I use it to look for anything we might’ve missed. I see a house out past the eastern edge of where we searched. I turn up the scope’s magnification. It’s a Leupold variable 3- to 12-power scope and it takes me a while to get the house back into my field of view. The place is white with green trim. At least I think it used to be those colors. The walls are blown out, and I can see inside the living room.

I tell Mom I found a house where a fight happened. She sees where I’m looking. She stands up and we walk through the last sunrays of the day. We walk the main drag and take the alley we took before, back when we were all together. The junkyard is covered with snow, but it doesn’t look any prettier. There’s evidence of the little assholes everywhere, graffiti and garbage and broken things. It’s like walking through a place where zombies roamed, but none of these assholes had the decency to stick around long enough for me to put my scope’s crosshairs on them.

*     *     *

We spend the night in the blown-up house. The main floor is covered with spent brass, a layer of 7.62 NATO empties and little steel pieces that look like the links that hold machine-gun ammunition together. I look for a machine gun, but can’t find one. Sandbags are set in the windows. The walls are full of random and not-so-random holes. It must’ve been a hell of a fight, but I can’t tell how it turned out. There isn’t any blood or blood trails, but the absence of blood doesn’t prove anything.

We set up camp in the basement. There’s a little woodstove down there, and enough firewood to get our faces red and itchy. I put some strips of frozen beef on the stove and we eat it without talking. I leave the last of our scavenged meat outside in the snow. The whole world is a deep freeze now, and we wouldn’t have any protein if it wasn’t.

In the morning I force myself out of my sleeping bag. I go outside to take a piss and get the last of our meat, but we’re not alone anymore. There’s a National Guard convoy rolling up from the south. Mom is outside watching it come up. Maybe the soldiers are looking for something in particular, because they have a Black Hawk helicopter spotting for them. It’s armed with door guns and it circles like it’s hungry. The damned noisy, beautiful thing circles the town for half an hour before it lands next to the convoy trucks.

Then we’re off again, walking a trail that leads north from the house. It’s as good a direction to go as any. If Dad and Melanie were here, they probably took this trail. We walk until the trail leads to an unplowed road. We follow the road, using our senses and instincts to look for the parts of God’s plan we want to come true.

*     *     *

It takes us two weeks to find them. We’re out of food and burning through our supplies of faith when we smell woodsmoke. We follow the smell to a log cabin. It’s not the first house we’ve come up to. We take cover and I shout out that we’re here, and that we mean no harm; it’s just that we’re looking for the rest of our family. Mom covers the door with her shotgun. I scope the windows for movement. The front door opens a crack. A kid’s voice asks us to show ourselves. I say, No way in hell. A black-haired kid peeks out to take a look. I get his face in the scope, but he ducks back inside before I can decide whether or not to cancel him.

He says we can come inside if we put down our guns. There’s zero chance of us doing that. I sling the rifle and pull out the Glock. I walk across open ground and move to the door. The adrenaline lifts me far above hunger and doubt, but I know it won’t last long. Mom moves to my side. I push the door open and step through it. The kid is inside with a pistol. He’s a skinny little dude, and he’s holding a Beretta down alongside his leg. I put the Glock’s sights on the base of his throat and take the slack out of the trigger. He’s all tensed up, but he doesn’t raise the pistol. When he sees Mom, he opens his mouth. No words come out. After a few seconds he starts to calm down. Mom takes off her sunglasses. The kid gives her a long look.

“I won’t shoot you,” he says. He puts his pistol down on the floor and backs away from it.

“Have you seen them, a man and his daughter?” I say.

“She looked a lot like you,” he says to Mom. “Come in. I’ll tell you what happened.”

He sits down on a couch and we stand across from him. He tells us a story. He’s nervous, but he says it’s everything he knows about Melanie. It’s not a happy story. I can’t tell the lying parts from the true ones. Mom is crying hard. I’m pretty sure the kid is telling the truth, but I keep the Glock pointed at his guts.

“I wouldn’t blame you for popping me,” he says. “If I had a sister and she got done like that, I might want some payback.”

Mom says, “No.” She gives me her no-bullshit look and I put the Glock away.

The kid is a nervous little shit. His eyes are brown and shifty, but then he gets them to lock onto mine.

“It’s true that I never did anything bad to her,” he says. “I helped her every chance I could get, but I couldn’t help her in the end.” Then his little chest puffs out and he gets a look on his face that makes him look like a juvenile delinquent Napoleon.

“It was too late for her, but listen,” he says. “I saved the old man. Come on. I’ll show you.”

I stretch out to die, then I wake up with that little black-haired kid checking my pulse. He’s looking at the ceiling and counting out loud. He’s breathing through his mouth. His breath is rank.

I have no idea what day it is. I’m in a warm bed, covered with blankets. The thin light from the bedroom window is either gaining strength or dying away. There’s a tube running from my belly. I look for Melanie, but she isn’t here. The black-haired kid says, “Hey, he’s awake.” I tell him I already know it. Someone else comes into the room. It’s Susan and Scotty.