The Unit (4 page)

I glance at the yellow sky again. It makes me dizzy to look up while I’m walking. Jerry is ahead, just to my right, and I wonder if my position behind him resembles some paternal code of female subservience from another time or place. I can tell he needs to cough, but he hunches over and fights it. That’s Jerry, always fighting something. He’s fighting for us now, and I wouldn’t want to be the fool who stands in his way. I’ll back him with my last breath, for the time being, but I might as well admit that my plans for the future don’t necessarily include him.

Just before dark, we walk around a long highway curve. The litter here tells the local story—crushed Budweiser cans, empty Marlboro packs, Quarter Pounder with Cheese wrappers, and loaded disposable diapers. The highway curve is banked and it takes forever for us to unwind it and then we’re standing at the base of a hill that’s six lanes wide and disappears into the dirty clouds. It’s like one of those “stairways to nowhere” in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.

As the road gets steeper, we lean forward and put more muscle into our pace. Every step takes us closer to the clouds. Dad and Mom give each other a look, but they keep walking. They don’t stop to talk about what might happen if we breathe the crap in those nasty clouds. They just keep walking, and so do Scott and I, but Scott is shaking his head and muttering to himself, and I think we might have to part ways with Mom and Dad soon.

We climb until dark. I’m an athlete and I’m tired, so I know the others must be just about wiped out. Mom gives us an MRE pouch of fruit cocktail. Scott and I take turns slurping it down. We spend the night shivering in a roadside ditch, then we walk uphill again. It’s getting colder and there’s more snow. The last gravel spread by the last Caltrans crew crunches under our boots. Lots of cars and trucks died here. The ones that had been going uphill couldn’t coast to the side of the road when they died, so they’re all over the place, some of them backed into ditches, but most of them stopped right where they lost momentum.

We don’t bother to search the cars and trucks because their doors are all open and they’ve already been picked clean. Dad and Mom and Scott keep their guns at the ready, but there isn’t anyone else here. We climb until the cloud ceiling is just above our heads. When we can’t smell anything but smoke and toxic chemicals and burned meat, Dad stops. He turns and looks as if he wants to apologize. Mom is crying. Scott turns and walks downhill, but Dad tells him to wait.

“What for?” Scott says. But he turns and walks back to us.

Dad takes Mom’s hand and they bow their heads. If other people were here I’d be embarrassed as hell, but since we’re alone it just looks sad and pathetic. They pray and nothing happens, of course. We stand in the freezing air and wait for the big head in the sky to pucker up his lips and blow away the clouds. I look back downhill and see some people at the bottom. They’re climbing toward us. There are maybe twenty of them. They’re carrying guns, and I think they see us. Scott clears his throat. Dad looks up from his praying. He sees the other group.

“Okay,” Dad says. “Maybe there’s another way around.” His voice is very low, and there’s a look of disappointment on his face.

But then the wind picks up. It blows uphill from the west and makes the clouds boil and lift. The wind blows the heavy cover up and over the top of the mountains. There’s a kind of tunnel in the smoke. It’s like the pipeline of a big surfing wave, and we can see all the way across the summit.

Mom and Dad laugh together, her voice riding high over his. They run uphill. Scott and I hesitate, but then we run, too. We run into the place that was choked with clouds, and there are bodies in the road, but the air is okay, for the moment, and we make it across. We pass a yellow sign that reads “Steep Grade Ahead.” We run downhill until the clouds are high above us, and we stop and bend down and try to get our respiration rates back to sane levels. The wind dies down and we turn and watch the clouds close in again and cover the road. Dad and Mom don’t say the word “miracle,” but I know they’re thinking it. They’re smiling and Dad points at the ground. He says, “Let’s have lunch, right here.” Mom breaks out an MRE entree of Vegetable Manicotti and we eat it, rich and cold, then we hit the road again.

We get caught up in the rhythm of walking and put some miles behind us. I shoot Scott a look. He shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes. I’m totally with him. Maybe it wasn’t a miracle that caused the clouds to open up for us, but it
was
some damned good luck, and so we stay with Mom and Dad.

We walk and listen to the bad rhythm of gunshots in the distance. The feeling of being lucky fades a little more with each shot. My teeth are chattering, and not only because of the cold. The clouds are high above us now, but I’m more afraid of the clouds than I am of other people. There must be radiation. There has to be. And I’m worried about the ozone layer. I don’t feel any different, but there’s a chance that our skin is being bombarded by the sun’s UV rays. Maybe tumors are growing on our skin. And I wonder if these nasty clouds cover the whole earth. And if they do, aren’t we in for a serious round of global cooling? And then what happens to the crops and the animals?

I want to ask someone about it. Dad might know something more, but he’d only try to withhold the hard facts from me, all evasive and Dad-like, because he’s the same man he was when I was growing up. When he’s not drinking, my dad is more uptight then anyone I’ve ever met. I can’t help noticing that his whole world is filled with worry, and that he’s worried about
us
. Giving orders is his way of showing love, and he’s loving us with all he’s got, my uptight daddy is.

I haven’t seen him relaxed since he was drinking beer with the colonel, the poor old colonel and his cool, wrinkled wife, back in Yreka, that beautiful place in the good time that didn’t last. We had a fine time, just after the bombs. The locals put on a crazy food orgy of a barbecue, then the colonel and his wife took us in. They were just about the friendliest people I’ve ever met. It seemed as if they didn’t care about their own needs at all. They gave us their best food and asked if we had room for dessert and if we wanted more blankets or needed anything, anything at all. The colonel gave Dad that black rifle, yeah, but I just thought it was a weird gift at the time.

But maybe they were too friendly. Dad was right to be paranoid, and I’m embarrassed that I wasn’t. Groups of hungry people started sneaking around in the night. They stole only food at first—who could blame them?—but then a big armed group came rushing up the freeway. For some reason, no one tried to talk to them. There were gun battles and the outsiders won them all, because the locals were all spread out. The locals didn’t band together because they refused to leave their houses, the evidence and trappings of their lifetimes of hard work, and so they died family by family.

Dad keeps up a pace that doesn’t seem possible. His skinny legs seem to be moving at an ordinary speed, but we have to keep breaking into a run to keep up with him. Mom was a speed walker back in the day, and she gets her hips swinging and she manages to stay with Dad, but her face is strained because we keep getting all strung out on the trail.

I used to think that walking wasn’t really exercise. To a gymnast, walking is only part of the peaceful vacations that come between workouts. But we’ve been walking for weeks now, and I’m starting to change my mind about the whole walking-as-exercise thing.

“Goggy” was the first word I had for my dad. It was an illogical baby-talk mutation of “doggy” and “daddy.” All I knew was that I loved both doggies and my daddy. It lasted until sixth grade before it began to slip, that idea of love without question. I was a very bad girl for a while, but when I returned to Planet Earth after that first big blast of puberty, he was a different, softer Goggy than I’d known back when I was little.

I sprained my arm in my senior year from a flubbed gymnastics vault, and he stayed home from work the day after, joking and bringing me stuff and acting like he was about to explode into a big, mushy cloud of worry. I was taking classes at a junior college and Dad was proud of me and the air was heavy because of all the permanent changes that were coming. My arm healed and I came and went as I pleased, but I was about to leave for good, and I came to see that the threshold of a house isn’t defined only by what arrives, but also by what leaves.

Then this shitty thing happened and the world is still turning, but this was supposed to be my big year. The year I went off to Berkeley. My first year of freedom, and I was
so
ready to grab hold of it. Why else would I work my ass off to get a gymnastics scholarship? I was ready to see if anything better existed beyond the hypocrisy of “turn the other cheek” and “peace through strength” and “smite thy enemies.” I was ready to join forces with people who didn’t believe in an afterlife—and so they had to maximize the amount of goodness they could bring about in the here and now.

But now they’re gone. The nuclear-free zone of Berkeley is a graveyard of common sense. Maybe they’ll build a memorial there when the radiation cools, but that doesn’t help us now.

And, in a way, Daddy and his pride did this to us. He and his kind. The selfish, hypocritical neocons. The armchair war pigs. I love him, but my Goggy is a war pig, and I won’t take the gun he wants me to carry. I won’t kill people. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well stop with me.

I don’t have to think about things so much anymore. I’m nice to my family but I’ll shoot bad people in the head, if I have to. I won’t hesitate to shoot them, and I think that soon enough I’ll be doing a lot of shooting, and I don’t mind it at all. Fighting to stay alive gives people two faces, and both faces are more real and deep and true than our bored, spoiled peace faces. No more of the bitching and whining of the spoiled people we used to be. There’s only love of life and family now, and I’ll blow the shit out of anyone who threatens us. It’s down to love and hate, baby, and I’ve never felt so alive. It’s the purest rush I’ve ever felt, and I’ve felt a lot of those.

I don’t know what I’ll do when the time comes to prove myself, but I want a chance to find out. We sleep in a hole above the road. I stand my watch from midnight until four, and nothing moves. It’s hell getting up and staying awake at that ungodly hour, but fear keeps me sharp. I barely remember having stood guard when morning comes. I’ve never been so tired, and that’s saying a lot because I’ve been able to sleep like Rip Van Winkle since I was about twelve. If we weren’t in a dangerous place, I’m pretty sure I could sleep straight through a whole week. It’s one of the things I really, really want to do.

We’re in a hurry to get moving, so we eat a cold breakfast. When I’m not chewing, I’m yawning. There isn’t much to say, so we clean up our campsite, bury our garbage and our shit, and we use pine boughs to wipe away our tracks. It wouldn’t fool a decent tracker, Dad says, but we don’t want to leave clear signs for anyone, either.

Dad’s a trip. It’s like I didn’t really know him before, the guy who taught me how to throw a curveball and how to play chess and how to be a poor communicator. Don’t get me wrong—he’s been an okay dad. He doesn’t understand me very well, and he thinks I’m still a little kid, but now I can see that I don’t understand him very well, either. I guess I didn’t think very much about what-all was inside him. I had no idea that he knew all this silly shit about tactics. Sure, he taught me how to shoot, and we had fun doing that, but all the other stuff he knows kind of blows me away. It’s kind of obvious stuff, but it took twisted minds to think of it. Don’t walk on the tops of ridges, because people can see you outlined against the sky. Walk on
military
ridgelines, which lie just below the summit. Pay attention to the plants and the folds of the earth, in case you need to take cover. The difference between cover and concealment is that cover stops bullets. Flank a group of bad guys and they’ll probably have no choice but to run or die. Put out massive return fire when attacked, so the bad guys think they’ve walked into a superior force. Shit like that. It sounds like it came from the mind of a middle school kid, but Dad says it’s all written in the Marine Corps manual. It sounds too easy, but I’m hoping it really works.

All the walking we’re doing doesn’t hurt so much anymore. My stamina is getting pretty good, even though I was never a real jock. I always had to work hard to keep my place as a starting defensive back in football. I was nothing like the guys who seemed like they were born to block and run and hit, but I got to the point where I could almost keep up with them.

Hard work alone can’t make a person great, but it can help you beat lazy, gifted people. The blisters on my feet are turning to calluses, and I’m getting harder all over. I don’t have a shitload of foot speed, but maybe I could run down a deer if I used the simple tactic of never giving up.

But still, I’d rather be flying. It’s my favorite thing in the world, to break the surly bonds of earth, as they say. And seeing that little bird in the sky yesterday made me happy. It was a Cessna 182 with retractable gear. I’d give one of my nuts to be sitting in the left seat, cruising at 150 knots and flying us somewhere else.

About halfway through the day, we smell woodsmoke. Dad marches us from one place of cover and concealment to the next, until we can see a big column of smoke rising into the brown sky. We pass a barn surrounded by cows that look like they died of thirst. We cover Dad while he searches the barn, but he comes out right away and shakes his head. The gas rising up from the dead cows is about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever smelled. Melanie looks like she wants to puke again, but the smell is so sick that it makes me want to break out laughing.