The Unit (7 page)

We circle and I try to keep us upwind of the buildings as long as possible. We trudge along with the fickle mountain breezes that could so easily betray us. We’re out in the open but there’s no other choice.

The door to the Mexican restaurant bangs in the wind. The service bay door of the tire shop is open. We circle the market and check out the other buildings. If everything is quiet, we’ll approach the market again from the front. A black pit bull walks out of the wrecking yard and lifts its head to sample the breeze. It looks directly at us, then trots away to the south.

We’re in danger here. I know we are, but we need food, so I can’t very well ask Jerry to bypass it. We walk narrow streets that funnel us into more narrow streets. I see no movement behind the dusty windows of the houses and shops that surround us, but that doesn’t mean no one is watching.

I pray while I walk. We need food, but that’s not what I’m praying for. I pray to be left alone. Is it such an impossible thing to ask? Just let us be left alone. But no man is an island, as they say. What I
really
want is a safe haven, but I don’t have the nerve to pray for that today. We keep walking. No one shoots at us, and that’s the very definition of hospitality, isn’t it? The odds of having faith in others aren’t very good, but sometimes there’s no other choice but to bet everything on trust.

Cynical. I’m turning into a coldhearted cow. Mustn’t let the others see it. No. I won’t. Optimism is the best medicine for this condition. Optimism and sacrifice and whatever courage I can muster. These are the things we need, now. Quiet courage and kindness, even if they’re not entirely true. The small things, like preparing meals for them. Tucking them into their ponchos at night, trying to get them to remember the bedtime feeling of childhood, the feeling of snapped-out blankets hovering above them, about to float down and create a magical shell of warmth and safety. Having coffee ready when they wake, and clothes that have been at least brushed off, and something special at breakfast—a handful of wild berries or a stick of gum for after they eat. I can still enjoy that kind of thing, and they can, too.

And we mustn’t give in completely to the mistrust that’s all around us. The enemy is everywhere, because the enemy is also within us. And so if we can’t rise above it—if we can’t be decent and kind to each other—we’ll lose the fight. It’s maybe a silly way of thinking, but I’ll see if I can squeeze myself into the glass that’s half full. Even if I don’t believe we’re better than anyone else, I’ll fake it like I’ve never faked anything before. If all life is a stage, then I’m going straight for my Oscar moment, walking with this shotgun in my hands, but quick to smile when the danger passes, and quick to do special things for them. And maybe I’ll even be nice to strangers, too, if I ever get the chance.

It’s a tiny, lonely place, but it feels like a city after being in the hills for all those days. Mom and Dad want to scrounge for food. If they thought about it, they’d see that taking stuff from people who can’t protect it is the very definition of looting.

“I’ll go in alone,” Dad says.

Mom doesn’t disagree with Dad very often, but she isn’t a submissive housewife either.

“No you won’t. All of us go, or none of us,” she says.

Dad has the good sense not to argue. We walk around the community buildings, a Chamber of Commerce with a fresh brick façade, a Methodist church, and a coffee shop called Moody Brews. The town is in a bowl that’s like a big navel in the ripped belly of the mountain range. We pass small wooden houses with porches that face the slow highway curves. The shade trees in their yards are bare and gray. A cold breeze blows down from the mountains and rattles bare branches. Either there aren’t any people here or they’re hiding.

Dad tells us to stay alert, as if we’re mentally challenged. I’d get mad, but I know he’s worried sick, my poor war pig Goggy. He’s always been a reactionary kind of guy, but even the most radical anarchists are probably on his side now, wanting the world to go back mostly to the way it was before.

I trip over clumps of grass and my feet make crunching sounds when I stumble over patches of old snow. The sky is the same color as the snow today. It’s dirty and cold. I used to love to see snow under cloudy skies, but I don’t anymore. I try to pay more attention to where I’m going so I can manage to stay mostly quiet. It’s freaking me out, walking into a place that might be inhabited, but I hate myself for thinking the worst of others. Here I am, making my big pacifist statement, trying to believe other people are just like we are, and worth saving, and worth inspiring to higher causes and teaching the ways of justice, but aren’t I really just a member of an armed gang now?

I can’t let myself think about that, though, so I try to remember the good times. I used to love walking in crowds. When I went up to visit the Cal campus, I’d make a point of walking the streets of Berkeley. I usually ended up, sooner or later, in a conversation with someone cool. Someone real, like a bus driver or a flower seller or a bag lady or a handyman. Working people. People like the ones who used to live right here.

Just after the bombs, the whole West Coast of the country was on foot together, as if we suddenly got an urge to march together for some great cause. And I think our walking was at least partly a protest. So yeah, I miss walking in crowds in the time when people were sane and helpful and giving and kind. Brave. Noble. Someday, people will be like that again. I truly believe it. We’ll be comfortable again, and we’ll surely bitch about the things that annoy us, but our bitching will be ironic after this. We’ll actually learn from our mistakes this time, won’t we? I understand that life happens in cycles, and we need to live through bad times to recognize the good ones.

We’re all alone in this place, and the sky is brown and the air is so cold that I can’t feel my hands and feet. I’m not sure if I could break into a run if I had to. I feel a panic attack coming on, so I try to fill my mind with something else. Anything else. Something symmetrical and orderly. So I think about the train set Scotty had when he was a little kid. He had a train set and a slot car track, both, and he set them up together, with bridges and banked corners. He had a train crossing for the cars, and he ran the cars and the train at the same time. Most kids would’ve gotten off on having the train slam into the slot cars, or having the cars slam into the train, but not Scotty. He timed everything so there weren’t any collisions. He loved to watch all that perfectly timed movement and energy, and I have to admit that it could be hypnotic. But sometimes I got sick of the sound of those little wheels and motors going around and around and never actually getting anywhere, so I’d sneak up and pull the plug, and everything would come to a halt.

And that’s exactly what happened to us on the freeway. One minute we were cruising fast in our air-conditioned, gas-sucking Chevy Suburban, listening to good music on high-quality headphones and looking through tinted safety glass at the beauty of nature, sucking down resources like they were cheap beer, and the next minute the electrons stopped flowing and our truck died and all the other cars and trucks around us did, too.

We coasted without making any sound. We didn’t see any flashes or mushroom clouds or anything like that. We were driving in the mountains and our car just quit running. The cars and trucks around us rolled without power for a while and then they all stopped, too. Dad said something. A curse or a prayer. I don’t know. No one else knew what was happening, but
he
knew. We were parked on the side of the road, and Dad put on the emergency brake. No lights. No iPod. No cell phones. No engines. Car doors opening, and people walking in the freeway. Voices in the road. Someone lit highway flares, but no more cars came up on us, because that way of life had ended.

“Everyone okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell?”

“Don’t know.”

And then it was like coming to understand a nightmare had come true. There was only one possible conclusion. Dad made it clear.

“No, ma’am, it couldn’t be UFOs or sunspots or a government plot. Not with all of the cars, all at once. It’s here and we’re in it. It doesn’t matter who did it. Knowing who did it won’t help us, but it
will
help us to know where the closest bomb went off.”

He sent a young guy up onto a hill to try to see something, but the young guy came back and said he couldn’t see anything but more mountains.

“There’s nothing for us here, folks,” Dad said. “There’s nothing to do but walk to a better place. The nearest town is Yreka, and we need to get there fast. Let’s go, people. Let’s help each other get through this.”

And the people were amazing. Adults took turns carrying children. The young steadied the old. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, rich and poor, we all marched together. Progressives and conservatives shared food and water, rattling off the kind of friendly insults that keep people warm inside.

“I’ve never marched with a Commie before.”

“Yeah? I’m happy to see that Republicans don’t goose-step.”

And the singing. We sang as we walked, and it wasn’t an easy journey, but the time went faster because of the singing. We had musicians in our party, two guitar players and a guy with a sax and a neo-funk singer with his backup babes, their big hair and big voices keeping us going. We had bonfires at the side of the freeway at night. One night we camped near a Safeway truck that was full of fresh produce and good wine. Another night we opened up the trailer of a Wal-Mart truck and chose new wardrobes for each other. We were a model society for a while. No one was better than anyone else. Any hints of pettiness or bullying were stopped by the majority. We had zero tolerance for bullshit. It took a nuclear attack to bring us together, but for a while we were good people. We were frightened, but we weren’t ugly Americans anymore. And I was
so
proud of us. I thought it would last, but I didn’t expect the government to just leave us alone like they did. When the food started to run out, and people realized they could get away with almost anything, singing was the last thing on our minds.

The buildings here all seem to be empty. There’s an old motor lodge with little garages between the rooms. It’s freshly painted with redwood stain, but there aren’t any curtains on the windows. There’s a motel with a big plastic sign that’s all patriotic with stars and stripes. The Golden Eagle Motel. There’s a smoky fire in its little parking lot. We give it a wide berth. There’s a small junkyard just beyond the motel, and I don’t want to go near it. All those old wrecks freak me out. Blood on the highways. Blood on the dashboards. The junkyard makes my dirty hair try to stand up straight, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s this: If you think you’re in danger, you
are
.

We don’t see any more dogs. There aren’t any walkers or drivers. There aren’t any girls in halter tops and tight jeans. Nothing is moving on the ground but I can hear a jet in the sky, headed to the east. It’s probably a bomber flying home after getting some payback. On the day after all the cars stopped running, the sky was full of weird lines and curves and glowing, smoky corkscrews from our outbound missiles. That was the last time I saw blue sky. Now it’s just the bombers up there, finishing up. I guess it makes sense, in a hard, no-bullshit kind of way, that the government decided to wipe out our enemies before it started to help us. I mean, what good would it do to start rebuilding if the bad guys could still nuke us whenever they wanted?

The only stoplight for miles around is dead, but the yellow blinker of a construction barrier is winking away on the last of its battery power. Some things are tougher than others. Some things are just in better places or somehow lucky when the shit hits the fan. That’s the kind of luck I want for us, too. The wind is puffing my hair and trying to push me around. Broken things are banging against rotting things. My boots thump on old asphalt that’s seen better days. The thought of an ambush keeps me sharp.

I put the rifle scope on the tire shop, but nobody’s home. We walk along an alleyway that divides the tire shop from the junkyard. I slip on frozen puddles. Dead weeds and grass stick up through cracks in the alley. The junkyard is breathing out the smells of rust and old rubber and plastic. The place is surrounded by a fence with busted slats. I can see gray puddles of engine oil. Wiring harnesses are hanging like guts in the frozen mud. Windshields bubbled out by foreheads. Airbags look like used rubbers on broken steering wheels. Cars that have been in front-end collisions look like people with their lips cut off. Jagged cuts where the jaws of life went to work. All that evidence of the time when people cleaned up their messes because there was profit in it.

We put the junkyard behind us and we don’t look back. We need food, and we aren’t going to pay for it. We might have to fight for it, because these are more honest times.

I open my eyes and I have a hangover again. It’s like freakin’
Groundhog Day
. And God knows it’s a bad one. I keep my head in my sleeping bag and try to rest until the pain winds down into something I can handle, but it just gets worse. Time stops and there’s only pain crowding out my sleep, so I might as well get up off my ass and do something about it. I stick my head outside my motel room and try to wake up one of the kids. It’s barely first light and it’s cold enough to hurt. Cold air and hangovers don’t mix. I want to send someone over to Lane’s Market to get some aspirin, but we’re all wiped out. The men are still sawing logs in their rooms. The fire is out. Everyone is dead to the world, and it’s quiet as a graveyard.