The Unit (27 page)

“They’ll surely try to burn us out,” says Wickersham.

He lifts a big fire extinguisher and puts it down at my feet. He pulls out the safety pin.

“Can you handle this, sweetheart?”

I’m about to tell him to stick that “sweetheart” crap up his ass, but the boys shoot at the house again and their bullets break lots of stuff upstairs. We wait until they stop shooting and Dad tells Mr. Wickersham that the boys probably have dynamite, too.

I don’t want to, but I follow them up the stairs. I take the fire extinguisher with me. The living room windows are shot out. The sandbags are piled two deep in front of the windows. Mr. Wickersham grabs some sandbags and tosses them over the glass near the breakfast nook windows. He kneels down behind the window, and it’s a bunker, a pillbox, a machine-gun nest. Dad puts down his gun and sets up a sandbag semicircle in front of the brick fireplace. He tells me to get behind it. I don’t want to, but I do. He kind of grimaces and blinks, and I think he was trying to smile and wink. He pulls out the stupid little gun he found in the RV and puts it on a sandbag beside me. I shake my head and he manages to really smile, but he leaves the gun on the sandbag. He stacks more bags near the base of the back window and opens the top of his machine gun and feeds it with a belt of ammunition.

There are two other windows, but they have shutters and the shutters are closed. I hear running footsteps and orders and shouts. I recognize the voices of Bill Junior and Luscious and a few of the others. They’re not talking to us. They’re getting themselves set up for their attack. I know it must burn Bill Junior’s ass that we were able to just walk away from him. He won’t want to let it happen again.

And then all in one motion, Mr. Wickersham pushes the barrel of his gun up onto the sandbags and into the light of day and pulls the trigger. It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. The sound of killing rips into my ears. Lines of red reach for the boys and hot brass streams against the wall and bounces across the floor and hits my legs. Dad starts shooting from the back window. It’s loud enough to make me start to lose my mind.

I put my hands over my ears while they try to sweep the boys away. They start to shoot shorter bursts and I hear a boy screaming and then I can only hear our fire. Yes, it’s
our
fire, and I have to claim it, too. My brain runs around and I can’t control my thoughts and they bounce like hot brass against the walls of my skull. I hope the scream I heard wasn’t from Donnie Darko. I hope it was one of the mean ones, even though no one deserves to be machine-gunned in the snow. Maybe even Hitler wouldn’t deserve that. But I can still feel their dirty hands on my skin and their stinking bodies pushing into me. I know I should feel terrible about all the shooting, but my lips are trying to smile, and I feel guilty and helpless and powerful. I stay down in my sandbagged place. I push my lips flat and straight so I’m not grinning like a cold-blooded killer. I do my thing; I curl into a ball.

It doesn’t take long for the boys to regroup. They manage to shoot more holes in our sandbags, and then I’m cursing. It seems to be the only thing I know how to do. I wish I could just accept things and do what comes naturally to other people in times like these, run or fight. I wish I could believe that I’m part of some god’s special plan, but all I can do is bang my head against the floor and curse the world of people and the shitty choices we have to make.

Dad and Mr. Wickersham go after the boys’ fire. They’re not shy about shooting dozens of rounds in response to a single shot. They’re trying as hard as they can to kill.

Dad says something to me, but I can’t hear him. He’s shouting and it takes me a while to understand that he’s telling me to go to the cellar for more ammunition. I don’t move fast enough, so he goes himself. It’s quieter with only one gun firing. I think it’s a good thing that it’s quieter, but the boys will think so, too.

Dad comes back upstairs with two green cans. He falls at the top of the stairs, and he doesn’t get up. He’s coughing on the hardwood floor. Wickersham tells me to bring him a box of ammunition, but I don’t want to. I go to my Goggy and try to make him better. I take off my coat and wrap him in it, but he pushes me away and manages to stand up. He drags a can of ammunition to Wickersham, then he gets his own gun firing again. I bring him my canteen, but he’s too busy shooting to see me behind him. He’s still coughing. I want to pat him on the back or something, but I go back to my little sandbag nest.

They keep shooting and I can’t hear anything except a single loud ringing. The boys were on us like dogs on rabbits, but now they aren’t so sure of themselves. Now they’re targets, too, and they’ll have to be smart if they want to live. But they
are
smart.

The boys stop shooting, and so do Dad and Wickersham. I bring Dad my canteen. As soon as he can, Dad turns to find me. He looks surprised to see me standing behind him, then he smiles and takes a drink.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Never better. You know how it is with we Sharpes.”

He has blood on his lips. I kneel beside him. I want to tell him I don’t hate him for shooting people, but I can’t shape the words. He tries to ruffle my hair, but I step back. It’s like we’re only camping or something, but then we hear something, and he turns back to his gun.

Right now the boys are hiding and thinking. But they’ll come again soon. They’ll get their shit together and come from all directions. And that’s just what they do. They wait until twilight. They’re very quiet and I don’t trust them when they’re quiet, so I look out from behind Dad’s sandbags. It takes me a while to figure out what’s happening, but then I see them coming. At first I think I’m getting dizzy, and I start to feel sick to my stomach, because the snow is moving. Dad and Mr. Wickersham can’t see it. The boys are camouflaged with dirty sheets that make them almost invisible in the snow, and they’re almost right on top of us.

The air in the bus is ripe. I don’t know how long we slept but the air doesn’t seem to have enough oxygen to allow a fart to burn. I’m warm clear through, and the snaplight is almost used up. We’re soaked with sweat under our vinyl nest. The dead girl is getting rotten enough to gag a cockroach, but Mom is okay and we’re together.

Mom might’ve been lying about dreaming she was in Gramma’s kitchen, but maybe she wasn’t. She doesn’t tell lies very often, now that she’s off the booze. But there’s no telling what she’ll do to try to put my mind at ease, and I want her to know that I’m okay. I know there’s a plan for me, and so whatever happens is cool with me, one way or the other, because either I’ll be God’s terrible vengeance on earth, or I’ll be sitting at His table in paradise. There’s no downside that I can see.

I start to tell her, but she starts talking about her dream.

“It was raining outside, at your grandmother’s house.”

“It rains in Portland?”

“Yes it does, Mr. Wiseacre. But there are different kinds of rain. You know how Eskimos have lots of words for snow? Well, for any person with eyes and a brain, there are different kinds of rain in Portland. This rain I’m talking about was a
sharp
rain, the kind that makes a person stubborn, holing up and looking for something good and wholesome, finding comfort in any way possible. It was somewhere between drizzle and shower, with drops so cold they felt like needles. It was the kind of sharp rain that makes you appreciate things, and it was warm in the kitchen. The windows were all steamed up because your grandmother had just baked a sheet of Toll House cookies. She was listening to KPDQ on the radio, and there was a sermon on, a sad one that made me want to hug her, and we were safe from the sharp rain.”

Mom mists up and then she gets pissed off at herself, because she was trying to make me feel better and failed.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I know what you mean.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a squeeze. She pats my arm and smiles and laughs as if it’s silly for her to cry. I don’t tell her that we all need to get harder about things. I was weak before, but I have a purpose now. I need to focus on my mission and let go of all the other stuff, even if it comes down to losing part or all of my family, here on earth. The thought of it makes me cry, but I need to be able to take whatever’s coming, so I can become God’s sure and swift right hand, God’s wrath unleashed on the monsters of the world, starting with the little fuckers who are probably raping my sister.

We need air, so I break free of our nest and go to find some. I’m weaker than I can ever remember being. I get the dry heaves again, and it seems to take away all my reserves of energy. I crawl to the front of the bus. I pull myself into a standing position. I push up on the door. I push it open enough to grab my coat and I pull and pry until the coat falls into the bus. It’s frozen solid and heavy. It lands on my left foot. I hear it hit me, but it takes a while for the pain to register. When it does, it’s the last straw. I don’t have the energy to curse, so I fall down and pass out.

A small avalanche of powder snow wakes me up. It keeps streaming in until I’m about to stuff my coat back into the hole, but then the little avalanche stops. Daylight and sweet, fresh air are pouring in. I take three or four deep breaths and it’s beautiful air, but then the cold cuts into me again. We’re soaking wet, and the cold will kill us very fast. It’s a shitty deal: suffocate or freeze or live long enough to die from gunshot wounds or from the radiation.

I try to shake out my coat, but it’s so frozen that it’s like a lump of metal. I bang it against the stainless-steel handrail that the special kids used to board their bus, and the ice cracks in enough places that the coat is almost flexible again. I take off my gloves and I manage to cram my arms into my coat sleeves. It’s like wearing a rusted suit of armor. Somehow I get it zipped up before my hands stop working. I put my gloves back on and wait to see if I’ll be able to move my fingers. The air coming into the bus is so cold that it refreezes the outside layer of everything, our clothes and the vinyl nest and the face of the dead girl. I can almost see the crystals growing. The cold hits the humid air inside the bus and it makes a fog, like when you open a super-cold freezer on a hot summer day.

But the cold doesn’t stop at the first layer of things. Mom and I are wet clear through, and our layers of clothes freeze up, and we’re dying. I go kind of crazy, because I know that if I don’t do something fast, I won’t get another chance. I get Mom up, and she’s full of adrenaline, too, and we walk back and forth and we yell and clap our hands and bounce off the walls of that damned bus, but it’s not helping. It’s not enough, so I tell Mom to keep moving, and she starts to sing a crappy Christian song from the seventies, something about God telling Noah to build him an arky-arky, and I’m laughing like a maniac and trying to push away the pile of snow at the door so I can light a fire there.

I get the snow pushed back into the bus and I’m grabbing scraps of vinyl and stacking them under the open door, wondering how the hell I’ll be able to light them, knowing all the time that the smoke will probably kill us. I can’t feel my hands, but I bang away on the wheel of my Bic lighter until I get it lit. I hold the flame under a scrap of vinyl and it lights and burns slowly at first, and then it builds into a hissing, smoking chemical fire. It puts out good heat, but it won’t last long, so we get right up to the flames. Most of the smoke is pulled up through the door, so we’re okay for a while.

But it doesn’t last long. The fire dies out and there isn’t anything else to burn. I tell Mom that I’ll try to get some diesel from the tanks and we can burn it in our canteen cups. The wild edge of desperation is wearing off, and I’m getting very tired. I start to pull myself up through the door, but I hear voices outside.

“Over here,” one of them says, and then I’m backing away from the door and reaching for my rifle, but then I remember that I don’t have one, and my hands are gone, baby, gone, and there’s no way I’ll be able to shoot off anything except my mouth. Mom’s face looks like she was just betrayed by someone she loved and trusted, but then she smiles at me. I know she’s accepting whatever’s coming, the next installment of His mysterious plan, and I smile back at her, and we’re okay then, the two of us freezing but at peace, because we have each other and a mustard seed of faith between us.

We’re close enough to throw dynamite into the house, but I don’t want to kill the girl. That big bastard Wickersham isn’t anyone to fool around with. My pops told me to steer clear of this place, back when my pops was still talking to me. We knew right at the beginning that Wickersham would put up a good fight, and we kind of saved him as a problem we’d take care of later, when we got super-bored or super-hungry.

I’ve lost four men today, and three more are wounded, but we’re in the middle of a battle, and I’ll leave the wounded to take care of themselves. Only pussies spend a lot of time taking care of their wounded while the fight is still on. It’s timing and momentum that wins fights, and it doesn’t make sense to waste time on men who might die anyway, if you ask me. My stomach isn’t so bad now, and maybe we’re getting better, but this could be our last battle, and I intend to win it.

There. I get close enough to see Wickersham peeking at us every now and then. It’s either him or that prick Sharpe. They have machine guns and good cover behind those damn sandbags, but I have a plan. I dig under my coat to find the sports whistle I’m wearing on a cord around my neck. I wish I had a bugle, but there’s nowhere to get one. A bugle would really make our enemies piss themselves, but all I have is the whistle, and I give it a short blast to send them forward.