The Unit (28 page)

Luscious and Stumpie move under their white sheets until they’re right up next to the walls. Luscious takes the front of the house and Stumpie takes the back. They each put two wrapped sticks of dynamite right up against the walls and then they back away. I can’t actually see them do it, but that’s what I told them to do. They know how to follow my orders, so I don’t let myself worry about it.

They don’t take any fire, going in. I give them what I think is enough time to get back, then I give a longer blast on the whistle. Seconds pass, and it feels like a whole minute goes by before they set off their charges. The explosions don’t happen at the same time, like I’d hoped, but that was only me being a perfectionist. There’s almost a whole second between the blasts, but they blast open the walls, front and back, and the sandbags are blown away. We can see clear through the house, from the breakfast nook to the back patio. I hit the whistle again, and Darko and Biggus light highway flares and throw them into the house, and we have us a nice, bright shooting gallery.

The trouble is, there isn’t anyone to shoot. We run into the house, ready to kill the old farts and take the girl, but nobody’s home. We clear the first floor. I send men upstairs and down into the cellar, but we don’t find them. It’s a plain mystery, but I’m not the kind to sit and scratch my head. I send Luscious and Stumpie and the two wounded men that can still walk outside. I throw them highway flares.

“Check all around. There’s no need to spare anyone. You see them, you shoot them. The girl, too.”

“Damn waste,” says Luscious, “but okay, we’ll do her.”

And off they go, the light of their flares making them look like rescue workers searching a crash site. In the dark with their flares, they look big and professional and important, and I’m proud that they’re my men, following my orders.

Inside the house, we rip apart the cellar. We look for a tunnel, but we don’t find one. We cut open the furniture and empty the cabinets and bash holes in the sheetrock of the walls and ceiling, but there aren’t any hidden compartments or passages. Somehow, the fuckers just plain disappeared.

I send men onto the roof and we check the chimney, but it’s like someone reached down and pulled them up into the sky. The old buzzards are gone. They left their machine guns behind, but there’s no more ammo for them. They shot us up pretty bad, but the thing they shouldn’t have done was to take my girl with them. That was going too far and, too bad for them, they’ve gone and got me mad, and there’s not so much as a fly turd of mercy in my heart.

There’s no doubt that Wickersham is an actual paranoid survivalist, because he takes us to a passageway that’s hidden behind his dishwasher. He kneels in front of the machine and I think he’s gone crazy, but then he unlatches some kind of mechanism and rolls the entire sealed box of the old Maytag out onto the kitchen floor. He points to a tunnel. Our mouths open and Melanie giggles. I haven’t heard that sound in a long time, and it makes me happy. It makes me greedy, too, because I want to hear my wife’s laughter, too, and Scotty’s nervous bray, and it’s all my fault that they aren’t with me, but I let up on myself and push Melanie toward the tunnel.

Melanie disappears into the dishwasher feet-first. She whispers something that sounds like, “Sleep, spiders, sleep.” I’m next. Maybe the dishwasher leaks, because it smells very bad in the hole. It’s like being born again via the wrong orifice, but we descend beneath the snow and volcanic rock. I feel safe for the first time in a long while.

Wickersham lets himself into the tunnel above us. He stands on a ledge and rolls the dishwasher back into place. He comes down with a chemical light, and its weird glow casts our shadows like green smoke on the tunnel walls.

When we near the tunnel exit, Wickersham drops the chemical light and we crawl the last ten yards in near-darkness. A ladder is buried at an incline. We climb it, Melanie first, and we come up into the snow-muffled night. Wickersham comes up and I look at the tunnel exit.

We’ve come up from the earth through a hinged stump. It’s exactly like the escape tunnel exit from the TV show
Hogan’s Heroes
. I can’t help but laugh, and my laughing comes up into the world quietly. I start coughing again, but no more blood comes up.

The craftsmanship of the escape tunnel is amazing. It’s a hell of a design, and there’s some humor mixed with the paranoia of it, so I slap Wickersham on the back and thank God for the crazy, TV-rerun-addicted survivalist loners of this world.

We wipe the tunnel dirt from our hands and knees and crouch near the exit. Wickersham turns and asks me if I’ve ever watched
Hogan’s Heroes
on TV. I’m about to answer when the boys run out of the blasted house and start shooting at anything and everything.

Wickersham isn’t lucky or blessed. He takes a round in the chest, and he isn’t shy about taking his leave from the world. We leave him mouth-open in the snow and run away. The boys aren’t on our trail, but we’re leaving tracks and it’s only a matter of time. We need to get some distance between us before first light. My knees are clicking and my quadriceps won’t last long at this pace and my head weighs a hundred pounds and my head is bleeding again. We finally get to a place where the snow can better support our weight. We make better time, and my legs hold off their impending mutiny, but we’re still leaving tracks. The clouds are low and thick and roiling above us. I pray for just enough snow to cover our tracks, but the sky holds on to its moisture.

We slow to a fast march. I’m about to puke, but then my mind wanders again from the pain and I’m okay. Melanie pulls up beside me, breathing cleanly and moving with good form. Maybe we’ll survive after all.

Sometimes we’re walking almost directly back toward the junkyard. It’s dark, and we need to make best possible speed, so we walk a snow-buried country road. The road is lined with ditches. An occasional lonely-looking mailbox rises out of the gloom as we pass by. Power lines droop unpowered between their creosote-soaked poles, and it’s very quiet. There aren’t any animals, no dogs or birds or squirrels. I start to worry about radiation again, the
cumulative
effects, and the worry keeps me warm for a few miles, but that’s about all it’s good for.

We walk single file. Every half hour or so, I trade places with Melanie at point, breaking trail through the snow, but it doesn’t take long before I’m used up. Melanie powers ahead of me, and I have no choice but to follow.

*     *     *

We walk into the foothills of Mount Shasta. I think we’re headed in the direction of Mount Shasta City. The road twists through the hills, and we walk its snowy switchbacks. We take a small single-lane track off the road, and it seems to dead-end at a growth of blackberries, but it doesn’t. There’s a walk-around through the brambles. The trail snakes through underbrush that seems like it’s from somewhere else, blackberry and vine maple and fern. We follow and it leads us to a cabin.

It’s a true log cabin, a big two-story job. The small first-floor windows are covered by rough-cut shutters. The exterior is smeared with mud and furry with patches of moss and lichen. The place is surrounded by blackberry vines that look as if they’re trying to swallow the place whole, and just might manage it. The logs of the structure look old and maybe past their prime, but I pound on a few of them, and they’re solid and perfectly seasoned and they seem to be well-sealed against the elements.

As a born-and-bred product of the suburbs, I can’t help but wonder what the place would look like all cleaned up, with a clear coat of varnish and a covered porch and a tasteful chandelier in the dining room and maybe some low-wattage lights out front. But then I realize why the place won’t ever appear on the cover of an architectural magazine. It looks like a crap-smeared old wreck because that’s the way it’s supposed to look. I knock on the door, but there’s no answer. I wait and listen to the sound of wind in trees, but we’re tired and cold, so I kick the door. I’m running on nothing but adrenaline. The impact of the kick reverberates in my head and ribs and in my irradiated guts, but I kick until wood splinters and the door swings open.

“Welcome to
mi hacienda
, et cetera,” I say.

“Thanks for having me over,” Melanie says.

“
De nada
, and so on and so forth.
Mi casa es su casa
, but let’s speak English, shall we?”

We go inside and I find a wooden chair and I jam it against the door to keep it closed. There’s a staircase to the left of the front door. I light a kitchen match and circle the ground floor, checking to see that we’re alone, and that the curtains are pulled. I stumble into a low table, and there’s a sand candle on it, and I light it.

Melanie gives me a smile. It’s a “what the hell are you gonna do?” kind of smile. She looks down. Her pants are filthy, and I’m a mess, too. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I can smell it on us, the smell of wet soot from burned cities and burned people.

Melanie goes upstairs and returns with an armload of blankets. She strips off her sopping, contaminated clothes and wraps herself in blankets decorated with scenes of elk and bear and salmon and eagles. I manage to throw the clothes outside. I strip out of my own nasty clothes and throw them into what’s left of God’s nature, and wrap myself in a blanket advertising Remington Arms.

I stand at a window high in the logs and peer through thick curtains. It would make a fine firing position, but all I have is the little belly gun. Melanie finds a lantern and I light it. The great room is clean and appears to have been furnished from a Cabela’s catalog. The hardwood floors are polished and everything is squared away. There’s an old-fashioned hutch to display the china, and the kitchen is spotless. A selection of books are fanned out on the handcrafted coffee table: a 9/11 conspiracy book, a pictorial history of failed United Nations military actions,
The Anarchist Cookbook
, and a do-it-yourself book about distilling alcohol.

There aren’t any subwalls or finish carpentry extras inside the cabin. The walls are unpolished rough-cut logs. They’re more than two feet in diameter—thick enough to stop the 5.56 rounds that the boys are so fond of. There’s a fireplace made of stone. A good compound bow hangs above the fireplace with a quiver of hunting arrows.

I put out the lantern. It’s dark outside, and the dirty snow doesn’t have much of a night glow to it. I peer through blackout curtains and look for whatever’s coming next. I weigh my options. I could use the bow, ambush the boys and pick some of them off. Maybe I could take one of their rifles and lead them away from the cabin.

I’m sick and battered and naked beneath my blankets, but I’m getting myself worked up to do it when a big gust of wind hits the cabin. It blows the sooty flocking from the trees, and the world goes gray. It makes the shutters bang against their latches, and it blows under the door and flutters the pages of the coffee-table books. I pray for more, and a storm blows in with high wind and more snow than I’ve ever seen. It’s a certifiable blizzard. It’s clean snow, too, and I’m not ashamed to give a prayer of thanks, right out loud. I use the conversational voice I used back when I stood a chance of making my family feel safe and loved and special. I talk to God as if He’s my beer buddy, and it makes me feel fine to do it. I pray without thinking and I don’t remember the words after I’ve said them.

When I’m finished, Melanie rolls her eyes, then smiles. We’ve almost certainly received a stay of execution, no matter its source. We won’t have to kill or die tonight, and I give a cheer, howling like a wolf while the storm wipes our tracks away. I dance a painful jig, circling and kicking up my feet, and I haven’t ever danced a jig in my life, until today.

I’m not sure where I am. I can’t remember in my normal way of remembering. The light of the world changes when a person is dying, and I remember the darnedest things.

They must’ve pulled the bus door open at some point. Powder snow floated down when they laid on their bellies and looked inside. There were pieces of ash in the snow like bits of vanilla bean in good ice cream. The light above was thick and yellow and it looked like it should taste of lemons. The last of the smoke from Scott’s little fire was whisked away by the wind, and I remember watching it go, thinking that our souls would soon be chasing it up over the mountains.

A young man stuck his head and shoulders down into the bus. He said, “We saw your smoke.” He didn’t point a gun at us, and we didn’t have any guns to point at him. We only stood and watched to see what he would do. He was backlit by the lemon-colored light, and he had wings on his back. He was a very handsome man, with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. In my unclear memory of him, they were heart-slaying eyes, and they seemed to carry knowledge of things that other people could never know—knowledge about the whys and wherefores of cities and kingdoms and the truths of man and woman, together.

His presence didn’t make any sense to me. Maybe he was one of the gunmen from the saloon, but then why did he have wings? He smiled at me, and his smile seemed to pass through my clothes and lay itself against my skin. It felt very good. My son was there beside me and we were dying of hypothermia and expecting to get shot at any moment. A man with wings was above us in the snow, but my body was preparing itself for lovemaking.

I can’t say I’m too proud of it. It’s not the kind of thing I’ll ever mention to Jerry, but maybe I’ll be able to rationalize it later. We were dying after all, and in times like that, instinct takes full control.