The Unit (31 page)

“Either way, the monsters have to pay.”

“Shouldn’t we leave that to God?”

“I
am
leaving it to God. It’s what He told me to do.”

I don’t know what to say. He walks outside to watch the helicopters land. From his turned back I hear:

“He told me. I heard it.”

We’ll be leaving soon. We’re gentle with each other while we divide the MREs. We trade for our favorite entrees. I get the veggie entrees. Dad takes the meat dishes—Pork Rib and Beef Enchilada and Pot Roast w/Vegetables and Meatloaf w/Gravy and Chicken Fajita. I get a pile of meals, too—Veggie Burger w/BBQ Sauce, Cheese Tortellini, Vegetable Manicotti, Cheese & Vegetable Omelet, and Vegetable Lasagna.

We eat our first meals fast and cold. I don’t know how many we eat, but it’s a lot. The place is littered with foil packets and slimed with food. We have food on our faces and our hands are greasy with super-preserved sauces. We burp and smile, then we see what pigs we’ve made of ourselves and we get kind of shy.

By evening, we’re getting back some of our almost-forgotten etiquette. I light lanterns and pump some water and clean my hands and face. Dad cleans himself, too. While he’s cleaning up, I clear the dining room table. I scrub the table as clean as I can, then I cover it with a linen tablecloth and set it with place settings I find in the hutch. White china plates with real silverware. I wonder when they were last used—a holiday meal, the celebration of a new birth, a wake. I light candles and heat our MREs in unfamiliar pots and pans. I find spices in the kitchen cupboards, and I add them to our meal, just because I can. Garlic and pepper and Tabasco and oregano and ginger powder. I add tiny amounts that I can barely taste, but it makes me feel rich to know that all those spices are in my food.

Dad stokes a long-burning fire in the fireplace, and we sit down at the table. We’re lit by soft flames. Dad bows his head and gives thanks, his lips moving, but no sound coming out. It’s the way he prays in public. It’s not like he’s shy about his religion or anything, and it occurs to me that he’s praying quietly like he does when he doesn’t want to embarrass me.

But I’m not embarrassed. He lifts his head and sees me looking at him. He smiles a huge smile. He hardly ever smiles like that when he’s sober, but he’s doing it now.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just that I think we might be on the other side of this thing.”

“I think you might be right.”

He nods and makes his “I’m pretending to be serious” face. I nod back at him. He hasn’t changed a bit since this whole thing began. He’s still worried about me, and he’ll still kill in my name, if it comes to that.

I must’ve let something show on my face, because he asks me if I’m okay. I tell him everything’s fine, then I squish everything back down inside me. That’s what cowards do, right?

But then almost nothing else matters as we dig into our last high-calorie meal of the day. I feel the proteins and carbs going to work inside me, and for the first time in weeks, I start to worry about getting fat. I tell Dad about it, and he laughs a real laugh. We eat in the flickering light, and our stomachs accept the nourishment, and it’s almost as good as all the dreams I’ve had lately of unlimited room service in a nice hotel.

*     *     *

After the first day of feasting we cut back to two meals a day. After we eat, we go outside and stare into the blue sky, but no more airplanes or helicopters fly over. After two days, Dad goes out scouting to see what’s around us. I go for a walk, too. I have nowhere else to go, so I follow Dad’s tracks, trying to be as quiet as I can.

I like the hard work of being quiet. I walk slowly because speed makes me noisy. I try to walk on the hard parts of the world, rocks and logs like slippery balance beams. I’m a gymnast, and I’ve trained for years to be very careful about where I put my feet, and I can walk with almost no sound at all.

Dad’s tracks go on and on, and sometimes they have deer tracks around them, but he’s still walking straight away from the cabin. I’m not a mountain girl or anything, but I think the deer tracks are fresh. And then I see a deer. It’s a doe, and she’s pawing at the ground and eating snow-dried grass. I stop walking and she looks at me, but I don’t think she can really see me. She tunes her ears at me like antennae while she lifts her tail and lets fly with her pellets, fertilizing whatever might still dare to grow in this world, then she slides into deeper woods.

It’s a soft day. The creek gurgles under its layer of ice, and in some places the water splashes onto snow. The ice is clear and grainy like an unflavored snow cone. It looks crunchy and good, and I eat some, and it is. Robins and jays make a racket in the trees. Squirrels and jackrabbits stand and chew on their meals of stored acorns. I space out for a while in that mild place, and I try to forget everything, but I can’t.

I start walking faster. The creek is about a quarter mile behind me when I know I’m not alone. I get the feeling that something dangerous is nearby. I slow down. I see Dad standing at the edge of a clearing. It’s a snowy meadow with a big McMansion in the middle of it. There’s smoke coming from the chimney. Someone is outside chopping firewood. It’s only about thirty-five degrees out, but the wood-chopping guy has his shirt off. His skin is the color of unsweetened chocolate and his muscles are big. His hair has grown out since I saw him last. He has a big ’fro now, like athletes had in the seventies, but there’s no doubt that it’s Luscious.

My breathing speeds up and my vision gets super-clear. Luscious doesn’t see us, so that means he’s vulnerable. I like seeing him vulnerable. Dad has an arrow strung in his bow. His head is down, but his eyes are locked onto his target. For a few heartbeats, I want to watch Dad shoot Luscious. For a few heartbeats I wish I had a gun, so I could do it myself.

But no. Hell no. I get more pissed off than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m pissed at Luscious and Dad and most of all I’m pissed at my own cowardly ass.

I move closer. I’m all done with trying to be quiet. This is the last straw. It’s the boys and Dad again, with only their violence in common, but it’s me, too, and I’m running past the edge of the woods and straight out into the clearing between them. The snow is the same pale color as the sky. The air is cold but softening, and I can feel mud beneath the snow.

Dad runs after me, but Luscious sees us then. He drops his axe and reaches for something. I see the whites of his eyes as his big hands close over a rifle. It’s like my worst nightmare, but somehow I’m not afraid.

Dad takes a shot with his bow. His arrow arcs over my head and misses Luscious by an inch and goes cracking into the far trees. He shoots another arrow, but Luscious dives behind his stack of firewood. Dad drops the bow and takes out his little revolver and pop, pop, pops away, but no one is killing anyone yet.

There’s still time, so I get exactly between them and I hold up my hands. A voice comes out of me that I’ve never heard before. I tell them to stop, for once in their lives to stop and
think
! It feels damned good to say it. Maybe I’m crazy because I’m not afraid anymore. And now that the fear is gone, I’m lifted up into the buzz of what I’m doing.

I stand between them, waving my hands over my head like a crazy woman. And they
do
stop. Dad stops shooting. He reloads the revolver, but when it’s loaded he keeps it pointed at the ground. Luscious points his rifle at us, but he doesn’t fire.

They look at me. They look at each other. Dad tries to move sideways so I’m not in his line of fire, but I sidestep to keep myself between them. He says, Please, baby, but I’m not a baby anymore. I’m doing the first logical fucking thing I’ve seen anyone do since this shit began.

I hear Dad start to move behind me. He walks straight toward me, and I immediately walk straight toward Luscious. Dad stops. I stop. Luscious smiles and shakes his head.

“Y’all are crazy,” he says. “All y’all.”

“Well then, let’s be crazy together,” I say.

“Let her go. She hasn’t done anything to you,” Dad says.

“Well, maybe you missed the part when she did a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people. Maybe we want our little whore back.”

Dad raises the revolver and Luscious raises his rifle.

“Stop,” I say. “Let’s talk. We have food. We could sit down and eat and talk.”

It’s like they don’t hear me. They’re looking right through me. The anger flares up so high that I can barely see.

“Dammit! Damn you all! Can’t you pull your heads out of your asses?”

I hold my arms out and take a few steps closer to Luscious.

“It’s over,” I say. “The National Guard is on the way. FEMA and cops and insurance adjusters and bail bondsmen and all that crap. The world is putting itself back together. It’s time to get back to being normal.”

Then Bill Junior walks out of the back door of the house. He’s carrying a black rifle, but he’s not pointing it at anyone.

“We’ve got the most normal thing in the world going on right here, girl,” he says. “Come over here, why don’t you, and give us some sugar.”

His voice is soft, but it makes me want to puke. With Bill Junior and Luscious and Dad out in the open, the geometry is impossible, and I can’t stand between them all. Donnie Darko comes out of the house, too. He’s holding a pistol down behind his skinny butt. I don’t think he’ll shoot us, but he’s another life to worry about. I back up until Dad is close behind me. He grabs my shoulders. I let him. He whispers to me.

“You’ve had your say. Let’s just back away now.”

He points his revolver with his right hand and wraps his left arm around me. He pulls me backward, but I don’t move my feet. How could I? I’m doing something worthwhile and I can’t stop now.

I try to peel his arm from around me, but he tightens his grip. He pulls me backward. I’m back to screaming again, because I scream at him to stop. My boot heels leave twin lines in the snow. He says something about running, and then he twists me around very fast. He’s shielding me from the boys, but he doesn’t know that my power can’t save us when it’s not in plain sight.

I hear the popping of gunshots. Dad lifts me off my feet and I have no traction to fight him. He fires his revolver over his shoulder, then he drops it and holds me leg-straddled in front of him and he starts to run. I hear more shots and something hits me and I can’t catch my breath. I don’t want to, but I rest my chin on Dad’s shoulder and he hikes me up higher to get a better grip. I look down and see the backs of his boots, running. The snow is granulated here, too, and there’s blood in it, and I can’t help but think it’s a properly flavored snow cone now.

The helicopters land. Six Black Hawks and two Apache gunships. Their green paint is so dark that I can’t read the black letters and symbols that identify them. They put down in a field of snow not far from the skeleton of Old Bill’s Cessna.

“Here’s our ride,” Mom says.

She’s wearing a daypack. She found a new shotgun in town, and she’s carrying it in her good hand. She looks down at it, then props it against the wall of the saloon. She motions to the helicopters.

“Shall we?” she says.

I roll my eyes.

“Our heroes,” I say.

The townspeople throw their doors open and run long lines across the buried roads and fields to meet the helicopters. Their packs are light, but their feet are clumsy in the snow. They smile at each other as they run. It might be one of those good times that people keep in their memories and tell their kids about, years later. It might be a rescue and the beginning of a return to a normal way of life, but I’m not ready for normal.

I slip into my pack and walk the other way. Of all the guns in town, I chose a scoped Kimber 30.06. I’ll be walking in open country, and it feels good to have a rifle that can reach out across it. I have a .40 caliber Glock at the small of my back, for close-in fighting, and plenty of ammo for both guns.

Mom was heading toward the helicopters, but she stops right away when I don’t pull up beside her. She turns and runs after me. She has a spastic running form, with her arm in the sling, but she’s still pretty fast. She picks up her shotgun and follows me. Part of me is happy to have her with me, but I don’t want her to be around when I catch up to the ambushers.

We get some buildings between ourselves and the rescuers. Mom pulls up beside me and I stop. I lift my head in the direction of the helicopters.

“You should go,” I say.

“We both should go,” she says.

“I’m not going.”

“Okay. But I’m coming with you.”

She looks right into my eyes, and her lips are welded together.

“I won’t take any orders from you. If you see something you don’t like, I’ll appreciate it if you keep quiet about it.”

“I’m not here to be your conscience.”

“Good.”

“But I do have one request. Let’s find your father and sister first.”

“That’s the plan, but it might not work out that way. What if we find Bill Junior’s crew first?”

“If we do, I’ll help you. God help me, but I want to hurt them, too.”

“I’m not talking about only hurting them.”

“I know.”