The Unit (8 page)

I get the spins, so I fall back down into my room and let the hangover have me. I let it have the sadness about Ookie, too, and I want to say that I deserve to be hurting. I downed at least one bottle of Jim Beam last night, but I don’t want to think about it. My body hurts everywhere and it’s like I’ve been poisoned and then beat to shit by Chuck Norris. My skull feels like a busted eggshell and what’s left of my brain is swelling up inside it.

I keep seeing Ookie’s head exploding and that makes me want to puke, but then it stops and Ookie gets up and tells me that it’s okay where he is now. He says it’s like being a rich kid waking up on Christmas morning. Every day is like that. He looks right at me, and he has a deep look in his eyes, like the paintings of the saints that were hung up on the walls of the juvie chapel that we used to go to on Sunday mornings for mandatory Mass. It’s a look that has the kind of pity that doesn’t piss me off. Ookie disappears and I can just barely sit up before I puke my guts out on the carpet. It’s like I puke my soul out. It’s like a prayer, and when I’m wiping my mouth I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of puking on purpose during a church service, because puking is more real and honest than any prayer can ever be.

I get my skinny ass back into bed. I tell myself that I’ll be okay after a while. Time heals everything but sometimes it’s too damned slow. Pain can only be fought alone and my soul is on the motel room floor beside me, so I don’t have anything to pray with. After a few minutes I fall asleep, and I sleep until midmorning.

Getting a second stab at the day. My head hurts like hell but I don’t feel like I’m about to die, anymore. I stick my head outside again. It’s still cold. Damned if the men aren’t still catching their Zs. I’m still wearing my coat and boots from last night so I stagger outside. There’s booze bottles everywhere around the cold firepit. Luscious hears me and drifts out of his room. He looks like he doesn’t have a hangover. He looks like he’s feeling no pain at all, but I seem to remember him matching me drink for drink. He smiles and he’s holding a pill bottle in his big hand. I read Oxycontin on the label. It’s about the perfect cure for a hangover. It’s about the best way to prevent one, too, as long as you don’t take too much.

“Sorry, boss,” he says. “I couldn’t face another ball crusher of a morning.”

“You could’ve given me some of that stuff, buddy.”

I’m hurting and he’s smiling and we’re alone and I’m not armed. The overcast is like a dirty church ceiling and birds are flying and eating and singing. The birds make me happy, because they’re like radiation gauges. Luscious gives me a hard look, then he starts cracking up because that’s what guys do when they’re stoned and they’ve kept something from their leader. I tell myself that keeping the drugs from me wasn’t like mutiny—it was only like playing a joke. Luscious is getting off on seeing my pain, and I guess it’s a good sign, but I look back at the motel and take notice of where I propped up my rifle.

“You look like you crawled from a dead mule’s asshole.”

“Thanks,” I say, thinking,
Why not let him have his fun? Why not let this play out?

He points to the pill bottle.

“Take some, now. Get yourself wasted and take a day of vacation.” He waves his arm at the motel. “I can handle the girls for one day.”

Luscious always calls the men “girls” when he’s in a good mood.

“Ah hell, I’m awake now. Might as well face the music.”

I see another pill bottle on a rock by the firepit. It’s empty. That’s twenty-five pills, plus the half-empty bottle Luscious gave me. That’s enough to give every man at least one dose.

“The men are sleeping like babies, are they?”

“Yep. Every last one of ’em.”

“You didn’t let them OD, did you?”

“Nope. Rationed out the happy pills myself.”

Just after we took over the town, we ended up with lots of drugs we found in the market and the houses and the cars. I had to lock them up in a little safe at the junkyard before the men could swallow and snort and shoot themselves into druggie paradise. I’m not a prude, but I didn’t want a bunch of dead or strung-out pirates on my hands. I hold out the pill bottle.

“Did this come from our stash?” I’m still smiling, but Luscious gets serious in a hurry.

“God, no. The hippies had it on them. Our other drugs are still locked in the safe.”

“Okay,” I say. “So this is just your average, everyday smartassed conspiracy, all of you guys working together to get over on your boss?”

Luscious lets his breath back out. His smile comes back.

“That’s just what it is. I’ll make us something to eat while you go clean up the puke pile you laid in your room.”

“You heard that, did you?”

“I thought I was gonna have to send for an exorcist.”

He laughs his low laugh and he’s very damned pleased with himself. I’m glad that he’s not so afraid of me that he can’t have some fun. Ookie is probably laughing his ass off, too, in heaven. I’m hurting like hell and the pain is my own damned fault, so I guess it’s okay that my second-in-command is giggling like a little bitch.

I sit by the dead fire and a short stretch of time comes that doesn’t have any pain in it. I know that I’m a sight. It makes me kind of happy that Luscious and the men got over on me. It’s a mild thing for them to do after they watched me shoot Ookie. It’s the middle road between them obeying me out of fear, like beat-down dogs, and them killing me. They’ll be in a good mood today when they wake up, and maybe this will be one of the days we’ll remember.

“Someday we’re going to say these were the good days, right?” I say to Luscious.

“Yep. It’s just like that.”

He stands next to me for a few seconds too long, not saying anything about Ookie. I’m weak from the hangover and I start to mist up. I think that Luscious is misting up, too, but I look over and he’s only wasted out of his gourd. He’s flying high and looking at the empty firepit like he can’t remember how to make a fire, so I tell him to sit down before he hurts himself, and I go for firewood.

One of the chores I’ve made the men stick to is firewood detail. We have maybe five cords stacked in the motel parking lot. We’ve cut and burned most of the trees close-in, so the men have to walk farther for it, but they’ve done a good job. It won’t be long until we’ll need to get a regular logging outfit going, and I’ve even had ideas about getting one of the town’s lumber mills up and running again. It wouldn’t be a bad way to put the men to work after the law comes back. The rich city fuckers will have to rebuild the places that got smoked, right? Maybe if I put the men to work doing something useful, something legal that makes money fair and square, the law won’t put us back into our cages. Yeah, there’s more than one way of taking advantage of bad times, but my head hurts too much to do any planning this morning.

I load up a wheelbarrow of wood that was split from a windblown pine. I’m careful when I load the wood, so it doesn’t make any noise to hurt my head. I’m standing bent over and breathing hard when I hear the sound of people walking. I think at first that my men are waking up, but it’s not them. Then I think it’s only the wind or my hangover playing tricks with my ears. But no, it’s real. The sound is coming from the road. We have visitors.

I run as quietly as I can back to the firepit. Luscious is zoning out with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and I wake him and shush him and he hears it, too, and then we’re back in the world that’s been left to us. Luscious comes back into himself then. He goes from room to room and wakes the men. They gather around me. They’re wasted on downers but they squat on the ground and load magazines and strap on their ammo pouches before I even tell them to lock and load.

There’s no way strangers should’ve gotten this close to us. I’ll leave it for another time to punish the ones that didn’t stand their watch last night and this morning. I split us into two groups and we move to surround the strangers. The eyepieces of my binoculars are cold against my eye sockets and they give me a monster headache, but I keep looking until I see that there’s four of them, one of each kind of human being, man, woman, boy, and girl. I hold up four fingers and the men hunker down without a sound, like the good, stoned hunters they are. The people head for the market, just like any hungry animals naturally would.

We’re hungry and cold. I’m tempted to go into the junkyard and see if I can get one of the cars to start—one of the big SUVs, maybe, with a good, strong climate control system and seat heaters. But no. Everything with a computer is down for the count, and the fact remains that running vehicles attract death.

We circle the market. Nothing. I take us around again. It takes ten minutes, but peace of mind is worth its weight in time. It’s about eleven in the morning and the light through the overcast doesn’t quite have enough strength to cast shadows. The wind is blowing over us and a few sick-looking geese fly south. The market overlooks the freeway. It’s located between the airstrip and the junkyard. I glass the surrounding area, but I don’t see any movement.

I turn and look into the windows of the store. My mind takes me back to past road trips, and I imagine the thrum of the road and the stillness of stopping. The wind is always blowing in places like this. The daylight looks a certain way when it hits freeway outposts. Thick. Weighted. A place that shouldn’t matter burrowing nevertheless into memory. The bright signs that draw people to the shabbiness of the closer view. Not mere patina, but barely restrained decay. But there’s the temptation of packaged goods. A bargain bin full of things past their shelf lives. “Shelf life”—the sad feeling of those words. The incredible loneliness of such places. Arriving and taking and buying and leaving. Lives spent just passing through, but I wonder what it would be like to stay here.

We finally move across the asphalt of the market’s parking lot, taking cover behind cars. The glass door isn’t locked. We enter the store. Scotty stands guard automatically. I want to get us in and out as quickly as possible.

The store has been looted, but not completely. It’s still a gold mine of packaged chips and cookies and candy, but I hunt for protein. I grab the last packages of beef jerky and cans of mixed nuts. Susan fills the outer pouches of her pack with antibacterial ointment and ibuprofen and multivitamins and Band-Aids.

Melanie opens a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and takes a chug that brings tears to her eyes and a smile to her face, then she goes for the gossip magazines. She reads us articles about J-Lo and the Baldwin brothers. The articles she reads all revolve around the issue of stars with big backsides. We’re laughing. It’s a good day, I’m thinking. The worry is still there, but we need something good to punctuate the other days, don’t we?

I find myself in the beer section. I slip a warm bottle of Widmer hefeweizen into my pack for later. There’s also an entire aisle of wine, but I walk behind the counter to the booze section. I limit myself to one bottle of Crown Royal. For medicinal purposes, you understand. I’ll light a fire tonight and have a nip of whiskey and maybe I’ll be able to lighten up for a few minutes. Yes. It’s a good day. I want the good time to last, so I don’t rush it. I know that high morale is a weapon in itself. The clock is ticking, but I let them shop to their hearts’ content.

We’re laughing and stuffing our packs with riches, with life itself, and then bullets are snapping all around us. Melanie is closest, and I pull her to the ground. We get right down on the broken glass and try to push ourselves into the cracks between the tiles. All of us but Scotty. He’s standing with his new, proud posture and shooting his rifle at the ambushers. Jerry runs and tackles him and pulls him back from the front of the store. Bullets take pieces of things with them as they pass. Melanie is screaming. I wrap myself around her. Bottles of wine are breaking red and white, and the floor is slick with wine and glass.

I check Melanie but she hasn’t been shot. Her screams aren’t screams of pain, but anger. People aren’t supposed to be like this. People
are
like this. I push the shotgun out around a rack of greeting cards and fire a blast into the parking lot.

Stop it! Just stop it! What’s so fucking hard about that?

I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry I didn’t see them before they opened up. I was supposed to be watching and I didn’t see them. Are we hit? Is there any blood? I can’t see Dad and Mel, and God damn these assholes if they killed them. I end up next to Dad. He’s okay and so are Mel and Mom. We’re all okay and the shooting is letting up. They shot high. Maybe they didn’t want to ruin the stuff in here. But now what?

We’re surrounded by shooters. We’re surrounded by a parking lot that only has a few cars for cover. And I get the feeling that the shooters didn’t just stumble up on us. No. I get the feeling we’re caught in a trap. Something makes me look up at the shelves. Rows of chips. Corn chips and potato chips and pretzels and cheesy fish crackers. I didn’t notice before that some of the packages are open. The bags are crumpled and crooked on the shelves. Some of them have dirty fingerprints on them.

It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t have noticed back when the world was boring, but I see it now, all right. Bait. It’s bait and this is a trap and we’re in it. The rat eats the cheese; the rat eats the cheese; hi-ho, the dairy-o, the rat eats the cheese. And now we’re totally screwed. Unless we fight. Unless we fight and kill and win.