The Unit

by Terry DeHart

  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.

  Susan

  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.

  When the man with wings grimaced at the stench of the dead girl behind us, I was pulled back into the real world, bad as it ever was. Another man stuck his head into the bus. He was bearded, flat-eyed, and weak-chinned and he was holding a lit highway flare. Scotty tried to put his arm around me, but we were shaking the last of our heat into the sputtering, flare-lit world, and his arm bounced itself from my shoulder.

  We were like animals in a bulldozed den. I’d like to say that I was calmed by the power of grace and acceptance, but mostly I was impatient. Our clothes were soaking wet in air that felt like cold fire, and I hoped the men would get to doing whatever it was they planned to do. We shook so violently that it seemed as if we were taking awkward little jumps and flights from the ground. The man with wings shouted to someone we couldn’t see.

  “They’re freezing.”

  “Well, get them warmed up, why don’t you?”

  And so they did. They caused us to levitate out of the bus. I didn’t believe they were really doing it, or that we’d actually survive, or that the men wouldn’t slaughter us right there in the snow. Some of the men had guns, but they kept them slung over their shoulders while other men gave us emergency treatment.

  The handsome man pulled the wings from his back and set up a mountain tent in the snow. Another man lit camp heaters in the tent and pushed us inside. Hands reached in and stripped away our wet clothes. Our skin was without feeling and it must’ve been like disrobing a pair of corpses. They wrapped us in sleeping bags and broke out a thermos and forced hot coffee down our throats. Two of them went back to town to get some dry clothes for us. The ones who stayed had worry in their eyes, and they moved with the speed of rescue workers, although I didn’t believe in the concept of rescue anymore.

  But in spite of my disbelief, the men treated us with what seemed to be the very best of intentions, and so I wasn’t at all sure that we were still alive.

  Melanie

  In the morning I’m sick again. Outside, the wind settles into a steady gale, and maybe it’s the dawn of a new ice age. There’s no question of going anywhere. Not today and maybe not ever. I’m so nauseated that I keep myself in a fetal position. The pain is horrible in my guts, and the skin of my face is hot and tight, like I have a sunburn.

  I pry myself off the couch and crawl to Dad. He’s on the floor, wrapped in Cabela’s blankets. He has red blotches on his face. I take his pulse and it seems fine. I take my own pulse and my heart is going like a machine gun. Dad opens his eyes. He parts his cracked lips and moans.

  “Hey,” I try to say. My voice is a croak. Dad croaks something back at me that sounds like “water.”

  His canteen is on the floor beside him. I unscrew the cap. Dad tries to sit up, but he can’t. I’m afraid for him, and for all of us. The worry rises like an uncontrolled fire. I see things happening, but they don’t seem real. We’re still taking radiation into our bodies. I read somewhere that radiation is measured by strength and exposure over time. Our recovery was only temporary. We’re sick anywhere and everywhere again, and then we’re curled up and panting.

  The hours pass slowly, and the pain in my head doesn’t go away. I drag myself across the floor every hour to stoke the fire. We sleep again. When it gets dark, we wake up and light the lantern and candles. Occasionally one of us stands and looks out into the storm. Dad doesn’t say a word to me all day and through the night, and he might be playing the Ignoring Game, so I play it, too.

  The sickness passes again. I’m grateful when the pain recedes, but good health isn’t a thing I can trust anymore. Also, something else is wrong. When I start feeling better, I start feeling guilty. With all the talking and hiding and screaming I’ve been doing, I haven’t done anything that really counts. I didn’t kill the animals who took me, but I didn’t make my point, either. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d killed some of them. At least then I’d be more than a victim. But as it is, I haven’t changed anything. Everyone is exactly the same way they’d be if I never existed. I’ve left it all undone, and I’m pissed off at myself.

  To take our minds off of things, we get busy. We try to settle in. We find canned goods and ration them out and we take turns cooking. We take turns doing the dishes, then we prepare a proper list of chores, and we don’t try to find ways to avoid the work. In the downtime, Dad dusts and scrubs and whittles, and then cleans up after himself. I find some rusty cast iron skillets in the pantry, and I sand them clean and carbonize them over the fire until they’re shiny and black. I tell Dad that I wish I had some yarn and knitting needles, even though I used to believe that knitting was only a way to keep women from ruling the world.

  Between storms, Dad goes into the woods on showshoes. He carries the bow and quiver of arrows. He doesn’t go very far. He sprinkles MRE cracker crumbs around outside the cabin, and the hungry deer come to him.

  Sometimes I watch him from the windows. Maybe he knows I’m watching him, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. Even though it’s twenty below outside, he moves very slowly. He kind of moves his head like a rudder, and it takes me a while to see that he’s pointing himself into the wind so his scent won’t give away his presence. He practices his stalking skills until he can get so close to a deer that he can take it with the bow.

  The first time I saw him shoot a deer, it made me sick. There wasn’t any sound as the arrow disappeared between the ribs of a skinny doe. She got a surprised look on her face, but she didn’t fall right away. She turned and I could see the arrow sticking out of her far side. She walked to a pine tree and rubbed herself against it, trying to scratch away the thing that was causing her such pain. Dad put another arrow into her, and it hit her just behind her front leg, and her legs buckled and that was it. I wanted to puke or die, but I did neither.

  The venison doesn’t make us sick. It’s kind of stringy a
nd gamey, but I feel okay after I eat it. I’m not happy that we have to kill to survive. We don’t have any other choice, and I think about native peoples, the Indians who lived here, and how they lived in harmony with nature. I try to believe that we’re like the Indians now, and that’s how I manage to tolerate myself as I watch my dad become one with the trees, moving into the breeze without sound or scent, to turn deer into venison through the nuclear winter.

  The spring doesn’t come. We hear dripping during the day, but everything freezes up solid again at night. The icy stream creaks and leaks into the dark underbrush, but it doesn’t gain its freedom until mid-May, and then it breaks free with nothing more than a sigh. The icicles drip away into the mud and all the world is soft to the touch, but nothing flowers or blossoms, and it’s as if all of nature is reflecting the way I feel.

  One morning I think I hear a helicopter in the distance, but when I run outside, the sound is gone. I stand with Dad at the window and we pray in our own ways for the world to come alive again. I pray to Gaia and Sophia, and I can almost picture the underbrush beginning to come alive: vine maple and nettles and wild blackberry and strawberry vines filling with life-sap. Tender buds swelling on branches and then pushing their payloads of blossoms into the sky. Animals rising from their sleep and joining the new cycle of seasons, but the sky is still overcast. All of nature is tired and aching for the sun, but Mother Earth is sleeping in.

  Scott

  The guys got us thawed out and took us back to Virginia City. It’s a safe place now. Pastor Jim is gone. He went missing after he chased after us in the storm. Sam, the young guy Pastor Jim backhanded at the bar, he’s in charge now.

  I think that maybe Pastor Jim’s disappearance wasn’t an accident. I think maybe the shots we heard when we were running away were what took Pastor Jim out of his leadership role. I don’t say anything about it to Sam. Anyhow, I’m not too broken up about Pastor Jim’s disappearing act, so there isn’t necessarily anything else to say about it, except good riddance.

  We’re snowbound, but Virginia City isn’t short of supplies: shelter, water, food, booze, and guns. Men, women, children, and three or four hot girls that are my age. There are thirty-five people here. Our supplies should last us through to spring, but I’m worried that spring might not come. The sky still doesn’t look right, and I think I’m not alone with my worry, but nobody says anything about it.

  I meet Sam at the bar every night and we drink whiskey and talk about stuff. There’s a mirror behind the bar, and I can see a reflection of my screwed-up face. It looks like a map sewed out of bad meat. Some girls hang out in the bar. The ones that don’t look away from me give me looks of pity.

  Mom sat with us at first, but then she caught the hint that I didn’t necessarily want her there. She mostly hangs out with ladies her own age, and they drink coffee and talk about their kids, and Mom is starting to sort of relax and I’m happy for her.

  At the saloon, we take turns being the bartender, and some of the other young guys in town line up on barstools while we talk. The saloon is the nerve center of the town. Its tables are almost always full of people, and I look around to see if I can find the hippie girl I saw when I first arrived, but she isn’t here. There are other girls at the tables and some of them look at me and look away, and some of them are almost as pretty as the hippie girl, but I can’t get her out of my mind, so I don’t hit on anyone or anything more complicated than a whiskey bottle.

  We get drunk and we start to believe that it’s up to us to change the world for the better. We drink good whiskey from clean glasses and we make plans. As soon as I thaw out and can sit upright, I tell Sam the facts of life.

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there. There’s no way to reason with them. The only thing they understand is killing. The first thing we need to do is fortify the town.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll get right on it.”

  I think he’s only bullshitting me, but the next day he sits at the bar and unrolls a scroll of paper. I pour a round of whiskey for him and the guys while he shows me his drawing of the town.

  “We’ll set up bunkers. Here and here and here. We’ll use plate steel and cast iron and sandbags to make pillboxes. We can borrow stuff from Harry’s machine shop.” He turns to me. “Whaddya think?”

  “Sounds like a good start.”

  “Do you think we can take them?”

  “Maybe. The ones we went up against had dynamite.”

  Sam scratches his oily blond head. He has ink stains on his fingers and the black fingernails of an old-fashioned newspaperman from the movies. The wind is blowing slower outside, maybe twenty miles an hour, but it’s lifting loose powder snow into the air. The snow is white, finally, but the wind uncovers patches of the gray snow. I remember how cold I was in the bus, and I’m not finished being grateful about things like heat and food and booze.

  “What we might do,” Sam says. He picks up his whiskey glass with his ink-blotched hands and drains it. “What we might do is open up the floor to discussion. Got any other ideas?”

  I drain my whiskey glass and pop it down on the bar.

  “Maybe. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  I step from behind the bar and come around so Sam’s drawing of the town isn’t upside down.

  “How long do you think the snow will last?”

  My question raises a few other questions that no one wants to think about, but I have to ask it. Four other guys are at the bar and they don’t say a word. They just look at Sam and wait for his opinion. Sam sighs. One of the other guys, Jonathan, goes behind the bar and pours a shot of the good stuff for Sam. Jonathan is a big, flannel-wearing dude who likes to please people, but he doesn’t have the shifty eyes of a true kiss-ass, and I wouldn’t want to push him too far.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Sam says. He takes a sip of the good whiskey and smacks his lips. The wind picks up, and a gust blows over the top of the chimney and makes a hooting sound.

  “Not long ago, I could spend just about all day sitting in front of a television set. Ask anyone here, they’ll say it’s true.”

  He takes another sip, and I’m watching to see exactly how he does it, using hand movements and good timing and his hushed but serious voice, to get us to lean in and really listen to him. A great stage presence is just about the most important thing for a leader to have. There’s no doubt that Sam believes he’s a leader. He drains his glass.

  “I mostly watched the educational channels. I really got off on that shit.”

  He motions for a refill, and he makes us wait. Jonathan pours again and we watch the golden whiskey gut-gut into Sam’s big shot glass. Sam takes a sip and lets his eyes get all distant.

  “Remember back when people had their panties in a bunch about global warming, and they made all those horror shows? Yeah? Well, there were also a couple of shows about global cooling. One of them was called The Summer That Never Was.”

  It’s a good place for him to pause again, and he does. The other guys are eating out of his hand, so he goes on.

  “In the year that Krakatoa exploded—maybe you’ve heard of that volcano, boys—in that year, the winter lasted right through spring, and there wasn’t a real summer. The volcano put tons of shit into the atmosphere, and it took more than a year for the sky to clear. There weren’t any crops to speak of, that first year. And the animals, people included, didn’t have enough to eat.”

  Big Jonathan pours himself a drink and downs it like he’s on autopilot. His eyes are blank.

  “So, to answer your question,” Sam says, “I think the snow might last for a good long while.”

  I’m not sure whether to roll my eyes or clap my hands. His words are probably true enough, but his performance is straight out of a reality show. I settle for a nod, hoping it looks like a wise nod, and maybe kind of like a smartass nod, too. It takes a while for Sam to get over himself, but he finally comes around.

  “Why do you ask
?”

  I motion to Jonathan for a refill of my own. The big dude refills my glass but he narrows his eyes at me, saying without words that I haven’t earned any favors from him. I don’t touch the whiskey. I let it sit there in front of me while I wait a few heartbeats.

  “The snow might give us an advantage in a fight,” I say. “We could dig tunnels.”

  Sam gets it, right away. He takes it without hesitation as his own idea, as I was pretty sure he would. He picks up his leaky pen and draws lines that stick out from the town like the spines of an urchin. He inks black circles every few inches on the lines.

  “If anyone comes at us, we’ll pop up all around them, and behind them, too, here and here and here. Get started digging tunnels in the snow. We’ll make them everywhere that make sense, so we can kill the fuckers coming and going. Make wide places in the tunnels, so we can fight the bastards if they get inside. We’ll fight like the Viet Cong did, from underground, and we’ll win, too.”

  Bill Junior

  We were sick as shit for a while, but we’re getting better. Only me and Luscious and Donnie Darko are left. The others are Popsicles in the dirty snow. Most of them were killed during the fights and the ambushes we started and finished, so they died with some honor, the honor of men trying to fill their bellies and maybe get themselves laid. But some of my men were frozen alive in that first big storm, or died from the radiation in it, and that’s my fault for not getting us to shelter right away.