The Unit

by Terry DeHart

  In August, the thaw achieves a more complete victory. The icy stream moans and leaks at the edges of its banks and then its water breaks. The icicles fall from the eaves of the cabin and shatter when they hit the porch. The world is dripping and soggy. The underbrush here is thin, but it’s made up of the same kinds of plants as the underbrush in Oregon. I watch it try to reassert itself—vine maple and nettles and wild blackberries—and I hate it. Tender buds unfurl and push blossoms into the sky and I want to pinch them tight and shove them back into their rough branches. But the new climate does it for me. Random freezes take place all summer, and the trees are dying. Even the hardy grasses lose their grip, and the slightest breezes blow dust into the house and into our lungs and eyes and dreams.

  More days pass. We’ve almost exhausted our supplies. God no longer allows grasses to grow and leaves to open, so I don’t talk to Him anymore. I’m helping Donnie change Jerry’s dressing when another kind of change comes into our lives. I hear a familiar sound. A small airplane is approaching. I walk outside and a little plane comes into view above us, circling the flattened mushroom of our chimney smoke. Scott is standing in the yard. His scarred face is twisted into a scowl. He’s aiming his scoped rifle at the pilot and his finger is on the trigger.

  A hand emerges from the airplane’s open window and makes a peace sign. Scott lowers his rifle, but doesn’t put it on safe. The pilot waggles his wings, and then throws something out. Sheets of paper flutter in the sky and float down to litter the forest. I walk into a swirl and pluck a flyer from the air. The front side announces the locations of regional federal aid centers. On the back is a census form, with a notice that martial law is in effect, as if that makes us safer.

  I’m not exactly overburdened by my trust of strangers, but we’re hungry, so I set out to walk fifteen miles to the nearest aid center. It’s an overnight trip, at best. Donnie stays home to watch over Jerry and Melanie. Scotty follows me, and I let him.

  We’re wearing empty packs in hopes of filling them. We’re dragging sleds we made from the metal of an old garbage can. There’s no snow and the sleds rattle over rocks and keep getting caught on shrubs and low branches.

  I’m carrying Donnie’s pistol at the small of my back, and I’m sure that Scott is carrying a concealed weapon, too. I’m walking armed again in open country, and I can’t quite believe there was a time when we rode fast and warm and whole in a big American SUV.

  We walk the fifteen miles. We’re not spoiled people anymore, so we don’t complain. There aren’t any clouds, but the sky is gray. I try to enjoy the fact that I’m walking with my son. I’m sure he’ll be leaving us soon. He’s been talking about joining the army or the air force. He’s a pilot, after all, and a young man, and I can’t expect him to stay in the middle of nowhere with us.

  Jerry and I expected him to go to college, but I can’t imagine it now. There’s much work to do in America and in the world, and now isn’t the time for passive learning and beer parties and flirting. I watch him pull his sled through clumps of dying grass, and I hardly recognize the boy he once was, last year.

  When we near the town, groups of people are converging on the aid center. It makes me nervous to be near them, and they don’t look happy to see us, either. On the main street of the town there’s a sign welcoming us to the Shasta County Federal Aid Center. There’s a sandbagged position manned by National Guard troops. A machine-gun barrel tracks our progress.

  We stand in a line. I have no idea what it’s for. The other people in line crowd us, and we glare at them and they glare back. A thin guy with tattoos cruises to the front of the line and takes cuts in a place that opens up in front of a woman in her fifties. The guy says something to the woman and her face goes dark. Scotty pulls his pistol and points it at the tattooed man. I draw my pistol and back him up. The guardsmen at the checkpoint aim their machine gun, and the line-cutter smiles as if someone has made a mistake. We keep our guns on him. He tries to say something, but his voice is small and raspy and I can’t hear his words. When he goes to the end of the line, Scotty puts away his pistol and gives him a small round of applause, and the tension seems to recede below the temperature required for killing.

  But then something else happens. The woman in her fifties is shouting at her linemates, asking them how they could be so selfish, so cowardly. She’s thin in her ragged jeans and middle age. Her coat is much too big for her. She pushes up her sleeves and waves her pale hands and shouts at her immediate neighbors, then she turns and shouts at Scott.

  “What the hell do you know?” she says. “What gives you the right?” Then she starts in on me, saying, “What kind of monster did you raise?”

  It’s too much and I take a grip on my pistol and pull it into plain view. The woman doesn’t appear to be armed, but her face is twisted with rage.

  “Oh sure,” she says. “Shoot me, why don’t you. But that man you kicked out of line? He wasn’t trying to take cuts. He was here a long time before you even showed up. He went to check on his sick little boy. The boy didn’t make it. I was saving his place, lady, if you must know.”

  The others in line are looking at me. All of them. I safe the pistol and put it back into the small of my back.

  “You’re no different than the ambushers, lady,” she says. “Can you tell me what makes you different?”

  I try to apologize but she turns her back and doesn’t say another word.

  The first line allows us to register for aid. There’s a second line to determine how much aid we need, and another line to receive it. We finally enter a small warehouse. Its shelves are stocked with MREs and a few cans of chili and stew. A girl wearing camouflage gives us a single shopping cart. The girl is Melanie’s age. I have the cart half filled with vegetarian items before I remember that Melanie is gone.

  We make the trek back to the others. Our little sleds are heavy with canned food, and they raise dust and wipe away our tracks behind us. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and that suits me fine. In the past, driving cross-country, I’d see the damnedest places. Not cities or towns, but places where people isolated themselves, living in hollows and stands of timber and in the middle of deserts. Standoffish people, and I never understood why they chose to live in such places. “Must be hiding something,” I’d think. Drug dealers or perverts or crazy people with bad secrets. But now we’re living in this isolated place, and I know one of the stories that cause people to live alone. We have nothing to hide. We just don’t trust anyone. We’ll live here with the ashes of our daughter, and the boy who cremated her.

  Jerry has no intention of leaving, and neither do I.

  * * *

  When Jerry gains enough strength to walk cross-country, he walks directly to Melanie’s final resting place. He needs to be close to her because the Ignoring Game doesn’t work if its players are too far apart to acknowledge each other’s existence. Melanie’s ashes are melting into a hillside beneath a spreading oak, but she’s still with us. She’s taken control of her father’s actions. She lives through him, his every move weighed against what she might say about it. He talks to her sometimes, but mostly they play the game. Sometimes he winks at me, as if to say that our girl is getting really good at it.

  And who’s to say that she isn’t actually communicating with him from the great by-and-by? Maybe later I’ll try to help him stomach the truth, but for now I let him believe that our daughter’s silence is only a perfected form of the Ignoring Game, and that humor and love and forgiveness and redemption still exist in the world.

  I tally up the government food in our cupboards, then I sit in a rocking chair on the cabin’s porch. I watch the world dry into a weak parody of summer. I’m knitting a pair of socks for Scotty. He’ll be leaving soon to join the military, what Jerry calls “signing his life away.”

  I’m mostly trying to concentrate on the knitting, trying to let the work crowd against the black weight in my heart. My shotgun is propped against the wall beside me. Every day I place i
t a quarter inch farther away from my chair. Someday I might leave it inside, but not today. We have to be smart and hardworking and careful, so we won’t be caught flat-footed when winter returns.

  I’ll stay here with Jerry, and maybe I’ll even love him. I know he won’t drink anymore. Never, never, never, he says, and I believe him. And he’s trying to be a good father to our daughter, even as my own grief threatens to take away all hope for the future. If it weren’t for Jerry and Scott and Donnie, our needy new addition, I might commit a great sin against myself. But I’ll stay alive for them. I’ll try to join them in the Ignoring Game, looking for rays of love at the crazy edges of it. Maybe Jerry will expand the game to include me, and maybe someday when we’re riding together on the porch through a long sunset, he’ll turn to me and smile, and I’ll remember how to find enough trust to smile back.

  acknowledgments

  I wish to thank Dr. Alan Robock (Rutgers University) for information provided in his “Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts” (Atmos. Chem. Phys., 7, 2003–2012, 2007, http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/7/2003/2007/acp-7-2003-2007.pdf) and the fine volunteers who run the Calflora Database. This book could not have been written without the love and forbearance of my wife, Sabra, and our daughters, Terra, Brenna, and Riley. I owe an impossible debt of gratitude to the Loney family, who put up with the lot of us, and to Jack and Jan DeHart and my brother, Tom, and sister, Tammy, for never doubting. This book was brought into the wider world by the ceaseless efforts of Jill Marsal, my agent, and my editor, DongWon Song. Thank you. Thanks also to my inimitable Oregon friends and to Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope online writing community for the encouragement and support that allowed me to suspend my own disbelief.

  extras

  meet the author

  Credit: Sabra Loney-DeHart

  TERRY DEHART is a former U.S. Marine and NASA security analyst. Three of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Zoetrope All-Story Extra, Night Train Magazine, In Posse Review/Web del Sol, Paumanok Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Vestal Review, and Opium, among others. Terry lives with his wife and daughters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  interview

  Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?

  When I was a boy, I didn’t think such a thing was possible. I’ve always liked to watch people and relish the deep feelings that certain places can bring and wonder about methods and motivations and ways of being. I’ve always thought it a waste that we can’t preserve more of our most moving experiences. Even though we can never answer the big questions about why we’re here, or what exactly we’re supposed to be doing, I wanted to try to somehow pull my weight. A writer can entertain, pull readers away from their daily troubles into worlds of speculation and, hopefully, small truths. It seems like a useful vocation, even if nothing real is produced, and I’m grateful to be working at it. Looking back now, it’s always been my dream job.

  How has your past experience as a Marine and as a security consultant informed your writing?

  I guess it’s given me an affinity for ordinary people who stand in the breach. The soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and coasties who give years of their lives to stand up against those with malicious intent aren’t any better, as a group, than anyone else. They have the same weaknesses and flaws we all have but, for whatever reason, they’ve decided to put their posteriors on the line. Their jobs are often boring and lonely, and sometimes dangerous and frightening, so it’s sort of a concentrated version of life, the slow parts and the fast parts compartmentalized in the months and years of active duty—kind of like the chapters of a book.

  Working in IT security has allowed me to meet some truly paranoid folks, and shown me some good reasons to worry. Virtual battles are being fought around us, every minute of every day. It’s not a bad field for writers interested in apocalyptic themes.

  Who or what inspires you in your writing?

  My family gives me all the reason for being I’ll ever need. If I want to interact with my wife and children, I only need to put out a bit of effort and time to reap the greater rewards of love. Writing is like icing on the cake. Being alive inspires me to write.

  How did you develop the idea for The Unit?

  I’ve always enjoyed post-apocalyptic books and movies. It’s one of the classic story premises, and I wanted to write something that would frighten me as I wrote it. I suppose I was trying to break out of complacency.

  It’s any parent’s nightmare to see their family in danger. When that happens, all bets are off, and characters reveal things about themselves that would remain invisible in calmer days. As I came to know the members of this family, they came up with ideas of their own, and my primary job was to remain true to them.

  Did you have to do any research to write this novel?

  Yes. I had to look up recent military MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) entrees. Some of them made me hungry. Some of them made me wonder if it might be better to get my jaw wired shut. I used satellite imagery to map the route the Sharpe family takes after the bombs go off, so I could picture them casting shadows against real landscapes. I’m not a botanist, but the Calflora website is a salve for my ignorance.

  But most of my research involved the effects of nuclear weapons. I found a recent study on the likely effects of a limited, regional nuclear exchange, the blast and fires and radiation and EMP effects, but also the way that tons of ejecta from the blasts would hit the stratosphere and bring about a sudden reduction of temperature. The part about ozone depletion really got to me. I’d never thought very carefully about all those effects occurring at the same time. I tried to imagine a world of freezing storms, the snow laced with radiation, and in the times of icy calm, the sun’s unfiltered UV burning the skin and blinding the eyes of the surviving animals and people.

  Even a limited nuke war, say an exchange between India and Pakistan, could turn our friendly planet into a cold hell. I was an aviation ordnance technician in the Marine Corps, but I don’t understand how anyone sane can truly love the Bomb. (Maybe there’s a book idea in that.)

  Was it challenging to write from each character’s perspective?

  Yes, the multiple first-person structure didn’t come easily, but it allowed me to climb into the skins of the characters. It was fun to get into their hidden thoughts and emotions, all the cross-purpose stuff that people do inside their heads. After I learned the rhythm, I came to enjoy the challenge of keeping the plot moving from character to character. Also, I’ve always admired the way Faulkner used multiple first-person present tense in As I Lay Dying, and this story seemed to lend itself to that setup.

  Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?

  At first it was all about the father, Jerry Sharpe, mortally afraid for the safety of his family. That’s how it began. But then the other characters asserted themselves, and none of them would allow me to write them as “lesser” characters. The lives of Susan (the mother) and the children were in the balance and they insisted upon being heard, so I was forced to give them equal billing.

  The Unit depicts what might happen in a post-apocalyptic United States. Literature, movies, and television shows that explore this territory have become increasingly popular. What do you think this says about society’s current mind-set?

  Well, we have good reasons to be gloomy these days, but the post-apocalyptic genre can also be uplifting in a dark way, because it reminds us that things could be much worse. When I was writing about people without shelter, exposed to radiation and barbarism and starvation, I began to pay closer attention to the things I’d taken for granted, soft puffs of warmth from heater vents on cool days, the textures and flavors of a nice meal, walking in public with my family and feeling a sense of community rather than threat.

  The post-apocalyptic world is a portrayal of ultimate poverty. The survivors lose all of their “stuff” and their sense of safety and all the systems and structures they
’d come to rely upon, including some of the beliefs that previously sustained them. In that light, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves these days.

  How realistic do you think the novel is? Is it speculation or should we be taking notes from the Sharpe family’s struggle?

  We have determined foes who have demonstrated their desire to use weapons of mass destruction against us. The Unit is set in the aftermath of simultaneous nuclear detonations in seven of our major cities, but smaller attacks are probably more likely, in the real world. It’s probably a sensible idea for people to keep a few days’ of necessary supplies on hand, as we do here in earthquake country.

  Disasters and attacks can certainly bring people together. We were gentle with each other after 9/11, united by horror. Disaster response efforts call forth the resourcefulness, hard work, and generosity of countless people. But when all infrastructure is destroyed, and there’s no expectation of a quick recovery, more primitive power relationships are likely to come into play. The very definition of what it means to be strong or good could be up for grabs.

  Can you tell us anything about your next novel?

  It’s a sequel to The Unit, following the story of the newly adult son, Scott Sharpe, as he ventures into a world of increasing government repression, with militias growing in the hinterlands and rumors of starvation in the surviving cities.