The Unit
Page 27
You know, cheery stuff.
Finally, as a first-time author, what have you found to be the most exciting part of the publishing process?
I’ve really enjoyed working with my editor, DongWon Song. He’s as determined as I am to make this book as clear and gripping as it can possibly be.
introducing
The Sharpes’ story
continues in the exciting sequel. Coming 2011
by Terry DeHart
After the bombed cities burned themselves out and the first hard spikes of radiation began to fade, the survivors in the surrounding suburbs and country rose from their improvised shelters, hungry and helpful and determined not to botch their new chance at life. The body count was unknowable, but as the embers cooled, much work lay ahead.
While their leaders unfurled their steely fingers to push the buttons that ground their enemies to dust, and the skies continued to grow darker day by day, the people donned gloves and masks and layers of clothing to protect them from the sun’s unfiltered UV rays. They turned to rebuilding, as best they could, what was left. They hung radiation signs around their ground-zero nightmares and posted yellow flags far downwind, mapped in the shape of giant teardrops. They looked for new places to grow crops and build communities. The best and worst of America were on display, still and again, standing with equal parts brutality and kindness before what remained of the world.
And it was into this world that young Scott Sharpe set off from his mother and father to seek a path of his own making. He was determined to answer the call of duty, or at least that was the story he told himself. It was five in the morning when he said his goodbyes. He stood beneath the fantastic nuclear sunrise and hugged his mother and shook his father’s hand. There weren’t many tears left in the world, but his parents shed what they could spare as he climbed aboard the bus that would carry him to the rest of his life.
He knew he would always remember his last glimpse of his parents standing on the cold shoulder of the road in the Sierra Nevada, their thick hats and sunglasses making them look like eccentric tourists as they waved at the black-tinted windows of the recruiting bus and then through the departing swirl of its frozen exhaust until a curve of the road took their waving away. When they were gone behind him he felt very light and very free, even though he was on his way to the Klamath Falls military induction center to “sign his life away,” as his father put it.
It was a hard-frosted Northern California September morning, nine months after the last of the bombs fell. The previous winter had been a nuclear winter, with icy storms raging from the Pacific and even colder ones flowing down from Canada. Scott wasn’t happy to see the shortening of the days, and the pines were casting shadows that looked to him like thin, blackened bones, but still he couldn’t shake the light mood that had taken him when he left home.
The recruiting bus moved at top speed in the government lane, a commandeered tour bus, spray-painted olive drab. Scott hadn’t been aboard an operational motor vehicle since before the bombs. The driver, if there was a driver, was invisible in his hijack-resistant compartment as the bus thrummed past dead crops and the half-cremated remains of what had been blinded and sunburned livestock.
The bus floated on its soft suspension, giving almost the feeling of flight. It steadily put miles between Scott and the dregs of his childhood. After a half hour of listening to the diesel growl and the hiss of filtered air flowing from the heating vents, the glow of the sun rising through its nuclear layer caused the bus to cast a long shadow to the west, its elongated box morphing and flowing like a runaway flag over the imperfect canvas of rocky meadows and patches of contaminated snow.
Scott sat with twenty-four other passengers, young men and women in their late teens or early twenties. They were accompanied by two acne-faced Army MPs who sat so close behind the driver’s armored box that it could’ve been a bonfire built to warm them. One of the MPs leaned into the aisle and peered at the road ahead. The other one sat facing the recruits. Both of them kept their locked-and-loaded M-4 carbines close at hand.
Most of the recruits were sprawled in their seats, alternately scowling at nothing in particular and pretending to sleep. They held their heads loosely, so the bumps and dips of the road caused them to nod. Scott imagined they were trying to look bored, like battle-hardened soldiers riding a helicopter into combat, but their quick glances betrayed their excitement. It was pathetic, but Scott himself was nineteen that year, and he had to force himself not to join their show of pretend nonchalance and make-believe courage.
The bus left the alpine plain and began to shoulder its way into the Sierra. As the miles rolled beneath heavy wheels, the young passengers became bored at their game of pretending to be bored. A long-haired kid said something about how good it would feel to get some payback, and his rowmates nodded. A boy with a shaved head let loose an almost impossibly profane string of insults about North Koreans and Al Qaeda, and then the recruits were laughing and punching each other on the arms and aiming imaginary rifles and becoming brothers and sisters already, in their shared mission.
Even the MPs smiled, and Scott smiled, too, the muscles of his face moving beneath the ropy whorls of scar tissue that surrounded his eyes and lined his forehead and cheeks. He hadn’t smiled in a very long time, and he wanted the feeling to last. One of his new comrades slid into the seat beside him and offered his hand. Scott shook it. The kid was thin, but his grip was sharp and crushing, the grip of a farm boy or a high school wrestler, probably both. He examined the pocks and scars on Scott’s face. Scott could tell he was dying to ask about them, but he didn’t.
“Can’t wait to stick it to the bastards, huh,” he said. “How ’bout you?”
“They asked for it.”
“Damn right they did. Every last one of them.”
“Let’s hope there’s some targets left for us.”
“Oh yeah? Hey, what if our nukes took ’em all out?” The kid was crestfallen, the hair on his upper lip quivering like a caterpillar in a wind. “Damn, I hope there’s some assholes left to shoot.”
The kid moved away without introducing himself and accosted someone else. Another inductee slid into the seat next to Scott. Her black hair hung over her face, and she reached up and pushed it away. She was dressed in shapeless khakis and a billowy black shirt and Scott wondered what she was concealing, weapons or rations or maybe just the curves of her body. Her dark eyes held the spark of intelligence. She made a not unkind twist of her lips that could’ve been shared camaraderie or joking mockery.
“What’s your story, scarface?”
Scott felt his eyes go hard. Serious. And the girl smiled again, a disarming smile that spread warmth to her eyes, and said, “Sorry. I didn’t have what you’d call a refined upbringing. But we’re on this bus together, so we might as well talk.”
“Someone tried to kill me. With dynamite. It didn’t work.” It was the response Scott had worked out in front of the mirror at his parents’ cabin, but he said it too quickly, forgetting to pause in the right places.
“And where is this mad bomber now?”
“Dead.”
“You kill him?”
“He’s dead. I killed plenty of others like him.”
“Was he militia?”
“No. He was with a group of assholes.”
“Plenty of that going around.”
The girl looked straight at him, measuring him and having some sort of conversation with herself, then she held out her hand.
“Name’s Chrissy. It’s my middle name. My real first name is Melanie, but I won’t answer to it.”
“My sister’s name was Melanie.”
“Was?”
“Yeah.”
Scott told her his name and they shook on it. Her fingers were warm and strong.
“What are we getting ourselves into?” she said.
“Someone has to clean up the mess.”
“We have to do something, right?”
“The job
market’s not so hot in the civilian sector.”
“What are you going for? What job, I mean?”
“Pilot,” he said.
“Can’t wait to look down on the common people, can you?”
“I already have a pilot’s license, so I might as well go for it. What about you?”
“I come from a long line of grunts. They were always telling me about their good old days in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seems as if they had more fun in their sandbox than they could ever have here, living in God’s country.”
“Yeah?”
“Anyhow, it’s not like we’ll be able to choose. The government will put us wherever they get it into their pointy little heads to put us.”
The way she said “government” held a practiced disgust that caused Scott to sit up straighter. She said it in the same way that the militia members he’d met had said it.
“We’re probably asking for trouble,” he said.
“Probably.”
“We could end up cooks, or something boring like that.”
Chrissy pulled a can of Spam from a pocket of her fatigues. She leaned close enough to whisper.
“Could be worse things than being a cook when there’s a famine on. Want to eat?”
Scott nodded, his suspicions about her receding behind the more immediate matter of protein.
Chrissy held the can in her lap and worked the key to open it, and Scott wondered what drove women to do nice things for men. He felt his heart rate increase and then a blush rose to his face. She shook the meat from the can, broke it into two exact halves, and pushed one of them into Scott’s hand. They ate quickly, furtively, managing to finish the food without losing any of it to the recruits around them. By the time the smell of the salty meat reached a larger audience, the Spam was gone. Scott hadn’t eaten meat for weeks, and he sat back and relished the feeling. Chrissy handed him the empty can, and he licked the oils away until not even the smell remained.
They leaned back in their seats on a tour bus that had once carried old people out for larks. Now there weren’t many old people left. They looked through tinted windows at a land both burned and frozen. Smoke rose at random intervals. The bus passed a collection of battered cars driving slowly in the civilian lane, Chevelles and Galaxies and Jeepsters, primitive machines that hadn’t been disabled by the electromagnetic pulse of the bombs. The cars were driven by suspicious-looking men, all of them armed and equipped with hungry-looking families. Scott noticed that every vehicle they encountered was headed in the opposite direction, away from town.