The Unit by Terry DeHart Read Free Book Online Page A

but I didn’t see it go. If I cried, my killing him would be for nothing, so I made myself hard. The memories were killing me. They went on and on, my little bro following me around and bragging about me to his little friends and all the times he’d given me things, like he knew he didn’t need to bribe me to get me to care about him, but it wouldn’t hurt to hedge his bets. I went kind of blind for a while, and when I came out of it I was holding the Beretta down along my leg, cocked and locked. The guys were backed off toward the trees, even big Luscious, who wasn’t afraid of anything, but was stubborn about choosing his own way to die.
    Ookie had been right. The guys were sad about losing him, but the looks they gave me after I shot him were different and I knew that I was really and truly the boss of the gang, right then. We’re still fighting for a good cause. We’re fighting for ourselves when nobody else gives a shit—never did and never will—so we gotta make our own way in the world, and follow our own laws and rules, no matter the price.
    I’ve been wasted for most of the day. I want to go back and bury Ookie, but it would be stupid to go back to that place, and it would also be a sign of weakness. I’ll miss him because he was the only person who really knew me, but I can’t even pull a blanket over what’s left of his head. We’re like the opposite of the Special Forces guys in the movies. We
always
leave our own behind. But Ookie’s not in such a bad place. He was able to get himself over to a tree after he was shot. It’s a strong-looking tree, a cedar I think, maybe two hundred years old. The freeway crosses a grassy field there and the sky is stacked high above him and if the clouds ever break up he’ll have a good view of Mount Shasta.
    And today’s another day. I raise my hand and make a spinning sign in the air. George Washington is our captain of the guard today and he raises our Budweiser flag. The town we’re in has the tallest flagpole west of the Mississippi, and the old man can see it from the airstrip. After a few minutes the old bastard calls us on the radio. The sound of his voice makes me want to hit somebody.
    “Let’s see what’s south today,” I say.
    “How about a day off?” he says.
    I turn off the radio and after about ten minutes the old man fires up the Cessna and heads out on a scouting mission. When he’s in the air I pick up a National Guard walkie-talkie, but I don’t call him. I haven’t told him about Ookie yet. I don’t want to distract him from today’s mission, and I don’t want to distract myself, because he might not give a shit that Ookie is dead, and then I’ll have to kill him. No. It’s better to wait until Ookie’s wake to talk to him. The old bastard is a happy drunk and I’ll get him a bellyful of liquor and then he’ll cry about losing his son and I can pretend that he’s not the shittiest father that ever lived. But for now I’ll leave him alone because that’s the way we both like it.
    The overcast is higher today and it looks like maybe the sun might poke through in a week or two. I don’t want to sit around, so I tell Luscious it’s time to lock and load. The boys climb into the trucks. Usually they’re telling jokes and grab-assing around when we go out, but not today.
    I take my place in the passenger seat of our Brinks armored truck. It’s one of the only trucks we’ve found that still runs after the bombs exploded, and it figures that the greedy bastards who suck all the money from the world would make their money truck nuke-proof. Our other two trucks are five-ton National Guard rigs. They’re full of holes from when we took them from the weekend warriors and they look like pieces of shit, but they run just fine.
    We haul ass out of town. Luscious hands me one of the gold coins. It’s warm from being in his pocket and it’s heavy. I tell him to give each of the guys two of the coins.
    “We’ll put them over their