The Unit by Terry DeHart Read Free Book Online Page B

eyes if they get killed, like we did with Ookie.” Luscious nods and I can tell he thinks it’s a cool idea.
    We’ve hit five groups in the last month and I don’t think anymore about the price we might have to pay when cops and soldiers take over the world. I used to wonder about the people we killed, but not now. I only think they were stupid to lose everything they had. Damned if they all didn’t walk right into our ambushes and get themselves killed. They trusted the world when they shouldn’t have, and we got some good stuff off of them, and that’s all there is to it.
    That last group had milk for their rugrats and some cheese and butter, too. They had eight shotguns and maybe four hundred twelve-gauge buckshot shells. They must’ve been backwoods hippie pot farmers, because they had more than a pound of good Mary Jane between them. They had animals, too—cows and sheep and four lambs. Somehow the animals didn’t get shot, and I feel like a rich man from back in olden times, to have them.
    I don’t know where the old gray-haired farts got that gold. Maybe they were hippie survivalists. Most of the grown-ups had coins sewed into the cuffs of their pants, and they had more in their wheelbarrows. It added up to maybe fifty pounds, all told, and that’s a shitload of treasure. In the old days, the pirates had chests full of ducats. Doubloons. Pieces of eight. Some of those old coins weren’t made of gold, but I don’t know which ones. My education kind of sucks. But whatever. All of
our
coins are solid gold. We have our tricks and our brains and our balls and our guns, and now we have our treasure, too, and that makes us pirates, fair and square.
    All we need now are some girls. Yeah, that’s just what we need. We’ve been killing everyone we come up against, lately, but now I think it’s time we let a few of them live. The wenches. The guys will love me even more if I can get them some of the other kind of booty.

Jerry

    We walk past the time that was previously known as lunch. I feel as if I’ve made them pop-up targets in some giant outdoor shooting range. I start to develop irrational fears. What if that little airplane is armed with machine guns? What if the bad guys have snipers? Wouldn’t this hill be a perfect place to set up artillery to control the area? Would they bury mines along the road? IEDs?
    Damn, I’m tired. The worry burns in my guts, but the coals of it keep me moving. A cold wind blows down from the mountains. Before we walk into the flatland I stop us.
    Susan says, “Ponchos.”
    “Yeah.”
    I should’ve done it sooner. We drop our packs and pull out our ponchos. Surplus military ponchos in woodland green camouflage, the most useful garments ever issued by a government. We put our packs back on and pull our ponchos over everything, our bodies and all our earthly possessions. The sage and winter grasses are tan and gray, and the woodland camo ponchos make us look like mobile oases. Susan looks at Melanie and Scott, and then back at me.
    “We’ll be warm. And at least it’ll break up our outlines,” I say. But I immediately regret the negative tone, the tone of settling for second best. I can’t afford to sound that way, not even in jest.
    “We’ll be fine.”
    “Sure we will.”
    I want to hold her hand, but I hold my rifle. I look at the dry fields, hoping to find a flower, but there aren’t any flowers. The old world is gone, and the fear is feeding on my insides, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve already made love to my wife for the last time. I wonder if we’ll someday return to our careless peacetime ways of being.
    Miles of open land stretch before us. Mount Shasta powers into the overcast at our eleven o’clock. A much smaller volcanic cone rises at its western base. I remember driving past it once with a Marine buddy who knew something about this part of the Sierras.
    We follow the deer trail out of the hills and descend toward an old lakebed surrounded by