The Unit Read Online Free
carried a pistol in plain sight and shifty people came to him for advice about guns and tactics and food storage techniques and improvised explosives, and he must’ve been in survivalist heaven.
Every morning Roger Romain used his old Underwood manual typewriter to print out what he’d heard on his radio. The government claimed its investigation had uncovered all the answers. Al Qaeda terrorists had manufactured the bombs with enriched uranium from North Korea. The bombs were thermonuclear devices of Pakistani design. They were smuggled into the country in the holds of oil tankers. They were loaded onto trucks and detonated at ground level. All the facts were so quickly and clearly laid out that nobody believed them. But we believed the government reports about its overwhelming counterstrikes overseas, because the clouds steadily grew thicker and swollen with death.
The cycle continued. We hit them. They threatened us. One day, Roger Romain nailed this note to a tree:
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco? Scratch them off the list.
And then people went all to pieces. There were plenty of guns and not enough food, and so here we are.
But just after the cars stopped, I thought that everything would be okay. Jerry would retire, as we’d planned, and we’d take cruises to Alaska and Mexico and the Caribbean, dancing and dining and walking alone to private cabins that held no kids but plenty of time. The sky was clean and sweetly blue before everything circled back around. I couldn’t believe anything bad had happened. There weren’t any mushroom clouds and the trees were picture-postcard green, but Jerry was adamant.
“Only one thing could’ve caused this.”
“There’s only one thing that can make cars break down?”
“All of them? All at once? Yeah, pretty much.”
Melanie said she’d watched a show on the History Channel about mega-disasters. She said we could’ve been hit by a small gamma-ray burst, flying at us from outer space, but her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything when she said it.
“I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “And listen, what we need to do now is watch the people around us. We need to be ready to defend ourselves when they start going bad.”
“You’re
such
an asshole,” Melanie whispered, and I was thinking it, too. Jerry winced, but he didn’t respond. We sat without talking, nursing our glares, and I didn’t want to believe that people couldn’t be trusted.
In the beginning, the people were fine. It was as if we’d all arrived at a party that didn’t have enough parking places. We pulled our coasting machines onto the shoulders of the freeway and we set about helping one another, families emerging from minivans and SUVs, mothers handing out snacks, fathers helping their sons and daughters into their Christmas coats. So many little girls in red and green. Boys in jeans and holiday sweaters. Mothers with freshened lipstick. We were all somehow formal, even the truckers, who slicked back their hair and tucked in their shirttails and offered to help people with their luggage.
All the voices and introductions and smiles. It felt as if we were waiting for something, a church service or a wedding. It caused me to remember scenes of my youth, my mother dressing for a Christmas service. The rustle of her dress. The smell of her perfume and her industrial hair products and the hasty precision of her walk. Our clear, formal purpose. It was then and now and all those times together, but we were all so worried that our politeness seemed like a sweet act of bravery.
I told myself I wasn’t worried in the least. The walk to Yreka was long but cheerful. Our numbers grew as we neared town. People streamed into that freeway-elongated town from north and south. Melanie and Scott were perfectly well-behaved. They were no longer merely pretending to be adults. They joked with small children and took turns helping burdened mothers carry suitcases, blankets, boxes of formula and juice packets,
Every morning Roger Romain used his old Underwood manual typewriter to print out what he’d heard on his radio. The government claimed its investigation had uncovered all the answers. Al Qaeda terrorists had manufactured the bombs with enriched uranium from North Korea. The bombs were thermonuclear devices of Pakistani design. They were smuggled into the country in the holds of oil tankers. They were loaded onto trucks and detonated at ground level. All the facts were so quickly and clearly laid out that nobody believed them. But we believed the government reports about its overwhelming counterstrikes overseas, because the clouds steadily grew thicker and swollen with death.
The cycle continued. We hit them. They threatened us. One day, Roger Romain nailed this note to a tree:
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco? Scratch them off the list.
And then people went all to pieces. There were plenty of guns and not enough food, and so here we are.
But just after the cars stopped, I thought that everything would be okay. Jerry would retire, as we’d planned, and we’d take cruises to Alaska and Mexico and the Caribbean, dancing and dining and walking alone to private cabins that held no kids but plenty of time. The sky was clean and sweetly blue before everything circled back around. I couldn’t believe anything bad had happened. There weren’t any mushroom clouds and the trees were picture-postcard green, but Jerry was adamant.
“Only one thing could’ve caused this.”
“There’s only one thing that can make cars break down?”
“All of them? All at once? Yeah, pretty much.”
Melanie said she’d watched a show on the History Channel about mega-disasters. She said we could’ve been hit by a small gamma-ray burst, flying at us from outer space, but her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything when she said it.
“I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “And listen, what we need to do now is watch the people around us. We need to be ready to defend ourselves when they start going bad.”
“You’re
such
an asshole,” Melanie whispered, and I was thinking it, too. Jerry winced, but he didn’t respond. We sat without talking, nursing our glares, and I didn’t want to believe that people couldn’t be trusted.
In the beginning, the people were fine. It was as if we’d all arrived at a party that didn’t have enough parking places. We pulled our coasting machines onto the shoulders of the freeway and we set about helping one another, families emerging from minivans and SUVs, mothers handing out snacks, fathers helping their sons and daughters into their Christmas coats. So many little girls in red and green. Boys in jeans and holiday sweaters. Mothers with freshened lipstick. We were all somehow formal, even the truckers, who slicked back their hair and tucked in their shirttails and offered to help people with their luggage.
All the voices and introductions and smiles. It felt as if we were waiting for something, a church service or a wedding. It caused me to remember scenes of my youth, my mother dressing for a Christmas service. The rustle of her dress. The smell of her perfume and her industrial hair products and the hasty precision of her walk. Our clear, formal purpose. It was then and now and all those times together, but we were all so worried that our politeness seemed like a sweet act of bravery.
I told myself I wasn’t worried in the least. The walk to Yreka was long but cheerful. Our numbers grew as we neared town. People streamed into that freeway-elongated town from north and south. Melanie and Scott were perfectly well-behaved. They were no longer merely pretending to be adults. They joked with small children and took turns helping burdened mothers carry suitcases, blankets, boxes of formula and juice packets,
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