The Unit (36 page)

“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.