“Okay,” I said, and Ookie smiled his little-kid smile like he’d just gotten the best present in the world.
I was packing the Beretta I took from a dead National Guard lieutenant. I pulled it from its flap holster and unsafed it. The guys were done with their work and they gathered around, even the ones who should’ve been standing guard. I racked the slide and pointed the pistol at Ookie’s head. My brother used the last of his muscles and blood and balls and heart, and he said, “Just remember that it wasn’t you that killed me.”
The guys probably thought he was trying to be tough when he died, but Ookie gritted his teeth into a smile and gave a nod goodbye. I pulled the trigger before his smile could start to fade. The back of his head busted open and there was a lot of blowback. It was in my eyes and running from my nose and chin. I stood with bits of my brother on my face and hands, and the guys didn’t say anything, but they couldn’t close their mouths. I tore a piece of cloth from the coat of an old dead guy and wiped the Beretta more or less clean and put it back in its holster. I picked up two of the gold coins and put them over Ookie’s eyes. I walked into the crowd of guys and grabbed one of the little drunks and searched him and took a pint bottle of Jim Beam off him. I put the bottle in Ookie’s hand and I didn’t need to say that I would surely kill the man who tried to take it.
The guys formed a line and passed in front of Ookie. A few of them gave him things as they passed. I didn’t watch to see what-all they gave him, even though most of the ones who gave him things were only trying to score points with me.
I turned my back on it. I raised my hands and looked up into the overcast, hoping to catch a last look at Ookie’s soul, 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 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.
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 volcanic hills. A small town comes into view below us. The kids are skittish when they see it. Susan is giving me looks again that I can’t decipher. I decide to tell them a story that my long-gone Marine buddy, Rick Sheffield, told me about that part of the world. I stop and point at the mountain.
“The smaller hill at the base of Mount Shasta is called Broken Top.”
They look. Broken Top is the most perfectly symmetrical inverted cone a person could ever hope to see. Its top comes to a sharp point.
“What dumbass would call that hill Broken Top?” Scott asks.
It’s exactly what I’d said to Rick, all those years ago. I realize now that the question is very old. Maybe it predates Western history. I try to remember the exact words.
“The locals like to tell an old Indian story. They say that Broken Top was once the summit of Mount Shasta.”
I point at the flattened summit of Mount Shasta and move my hand down to the perfect cone of Broken Top.
“In the beginning, Shasta was very proud of her perfect figure. She bragged to the other mountains about her beauty and called them ugly lumps, or something like that, and the other mountains summoned the gods and told them about Shasta’s vanity. The gods, being fair, warned Shasta not to be cruel to her sisters. But she was very beautiful and vain and she started to brag again. And so the gods punished her. They caused the earth to shake and Shasta’s top was blown off whole and it slid down the mountain to land at her feet.”
We stand and look. Our breath steams the air.
“The Indians didn’t know
shit
about geology, did they?” Scott says. He spits into the winter-gray sage.
“Shut up,” says Melanie. “At least they didn’t blow each other up.”
“Maybe they would’ve, if they’d had the bomb.”
“I doubt it.”
“You shouldn’t.”
Melanie opens her mouth, but she closes it. She’s quiet after that, and I think she’s written us off entirely. We leave the last of the trees behind. We walk exposed toward the town, and whatever stories it might hold for us.
I cough, but it’s more than coughing. A cough can hide a sob just fine. We walk fields of grass that hide patches of granulated snow. I start to worry about dogs. It sticks in my head that a barking dog could get us killed. I scope the place with my binoculars. The town appears to be abandoned. There’s a lumber mill lined with half-loaded rail cars. There’s a Chevron station, a Mexican restaurant, Primo Pizza, the Golden Eagle Motel, and a wrecking yard. There’s also a good-sized food store. Lane’s Market.
We pass a burned-out minivan, its skin blackened and drooping between the ribs of its unibody. It’s riddled with bullet holes. Scott stops. He points to the market.
“I sure could use some junk food.”
More stalled cars and trucks litter the road ahead. One of them is a shot-up National Guard humvee. Footprints leading away from them are stamped into the snowy patches. The snow has melted and frozen, time and again, and the indistinct tracks seem to lead neither north nor south, but some of them are fresh.
“Later. Let’s see what-all else is here, first.”
We seem to be the only people alive, horizon to horizon. It’s what I’m hoping for, and yes, it’s what I’m praying for, but the odds are against it. The town is small, but it’s surrounded by volcanic peaks and the old lakebed is wild with grass and I can see cattle grazing. There are deer in the hills and bass and trout in the streams, and I know people who prefer the challenges and gifts of nature to all the operas and concerts ever written.
The highway cuts through the four square blocks of downtown, making two fifteen-mile-per-hour turns. It’s the kind of tiny, isolated place that most city people drive through, shaking their heads and wondering who could possibly live there, but I understand its attraction. If I’d chosen to live in such a place, it would take more than distant bombs to convince me to leave.
I’m almost certain that we’re not alone here. I’m still worried about dogs. Our scent could give us away. We skirt the gas station, with its shot-out windows. We circle the weirdly intact market. I take out the binoculars but I don’t see any bodies.