Free The Unit by Terry DeHart Page A

through the overcast doesn’t quite have enough strength to cast shadows. The wind is blowing over us and a few sick-looking geese fly south. The market overlooks the freeway. It’s located between the airstrip and the junkyard. I glass the surrounding area, but I don’t see any movement.
    I turn and look into the windows of the store. My mind takes me back to past road trips, and I imagine the thrum of the road and the stillness of stopping. The wind is always blowing in places like this. The daylight looks a certain way when it hits freeway outposts. Thick. Weighted. A place that shouldn’t matter burrowing nevertheless into memory. The bright signs that draw people to the shabbiness of the closer view. Not mere patina, but barely restrained decay. But there’s the temptation of packaged goods. A bargain bin full of things past their shelf lives. “Shelf life”—the sad feeling of those words. The incredible loneliness of such places. Arriving and taking and buying and leaving. Lives spent just passing through, but I wonder what it would be like to stay here.
    We finally move across the asphalt of the market’s parking lot, taking cover behind cars. The glass door isn’t locked. We enter the store. Scotty stands guard automatically. I want to get us in and out as quickly as possible.
    The store has been looted, but not completely. It’s still a gold mine of packaged chips and cookies and candy, but I hunt for protein. I grab the last packages of beef jerky and cans of mixed nuts. Susan fills the outer pouches of her pack with antibacterial ointment and ibuprofen and multivitamins and Band-Aids.
    Melanie opens a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and takes a chug that brings tears to her eyes and a smile to her face, then she goes for the gossip magazines. She reads us articles about J-Lo and the Baldwin brothers. The articles she reads all revolve around the issue of stars with big backsides. We’re laughing. It’s a good day, I’m thinking. The worry is still there, but we need something good to punctuate the other days, don’t we?
    I find myself in the beer section. I slip a warm bottle of Widmer hefeweizen into my pack for later. There’s also an entire aisle of wine, but I walk behind the counter to the booze section. I limit myself to one bottle of Crown Royal. For medicinal purposes, you understand. I’ll light a fire tonight and have a nip of whiskey and maybe I’ll be able to lighten up for a few minutes. Yes. It’s a good day. I want the good time to last, so I don’t rush it. I know that high morale is a weapon in itself. The clock is ticking, but I let them shop to their hearts’ content.

Susan

    We’re laughing and stuffing our packs with riches, with life itself, and then bullets are snapping all around us. Melanie is closest, and I pull her to the ground. We get right down on the broken glass and try to push ourselves into the cracks between the tiles. All of us but Scotty. He’s standing with his new, proud posture and shooting his rifle at the ambushers. Jerry runs and tackles him and pulls him back from the front of the store. Bullets take pieces of things with them as they pass. Melanie is screaming. I wrap myself around her. Bottles of wine are breaking red and white, and the floor is slick with wine and glass.
    I check Melanie but she hasn’t been shot. Her screams aren’t screams of pain, but anger. People aren’t supposed to be like this. People
are
like this. I push the shotgun out around a rack of greeting cards and fire a blast into the parking lot.

Melanie

    Stop it! Just stop it! What’s so fucking hard about that?

Scotty

    I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry I didn’t see them before they opened up. I was supposed to be watching and I didn’t see them. Are we hit? Is there any blood? I can’t see Dad and Mel, and God damn these assholes if they killed them. I end up next to Dad. He’s okay and so are Mel and Mom. We’re all okay and the shooting is letting up. They shot