Read The Unit for Free Online Page A

doesn’t blow the greasy smoke to us.
    Mel bends down and just about pukes up her liver. She straightens up and wipes her mouth and looks at Dad like she wants him to drop dead. Mom and Dad search the bodies, but they don’t find anything we can use. We move on. We’re tired and cold but we keep our watering eyes wide open. Dad leads us the hell out of there. I keep the .22 at the ready. It’s a Ruger 10/22 with a 4-power Weaver scope. It’s the gun I used as a little kid to take my first shots. I try not to think about the times Dad took me target shooting, the casual-seeming way he taught me about safety and respect and marksmanship and fun and love and killing on all those sunny days. How tired and happy I was after a day of shooting, when we were comparing our ventilated targets, policing our brass, and picking up our shredded aluminum cans, Dad calling me Wyatt Earp and asking if the Marshal wanted to stop for ice cream on the way home.
    And I wonder if he knew all along that I’d end up carrying a rifle in hostile territory. Our trips into the woods to shoot didn’t seem, even then, to be all about fun. I don’t trust people anymore, and so I’ll have to rethink my memories.
    But whatever. Right now I wish I was carrying a bigger rifle. The .22 is accurate out to maybe a hundred yards, but it doesn’t pack much of a punch. It won’t blow through cover, and even heavy clothes could stop the little bullets, but I tell myself it doesn’t matter because I’ll be making headshots, when the time comes.
    A noise makes us stop. Dad holds up his fist and we drop to the ground. The rifle comes up to my shoulder and I take a look through my scope. I use the magnification to scan a clump of eucalyptus trees, but I don’t see anything moving. If I was a praying man I’d pray to God and ask for a good target, one of the people responsible for the killing. We wait. I reach into the small of my back and pull Dad’s Beretta out of my waistband. I try to give it to Mel for maybe the hundredth time. She doesn’t take it, but her “no” is softer now and her breath barely steams the air.
    The noise wasn’t caused by people. Eucalyptus trees drop their branches in the lightest breeze, and that’s probably what it was. We walk until dusk and Dad chooses a camp in a patch of oaks that stand on a low, grassy hill. We can see for two hundred yards in every direction. There’s no higher ground close to us. No higher ground within easy rifle range, anyhow, and so it’s a good place to be.
    I drop my pack. The blood comes back into my shoulders. It feels good to be sixty pounds lighter, but to tell the truth I
like
wearing the pack. Yeah, it’s heavy, but it makes me feel strong and more free than I’ve ever felt before. The weight reminds me that we’re doing something important, that our actions and efforts will decide whether we will live or die. And if there’s a God, He’ll be mad at me for saying it, but I don’t think this is such a horrible thing. Not really. Because I think boredom is worse than fighting, because of the way boredom kills you inside. And that’s all I had before, shitty days of school and dull days at the mall or the river, and it seemed like I had nothing but boring times ahead of me forever and ever until I fell into my boring grave. There wasn’t any real meaning at all, that I could see, so shoot me if I don’t hate this new world. At least this shit isn’t boring.
    We don’t light a fire. I open an MRE pouch of Beef Stew and warm it with a heat tab. I try to share it with Mel. I like MREs just fine, but Mel doesn’t. She was a vegetarian, before. She takes a few bites of the stew and then she cleans her spoon and puts it away. Mom and Dad share a Chicken à la King. Nobody had to tell us to sit so that we face the four points of the compass, looking out while we eat. We can’t afford to slack off. It’s the opposite of boring.
    It doesn’t look like we’re being followed. I’m