The Unit by Terry DeHart

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