Honor Road Jason Ross (any book recommendations .TXT) 📖

molesting his step-daughter. We should’ve put down our guns and seen the refugees as human beings.

“Us and them,” Mat agreed.

“What’s that?” Gladys asked with genuine interest.

“Us versus them. It’s easy to see the world like that. It feels kinda right, but it gives a person tunnel vision. When you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail.”

Gladys inhaled, closed her eyes and nodded. Mat wondered what effect remorse had on her healing. At least she was moving around outside, in the winter sunshine, breathing fresh air, and doing something about her personal guilt.

Mat saw a flash of color down in the swamp, among the slogging, heaving workers.

An Afghan wedding gown? A bright orange dress?

No, he decided. It was just a guy in an orange road worker’s jacket. The people around McKenzie struggled together to survive. At least for they day, nobody would be killing anybody.

Gladys described the work, “Susan thinks they’ll produce a hundred pounds of pork to every seven hundred pounds of cattail. Hauser’s people are eating the center part of the shoots for now, and feeding the rest to the piglets. We’re advancing the refugees ten fattened hogs per week, just so there’s a little meat in their stewpot. That’s what passes for a small business loan these days.” Gladys smiled at her own joke.

“How many refugees are in the program?” Mat got to the second reason he’d ventured three miles outside the HESCO barrier. He wanted to understand the threat. They were far from being out of the woods.

“Dr. Hauser says five thousand have taken the oath. They keep a pretty good record of it. They make them sign their names in a book—give their word of honor not to steal. Even the kids sign it.”

Mat nodded. It still terrified him; being surrounded by thousands of organized refugees. If Hauser decided to screw them over, it’d be a serious war this time.

But so far, the raids on the town had dropped to almost zero. Hauser’s ring of organized refugee camps had accepted responsibility for patrolling and turning away refugees who refused to conform to the treaty between the camps and the town of McKenzie. Mat thought of Hauser’s refugees as a three-mile buffer zone of semi-pacified aboriginals. Historically, that hadn’t always worked out for the British Empire, but Mat was willing to give it another try. The Creek Campers had definitely proven themselves worthy.

Hauser’s group had come through for McKenzie when push came to literal shove, and many of those folks had died or were maimed from exposure to the anthrax and mustard gas lingering on the battlefield. Some of Mat’s men had been struck as well, but nothing like the Creek Campers that fought the refugees hand-to-hand. A quarter of them had gotten sick.

“Where’s Susan Brown? Is she helping with the pig enclosures?”

“No.” Gladys began the slow walk to her electric golf cart. “The Tosh people train the refugees on how to raise pigs. They’re trying to remember the old ways of fencing in an austere environment. Susan is in Jensen’s lab synthesizing more penicillin.”

“Does it actually work?” Mat hadn’t heard good things.

“It saved my life.” Gladys shrugged. “We used up all the real antibiotics the day Jensen gassed us. Since then, Susan’s been making it out of bread mold. It’s not a strong antibiotic, but it holds the anthrax at bay long enough for the immune system to do its job. Most of the time, at least.”

“How’re you feeling about Jensen?” Mat probed. He meant, how are you feeling about ventilating that sonofabitch?

“I wish he’d survived my bullets and the poison gas so I could beat the shit out of him.” She smiled, but the bravado played across her face like eternal sadness.

“Candice is going to be okay,” Mat reassured her as he helped her into the driver’s seat of the golf cart. “She’s got a good family now. So does William.”

“Is that why you came all the way out here? To say goodbye? Mission accomplished for Mat Best?” Gladys’ face showed her disapproval as clearly as if the words were stamped on her forehead.

Mat chuckled. With this lady, what you saw was what you got.

He slapped his thigh. “Nope. I’m staying. Through the first of spring, at least. I have brothers and my folks on the West Coast, and eventually I need to go to them. For now, McKenzie’s my home.”

Gladys smiled, this time for real. Her approval landed just as quickly as her disappointment had fled.

“Welcome home, Mat Best. It’s about damned time.

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Meanwhile…

Noah Miller

Walnut Canyon National Monument

Three Miles outside Flagstaff, Arizona

Noah Miller would either disintegrate in a mile-high fireball or wake up in another life with his wife and daughter. Either way, in the next few minutes, his story would end.

He revved the 650 horse engine of the dune buggy and it growled like a two hundred pound panther. Even in the face of oblivion, he grinned. A man couldn’t help but rejoice in fine machines. Like a Greek hero, he would cross the river between life and death surrounded by treasure: a $130,000 carbon-fiber dune buggy, a $50 million tactical nuke and a half-full bottle of Leadslingers whiskey.

The carbon-fiber, supergrade plutonium, kamikaze dune racer would fly off the mountain, into the heart of Flagstaff and vaporize the enemy forever.

Noah wasn’t concerned with his own death. No thoughts of his own fate tormented him as he thumbed the red, plastic cover on the detonator, up-down-up-down-up-down. There were hundreds of American slaves in Flagstaff and his brother-from-another-mother, if he was still alive, would be down there.

Noah had duct-taped the detonator to the chrome-plated stick shift of the Tatum Dragon—an immense dune buggy once the privilege of men with more cash than good sense. He’d traded fifteen gallons of