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

a man has to have a home. A place he claims folks as his own, and where he lets them claim him.”

Mat pulled the office door open to leave. “I'll see you later, Sheriff. If there is a later. What I saw today was two thousand refugees pop straight out of the woods for a whisper of a prayer of a meal. We might want to hold off planning the village hugfest until we’re no longer surrounded by 10,000 near-cannibals.”

Sheriff Morgan smiled. “I respect a man who meets an attack with a counter-attack. And while I was born on Tuesday, I wasn’t born last Tuesday. Any fool can see you need us as much as we need you, Sergeant Best. You have the look of a man being chased by ghosts.“

Mat went to close the door, but the sheriff stood from behind his desk, so Mat paused. Respect for elders was a thing in Mat’s family, and it definitely was a thing in the army. He’d never close the door in the face of a man like Sheriff Morgan.

The sheriff met Mat where he stood. “I’m on your team,” he said. “We’re staring into the shittiest bucket of choices I’ve seen in my sixty-two years on this planet. I want you to know that I’m with you, and when push comes to shove, I’ll have your back. This is me giving you my word of honor.”

Mat covered the emotion that rose in his throat by looking away down the hall. What Morgan just said sounded like something his dad would say. Mat suddenly missed his family. He missed being surrounded by people who had his back. If he was being honest with himself, he did need a place to settle the whacky shit that’d sprung up in his battered head.

“I appreciate you saying that,” he admitted, in a voice that sounded too low and husky.

The sheriff clapped a hand on the crook where Mat’s shoulder met his neck. “Stand or fall—we’re brothers now.”

Mat nodded, stepped back and slipped into the hallway.

4 Cameron Stewart

“So then, royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of exploits, still eager to leave at once and hurry back to your own home, your beloved native land?

Good luck to you, even so. Farewell!

But if you only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore, you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me and be immortal. “

The god Calypso, the Odyssey

Grafton Ghost Town

Southern Utah

Cameron, Julie, Isaiah, his first wife Ruth, and the kids survived in a one room, old-timey farmhouse in Grafton, Utah. The little cluster of wood plank buildings was a ghost town, and they were its resident ghosts.

Cameron’s wife, Julie, kept her distance from her Celestial Husband, so he hadn’t felt the need to kill the man yet.

During their six weeks in Grafton, two important truths clarified in Cameron’s mind. Isaiah, the polygamist, was a nerd; and not only because of his weirdo religion. He would’ve been a nerd in any religion. The second thing was that they didn’t have enough food to make it even half-way through the winter.

They’d been slowly starving for two weeks now. The four adults rationed themselves about a thousand calories a day, and the kids were getting about half of that. When they arrived, the other wife thought they could stretch the food until spring. Her assumption had been that springtime would bring crops, a renewed wave of wild game and a reprieve from the biting cold at night.

In any case, Ruth was wrong. Even at a thousand calories a day, the food wouldn’t last to the end of February. Everyone could see that now. They were down to half of what they had when they arrived even though they’d been eating like sparrows.

Isaiah sat across the rough-hewn table from Cameron, his eyes sparkling with excitement. A candle burned in a sawed-in-half aluminum Pepsi can in the middle of the table. Everyone else had gone to sleep. Hunger did that—made a person want to sleep all the time. Cameron didn’t understand how Isaiah could muster the energy to be enthusiastic about anything, much less boring local history.

The polygamist nerd whispered his way through a detail-plagued story about the ghost town and its former residents. The nerd got off on Old West history, particularly stories that involved his forefathers. Their three-building ghost town was founded by the ancestors of the polygamist cult they’d just fled.

In the flickering candlelight, Isaiah’s eyes pleaded for Cameron to like him, and in the snarls and grunts of the human wolf pack, that meant power. Power to Cameron. So he played along with story time.

“George C. McGammon was the superintendent of the coal mine. He was my great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side. He built the barn in the south pasture.”

“Coal mine?” Cameron asked. He waited impatiently for Isaiah to get to the point—say anything that would lead to more food. Cameron thought if the coal mine had bats, they might be able to eat the bats. They’d already caught, killed and eaten all the rabbits on the property. “Where are the caves?”

“No, silly,” Isaiah chortled. “They’re pit mines. There are no caves. It’s a big hole in the ground, over yonder across the river.”

Nerd, Cameron thought. “What’s George C. Backgammon, great-great-great-nutter to your mother’s third cousin have to do with food?”

Isaiah waved his hand through the candlelight. “He built the impoundment up the river. Well, not this impoundment, but the previous impoundment that got washed out. The dam washed out thirteen times between 1875 and 1915 when they finally built the concrete impoundment.”

Cameron made the “get on with it” motion with his hands without lifting them off the table.

“The impoundment dammed the river, and if we restore it, we can divert water to grow crops,” Isaiah explained.

Cameron sat up in his chair and ran his hand through his dark hair. “There’s a dam?” His thoughts went immediately to fishing. Maybe a pond behind