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

Supplies. He has a place to go. He can’t go back to town. They said they’ll shoot him too if he returns. He’s willing to take us with him, but you have to control yourself.”

Cameron stared back toward town. Truck lights zoomed around like an anthill kicked over by a kid. Soon they’d send out trucks and horsemen, and they’d scour the red rock plains looking for the gentile who’d taken down their little heaven on earth. They weren’t going to forget about Cameron. He’d shot too many of their stalwart sons and exposed too many of their dirty secrets. He felt the heft of the rifle, and the weight of the bullets in his pocket. He had just five more rounds.

“Boys,” Cameron yelled. “Get in the back of that truck. Push stuff out of the way and make yourself a place to sit. You too,” he said to Julie. “Tell your Celestial Husband that if he tries anything, I’ll put a bullet in the back of his head.”

“He’s not like that. He stopped for us because he’s decent, Cam. He’s a decent man. Say whatever you want about the polygamists, but Isaiah isn’t like his father. He stopped for us because he gave his word to protect me and the boys.”

Cameron grunted. “I’ll be sure and put him up for Father of the Year. Tell him what I said, Julie. And if you screw him again, I will kill him.”

She glanced at the boys, probably to see if they’d overheard that last part. Cameron felt his face redden with shame.

How could he say something like that in front of the boys about their mother?

If his own dad had done that, he would’ve beat the shit out of him—no matter what his mother had done or who she’d screwed. He would’ve dropped his old man on-the-spot with a three-punch combination.

Pop. Wham. Thud.

“Nobody talks to my mom that way,” he’d say.

Another loop-de-loop of the mind, and there he was, being a classic piece of shit, right in front of his boys.

Julie shook his shoulder. “Cameron. Please keep it together. We need you. It’s life or death right now and we’re scared. Real scared.”

Cameron loosened his grip on the Mosin-Nagant. All the blood had been wrung out of his knuckles.

“Okay. Where are we going?” He stepped onto the truck bumper and over onto the pile of junk in the back.

Julie followed him up and into the truck bed. She wore the designer jeans he liked, the ones that showed off her long legs. A shockwave of jealousy ran up his spine.

Had she worn them for the polygamist? Had he peeled them off, with saliva in his mouth and lust in his eyes. How many times had they done it?

“Cameron. Did you hear what I said?”

“What?” The truck rumbled forward and gathered speed down the highway. The chilly breeze built a swirling tempest of wind around the shattered family.

“I said: he’s taking us over the mountain to a place we can hide. It’s an abandoned town his dad owned. He thinks we’ll be safe there. He’s not a bad person, Cam.”

“Shit,” Cameron scoffed. He pointed the rifle at the man’s back, through the sheet metal of the truck cab. The kids were in the back seat. He pointed the rifle at the sky instead.

“He’s decent,” she repeated over the wind. “You’ll see.”

2 Sage Ross

Present Day.

Holland Farm

Wallula, Washington

The burned farmhouse came as no surprise. Sage saw the orange glow on the horizon three days before. Even though every edible bit had been taken from the smoldering wreck, scavengers from the highway shuffled among the ruins, flipping over boards and picking through piles of blackened rubble.

Between the scorched remains of the two giant cottonwood trees, a charred body lay twisted in ankle-deep snow. He couldn’t tell if the corpse belonged to the Holland family or if it’d been a scavenger who caught fire and burned to death. Whoever it was, the Hollands were either dead or on-the-run, which amounted to the same thing these days. Refugees were dead people who hadn’t gotten the memo.

Sage had been a guest at the Holland’s house when the refugees first came from the highway. The farmer’s daughter died that first night. The rest either moved on or died later, defending the farm.

Sage hadn’t been around to see it. He’d left them to their hapless cause. Nobody could survive this close to a highway, not with hundreds of acres of farm to protect. The desperate and dying citizens of Seattle, Yakima and Richland had come from hundreds of miles to pick clean the countryside, just as the frosts of winter crisped the ground and grayed the skies.

For now, Sage didn’t have to worry about scavenge, though he would soon be a refugee himself. He carried a treasure trove on his back. His Grandpa Bob had set him up with enough food and equipment to last at least three more months. For six weeks now, he’d kept his head down, living in a cave carved into a crust of stone, hiding behind a camouflage wall of tumbleweed and sagebrush.

The same equipment that kept Sage alive also kept him rooted, unable to travel toward his family home in Utah. No matter how Sage packed and re-packed his gear, he couldn’t carry more than six days of food on his back, and to get home, he needed to cover 600 miles between Washington State and Salt Lake City. Even at twenty miles per day, a pace unlikely given the weight of his pack, his food would hold out for 120 miles—480 miles short of home.

But even more than calories, the peaks gave him a lump of cold lead in his gut. The Blue Mountains soared five thousand feet on the eastern horizon, looming between this place and the farmlands that stretched between Wallula and Utah.

He’d backpacked with his father and sisters many times, but it’d never occurred to him that live-or-die backpacking involved a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t calculus