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

several-minute process of putting his boots back on, moving the backpack and then setting everything up again under the pine.

“What are you doing out here anyway? Why were you and your friends heading west?” Sage asked with accusation in his voice. There had been no need to kill those men; the father and the husband. He wanted someone or something to blame.

“They’re not really my friends. We got kicked out together, is all.”

“Kicked out from what?”

“Union County. Sheriff Chambers sent us packing. Told us to leave,” the talker suddenly ran out of things to say.

“Why?” Sage asked.

“They have a rule against entering empty homes. I knew the family—I taught their kid basketball at middle school. I was checking the house to make sure they didn’t have any pets that were starving or anything, you know?”

Sage nodded. It sounded like bullshit, but he didn’t really care. He preferred this version of the story; the one where the men he killed were exiled looters.

“A lot of people were out of town when the thing happened. My wife. Lots of families. The harvest was mostly in, and people had gone out of town. They left their places empty without making arrangements. Ya know? Because they thought they’d be right back.”

“Where are the women and children?” Sage lifted his chin toward the road.

The talker pointed. “We left them about a mile or two up.”

So, they’d passed Sage, then doubled back when they smelled the smoke from his campfire.

“Do they have food?” Sage hated asking the question. It would lead down paths he would rather avoid: guilt, responsibility, risk, entanglement.

The talker shook his head. “Man, we don’t have nothing.”

Sage studied his own feet. They didn’t look like they were frost-bitten. They were the normal color now that they were warmed up. His toes had been sloshing around so much in the snow they were whistle-clean for once. He had to ask. “Will the sheriff take them back without their husbands?”

The talker shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Joey’s wife is pretty hot and what’s-her-name, Tanya I mean, is young. Their families lived in town for a lot of years. The girls were locals. The sheriff will probably go for it. I mean, it’s not like the town doesn’t have enough food.”

“Food?” Sage asked.

“Like I said, they just got the harvest in. There’s a shit-ton of wheat and hay still in Grande Rhonde Valley. They’d just begun shipping it out when America went tits-up. There’s a lot of food, if you don’t mind eating animal feed,” he said with a laugh.

Grande Rhonda Valley sounded like civilization. Sage felt the crushing belt around his chest easing. If he could find a safe place to resupply and, please God, warm up—he could continue into the next leg of his journey without feeling so damned desperate; maybe he could find some traveling companions. Maybe even a dog. If they had plenty to eat in that valley, maybe they hadn’t eaten the dogs yet.

“Tell me more about this sheriff and the valley. What do they need? What can a newcomer offer them that they’ll want?”

The talker slapped his knee. “I can tell you this much—if you can kill two men with one shot, they will definitely want you in their militia.”

“Militia?”

“Yeah. That’s how they keep the valley bottled up. From North Powder in the south to Meachum in the north, they got the valley sealed up tighter than a frog’s hoochie-hole.”

“Why didn’t you join the militia then, instead of raiding farmhouses?” Sage pressed. It made him uncomfortable to talk to an adult like that. He was calling a grown man a liar, which he almost certainly was. It was the first time Sage had talked to another human being in a long time, and he felt like he might be doing it wrong.

“I did join,” the talker explained. “They didn’t want me. They said I was too fat and slow. I don’t know why that mattered. All I ever did was stand guard at the roadblock. Why does a man need to be skinny for that?”

Sage noticed the loose skin around the guy’s neck. He’d probably been fat, back before the collapse.

“And you think they’ll take me in the militia?” Sage confirmed.

“Yeah. You’re definitely skinny enough.”

6 Mat Best

Highway 79 Road Block,

McKenzie, Tennessee

“… Anything you say can and will be used against you…”

Mat looked down from atop the HESCO barrier at the two sheriff’s deputies. They twisted a long-haired, twenty-year-old man into handcuffs, and read the guy his rights.

“Sweet Jesus in a shopping cart,” Mat swore.

He scanned the crowd of 250 refugees pressed against the barricade. The town had built the hasty HESCO barrier across most of Highway 79 and out a hundred meters to each side. It was the start of what Mat hoped would be the final word in town defense: a fortification surrounding the majority of the small town’s homes and businesses.

This was exactly how the army did it in Afghanistan, in all the army’s rarefied wisdom. They set up forward operating bases surrounded by HESCO barriers, perimeter guards and heavily-guarded points of ingress.

They’d only completed a couple hundred meters of the barrier since Mat took the job. The mob of rats could go around the wall if they waded across the mucky fields, but it was a good start. They’d also cobbled together barriers across both sides of Highway 22 and Highway 79. All together, Mat figured the town had completed about 500 meters of HESCO barrier. There was a long, long way to go before the town was fully encircled. He sucked at geometry, so his mind left it at “a long, long way to go.” But the majority of town was surrounded by ankle-deep mud—the post-apocalyptic remnant of the hay fields that’d been plowed under for the winter; and it’d been a rainy fall for Tennessee, they told him. The mud and muck could be considered a half-assed moat of sorts. The rats stacked up at the highway gates and they avoided stepping off