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

This barricade at the northwest corner of town got the most pressure. The refugees pressed against Mat and his erstwhile soldiers in hopes of a handout from the people of McKenzie. A handout wasn’t going to happen. The town couldn’t feed even a fraction of these refugees, even for a week, without killing itself. He sighed as he watched the cops arresting the long-haired guy.

“To a hammer, everything’s a nail,” his commanding officer in Iraq liked to say. Mat had been an Army Ranger—a death-dealer for the United States of America, and one hell of a hammer himself. But the country he defended no longer existed. His area of operation, these days, was the fields and bogs around McKenzie, Tennessee, chock-a-block full of the filthiest, most-desperate human beings he’d ever seen—and he had seen some real trash-lickers.

Fortunately, most of the refugees had wasted away during whatever hellish travail brought them to the outskirts of McKenzie. They’d exhausted themselves pursuing the ever-dwindling world of modern possibilities and landed in the mud, outside the small town. Exhausted was good, but even dull-eyed zombies were capable of superhuman acts of desperation, in Mat’s ample experience. They were the enemy, and while they weren’t Zulus, they could easily kill them all if they got the wrong idea.

“Hey, he didn’t do anything wrong!” some, filthy, city schmuck shouted from the crowd.

Mat didn’t like the look of the crowd gravitating toward the arresting deputies. He couldn’t allow this to become a pre-apocalypse “protest” with people bitching about police brutality. He had to nip that shit in the bud, right away. People hadn’t had entirely forgotten “their rights”—it’d only been a couple months since the nation vanished out from underneath them. The last really big race protest had been in Los Angeles, then Baltimore and Detroit, and that was right before the bomb turned everything ass-toward-the-sky. That’d been October and this was December. People still remembered how to demand shit from “the man,” even though the original copy of the Constitution had probably been used to wipe some looter’s butt by now.

Mat climbed down off the tetanus-infested jumble they called a HESCO barrier and hurried to where the deputies were about to fold the unruly guy into a patrol car. The town’s eighteen cops, including six auxiliary officers, plus two dozen volunteers, were all Mat had to work with on the barricade. Half of those men and women were spread like wandering ants across the top of the HESCO. If this crowd got big ideas, and came at them like Mat had seen the Sudanese do, his guards wouldn’t even be a speed bump. They’d go right up and over the barricade and pour into town.

The wall was a HESCO in name only. In this section, they’d stacked hundreds of otherwise useless vehicles, three tall. The tires were removed on the bottom so there wasn’t space to crawl under. The top car was flipped over and mashed as flat as possible with the bucket of a backhoe; it gave the guards a flat surface for high-ground defense. Three cars, stacked and crushed, added up to nine feet of wall. They had welded sewer pipe to the outside of the cars and extended the height of the wall another six feet with chainlink fence. Near the highways, they added razor wire on top of that. It was the ugliest HESCO imaginable—uneven and full of holes, like a kids’ tree fort made out of pallets and trash cans.

Mat climbed down the HESCO and trotted toward the deputies. “Stop!” His voice was loud, firm, and calm. “We’re not arresting people today.” The portion of the crowd within earshot quieted. He could sense hope rise. They probably thought the police would back off, lay down and give the “protest” room to burn out like the old country used to do. But hope in this circumstance was bad for the town. Very bad.

The deputies hesitated. Town cops still answered to the sheriff, not necessarily to Mat.

“He refused to comply with a lawful order,” one of the officers argued. “Sheriff Morgan said we maintain the peace.”

Mat leaned into the man and lowered his voice. “Yes. But this is an indigenous population, not your normal arrest. Peace requires strength on this side of the wall.”

The cop looked confused at the word “indigenous,” but he stopped trying to cram the guy into the patrol car. Mat looked hard at the refugee. He was thin, filthy, and frightened, but in his eyes, resentment mingled with fear. Mat had seen the same steam coming off young, pissed-off Afghans. Resentment was the last thing Mat wanted to see in these people. Resentment meant they thought they were owed something. It was one thing for people to beg, it was another thing for people to act like they were being ripped off by someone. Old, bad habits still smoldered in tumbledown America. The collapse of everything was still not enough to stamp out victim culture.

Mat didn’t ask the guy’s name. He gave him a new name in his mind: “Mr. Example.”

He turned Mr. Example around and frog-marched him to the front of the crowd. Mat was exposed, but it wasn’t the first desperate throng he’d faced. The rats shouted and griped a blue streak, but they weren’t a mob yet. They hadn’t gone over the top of the emotional spillway. With luck, Mat’s gambit would settle the waters.

From behind Mr. Example, Mat raised his voice. Those in front could hear him. The back of the crowd muddled around with low energy typical of extreme hunger.

“We will not be arresting you today,” he called to the refugees within earshot. Mat felt hope rise like a sheet in the wind, as anticipated. He removed the deputy’s handcuffs from Mr. Example, stepped back and delivered a vicious side kick to man’s kidney.

Mister Example must’ve believed he’d won this round of “who’s entitled to what” because when Mat’s kick connected, he was as loose as a noodle. His back