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

enjoyed having someone around with the guts to call him on stuff. He’d always liked having a second set of eyes—someone to tell him the scuttlebutt on any team he led. He decided that he’d ask the WNBA player to train with the quick reaction force. She could end up being a decent 2IC—second in command—if she could learn to keep her mouth shut until after an operation was in the bag.

From on top of the semi trailer, Mat could survey the bulk of the crowd. He was exposed to gunfire, but this next part couldn’t be done from behind the barrier. He wanted the rats to see him. He knew how he looked to them: dark haired, muscular, tattooed, bearded and well-armed. To the starving hundreds of barbarians at the gate, he must come off like Zeus, fresh down from Olympus.

The frothing sea of humanity had become a stagnant pond of just a few, focused acts of violence. He patted himself on the back for his judgment. It’d played out more-or-less as he’d hoped.

“This town is closed!” Mat bellowed. “There’s nothing for you here! There is only death. Move on. We do not want to hurt you, but we will. Old Paris Road will take you south. This town is closed.”

Mat repeated the message three times and then thumbed his radio. “Highway seventy-nine detail this is Best, repeat my last, tell the refugees they must move south on Old Paris Road.”

Mat waved the basketball pro up to take over shouting the message. She shook her head, but did it anyway. She shouted a lot louder than Mat. It only bothered him a little.

Fifty people detached from the back of the crowd and drifted toward Old Paris Road. Mat mentally urged more to leave. The remaining six hundred or so ignored the commands.

In the distance, down Highway 79, a thin, staggering mass of refugees trickled in to replace the few that had left. They’d be at 700 in the next half hour, and then maybe 900 by nightfall. They’d start the day tomorrow at well over a thousand. Mat’s showmanship had bought them just thirty minutes of reprieve.

Mat turned and found Deputy Rickers crossing behind the semi trailer. He called down to the Deputy.

“Yo, Rickers. Go get the dry food wagon. Let’s offer the food-for-guns trade while they’re tuckered out.” Rickers saluted and hustled off down the highway toward his cruiser.

Every little bit counts, Mat tried to make himself feel better. If he was being honest, this was like fighting forest fire with coffee piss. He didn’t need a new plan, he needed a whole, new playbook.

He contemplated the enemy arrayed before him on the roadway. Nearly all of them had run out of gas driving through snarled traffic between the big cities and McKenzie. There were 700 here, but at least ten times that number squatted in make-shift camps in the woods, surrounding the town, like an invading army preparing for siege. Mat had no idea what led some people to gather in one camp as opposed to another, but smoke columns rose from at least thirty clusters of trees, mostly toward the north and the east in the direction of Louisville, St. Louis and Nashville. The refugees had overrun the farmlands around McKenzie and chased almost all the farm families into town.

The rats were “just people,” a never-ending sea of accountants, receptionists, day care workers, cab drivers, parking lot attendants and paralegals. They weren’t gangbangers, mostly, and they weren’t militia combatants. They were very hungry, regular folks.

Mat remembered the old movie with Kevin Costner—The Postman. The bad guys had been a militant gang of preppers with a megalomaniac tyrant for a leader. What Mat wouldn’t give for such an enemy. At this moment, staring down at the mulling, sulking crowd of discontents at the foot of the wall, clear battle lines and black-and-white evil would come as welcome relief. At least he could fit that situation into his wheelhouse of past experience.

“The food-for-guns wagon’s here,” Gladys Carter had climbed up the semi trailer to tell him. She could’ve yelled from the ground, but she hadn’t. “Sorry for getting in your face earlier. It probably could’ve waited.”

“Yep,” Mat agreed. “But I appreciate your candor.”

“The food wagon’s here,” she repeated. “Do you want me to crack the gate and let the refugees know we’re open for business?”

“Yeah. Thanks. That’d be great. Every little bit counts,” Mat said. On some level, they probably both knew it was B.S.. Sometimes, “every little bit” didn’t add up to diddlysquat.

7 Cameron Stewart

“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!

By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

Achilles, The Odyssey

Grafton Ghost Town,

Southern Utah

It took two men to carry an eight-foot section of twelve inch, corrugated pipe, or Cameron would’ve made Isaiah move two pipes to his one. Cameron reminded himself throughout the day: if he wanted to survive, he must do less and eat more. It was the only way to make it to spring. If he burned fewer calories than the polygamist, he would come out on top.

But if Cameron did no work whatsoever, Isaiah would balk and the water project would grind to a halt. Isaiah would never quite tell Cameron “no,” but he had his own way of slowing down and playing dumb when he felt jerked around.

Cameron could point his rifle at the man and order him to work as a proper slave, but then the polygamist would dig in his heels and his ideas for food would cease. So far, the weirdo had a lot of ideas, and some of those ideas held promise. Even starving, the polygamist chatted incessantly while they carried pipe—reciting endless factoids of local history, picking them apart for some survival advantage. If Isaiah had spent half as much time reading about Native Americans in the area, they wouldn’t be so focused on