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

and run away from the city. Without a bug-out destination, they drove as deep into the countryside as they could. They ran out of gas on the outskirts of McKenzie with a month’s rations, nowhere to go and no way to get there.

“The camp was a cooperative accident. The Baylors and Smiths were traveling together and happened to run out of gas at the same place as us. Tom Baylor and his two teenage sons are eagle scouts, and I mean the real kind, like we had in Jackson. James and Linda Smith are avid hunters.”

Mat offered a platitude to keep him talking. “Good people to know these days.”

“Yes, they are. But mostly they’re just good, honest people. That’s proven to be the most important survival skill—being a good person. The selfish ones, they’re your enemies, Mr. Best.”

“Sergeant Best. I’m army, retired.”

“We could use combat veterans who’ve been ‘in the shit.’”

Mat laughed. “What makes you think I’ve been in the shit?”

Hauser looked pleased with himself. “I know I don’t carry myself as a veteran today, if I ever did, and I don’t blame you for not recognizing me as one. The Army sent me to medical school. I served in VA hospitals stateside for twelve years and retired with the rank of major. I never deployed in combat, but in Germany, I treated men back from the Global War on Terror. They looked just like you.”

“And your campfire council?“ Mat asked. “How did three families become Creek Camp?”

Hauser had finished his sandwich. “How about I show you?”

Matt nodded. “You’re free to go. Sorry about the rough treatment.”

Hauser tidied up his napkin and plate. Mat reached across the table and took them from him. “I’ll come by your camp to see you soon.”

Four days later, Mat met Dr. Hauser at Creek Camp. When he arrived, Beatrice Morgan, the sheriff’s wife, and another woman from town were there in the camp, standing in the mud, talking to Hauser. A boy from town unloaded empty fifty-five gallon metal drums from the back of the Morgan’s pickup truck. The drums had been torch-cut in half.

“Mrs. Morgan. A word please?” Mat called as he moved into camp with his security team. The sheriff’s wife should not be outside the HESCO. It was a security risk and totally unacceptable.

She paused her conversation with a touch on Hauser’s arm and followed Mat to one side of a large, dirty tent.

“Mrs. Morgan, are you trying to get yourself killed? What are you doing in the camps?”

“We’re delivering cook pots that the sheriff made in our garage. I can call him over if you like. He’s around here somewhere giving first aid. Living outdoors, even minor injuries can fester.”

Mat glanced around, but didn’t see the sheriff. He didn’t want to talk about post-apocalyptic first aid. He wanted them back inside the wire.

“I’ve got no problem with your charitable work, per se. Has the food committee signed off on this?” The look on her face told him she hadn’t checked with any committee, and she had no intention of doing so. Mat didn’t care about permission either, but if townspeople got kidnapped by refugees, it’d be Mat’s team called in to mount a hostage rescue. “You can’t be out here without security. My team and I could have delivered the pots for you.”

The pots were brilliant, really—primitive tech he’d seen in the hinterlands of Iraq among the Kurds. Hauser had organized the Creek Camp into tent clans around campfires with ten to twenty people, and the big pots would become social pivot points for each clan.

The camp smelled of pork. The domesticated pigs they’d lost at the ambush a month back would avoid capture for a time, but all fifty of the escaped pigs would eventually end up in the stew pot—if the camps had stew pots.

Stewing meat in a big pot was far more efficient than roasting it over a fire, where most of the precious fat dripped away. The stew pots the Sheriff and his wife had crafted were a game-changer for the refugees. They could add bits of meat and handfuls of greens to the pot for weeks, or even months, so long as they kept the fire going. It was hard to find fault with Mrs. Morgan’s initiative.

The camp looked safe enough. Tetanus or cholera were probably bigger risks to the Morgans than being kidnapped. But even on that score, Mat noticed, each grouping of tents had a tidy pit latrine with a privacy curtain. Someone had taught Creek Camp proper sanitation. Probably their physician leader.

Mat sighed and Mrs. Morgan waited patiently.

“May I ask,” Mat hazarded the question, “whose idea was this? The stew pots?”

She didn’t answer directly. “Did you know that my husband is a deacon at First Presbyterian?”

“Indeed, I didn’t,” Mat admitted.

“He does what he must, for his job, you know,” she explained. “But before all, my husband’s a Christian.” She patted Mat on the forearm, just like she’d done to Hauser, then she turned back to her work with the refugees.

You think you know a guy, Mat thought to himself and shook his head.

The members of the Security and Food Committees sat on folding chairs in the foyer of McKenzie City Hall, taking advantage of the natural light streaming though the plate glass windows. It was cold outside, and raining again, but they kept the front and back doors propped open for a breeze to carry away the body odor.

The town was on one-day-in-three rationed water because it required electricity to pump water to the top of the cisterns. Electricity required a gas generator, or solar power, and solar was harder to move around where it was needed.

Every three days, a pickup truck with a propane generator drove around to each of the water towers and pumped them full of well water. When Black Autumn struck, there was a lot of propane in town. The outlying farmers used the gas for heating and cooking. A huge propane storage facility