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

“Bad dreams?” the sheriff asked.

Mat turned away so he wouldn’t blast the man with his morning breath. “Something like that.”

Mat felt a strange compulsion to talk about it this time. “Yeah,” he continued. “I was remembering a bad Predator strike in Afghanistan. I mean, it was a good strike—by the book. But a couple girls ran onto the X at the last second. It happens.”

The sheriff nodded. “Just because it’s by the book doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

“Yeah. True dat. I ran into Perez before the shit hit the fan—the TACP who was with me on that mission. I ran into him at a bar in Landstuhl. He was all strung out on oxy and booze. He couldn’t talk about anything else. He’d done a million of ‘em, but it was that strike that ate his lunch; the one with the orange shawl.”

The sheriff nodded and kept his mouth shut, which was smart. There was no way he could understand or commiserate. Civilians just didn’t get it, no matter how hard they tried.

“I’m going to brush my teeth,” Mat made his excuse, climbed off the couch and walked to the bathroom. When he got back, the sheriff waited on his couch.

The sheriff shifted his butt nervously. “I’ve got some shitty news. I couldn’t find you last night, so I held off till this morning,” the sheriff said.

Mat’s stomach flipped. “What’s that?”

“Parker shot himself.”

Parker had been one of the overwatch guys, blocking for the Brashear camp assault.

“Parker went down to the road for some reason, after the...thing,” the sheriff explained. “It was a mess. He and Bergman really got into it. They hammered anyone who stepped onto the highway. I’m talking boxes of shells. Anyway, Parker went down to see his handiwork, saw a dead teenager or something, and he shot himself right there on the road. He has a wife and a baby—Parker does. Well, Parker did.”

Mat slumped on the couch next to the sheriff. He rubbed his eyes again. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want from me,” Mat agonized.

The sheriff tried to make it better. “Yesterday got crazy. I was there. I took part. This is the shitty hand we’re being dealt. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Every time we defend ourselves,” Mat grieved, “We’re snuffing out the town. We can’t kill our way to safety. No matter what, we can’t use that fucking gas. Promise me we won’t use the WMDs. If we use mustard gas or anthrax on refugees, this whole town will commit suicide.” Mat’s eyes burned into the sheriff. He was fully aware that he was being melodramatic, but the truth wasn’t far from the worst case scenario. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. This is not what I was trained to do. I fight bad guys, not infestations. Nobody commits mass murder and shrugs it off, least of all a bunch of Midwestern pig farmers. Parker is just the first from that strike team to off himself. He won’t be the last.”

The sheriff sighed. “No matter what happens, we’ll get through it together. We bear the sin together. You. Me. Everyone in Brashear wood. This isn’t on you, Sergeant. We chose to hit that camp together.”

“You think that kumbaya shit is going to save us? Because it didn’t save Parker, and it didn’t save Perez.”

“No. It didn’t save Parker,” the sheriff admitted. “This is death by a thousand cuts. You’re right about that. We have to find a better way.”

16

Cameron Stewart

“Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods.

From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.”

Zeus, The Odyssey

Grafton Ghost Town,

Southern Utah

Two weeks after being shot, Isaiah hadn’t yet died. Miraculously, Cameron didn’t regret bringing him back to the homestead. Maybe it’d been the warm spell in the weather, or maybe it was the restorative power of calories, but Cameron felt almost cheerful.

The last of the raiders’ food had been eaten—shared equally among the group—and they’d resumed their desperate rationing of the last scrim of red winter wheat in the five gallon bucket. But the captured, nutrient-dense calories had served them well. The children even played a little in the dirt outside the house.

Isaiah’s boy, baby girl and Cameron’s boys acted out a Bible skit with figures made of sticks. From what Cameron could gather, it was a conflation of Daniel in the Lion’s den and John the Baptist. He assumed the polygamist kids had come up with the plot because his boys sure-as-hell didn’t know the Bible.

Beside their “lion’s den” carved in the earth, the cold frame grow-beds had finally sprouted, and all manner of tender greenling peeked through the ocher soil. There was nothing yet to eat, but the little shoots had survived more than a dozen frosty nights beneath the plastic enclosures.

While studying the sprouts, Ruth devised a sprouting tray for the wheat berries that, hopefully, would add a bit of the sun’s energy to the wheat’s calories. With a little water and a couple days’ sun, the wheat kernels shot up grassy tentacles and reached out with twisting roots. She didn’t know if there was any increase in nutrition, but the matted mass of the sprout tray certainly satisfied the stomach more than wheat alone. They’d grown utterly weary with the starchy flavor and gummy consistency of raw, boiled wheat. Any variety dazzled the palate.

The grandest ray of hope came in the form of a note tied to a road sign on the highway across the river. From his sickbed, Isaiah had suggested they make careful contact with the town of Rockville, and even writhing in pain, he devised a clever plan to trade with the besieged town.

Rockville’s reply on the road sign read, “Let’s meet up. Tuesday. 10am. This location. —Rockville P.D.”

It’d been posted in response to a note scrawled on the back of a porno mag page from the marauders’ packs,