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

Isaiah counseled him to send Ruth with a written list instead. They’d hide the booty at the edge of the river, and Ruth could retrieve it if they reached terms.

Cameron had reservations about allowing Ruth to conduct the negotiation. She’d grown up in Colorado City, and to say she was naive to the ways of the world would be an understatement. Isaiah countered that nobody in their group knew the value of raw foodstuffs better than Ruth. She’d been born and bred into mastery of the kitchen. She’d know good food from bad, and there were strong odds that Rockville would try and deal in bad food. Isaiah’s wife was the obvious, best choice.

In Cameron’s mind, the notion of “wife” had fogged over, like the memory of a Pink Floyd concert he’d gone to in high school after his first run in with a bong. He remembered marrying Julie—the white dress, tuxedoes and the cake with two tiny figures that looked nothing like he and Julie—but he couldn’t put his finger on why marriage had been such a big deal.

In the now-and-foreseeable reality, there were two basic functions of adults: surviving and rutting, and the second one only rose to consideration when the harsh edges of hunger had been knocked off by a bite or two of food.

He and Ruth were still fucking, but Cameron was no longer sure why anyone would care. Isaiah couldn’t even get out of bed lest his leg crumble, and Julie had become an apparition who did little more than make sure the kids’ food made it to their faces. He still humped his wife on occasion, but it was a joyless, perfunctory affair, and he told himself she needed it as a link to the old life—an artifact to give her hope. She consented to sex without the slightest moan or sway from her hips, and every time Cameron came away telling himself it would be the last time with her. Any fool could see the signs; his “former wife” was sinking away in an ocean of depression. But who wouldn’t? Their life sucked.

One night, Julie stumbled upon he and Ruth screwing on the edge of the tree line. Julie had been collecting tinder to restart the fire. It was dark, but without batteries or candles, they’d learned to get by without light. Everyone went half-speed at night to avoid bumps and bruises that would take weeks to heal, given their malnourishment.

When Julie came upon them screwing, Cameron held Ruth’s skirt up over her shoulders while he massaged her breasts and entered her from behind. Ruth’s mouse-like moans squeaked to a stop, and Cameron looked up to see Julie staring straight at them. She paused for a moment, then turned and moved off into the night, plucking up twigs from the forest floor.

He finished with Ruth, then went back to the homestead to face Julie’s wrath. But Julie never even brought it up. She went about her slack-faced duties like ever before. If there was now more distance between he and Julie, he could barely perceive it.

And that was pretty much the long and the short of how Cameron became a polygamist. There might’ve been some odorless contagion in the sand and the red rocks of Southern Utah, or perhaps the rudimentary addition and subtraction of survival in a clan led to one man and several wives. If another wife or two added themselves to Cameron’s family unit, he could envision that working out too. The women did most of the work, now that the irrigation pipe was built, and Cameron’s job—standing ready to protect them—arose only on rare occasion. By killing the troop of marauders and a half-dozen snakes, he’d done almost everything expected of him by the clan. He roamed the pasture, repaired the impoundment dam and cured leaks along the corrugated pipe. Otherwise, he ate and screwed.

Since the captured food from the marauders had run out, they were being forced to take risks by trading and he would, once again, be called upon to work a gun. He couldn’t help feeling more god-like behind the bright, red-dot scope of the AR-15 rifle. He didn’t know much about the range or accuracy of the black, metal gun, but it was certainly much deadlier than his Mosin-Nagant.

The next morning, he went with Ruth and Julie for the first face-to-face trade meeting, but Rockville didn’t show. Someone must’ve gotten the day of the week wrong. It could easily have been them.

The morning after, they tried it again. Ruth carried a note with a list of offerings: one Glock 17, the Mosin-Nagant, a gun cleaning kit, twenty rounds of nine millimeter and a bowie knife. They hoped to score at least two week’s food in exchange.

Rockville showed up at ten a.m. sharp. A pickup truck rambled down the road and stopped three hundred yards from the speed limit sign where they’d exchanged notes. Ruth stood beside the sign and Cameron and Julie waited in the trees. Cameron felt like he could hit the man walking up to Ruth if he had to, but the truck seemed awfully far. Three Rockville men held back at the truck—the driver and two with hunting rifles aiming over the cab to cover their negotiator.

Ruth and the man, a small, pot-bellied yokel under a huge cowboy hat, talked for a few minutes. Ruth handed him the note, they exchanged a few more words and the man walked back to the truck. He climbed into the passenger seat, the truck did a three-point turn, and drove back to Rockville. Five minutes later, Ruth stepped under the cover of the tree line along the river.

Cameron slid through the brambles over to the trail and caught up with Ruth. “What happened?” he asked.

“They said they’d bring some food tomorrow at the same time to trade for the guns and stuff.”

Ruth wasn’t always the sharpest beak in the chicken coop. She hadn’t provided any interesting details.

“What exactly did he say?” Cameron made his question