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

“He wanted to know who we were and where we were from. I told him that I wouldn’t discuss that. He said that not telling them who we were gave us an unfair advantage in the trade since we already knew that they were from Rockville. I said nothing, so then he asked what we wanted to trade. I gave him the list. He said ‘Okay. We’ll come back tomorrow with some food.’”

“He didn’t say what guns they wanted from the list?” Cameron asked.

She shrugged. “That was everything he said.”

“What was your impression? Will they give us a lot of food for the guns?”

Ruth shoulders hunched. “I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about how much food they had.”

Dealing with Ruth in the light of day was infuriating. Cameron should’ve done the negotiating himself, but then who would cover him? Neither of the women could shoot, and he didn’t want to waste the ammo to train them, if training them was even possible.

The three trudged silently back to the homestead. As per Isaiah’s instructions, Cameron stopped at the halfway point and doubled back, quietly, all the way to the edge of the trees until he saw the speed limit sign again. They were alone. Nobody had followed them.

The next morning, they left an hour early for the trade. Isaiah insisted they watch the road for a long time before the meeting, keeping an eye out for Rockville spies or snipers who might come before the meeting to ambush them or follow them home. Cameron and the two women waited for an hour in the bushes and saw nothing.

Right before 10 a.m., the pickup truck shimmered into view on the gray ribbon of highway. Ruth stood under the speed limit sign. The clouds sulked across the sky, maybe a rainstorm in the making. At his feet, Cameron kept the guns, ammo, knife and cleaning kit wrapped in a plastic sheet. If the deal went through, Ruth would come for them.

The truck stopped, three hundred yards out and the short, portly guy stepped down, walked around the truck bed, and retrieved a pair of white buckets from the riflemen in the back. He lumbered over to Ruth under the weight of his cargo and plunked the buckets onto the pavement with a thud that carried across the sage flats.

Ruth struggled with the lids on the buckets. The man pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket and pried both the lids off. She stabbed her hands into the buckets and let the grain run through her fingers. She held something up to her nose. Inaudible to Cameron, they spoke for several minutes, with the man gesticulating ever more emphatically with his hands, and Ruth keeping her hands folded neatly in the fabric of her voluminous dress. At last, Ruth said something, turned and walked off the road. She stopped and glanced back. The man was already returning to the truck with the buckets.

“Fuck,” Cameron swore under his breath. No deal.

Ruth stopped in the middle of the clearing and waited for the truck to disappear over the horizon before resuming her walk to the tree line.

“What the hell happened?” Cameron whispered when she reached him in the brambles.

“It wasn’t enough grain, and it smelled stale to me,” Ruth held out her hands in supplication. “You and Isaiah said at least two weeks of fresh food. That wasn’t two weeks and it wasn’t fresh. The wheat was stale and the oats smelled like cardboard—not sweet like they should.”

“Oats?” Cameron repeated. “They had oats?”

“Yes, but I think they were at least thirty years old. There’s lots of old food storage like that floating around Mormon Country. The Mormons started stocking up for the apocalypse sixty years ago. The old stuff has a smell to it, and it’s lost most of its nutritional value. That’s what they tried to give us—somebody’s old stuff from the 1970s. Isaiah said that if we take a bad deal the first time, we’ll never get a good deal from them, ever again. He said we should probably turn down this first trade—no matter what they offered.”

Cameron knew she was right. Isaiah had told all three of them, and it’d made sense at the time. Awash in visions of sweet oats, Cameron had lost track of the big picture. Maybe Ruth was the perfect person to negotiate after all. She had no inclination to get creative in the clutch. She didn’t care that they were hungry. She did what she was told.

But then why was she screwing Cameron? It wasn’t predictable, or even particularly stable.

Ruth stood in the brambles, empty-handed and quiet. Julie was still in her assigned overwatch post, across the path, holding the AR-15 like a wet towel.

“Let’s head back,” he said with a wave. He didn’t bother to explain to Julie and Julie didn’t ask.

“When do we come back, then?” Cameron asked Ruth.

“I dunno. I walked away. We didn’t set up a next meeting.”

Cameron swore and waved the women ahead of him. Trading was their only shot at cheating starvation. The garden vegetables were taking forever to mature, probably because of the shitty winter sunlight. Even if the plants suddenly exploded with life, the truth was slowing dawning on him: at best, the garden greens would offer a few vitamins and almost no calories. The turnips would fill their bellies when at last they matured, but the tubers would be mostly water. Even after planting every seed in the survivalist seed vault, they could expect maybe a few thousand calories from the cold frame garden. They’d invested tens of thousands of calories in the dam, the pipes and the cold frame greenhouses. Without starches, like wheat, rice, oats or corn, they were going to perish long before the skylark days of spring.

Cameron turned around and stumbled back to the tree line to watch for pursuers, as per Isaiah’s instructions. All the cleverness and tactical-whatnot sounded really cool when Isaiah laid out the plan for the trade. Doubling back