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

on “rear security” was a Navy SEAL thing, and Cameron had loved the thought of it. Now, after doing it twice, it already felt like work.

Nothing was easy, not even a simple trade. They’d already wasted hundreds of calories walking back and forth to the highway, and they had absolutely nothing to show for it. Maybe Rockville had nothing to give them but nutritionless buckets of chaff. Maybe they’d been barking up a dead tree from the get-go.

Cameron already knew what Isaiah was going to say, and as much as he wanted to tell the cripple to shove it where the sun doesn’t shine, he knew Isaiah would be right: they should come back every morning until a good trade materialized, no matter how long it took. It was either that or death by starvation. They didn’t have a choice at this point.

Two mornings after the trade deal went flat, the truck and the portly man in the cowboy hat returned to the speed limit sign. He brought four buckets—the same two buckets of old wheat and oats, plus a bucket of only-slightly stale rice and another of fresh wheat.

Ruth struck the deal and carried two of the four buckets to the tree line, retrieved the guns and ammo, and delivered them to the Rockville negotiator. He gave her the last two buckets, retreated to the truck and rolled back the way he’d come. The trade finally went down just like Isaiah predicted.

“We’ll meet them again, here, in three days,” Ruth reported at the tree line. “Today’s Saturday, the guy told me. So, ten a.m. Tuesday. He said to bring more guns and ammo if we have them.”

“What’s his name?” Cameron asked.

“He didn’t say.”

Cameron stared up the highway toward Rockville. He couldn’t see the town, but he could imagine it in the distance, curled at the foot of the towering red rock mountains that marked the entrance to Zion National Park.

His brows furrowed. It irked him that the stout man hadn’t given his name, or asked for Ruth’s. Manners counted for something, but Cameron couldn’t say what it meant. He just knew he didn’t like it.

Cam collected two of the buckets and let the ladies trade off with the other two. As was his custom, he left the heavy buckets at the mid-way point, doubled back and “checked their six.”

Starvation, once again, retreated into the ominous shadows, at least for the moment. He’d sleep that night with a full belly and without waking to the moans of his hungry children.

They were probably nearing the middle of January, if Cameron were to guess. It would be a long road to April, when Isaiah said the days would grow longer and the night frosts would meander north.

Isaiah’s intestines hadn’t been pierced by the bullet or he would’ve died from infection by now. The slug must’ve circled around his belly, slipped through loose flesh and glanced away from the abdomen. On the other hand, Isaiah’s lower leg looked like a hairy salami, hanging from his knee and hardening in an angry, red shank. Where the bullet passed through the bone, a series of porcine lumps had formed around the bone, none of them clearly infected, but not appearing in any way human. The pain had only intensified. Isaiah insisted they carry him to the porch at night, to weather the cold night alone so he wouldn’t wake them with his restless agonizing. Part of Cameron wished Isaiah would die, and the other part knew he would miss the man. Cameron knew he would’ve made a long and dangerous series of mistakes without Isaiah as a second opinion. Even crippled and crushed in a vice of pain, Isaiah saw things in a way Cameron never would. In another befuddling irony of the apocalypse, the two men actually made a pretty good team.

One horrifying truth plagued Cameron, so vomitous that he dare not speak it, and every day the truth stalked closer, like a lion in the tall grass. For a short while, Cameron took courses at the local community college to become a paramedic. He went on some ride-alongs with the ambulance, and discovered that his stomach did barrel rolls every time he saw gross human injury. Guys who puked at the sight of compound fractures and arterial bleeding weren’t a good fit for pararescue, his instructor told him with a hand on his shoulder. Thus ended Cameron’s short time as a paramedic.

Before changing career course, He sat on the edge of his chair during a night class that taught “traction in-line” or TIL as the gleeful instructor called it. TIL wasn’t in the course curriculum, but the teacher described the procedure “in case you have a bone break deep in the wilderness, where there is no surgical center.”

The usual first aid for a bone break was to immobilize it and transport to a trauma center, but in case a trauma center couldn’t be reached in twelve hours, the first responder would need to set the bone before splinting. Leaving a bone crooked for more than twelve hours risked further tissue damage. The instructor had demonstrated the TIL by holding a student’s arm, yanking the shattered bone straight, then setting it back “inline” where it ought to be. “Then, it can be properly splinted,” the instructor pronounced. Cameron felt like he might puke on the linoleum.

The specter of traction in-line had haunted him since he first saw the bone fragments sticking out of Isaiah’s shattered shin, back in the thicket where he’d been shot. Ruth had carefully removed the exposed pieces of bone and they’d hoped the leg would heal on its own. It hadn’t.

It’d been two weeks, and the leg looked like it might require amputation. It simply wasn’t healing. The infection came and went, but the limb would accept no weight or movement without sending jolts of pain into the man. Cameron hadn’t even mentioned traction in-line to Isaiah, but unless he wanted the man to die from gangrene, he