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

armed patrols of the town of Hurricane, and then he’d need to figure out how to get through the roadblocks keeping people out of Saint George.

“Run for Saint George,” Isaiah had said. Isaiah had believed running was better than hiding in the desert, but Cameron didn’t know why. They’d been hiding in the desert for months, and it hadn’t ended well. Maybe Isolation meant vulnerability. Hiding was great until someone found you, which they inevitably would. Scavengers picked across the land like locusts. The only real safety was a town, civilization, if any still existed.

Run for Saint George. Isaiah had implored him. He’d promised to do it.

Highway 59 would take them back through Hurricane, which Cameron thought might be as dangerous as Rockville. He’d find a dirt road around the town, then loop west toward the big city of Saint George. There, he hoped to slip in and take up residence without raising a fuss. They didn’t need anything from the city—just a buffer zone of watchful humans to blunt the predations of marauders and militias. The clan had enough food for the rest of the winter, but they needed protection from predators. They needed a community to watch their back. A bigger clan.

The truck rolled down the dirt road on the south side of the butte, following an old two-track that had probably been used by polygamist kids to escape out from under the watchful eyes of their priesthood.

Cameron would gladly submit to a few priests at this point, if it meant being surrounded by a community. He’d run fresh out of individualism. After living in a bolt-hole, under the starry skies, away from the comforting lights of town, he no longer took good neighbors for granted. The Grafton bug-out location had chewed every ounce of fat off his body, taken his wife’s life and killed his friend. At this point, he’d trade his dad’s sterling, American individualism—“neither a borrower nor a lender be”—for a half-decent Neighborhood Watch.

The truck reached the highway at sunset. The tanks still hadn’t rolled out of Colorado City. Cameron stomped on the spongy accelerator and put distance between the clan and the armored column. Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, they’d be tucked away in an abandoned house in Saint George, no longer refugees. Having no place to hide, no home base, left them vulnerable to threats from every point of the compass. He longed to have his back against a community, with allies surrounding him, facing threats head-on instead of over his shoulder. Being a refugee felt like a three-hundred and sixty degree ring of death.

They drove fifty miles on blacktop, through the coming night, and descended toward Hurricane. The dark closed in on all sides and the gas gauge ceased its bobbing and stuck firm to the red post. Ruth drifted to sleep in the dark of the cab, as did the children. Looming death had dried up any lifeforce energy in the cab of the truck. They slept while Cameron drove, and communed with ghosts.

As the half moon hovered overhead and flickered between the banks of clouds, ghastly figures glowed in the bed of the truck. Cameron watched them in the rearview mirror. If he didn’t look straight at them, they appeared in the edges of the gloom of the taillights. His dead wife, Julie, sat on the driver’s side, perched on the wheel well, leaning back against the sidewall. Her arms reached wide, relaxed and wind-blown. Her golden hair whipped in the slipstream, clean and intact. She luxuriated in it, grinned and laughed like the girl he’d met at a party, fifteen years before. Across from her, the big, easygoing polygamist sat on a pallet, younger-faced than Cameron had ever seen him. Isaiah pontificated to Julie about some factoid—the stolid young man, religious and sure. Hardworking and fair.

Cameron knew they weren’t really there. His mind was making its allowances for the injustices of the day. He’d played his guilt-stained part in the play, and the other protagonists had suffered for it. They’d been taken up to heaven, now away from this world of terror and pain. Julie was no longer depressed and Isaiah was free of pain, but for a moment, they tarried in Cameron’s truck bed.

The ghost of Isaiah looked straight at him in the rearview mirror and pointed a thick finger. He grinned, as if to say, “I see the same thing you saw when we first met: the back of the head of a weirdo, his polygamist wife and bundle of kids, in a pickup truck in the southern desert, running for their lives.”

The ghost said something to Julie in the whistling wind. It sounded like “Look! Cam and I traded places. Ain’t God a darn joker?” The ghost raised his eyebrows and poked his finger ahead, into the night. “Lookout, brother,” the ghost mouthed.

Cameron stood up on the brakes and the truck howled to a sliding stop. Ruth and the children jolted awake with screams and cries. Red bonfires burned on both sides of the highway, a mile down the road: the Hurricane road block. The town, once a sparkling pool of electric light, barely twinkled beyond in a dark valley, with a few campfires and a hundred wispy candles.

Cameron made a three-point turn and drove back the way they’d come. His terrified family settled with each new thump-thump-thump of the reflective bumps in the road. Cam found the dirt road Isaiah had described to get around the roadblock. If it was the right one, it’d circle the town and drop them at Sheep Bridge, at the edge of the tiny town of La Verkin. Hopefully, La Verkin hadn’t militarized like Hurricane and Rockville.

Every move, for refugees, was fraught with risk. They just had to survive the night, Cameron urged himself and his ghosts. Just this one night.

They crossed the small, concrete bridge and rolled through the town of La Verkin. It’d been rendered black, toothless and burned out. Charred posts and soot-plastered chimneys