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

were all that remained of the farming hamlet. Some past evil had chosen the town for immolation. Cameron rolled through the graveyard and toward the interstate.

They would attempt entry, that night, into Saint George. It was a plan crafted by Isaiah, many weeks before—a plan barely remembered. Cameron had never seen the mountains at the back of Saint George. He’d only ever motored past the city, flying along the interstate toward Salt Lake City to visit his sister.

Isaiah had cavorted around the little city of Saint George as a teenager, no doubt hoping to glimpse the lives of “normal” high schoolers. He’d known the roads, lanes and dirt tracks in and around the once-neon boulevard. The way he’d described it, Saint George sounded like a throwback to the nineteen fifties, straight out of Happy Days. Now, that same boulevard would be chained-up pizza joints and dusty milkshake shops. It’d be a sad, rusting monument to the heyday of middle America. The boulevard would be surrounded by thousands of brick bungalows, and most of them would be occupied by frightened, resolute Mormons, each with their food storage and maybe a few boxes of hunting rifle cartridges. To Cameron, it sounded like paradise. The lawns would be overgrown, but streets would be safe—at least until that column of tanks came to town.

Saint George was only a dozen miles away, now. But they couldn’t approach directly on the interstate. They’d have to circle around. Without a doubt, the city blockaded the main approaches. Cameron would have to probe to find a way under the watchful eyes of the community guard.

The truck drove slowly through another smoldering town. The winter mists rolled off the snowy plains of the valley and curled into cloud banks along the dark ramparts of red rock. The chill night air flattened the clouds to earth and splashed them against the buttes and gravelly escarpments. Cameron flicked the switches on the dash, but the aging truck had no fog lights. The engine missed a beat as they passed through a cut in the hills and descended toward the junction with the interstate. The engined sputtered, coughed then resumed its growling when they hit flat land. They weren’t going to make it to Saint George in the truck and they were too far to walk, at least not carrying their food.

Cameron quietly cursed himself. If I had looked for gas in the burned-out towns.

Without Isaiah, he felt like a hammer without a hand.

The engine sputtered, then cut. The silence of night enveloped the truck. Ruth and the children slept with quiet murmurs and troubled dreams. The tires hummed against the roadway. The headlights pierced the fog, but it was a sham. The light would only last as long as the battery, now. They rolled downslope by gravity for the moment, but hundreds of bearings, gears and shafts bled momentum away into a stubborn universe that preferred stillness to life.

Ahead in the distance, the fog glowed. The apparition of headlights pinpricked the haze and lit the fog banks. Cameron strained to see what lay ahead, but it was pointless. Six pairs of lights—probably the same marauders who’d burned the towns—waited up ahead. He groped the dashboard for the switch and killed the truck lights in a desperate, if too-late attempt to save his family from the hell that would soon eat them alive. The truck rolled to a stop with the squeal of brakes. The clan was doomed. Cameron sighed. His instinct to give up rose on a ground-glass bed of frustration.

Ruth woke up, rubbed her eyes and craned her neck forward to stare into the impenetrable fog.

“What’re those lights?” she asked.

“They’ve seen us. We’re out of gas,” Cameron explained. Ruth was usually content to leave decisions in the hands of others. It was a nice quality: being a good follower. That quality alone should’ve guaranteed her survival, but she’d hitched her wagon to the wrong star. Cameron had been the wrong man to award sex. He was no husband—no sheepdog at the gate. He ran like an aimless mongrel, snapping at flying birds and chasing jackrabbits he would never catch. Without the steadiness of Isaiah, Cameron couldn’t shepherd a family. He had no business leading a clan.

The mongrel knew what to do, now. Run.

The marauders would want Ruth, and maybe they’d want the little girl, Leah. They might not kill Ruth’s other kids to keep her from going insane. The killers up ahead would want the two women for sex, of course, but that was better than death, wasn’t it...was it?

Either way, Cameron and his two boys were dead. The marauders would cut their throats on this very spot and leave their bodies for the turkey vultures. But they could run, and leave Ruth behind to occupy the horde. Maybe that’d satisfy them. Maybe they wouldn’t see the need to chase after three tracks in the snow. If Cameron and his boys didn’t run, the killers would surround the truck in two minutes, and after that, he’d be a trussed hog. A leashed cur. A dead man.

Cameron jumped out of the truck and snatched the backpack of ammo from the truck bed. He flung open the rear door of the crew cab and woke his son.

“Come on, Denny, we gotta run,” he said to the boy. “We need to go. Ruth, give me Paulie. Give me my son.”

Ruth opened the passenger door and hurried around, the four-year-old boy in her arms. Cameron slung his rifle around to his back and scooped up the child.

“What’re we doing?” she asked. Her own rifle dangled from its sling.

“You’re better off with them. You’ll be okay with them,” he said, flicking his head toward the lights.

But her eyes reflected the withering truth: she and the girls would not be okay. They would be better off dead. They needed a family in order to survive. Her hand gripped the front of Cameron’s shirt and wouldn’t let go. When he went to pull away, she pulled the