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

“Old men are like clockwork,” the captain explained. “If he got up at 3:30 a.m. one night, he’ll get up at 3:30 a.m. every night. If he pissed off his porch once, he’ll piss off his porch always.”

It made sense, but Sage disliked it—arresting a man outside his home while he peed. But the die was cast. Sage consoled himself with the knowledge that he would be asked to make peace with many evils in this new world.

He’d shot men before. Their faces had filled his scope and their guts had blown onto the snow, red as Christmas. Someday, he hoped to stop having nightmares about those men. He would welcome the day when he didn’t wake up in the witching hour and see their slack faces against the snow.

Snatching up a county politico and throwing him in jail shouldn’t be a big deal after the killing he’d done; it would be just another burr under his saddle.

He was tempted to join the high school boys in their five mile afternoon run, but with the mission coming, he opted to conserve his energy. Captain Chambers called it “tapering,” which had something to do with storing up glycogen in the muscles prior to a triathlon. Sage wondered how many years it would be until the world hosted another triathlon, or the Olympics.

It wasn’t like the world was starved for exercise. People hadn’t been in better shape in a hundred years. Everyone worked, all day, with their bodies and hands. Nobody worked strictly with their mind anymore.

He and the high school boys were the same age, but running laps with them felt like child’s play. The boys left from the bunkhouse, and the same daily competition heated up: some boys lit out like they were running the quarter mile, going balls-out to be first. Those same guys would be dragging ass by Mile Two and would barely make the finish line at Mile Five. Even after weeks of running five miles, they couldn’t help themselves. They sprinted and then paid the price. Everything was a competition for these numb nuts high schoolers, but Sage knew better than to get sucked in. Even around other seventeen year-olds, he’d seen too much bad shit in the world to squander his energy on gamesmanship.

He’d been seeing a lot of Aimee Butterton. The captain didn’t ask him to sleep over on the ranch with the high school boys, so he drove out to Elgin every evening, curled up in Aimee’s lap and let the stress of the coming mission bleed away into her sweet smell.

Union County had a lot of gasoline from a storage facility Sage had never seen, and no one seemed to be conserving fuel. The unleaded would go bad in another eight or ten months. So, they didn’t begrudge him the gas to drive thirty miles to see his girlfriend.

Sage had begun to wonder if Aimee might be too old for him, but that didn’t stop him from gravitating to her like a puppy to its mother. Sometimes, as she swept back his hair and rubbed his neck, she felt more like a big sister than a lover.

Once, he picked her pants off the floor when he reached for his own, and based on the feel of them, he guessed hers might be an inch bigger around the waist. She was no bikini model. She looked great naked, but she was twenty-two years old, and while he’d seen the dark side of the world, she was the adult in the relationship. She was wiser in the ways of north-eastern Oregon, and she corrected his mistaken assumptions about town and county. If she came off as a little motherly, that could be forgiven. Sage needed a mother, he supposed.

He’d never been with a more physically affectionate woman. She rarely stopped rubbing his shoulders, scratching his back and straightening his hair.

His nightly appearance at the Butterton home became routine. He got to know the older sisters, and even kissed Mrs. Butterton on the cheek when he came through the door. The smell of comfort food usually swirled around him when he stepped over the threshold, redolent of potatoes, casserole, cheese and cabbage. The captain kept the Buttertons in food and drink, and their home welcomed Sage, every evening, like the prodigal son. After he got over the newness of sex with Aimee, he couldn’t tell if he was going every night to see his girlfriend, or just going home.

Captain Chambers never spoke of Aimee Butterton to Sage. He and the captain spent most of their days together at the Chambers’ ranch, around the captain’s wife and children. It was the wrong place to mention the Buttertons. He took his cue from the captain and kept his mouth shut.

Sage spent less and less time in his hotel room in La Grande. He’d found a home with the Butterton ladies and they treated him like a beloved pet—five pretty girls and their smoking hot mom. After two weeks, he settled in as a member of the family. Occasionally, one sister or another would breeze through the living room in panties, or with her breasts out, while Sage ate leftovers or enjoyed a cup of coffee with Mrs. Butterton at the kitchen counter.

The more comfortable he grew with his new, all-girl family, the more he regretted ever thinking of the place as a whorehouse. That’d been his first impression, but he’d judged them unfairly for “entertaining” The Five. The longer he stayed, the more he understood: they were guilty only of coming to terms with the new world faster than others. Trading companionship and sexual congress for food and protection had always been the way. Modern society briefly interrupted fifty thousand years of sexual transaction, only for it to come rushing back. It wasn’t as simple as prostitution, and it probably never was.

Aimee told him that her mom and Captain Chambers had been a thing before the apocalypse—even before their father died. Mrs. Butterton