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

staying up all night drinking beer with his buddies while occasionally tending the barbecue. He’d done it a thousand times. But this was entirely different. This was like a damned job—a shitty job, too.

They’d lined up hundreds of scavenged, home barbecues in the old lumber curing shed and piped them to the lumberyard’s 5,000 gallon propane tank. His job was to mind the meat.

Buddy didn’t have a problem doing menial tasks. He’d worked in the back end of a kitchen since he flunked out of high school, but he always cooked in the haze of a whiskey buzz. Working sober royally sucked.

“Stop your bellyaching,” Lee Billings jeered. “Shift’s almost over. Finish packing up today’s batch. I’ll go shut the valves, and we’ll be outa here in twenty minutes.”

Buddy was trying to remember whether he’d hidden a whiskey bottle in the lumberyard or if he’d only thought about doing it. While he considered it, his gloved hands shoveled dried pork into plastic tubs, snapped their lids tight and stacked them on industrial shelving on the wall of the curing shed.

Billings headed to the exit and called over his shoulder, “Finish cleaning up for me will ya? Wendy’s cooking a real breakfast this morning.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Buddy didn’t have a family waiting for him, just a half-empty bottle.

“Come on over to our place,” Billings invited. “There’ll be plenty.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.” Buddy could think of little except how soon he could get the next slug of whisky into his belly. As Billings walked out the door, Buddy turned the wrench on the six rows of ball valves to shut off the propane supply. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have heard Billings say that he’d already done it.

The hoses from the rows of barbecues snaked across the floor to the propane tank outside. The shed had once been used for a lumber oven, but now it powered every barbecue in town. To make it easier to add or subtract rows, they’d split the main hose at a hose manifold C-clamped to a heavy wooden workbench. They used surplus ball valves from a bin at the back of the hardware store, and the handles had been swiped for some dude’s sprinkler system back before the crash, so they had to use a crescent wrench.

Buddy turned the last of the six valves with the wrench. He saluted the barbecues, like rows of soldiers, and headed for the door. He trimmed the kerosene lantern by the exit down to a dull glow and left.

The door clicked shut and physics ran its course. The propane gathered in an invisible layer on the floor until it flowed across the entire footprint of the warehouse, then it seeped between the floor slats into a long-forgotten storage basement, where they’d once kept coal for firing the lumber ovens. For two hours, propane shushed from 300 barbecues, cascaded through a thousand gaps in the rough-hewn floor and mingled with the hundred-year-old coal dust.

When the basement filled to the brim, the lapping pond of colorless gas filled the warehouse: six inches, eighteen inches, thirty inches. By the first light of day, the propane reached the guttering flame of the kerosene lantern, and the structure had become an enormous fuel-air bomb.

In a ka-whomping flash, the explosion killed every living thing in the warehouse, even the cockroaches feasting on pork drippings. The fireball vaporized the windows and ignited mountains of left-over sawdust and a hundred trillion particles of coal dust.

A dust explosion can blow the top off of a grain silo. A propane fuel-air bomb mixed with coal dust and sawdust can send a man to the moon. The roof of the pork shed didn’t stand a chance. The primary fireball and secondary dust explosion hurled the roof 300 yards in six pieces. The flaming warehouse walls collapsed on 2,000 pounds of dried pork.

Alan Stokes lay awake on his rotting cot as the the sky above became too light for sleep. His morning wood was painful, but he was too tired to jack off, or make a move on Janice, his end-of-the-world-hookup sleeping on the other side of his plastic lean-to tarp.

The word “girlfriend” didn’t make sense anymore because nobody even pretended there was a future, but the word “hookup” fit. She hated it when he called her that, but the options for a grimy brunette with teeth coming loose from starvation were markedly limited, so she tolerated his vulgarity.

Life in the mud camps didn’t leave much for courtship. Before they grew too weak to care about sex, he and Janice couldn’t get enough of each other’s unwashed, malodorous bodies. One type of hunger took the edge off another, it seemed.

But not anymore. The hunger had taken even that. Alan lay still, waiting for his dick to get the memo, when a pair of near-simultaneous explosions slapped at his lean-to.

Ba-boom-boom!

The explosions came from the direction of the town. Janice rolled over, startled, then went back to sleep. Alan stayed awake and pondered his boner. Janice probably wouldn’t turn him down, now that she was probably awake. By the time he thought it through, he was soft again, which was probably for the best. It occurred to him that he may have done the deed in this life for the last time. He was too weak and hungry to care about such a minor tragedy.

Ten minutes later, the smell of cooked meat ran over him like a dump truck.

“Oh, my God!” Do you smell that?” Janice sat up ramrod straight, like she’d taken an enormous coke hit.

“Dear Lord, where is that coming from?”

“Fuckers are having a cookout in town,” Alan spat.

The couple scrambled out from under their clumpy sleeping bags, pulled on pants and stumbled out of the lean-to. The cluster of tents around them sprang to life. Some people staggered directly toward the scent of roasting meat without bothering to put on shoes. Others paused to pick up possessions so they wouldn’t be stolen in their absence.

Alan grabbed the heavy stick