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

he used for defense, slipped on his boots without tying the laces and shuffled southwest. Throughout the woods and across the highway, desperate thousands of insidious, human beasts converged on the town of McKenzie, Tennessee.

Dr. Abraham Hauser

Sedalia, Tennessee

Dr. Hauser had trusted the wrong people. He’d been taken in by Sergeant Best’s lies and the seemingly-kind acts of Sheriff and Beatrice Morgan. He’d been fooled into a pipe dream—an unlikely tale of food to feed his people through the winter. All they had to do was walk thirty miles and take it, the Army Ranger had said. It was a tale they’d yearned to believe.

Three days and thirty miles later, 800 people gathered in campfire groups in and around a rural warehouse outside Sedalia, Tennessee.

Dr. Hauser regarded the now-picked through shelves along the walls of the warehouse, and he knew they’d been betrayed.

At first, when they arrived, they’d celebrated. The shelves looked stocked, just like the Federal Emergency Management Agency might’ve done. But as Hauser’s friends unpacked the shelves, devoured the dried meals, and took a hard look at what was left, they realized the shelves had been shallow, with empty boxes instead of heavy, preserved calories. Much of the dried and canned food was expired. Though it turned out to be edible, they began to suspect FEMA had nothing to do with the warehouse. Too many details failed to line up: the empty boxes, the too-perfect map of FEMA locations, the lightweight padlocks on the doors.

The food would barely get them to the next warehouse on the map, which was supposedly another thirty miles north in a town called Hillerman on the far side of the Ohio River.

One of their group had grown up near Hillerman, and she was absolutely certain there was no FEMA warehouse, nor a warehouse of any kind.

They’d been duped, and the realization steadily dawned that they were marooned in Sedalia. Soon, they’d begin starving again.

Hypothetically, they could drive back to their camp outside McKenzie. There were plenty of vehicles around for the taking, but nothing to put in the gas tank. Every car, everywhere, had been driven until it ran dry.

“It was all our mistake, Doc. We’re in this together,” Jeanine Barlowe reassured him as she put her hand on his forearm. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Vehicle approaching. Defensive positions!” a sentry on the roof shouted through a skylight.

The refugees responded by forming circles, with fighters and melee weapons facing outward. The vulnerable members moved to the centers of the phalanxes.

“One pickup truck. Driving slow. Two pax,” the sentry shouted again.

His people clutched clubs, axes, and spears, poised for another sad turn in their parade of misery. Dr. Hauser hurried out, through the front office of the warehouse and into the parking lot.

A truck turned the corner, and Hauser recognized Sheriff and Beatrice Morgan in the front seat. Hauser almost singled “all clear,” but hesitated. The Morgans had certainly been party to his deception.

What was going on? His shoulders hunched in anticipation of coming conflict. If they didn’t bring the conflict, Hauser certainly would.

Sheriff Morgan pulled in, got down from the cab and looked Hauser in the eyes. Hauser curled his lip and signaled an all clear with his finger in the air.

“You’ve got some nerve, coming here,” he sneered.

Mrs. Morgan walked around the fender and joined the two men. Shame painted her face red.

“That’s true,” Sheriff Morgan agreed. He didn’t extend a hand.

Hauser jammed his fists on his hips. “You lied to us. My people could die here. There’s not enough food. We’re too far now to make it back without people dying along the way.”

“Yeah. That was the plan,” the sheriff confessed.

“And the next warehouse?” Hauser asked.

“Doesn’t exist.”

“What in God’s name are you doing here, Sheriff? Do you think I can stop these people from stomping you to death when they find out?”

“Bea and I made peace with that possibility, if the Lord wills it. But if you’ll hear us out...”

Beatrice Morgan interrupted her husband, “Dr. Hauser, the Lord told us to be your Esther.” She smiled like a penitent and quoted, “Do not urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

Hauser felt nonplussed. “Our Esther?” He knew next-to-nothing about Bible stories.

Sheriff Morgan interjected, “When I agreed to be complicit in lying to you, I thought I was choosing the lesser of two evils. I told myself that the town was giving you the chance to move on before you became too desperate and we had to shoot you. But my better half had other ideas—more faith than me. She was right and I was wrong. The town was wrong. I see it now. We’ve come to ask you back, to find a way to survive together.”

Hauser suspected another deception. “You mean to tell me the same town that sent us on a death march has had a change of heart? I don’t believe you.”

“We weren’t sent by the town,” Beatrice answered. “We’ve come to share your fate, one way or the other.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to offer? Two more mouths to feed?” Hauser looked around at his people, milling about the parking lot. He shook his head.

Sheriff Morgan smiled, and flipped back the tarp covering his truck bed. “We bring two more mouths to feed, plus eighty gallons of unleaded gasoline. That sound any better?”

William and Candice

Abandoned home on Kemp Street

McKenzie, Tennessee

William pulled the heavy handgun from his backpack and studied the mechanism. Mat hadn’t let him shoot this gun yet, and yet William planned to kill a man with it.

He and Mat had done four gun range sessions since the collapse, and they hadn’t been long ones. There was precious little ammunition, and Mat was working overtime on the HESCO barrier and night patrol. Organizing a mini-Ranger School for William hadn’t been a top