Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

On the side of the road facing the hayfield, she spotted a white van. As she flew toward it a man climbed on top of the van and gazed east.

Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

From a few hundred yards, she recognized Jim Jensen, wearing his saggy-ass denim pants and yellow golf shirt. He always tucked in his polo shirts, making his belly protrude like a volleyball. She pictured his naked, skinny ass on top of the thirteen-year-old girl, his pathetic, white belly smashed against hers.

I’m gonna fuck a brother up, she decided. Her legs pumped harder, pushing her into a ferocious sprint.

As she dashed onto University Drive, she saw the whole of the Sprinter van. A ladder leaned against the side and the rear doors hung open. Jensen climbed down.

Her right hand slid to the tang of the pistol grip on the AR-15. Her left hand ran the charging handle like it had ten thousand times in training. She glanced down to see brass in the breach and she let the charging handle fly. The bolt sprang forward with a satisfying snick. She looked up just in time to see Jensen’s startled expression. He held a jar in each hand, three-quarters full of yellow powder.

She must’ve looked like she felt—like the Goddess of Vengeance—because Jensen began babbling before she could even hear him. The barrel of her rifle made her emotional state abundantly clear.

“I’m saving the town,” he screeched. “Just look. Look at the field. Stop! Wait!”

Nothing would brook her fury, but she couldn’t help but look where he was pointing. Then she looked again. All the fire went out of her legs and her sprint became a jog, then it became a walk.

The Carroll’s hay field flooded over with thousands of refugees, stumbling, running, laying in the muck. It was as if she witnessed Dante’s Inferno alongside University Drive. Her brain vibrated in her skull with the horror of it.

“I did that. I stopped them,” Jensen whined. “I formulated the mixture of mustard gas and anthrax. I invented the launchers. I pulled the trigger. It was me who saved this town.”

A corner of her mind rolled below an avalanche of emotion: thousands of refugees threatened her town. Some terrible evil was eating them from the inside out. This animal...what he had done to the girl.

His cold, sweating belly pressed against her pubis.

The rifle snapped to her shoulder. The sights centered on his chest.

“Whoa,” he held out his left hand, like a magician drawing a bird from the air. His other hand appeared with a revolver. The jars had disappeared while she was stunned by the mayhem of the battlefield. The jars of putrescence must’ve gone down the white, yawning mouths of the up-angled tubes in the back of the Sprinter van.

Gladys’ radio blared to life. On top of the road, she had line-of-sight with her QRF team. “All stations, this is Mat. Hold what you’ve got. Repeat, hold what you’ve got.”

“What’s happening, sir?” another voice cried in her earbuds.

“Just hold what you’ve got. Mat out.”

Jensen’s revolver was out, but not pointing directly at her. His other hand wandered to a milk crate on the tailgate. Her rifle hadn’t drifted a centimeter from his chest.

“Break, break, break.” Gladys keyed her radio with her left hand while the right kept the rifle aimed at Jensen.

“Go for Mat.”

“I’ve got Jim Jensen in front of me getting ready to launch some kind of poison gas into the refugees. This is Gladys.”

She wasn’t asking for orders. She just didn’t know quite what to do. Should she drill this fucker or contain the launcher-weapon. She felt totally overwhelmed. The little, shiny revolver in his hands barely merited consideration. Not from where she stood. Not with people dying in the hundreds.

Jensen’s free hand drifted toward a bright red lever poking out of a cluster of white tubes. He was going to fire the launcher again. He’d send more people to a twisting, tortured death.

“Acknowledged,” was all Mat Best replied.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Because of the poison gas, he was going to win this battle, and it’d probably be the final battle. After this, the WMD genie would be out of the bottle. The clutching horror of mass murder would be knocked off the town like dust off an old golf ball. The town would take Jensen’s murder wagon on tour, around to the camps, and by-hook-or-crook, the refugee threat would go somewhere else; either to the Great Beyond or to the next, hapless Tennessee town. For Mat, it would be mission accomplished.

Welcome to the long, lonely road, Mat pictured himself saying to the people of McKenzie, Tennessee. It was kill or be killed and you chose to kill. That was the cost. So, pay up, bitches.

He’d been clutching his binoculars like a grenade with a lost pin. The radio shushed in his ear. He could almost feel Gladys Carter on the other end, waiting.

He pictured William, growing up in a town with mass murder scrawled in the Book of Life.

He pictured himself leaving them all behind; William, Gladys, the Morgans—McKenzie town vanishing in the rearview mirror of his Ford Raptor as he rolled west. Forever west.

“No,” Mat said to gentle breeze. “Win, lose or draw, that’s not me. That’s not them.”

Mat keyed his radio. “Gladys, this is Mat. He doesn’t fire that thing again. Not at any cost. Do you copy?”

“Good copy. Cease fire the cannons,” she replied.

The child molester lurched toward the van when Gladys said, “Cease fire the cannons.” His hand hit the red lever at the same moment she pressed the trigger—twice in quick succession.

Pop-pop. Jensen fell back against the white doors.

Instead of thunk-thunk-thunk, the six gaping mouths of the launcher coughed. Six glass jars puffed out of the tubes, flew four feet and crashed to the gravel. Four of the jars shattered.

Jensen tipped sideways into the Sprinter van and fired his revolver.

Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, click, click, click.

A bullet punched Gladys below the