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

She stared at her former colleague. He wheezed, then hacked; his eyes welled with copious tears.

The gas!

She dropped her rifle and ran. Her clavicle howled in pain. Her lungs were suddenly seized by fire.

Gladys made it a hundred yards before she collapsed onto the asphalt.

“All stations. This is Mat. Consolidate ammunition. Prepare for the second wave.”

This half-mile of HESCO barrier was their last stand, and it’d be Mat, his forty-man QRF and a few hundred lightly-armed townspeople against thousands of desperate, starving barbarians. He had one mag left.

Mat had probably killed them all with his decision to end Jensen’s death cannons, but serenity flowed around him; over his shoulders, through his hair, and it caressed his arms. It smelled a lot like barbecue.

The apocalypse would kill them all eventually, but it’d be on terms Mat, Gladys, the Bible-thumping sheriff and his rosy-cheeked wife could abide. They would hold to their humanity, even in death.

This time, on this field, Mat had the authority to stop the Reaper drone from raining death on the young bride, and he had done it. This would be his own final entry in the Book of Life. He wished he could have Perez here beside him—that his old buddy could die with redemption on his head instead of oxy strangling his soul.

The invisible gas must’ve thinned and blown northeast because another thousand rats surged onto the field from the edge of Carroll’s wood, and these rats knew nothing of poison gas. All they knew was that someone, somewhere was cooking hundreds of pounds of pork. The dead and dying that littered the hayfield meant nothing to them.

Why haven’t they gotten that fire under control? Mat fretted as he went through his magazines and shuffled every bullet into one and a half, twenty-round SCAR mags.

The few hundred rats that’d crossed the HESCO barrier and run into town would’ve reached the source of the smell by now and realized their mistake; the pork was all burned up. Now, they probably rampaged across town, raiding homes for food.

Sporadic gunfire popped and crackled from town proper, but Mat couldn’t allow that fight to distract him from the stunning threat he now faced: two thousand refugees, churning toward him and his hapless cohort.

“All stations, this is Mat. Shoot only those with weapons. Stop everyone you can at the wall, hand-to-hand. This is to-the-death, folks. May God help us. Mat out.”

The first ranks of the rats reached mid-field, where a gravel service road cut across, east to west. They loped up and over the road and poured into the last three hundred yards before the HESCO.

A low rumble built on the wind as the thronging mass of desperate zombies bore down on them. Out of the north, a line of speeding pickup trucks burst onto Carroll’s field, racing down the access road along University Drive, then angling out across the gravel service road, cutting the field in half.

At least twenty trucks of all makes, models and colors cut across the mid-field service road and plunged into the mass of refugees. The trucks smashed through them like ships plowing the sea. Rats dove out of the way as the convoy stretched across the breadth of Carroll’s field. Men and women poured out of the trucks, and leapt from the truck beds, and went instantly to battle with sticks, baseball bats, shovels and rakes.

The fight for Carroll’s field flipped from a siege to a melee in an instant, but it was still thousands of rats against hundreds of defenders, and Mat had no idea who had just thrown themselves into their fight.

“All stations. Reinforcements in mid-field. Move up to the center road. Get off of the wall and help them! Give them cover fire. Go, go, go, go!”

Mat slung his rifle around to his back and climbed over the side of the HESCO. He scaled down the unsteady chainlink, dangling like a sail. He let go and dropped the last ten feet to the muddy field. All the defenders followed. Up and down the HESCO, townspeople slopped across the mud and into the melee.

They charged forward, ignoring the rats that’d made it past the service road. Mat burst onto the gravel road first, punched a rat in the nose, and scanned. He saw Sheriff Morgan below in the field, shoving a woman back the way she’d come. The sheriff stood a head taller and was a fair-sight cleaner than the refugees. He wore a chunk of neon orange survey tape around his head. So did many others—all the others fighting with their back to the town.

“Friendlies are wearing orange tape. All stations acknowledge,” Mat radioed. A refugee raised a knife. Mat shot him through the chest. Another man swung an ax. Mat blew the top of his head off into the hay stubble.

“All stations, look for weapons. Clear shots only. Friendlies are wearing orange marker tape,” he repeated.

Rats charged the raised road bed. Mat butt-checked a guy in the face with the stock of his SCAR. The dude went down with his nose smashed flat. Mat searched the crowd and shot a woman swinging a shotgun like a club, then he shot another man with a hatchet.

All along the service road, town defenders picked their targets and added gunfire to the fist fight. It was impossible to read the tide of battle, but the flow of rats had halted at the melee, and few crossed the gravel road. Fewer still made it across the stretch of churned-up mud to the foot of the HESCO.

Thousands of starving rats had been fighting for fifteen exhausting minutes and, all-at-once their will broke. Whatever spare calories they had in their bodies gave out, like a switch had been flipped. Hundreds folded to the ground like wet paper dolls. Others staggered back the way they’d come. Some fell unconscious from exertion.

“Morgan!” Mat shouted over the din. The sheriff looked up from a fist fight he was winning