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

Aimee, partially, for him coming down on the wrong side of the raid.

The other part of him knew they’d been struggling for their own survival and using any means necessary to achieve it: Chambers, Commissioner Pete, Butterton, and even Sage Ross, none had behaved with any particular nobility. They were all serpents when it came down to it.

Sage would have to live with his doubts and his guilt. Arguing with Aimee would achieve nothing. All that mattered, really, was the meat.

Nourishment. Survival. Spring.

“I’ll bring up a snow machine,” Sage said, instead of arguing.

Aimee smiled. “I’ll get to work quartering her out.”

Sage snowshoed toward the machines. They’d dragged an empty sled behind for just this purpose. When he got a hundred yards away, he turned around and watched her. Aimee hung the rifle over one shoulder, her pack over the other, and her slightly-larger-than-his ass worked hard, stomping up the rise toward the dead animal. She reach it, set down her pack and gun, dug into the bag, then plunged her knife into the hide, unzipping the belly like a duffle bag.

He would’ve loved to stay and watch her—a woman only a few generations removed from the women who settled this valley in the wake of Lewis and Clark. Aimee would need his help in a few minutes to roll the elk over to get to the other side, so he couldn’t tarry. He set off again for the snow machines, thinking about the women of the frontier. He’d always imagined them as beasts of burden, doing the homestead work, caring for the children, and keeping house while their men hunted, fought and lead the way, but now he wondered if that was even remotely true.

How many times had those frontiersmen looked up from their adventures only to realize they’d been nothing more, really, than puppets on a string? Servants to a wiser clan?

Sage stopped again on the next hill. Aimee wedged her shoulder under it’s blood-streaked rump, pushing with her legs to get the three hundred pound beast rolled over far enough to pull back the hide covering the elk’s rear quarter. She struggled competently in her own world of hide, snow and blood.

He shook his head in amazement. She’d lied to him, cajoled him and kept him on track with a plan only she and her aunt fully understood. She’d taken down a powerful man, with a militia army of hundreds. Then, just now, she’d killed an elk twice her weight and set to quartering it without even glancing around for help.

Would he ever be that strong?

He knew that he probably wouldn’t. But the human race would go on—carried on the shoulders and in the hearts of the true warlords.

24

Mat Best

Clear Lake Bog

McKenzie, Tennessee

Four weeks later

It looked like cold, miserable work to Mat. Two hundred of Dr. Hauser’s people stood butt-deep in the bog, pulling cattails up from the roots and loading them onto rafts made out of empty milk jugs. Every so often, they shouted and flailed after dislodging yet another cottonmouth. The swamp must’ve been infested with them.

“Can they eat those?” Mat asked Gladys Carter.

“The snakes or the cattails?”

Mat smiled. “I know they can eat the snakes, but is there really any nutrition in the swamp reeds?”

“Some parts of the cattail, sure. They can eat it raw or dry it, grind it and make flour.” She shifted around on her walking stick. “It makes more sense to feed the cattails to the pigs, though. The pigs eat the whole thing—root, leaves and all. A human can only digest the tender center of the root.”

“Look who’s becoming the resident biologist,” Mat joked.

“Naw, that’d be Susan Brown. Biology was my minor.”

Mat had come out from town to visit the swamp lands to see how Gladys was healing. Her breath came with obvious difficulty. She moved like a fawn with a broken leg. It was anyone’s guess if she’d recover from the lungful of anthrax and mustard gas.

“So, we trade the refugees our pigs for their cattails? Explain that to me. The Tosh Farms guy told me, but I didn’t quite follow.”

Gladys smiled, obviously proud of what they’d worked out. “We trade them five piglets on credit. They raise them on cattails and give us back a two hundred pound pig—or they will when they have them fattened up. Then Tosh farms finishes the pigs with a couple weeks of grain.”

Mat understood but felt like he should keep her talking. He’d heard somewhere that having a purpose gave sick people a reason to heal. Gladys had taken the Rat War harder than most, and she’d paid a bigger price as well.

The townspeople buried almost a thousand dead refugees in a mass grave on Carroll’s field. The guilt and the shame of it was almost more than the town could bear. Down in the bog, many of the cattail pickers were townsfolk practicing a wet and painful redemption for Jim Jensen’s sins.

Gladys had taken part in both the Brashear wood massacre and the Rat War. She wasn’t about to blame it all on the pedophile. They’d all lost their way, to one degree or another.

Gladys must’ve read his mind. “I still can’t figure out how our imagination so utterly failed us,” she lamented. “We were surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of wetlands, chock-full of cattails. We had the piglets. Tosh euthanized an average of fifteen percent of their piglets because they didn’t have the space in their barns to bring them up. Refugees were starving and raiding while we were sitting on a calorie machine. An acre of cattails raises up forty pigs, and we have thousands of acres of the stuff. The swamps are so hard to harvest, we never considered it. The refugees could’ve been considered an under-utilized workforce instead of a threat. Piglets plus cattails plus refugees equals survival—for all of us.”

Mat overheard a lot of hindsight lately: we should’ve thought of the cattails before. We should’ve known that Jensen was