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

The taped-up detonator was the size of a paperback novel, with a red, plastic cover over a toggle switch. The switch woke the detonator and the clacker-bar grip made it go “boom.” Noah had been fiddling with the red cover as he hauled ass across the Arizona desert, circling the town of Flagstaff like a vulture hunting for a way past the coyotes.

Up-down-up-down-up-down.

Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.

Three days before, Noah and his men smuggled the cylindrical, three-foot-long Tomahawk nuke from Ellis Air Force Base, where the U.S. government had hidden it in an underground bunker. The remnants of Ellis command had joined the Arizona resistance after the battle of Dry River Refinery. They’d followed the cartel army back to Flagstaff, and later sent Noah to collect the tactical nuke from the Air Force base.

With the warhead and the buggy, Noah would slag the narco invaders, garrisoned in Flagstaff, along with hundreds of innocent Arizonans. It wasn’t the first city Noah had annihilated, but it would be his last. At least this time he’d die with them.

Up-down-up-down-up-down.

Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.

There had been a lot of hoopla about which lives mattered, back in the Stupid Days before the collapse.

Black Lives Mattered. Blue Lives Mattered. Trans-pedo-nose-pierced Lives Mattered. All Lives Mattered. Noah couldn’t remember the whys and wherefores of the ceaseless, clickety-clack arguments on the internet. He did remember the fat, comfortable fools who argued. Half of them were dead now, at least in the Southwest. He didn’t know how many had died in the cities back east. Maybe all of them.

In the Stupid Days, they’d all but forgotten about slavery—consigning it to the wood pile of history. But just four months after the world face-planted into its own briar of selfishness, technology and limp-dick comfort, slavery came flying back into vogue, like the Bee Gees and bell-bottom pants.

An off-color crop of freedom fighters had sprung up in Arizona and they chased the slavers into the soon-to-be-radioactive heart of Flagstaff. Now, Noah and hundreds of others would die to end slavery. Hopefully, the next time America wrote history, it would remember better.

In the immortal lark of the movie Team America, World Police: “Freedom isn’t free. There’s a hefty, fuckin’ fee.”

Indeed.

Noah gunned the engine, punched the shifter into gear and popped the clutch. His head slammed into the headrest. The tires clawed at the dirt and the front end danced with ferocious power, threatening to take flight. In a fury of gravel and dust, Noah Miller yee-hawed as he rode the warhead toward both victory and death.

Nine Weeks Earlier.

Black Panthers

Nackards Corner

Phoenix, Arizona

“I don’t see no white militia, the boogie boys, the three percenters and all the rest of these scared-ass rednecks. We here, where the fuck you at? We’re in your house... let’s go!”

Black Panthers, Facebook post, October 6th, Black Autumn

Willie Lloyd had no clue why he was shooting at the cops, except that they always shot at the cops and the cops always shot at them.

Hell, he wasn’t even sure the dudes across the boulevard, hiding behind the CVS Pharmacy were cops at all. They used to be able to tell the cops apart because of the chunky mustaches and the 1950s haircuts. Now, two months into the Boogaloo, everyones’ hair and beards were shaggy. It was like Bible times. But Willie could tell which dudes where his brothers, ‘cause they were black, shaggy or not.

That pretty much summed it up. His boys were black and the boys on the other end of his gun barrel were white. Not that the cops had much to fear from Willie Lloyd—bossman of Black Panthers, Phoenix faction; Willie Lloyd couldn’t shoot for a damn. He’d been a felon since he was nineteen, but he was no hard-ass gangbanger criminal. He’d gotten rolled up in some trouble with his big brother and that’d been enough to give him a criminal record. When you had a felony record, carrying guns became as risky as carrying dope. After his short stint in prison as a kid, he pretty much followed the instructions given by his parole officer, which included no guns. Willie had joined the apocalypse not knowing a mag release from a meatball.

In the last two months, that had changed. He had a lot of guns now, plus a couple hundred soldiers. Willie and a handful of his men were in another skirmish with the cops—the kind of firefight where nobody really focuses on killing the other guy, Bullets fly like insults; lots of noise but not a lot of physical contact.

Six shaggy-faced white men busted out from behind the CVS and ran full-tilt across Southern Avenue. They ducked behind the burrito joint and bullets chewed at the tan stucco behind them.

They were definitely cops. They sprinted like a bunch of defensive linemen—short, fat and squatty. All butt, no body—as his boxing coach used to say. Phoenix cops had either been pumping a lot of iron or taking ‘roids. Most of them were fire plugs with shoulders that ran up to the bottom of their jaws instead of stopping at the base of their necks.

Willie waved five of his guys back to the Ranch Market. When they dipped through the the store, they’d grab a few more brothers and head off to flank the burrito place. This wasn’t the first time they’d done this dance with the cops. They did it every two or three days. The cops wanted to push the Panthers out of the Ranch Market. It was an attempt for supplies, like every skirmish these days. Willie sheltered twenty families in the Ranch, along with fifty black soldiers. They weren’t going to be driven out by a handful of cops. The cops were wasting their time.

Little by little, Willie’s men came out to join the fight. In no version of this story were a dozen cops going to overrun them. His boys would trade rounds until the cops got the picture. Nobody needed to die to figure that out, but