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

skin, and everyone was dragging ass. Rebuilding the dam sounded about as likely as getting the Umpa-loompas make a candy forest.

“We could partially dam the river and channel some water with metal pipe. We could run it down the old canal bed.”

There was a lot of galvanized corrugated pipe laying around the river, rusting into oblivion. Cameron chalked it up to past attempts at damming.

The highway on the other side of the river led to the Zion National Park, ten miles up the road past Rockville. Steep escarpments and pink sandstone monoliths framed the green, winding riverbed. Titanic stacks of boulders dotted the landscape. They stood out ruddy and bulbous above the desert grasses, thick stands of saltcedar and the towering willow trees. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t killing them.

When the power stopped, so did the water to the towns up the Virgin River. An ancient truth emerged: a man can have water at his feet, but unless he has water pressure in pipes, he’s got squat-nothing. As the unlikely family of refugees discovered firsthand, carrying water was slow suicide.

“If we can channel the water from a hundred yards upriver,” Isaiah continued, “we can fill the cattle cistern at the top end of the pasture. We can run PVC tubing down to the garden and water vegetables. I have a roll of clear plastic sheeting in the back of the truck, and we can use it to make half-buried greenhouses, like Mary Allen Mayfield.”

It took Cameron a second to remember who that was. The greenhouse lady. Turnips.

The candle guttered. It was one of their last. Soon, their days would end with the setting sun.

Like the candle, Cameron could see their energy failing. They would have one more chance to get ahead of starvation, if that. The pantry was down to a bucket and a half of raw wheat, eleven cans of beans, two cans of spam and a bottle and a half of home-canned peaches. It reminded him of his bank account when he’d been out of work six weeks. Down, down, down—less every time he checked it, which he’d done ten times a day.

They would stretch the food pantry, but calories were calories were calories. Energy out required energy in. Every twitch of their muscles drew down the pantry, and very little was being done to add back.

They had no electricity, no refrigeration, no cooking gas and barely enough sleeping bags if they spread them out and slept in family stacks. There was sage brush and cottonwood firewood nearby to last them months, maybe even the winter, if only to cook and to take the edge off the coldest of nights.

They were refugees, plain and simple. Cameron knew from personal observation: refugees were the walking dead. The supplies Isaiah and Ruth had tossed into the back of their truck as they fled Colorado City were the only things standing between Cameron’s family and the same, slow death that’d devoured the rest of America.

They had this ghost town. The forty acre spread didn’t hold any wildlife to speak of, but it was protected by the bridgeless river. They could ignore the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire, but they couldn’t go anywhere. It was a prison, and homicidal, small town prison guards wandered the outside world ready to shoot on sight.

Cameron tossed out his pride days ago. He’d admitted the truth to himself: the weirdo polygamists were his only hope of surviving until spring, but he would have to make them work. If he let them sit around like rag dolls, they’d all die.

He’d begun to think of them as slaves. This bright-eyed fool across the table from him was a calorie bank for his family, and it was up to Cameron to work him down. The weirdo had put his blond-haired dink in Julie, and that had sealed the deal. Cameron would use the man as a workhorse, get as much out of his horseflesh as possible, then let him perish. The polygamist had been living on borrowed time, anyway.

Cameron sighed and closed his eyes. He didn’t enjoy being the madman, the slave master. He couldn’t help it. It was a mad world, gone back to the ancient ways of survival. If Cameron had gleaned anything from a dozen documentaries on the Roman Empire, it was that slavery got it done.

His dreams of slavery thinned when he considered the polygamist wife and kids. They were being worked down too. His wife Julie wasn’t a tenth as useful as Ruth, and Julie had a bad habit of disappearing when work needed to be done. Cameron had no idea where she went.

If he was going to use this man up, it might as well be to get water to a garden. Cameron didn’t have any better ideas.

“We can go look at the wreckage of the dam tomorrow. We’ll see if anything can be made of it.” Cameron slapped his knees and got up from the table.

Five minutes later, the candle flickered out on its own.

It took them a half-hour to walk the river to the old dam. It was the first time Cameron ventured so far off the property. They moved slowly, deliberately, like the starving men they were.

They’d eaten a quarter cup of boiled wheat kernels each, with a small pour of peach syrup. Cameron guessed it amounted to three hundred calories. His stomach snarled as it pounced on the little knot of nutrition. He could swear he was hungrier after eating it than he was before.

As they picked along the riverside trail, the winter sun strengthened. It might’ve reached seventy degrees—enough for the crickets to animate, move around, and dine on the dried algae on the edge of the water. The men scrambled for the crickets, then shoved them into their mouths straightaway.

“We shood cash sum for da women and kiz,” Isaiah spoke around a mouthful of insect.

“We’ll get them on the way back,” Cameron replied. He flipped over a rock and found five crickets. Four