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

Mat’s Glock sprang into his hands and he searched for targets in the first row of the crowd. Mister Example gasped like a fish out of water and twisted at Mat’s feet. Mat didn’t think he’d broken the dude’s back, but he would walk like an old man for a couple days.

“NOW! BACK THE FUCK UP!” Mat didn’t dare fire a warning shot. If he fired his gun at this point, it’d flip a switch—and maybe trigger a cascade. There were undoubtedly firearms in the crowd. His men were outnumbered, and they were not prepared for battle. In his peripheral vision he saw the security detail had drawn their weapons. “Hold!” he ordered his team.

The crowd couldn’t back away. They were hemmed in by other refugees on all sides. Mat backed up, finally with some breathing room. Without turning his back on the crowd, he led his team in an orderly retreat through the gate and behind the barricade. The big rig they used to block the entrance across Highway 79 rumbled forward, scraping the sides of its trailer along the HESCO. The local welder had added steel plates to the underside of the trailer so nothing bigger than a cat could slip beneath.

Mat’s security guys stepped through the gap before it closed, then ran up the ramps to the top of the HESCO.

The crowd roiled forward into the space Mat had made with his antics. Rats piled against the big rig and the HESCO, mashing their front row into the wall. Mat gave orders to employ the greased poles if anyone climbed.

The greased pole idea had come to Mat a few days before. He and Sheriff Morgan had been discussing the town’s major source of meat, the pig farms in Henry, five miles to the Northeast. The mental association of pigs led to greased pigs, like at the county fair, then to the greased pole the Army had Mat and his fellows attempt to climb in training. If a man couldn’t climb a greased pole, he sure as hell couldn’t rip one out of another man’s hands.

Mat issued the McKenzie defenders six-foot fence posts from the lumber yard and tipped them with half-spherical caps. An enterprising deputy filled the middle of the tube with concrete for weight. The top three feet of the blunt, heavy lance was smeared with axle grease to prevent attackers from yanking it out of a defender’s grasp. The post focused the punching power of a snap-thrust into a two-inch ball of regret.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “They got plenty to eat in there, while we’re starving out here,” and that was all the crowd required to go high-order. The throng surged up to the semi trailer, but they could get no purchase on the slick, metal-sided wall. They overflowed onto the fields on both sides of the road, and then scrambled up the stacked cars that served as walls.

There were plenty of footholds, but climbing the curved surfaces of car fenders and hoods proved tricky—as many rats fell away as made it to the chainlink topper. As they climbed, the fence wobbled and waved. The weird motion shucked off rats like sand off a shaken beach towel. They plummeted into the mass of people surging against the HESCO.

A female police offer punched her ramrod through the fence and took a jowly-looking man in the sternum. He toppled backward and bounced down the stack of cars. A woman rushed to him and went down to her knees. The crowd loosened around them.

Another guy flew away from the fence, probably gut-punched by Juan Cabrera’s ramrod. He fell all the way to the ground and lay there heaving, like trying to suck breath through a straw. Several others fell part way off the fence, bounced down the cars, and rolled into the mob.

On the opposite side of the gap across Highway 79, the crowd thickened and surged up the car-wall. Their chainlink waved rhythmically as six men climbed at once. A college-aged kid from town fought furiously with his ramrod, punching repeatedly through the fence without dislodging any of the climbers. The welds holding the corner fence pole cracked like a shotgun and a fifteen-foot section of fence gave way. The six men fell. One swung into a crushed Oldsmobile. The naked hood armature impaled him through the side of the gut. He slid off the metal stake, bounced once on the car below and fell to the ground. The mob swallowed him and his body disappeared as they flowed back away from the wall.

The attack on the wall waned. Hunger left the rats with short fuses and even shorter endurance. Mat nodded satisfaction. The ramrods were working for now. The refugees backed up and took to yelling insults.

“What the heck was that you did down there?” a civilian volunteer asked Mat. He was pretty sure her last name was Carter. Gladys Carter. She’d been the high school basketball coach before the shit hit the fan. Before that, she’d played in the WNBA, which is why Mat remembered her name—that and the fact that she towered over his six-foot frame. Now, she looked pissed, her fists on her hips. Mat felt like a schoolboy being called to task by his mother.

“Are we beating people up now?” she pressed. The whites of her eyes swam beneath her knotted brows. “I don’t think they would’ve attacked the wall had you not kicked that guy’s ass.” She was referring to Mr. Example. That was minutes ago, practically forever in battle time. “Now some dude has an Oldsmobile ornament up his ass. That was unnecessary,” she said.

“We’re saving lives, ours and theirs,” Mat argued. “You mind if I keep at it?” Her fierce eyes relented and she tilted her head to the side as if to say “Go ahead, mister, but this conversation isn’t over.”

Mat smiled as he climbed up a ladder at the back of the semi trailer. He