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

full of biology experiments and hazardous chemicals, would seem odd. But Jensen was head of the high school science department. The lab was only a little strange. She was the only person in the world who knew he’d gone on an ego-fueled binge after watching the show Breaking Bad. He’d taught himself how to cook crystal meth, just like Walter White. But he’d never achieved the perfect, mythically-blue product. He’d gotten spooked and sold all his meth stuff to a drug dealer in Oklahoma City.

That was far from their only secret—she and him.

Jensen was popular with the kids and the townies thought of him as a harmless “science geek.” If the town knew half of what he was doing in that basement, they would freak out.

Candice paused at the bottom of the stairs. Jim tinkered at a counter, facing away from her. She knew he’d heard her, but he wouldn’t stop and acknowledge her until he finished his current task. That was his way.

The basement lab was big; the same footprint as the house, packed to the gills with boxes, barrels of liquids and chemicals in glass or plastic containers stacked on industrial shelving. Jim kept his secrets from the town, but he bragged to her. She was his “special girl” and she’d been allowed into his private world of potions and science, genius and deviousness.

Her mom—a cocktail waitress at a bar in the town of Paris—had begun to disappear, a little at a time, over a year before. At first, Candice imagined she might be jealous of the teacher-student vibe between Jim and her daughter. Now, looking back, Candice saw her mother suspected the truth, but wasn’t strong enough to confront it. She had drifted toward friends in Louisville and left her daughter behind.

At first, Candice had felt the tiniest bit triumphant as Jim lavished attention on her in her mother’s absence. Over the months her mother waned even further, spending more and more time at “scented candle conventions,” and then an astral projection convention. She came home days later with bags under her eyes and a gray pallor to her skin. Her mother wasted away in front of her eyes. She and Jim pretended it wasn’t happening.

When the crash stopped everything in its tracks, her mother was in Louisville, and Candice was left in the hands of her stepfather. Bit by bit, in the weeks that followed, Candice suspected she’d discovered a new, insidious hell.

The lab contained explosives, of course. Not just useful chemicals that happened to explode when mixed wrong, but actual explosives, cooked up by Jim on purpose. Even before the collapse, he’d bragged about experiments with biological and chemical weapons. It was common to find dead rabbits in the trash bin. He kept a hutch of them in a dark corner of the lab.

Without turning, Jim said “Hey, sweetie. You’re back a little later than I expected.“

“I was with William.”

“That’s a good girl. You made friends with him? Is he beginning to trust you?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” Then he paused for a moment, as if thinking. He set an instrument down on the counter and turned to her.

“You sound like you’re hiding something.“

“I’m not.”

Jensen crossed the room in three strides. He reached out and touched her cheek. It took everything she had not to flinch. He hated it when she flinched.

“Then perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re wearing such a guilty face?

Candice couldn’t look him in the eye. She looked at his chin instead. “No reason. Will introduced me to his guardian, and I talked with him about you. Just like you asked me to do.”

“Will is it? Such a grown-up name.”

“William. He… we were at his house waiting when Mr. Best came home.”

Jim was obsessed with Mat Best. He wanted Candice to engineer a friendship between them: the genius scientist and the brawny soldier. Maybe Jim had seen a movie like that or something, but it was all he could talk about these days.

She offered him some hope. “I think you’d like what I said. I talked about how smart you are and how much you could help the town. Mr. Best said that your farming and chemistry classes were an amazing idea,” she embellished a little.

Jenson smoothed a lock of unruly hair with his fingers. “What did he say?”

“Mr. Best seemed really interested. He said he liked where you were going with things.”

“Good girl.” His smile almost reached his eyes. His expression hardened.

“You said Mat came home. So you were alone with William in their house? Where in their house?”

“I made friends. Like you said. We were on the couch. In the front room right by the door.”

Jensen took Candice’s cheeks in his hand. He stroked her hair with his fingers. “You won’t forget that you’re my special girl? You’ll remember that only a man like me can protect you now? A dominant, smart man. An alpha male. I’m the only one who can help you find your mother. When we finish our work here, and we have what we need to pacify the barbarians around the town, we’ll get her and bring her back. We need to put the rats down, then we can go find her. ”

“Yes. I know that,” she said, and she wasn’t lying. Her mom was adrift on a sea of chaos. She could almost feel the pulsing, hateful terror gathered around them all. Candice floated on a tiny island amidst a sea of abject horror, with only this minor fiend to terrorize her. This was survival, she told herself: enduring his repulsive hands in order to save her mother from the unspeakable evil of the world.

“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” He pulled her into his chest in an embrace. The front of his pants was soft, and that was good.

“Thank you,” she said. Part of her meant it.

“Excellent. Now give me a hand with this tank of ethylene. Then we can head upstairs.”

10

Cameron Stewart

“Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth, our mother earth breeds nothing