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

of his leg. He pitched into a stone fire pit, full of rainwater. Mat didn’t wait to see if he’d drown. He placed controlled bursts into the other two. One turned back, maybe wounded.

The rest was a blur. Mat noticed each mag change, but his gaze danced across the enemy.

Trigger, trigger, trigger—scan for threats—trigger, trigger, trigger. Lull in the fight. Tactical reload. Scan again. Shift to new cover.

For some reason, the mag changes always stuck out in his mind. After four mag changes, the rats stopped appearing from the tree line. The flow must’ve turned back toward the highway. The rattle of rifle fire had done its job and convinced the marauding thousands of the futility to run toward death.

The mayor’s brother stumbled up and thanked Mat personally. He even said, “I’m the mayor’s brother,” as though it was a thing people said when surrounded by stinking, shitting, dying people.

The mayor’s brother carried a big, Dirty Harry revolver. Now that the gunfire had stopped, more town folk poured out of the homes. Every adult had a gun of some kind, but they hung back from the killing fields. They’d stayed in their homes while Mat and the QRF did the work of death.

Mat understood the logic: stay inside as a last line of defense if the rats break in. Stand between their family and the threat.

But, still, he hated them for making he and his boys take life. If only the families had moved inside town, this could’ve been avoided. The HESCO barrier wasn’t a magical force field, by any means, but it gave the rats a serious reality check. Without it, the rats drifted in and out of no-man’s-land, catching bullets for their trouble. A ramrod to the solar plexus meant a few days of bruising. A bullet hole, pretty much anywhere, was a death sentence in the refugee camps.

Mat needed to get the fuck out of this town. He’d been forced to shoot people who, just three months before, might’ve served him his bacon and eggs at the Pancake House.

It’d be one thing if the town of McKenzie would follow his advice to-the-letter. Mat might be able to live with the killing if it was always absolutely necessary. But this shit here in Reedy Grove—this was lethal stupidity. Those lives were wasted in the name of hayseed politics.

Who had Mat been kidding? No town—no group of Americans—was going to set aside their compulsive opinion-making and bow to Mat’s expertise. It was not something Americans did. Not then. Not now. For every six Americans who followed good advice, three more would pitch a hissy fit when told what to do.

If he stayed in McKenzie, Mat would be forced to kill, with ever-greater prejudice, in the name of local-yokel, municipal theater. The good folk of McKenzie would have their big opinions, and Mat would be forced to do the killing.

Mat cleared his rifle and caught the spinning brass as it catapulted out of the breach. He turned his back on the killing fields as he watched the neighbors collect in conversational knots in the street. The townies did their best to act like carrying a gun came easy.

Mat slipped the loose round back into the mag and stared down the stack of brass. He couldn’t remember if he’d depleted this mag or not. He looked into the dark space around the bullets in the AR-15 magazine, and it felt like gazing into the pit of his own soul. Time skipped a beat.

Mat keyed his radio. “QRF. This is Mat. Let’s get the hell back to town.”

Mat made his rounds to the check points—perhaps more quickly than usual, but with no skipped steps. Then he checked in with Carter at her home, as usual. This time, he asked her if she’d take William when Mat left town.

“Are you absolutely sure that’s what you want?” she asked.

“It’s not so much about what I want as what William needs. He’s lost everyone he loves: his father, mother and sister. He needs a home and a family. That’s not something he’s going to get with me. Caroline would want it this way.”

She shook her head like he was the dumbest genius she ever met. It was a common refrain between them. Gladys barked a laugh, apparently amused at his dumb jock logic. “Wouldn’t she want both of you to find a home and a family?”

Mat launched into a list of reasons why leaving William with her, when he got the mission under control, was the right thing to do.

In the end, she reluctantly agreed.

Mat left Gladys’ house feeling a weight lifted off his shoulders. He’d settled the question of William. She’d agreed to take him in.

If it weren’t for the fact that she towered over him by six inches, he’d probably make a move on her. He’d never knocked boots with a professional basketball player. In fact, he hadn’t been in the sack with anyone since Caroline. It was probably a personal record since puberty—going without the no-pants-dance for three months. It was like being on deployment.

It wasn’t that Gladys wasn’t hot. He could definitely “get there” with her, but he needed her even temperament and steady wisdom for the job. She’d become Mat’s back-door channel to the gossip tree. She told him stuff nobody else wanted to tell an Army Ranger. If he was the father of the QRF team, she was the mother. So what if mom and dad weren’t pounding the punnani pavement? Mat couldn’t risk screwing up the friendship for sex.

In any case, he thought Carter might be a lesbian, but he really had no reason to think that. He was probably just being a prick. He automatically thought of a woman as gay if she didn’t come on to him within the first seventy-two hours. Mat chuckled at himself.

She was a solid human and he was glad to leave William in her capable hands.

Mat walked from Carter’s house to his appointment with the sheriff. When