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

Mat pretended he hadn’t heard the bump-and-crunch from under the rear tires.

Highway 79 reminded him of an Afghan goat trail. The Tennessee Transportation Authorities’ incomplete repairs had stripped the road bed to nothing. Heavy rains in October demolished the remaining track.

The same rains that killed Caroline, Mat churned. The same rains that dumped her bike and gave her a lethal dose of flesh-eating bacteria.

The jacked-up road and thirty-mile-per-hour speed of the convoy allowed plenty of opportunity for rats to attempt an ambush.

But not today, rats. Today, you get a giant helping of O.D. green radiator grill right over your filthy mugs.

Mat was lead security for the convoy—out in front of a livestock hauler full of pigs. The Porky Pig Fun Run, his security team called it. This was the first of two trips slated for the day that’d bring a hundred live hogs into Mackenzie to be butchered, dried and preserved; 27,000 pounds of pork on the hoof. The Tosh Farms complex held thousands more pigs, and they had to be protected-in-place. The pigs were the key to survival for the town of McKenzie—an immense bank of living, breathing, eating, shitting post-collapse wealth. They were also an up-at-dawn security nightmare. Thousands of starving refugees surrounded the farm and the town, knives out.

Mat’s four-vehicle, seven-man convoy should’ve been sufficient for the pig transfer between Tosh Farms and McKenzie. The convoy team was made up of his best men. Mat was the only guy with actual combat experience in town, and he’d been asked to lead security, which was a lot like being thrown into the middle of a swamp with a pocket knife and asked to eradicate the alligators.

Seemingly, word had gotten out about The Porky Pig Fun Run. Thousands of rats lined the roadside to watch the truck-loads of meat cross the vulnerable five-mile gauntlet between the “mutual security zones” of McKenzie and the neighboring berg of Henry, population 475. The town of Henry handled the pigs. The town of McKenzie handled the security. That was the deal.

The rats were castaways from the urban hellscapes surrounding the small towns: Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Louisville. When the economy took the Big Dump, thousands of city people flooded into the Tennessee countryside, where food actually grew.

The watchers along the road weren’t Mat’s problem. They could have their drooling fantasies about pork chops and applesauce. Today, though, the rats had grown a pair. Mat had never seen them coordinate like this before. It was a ragged attempt, but the new motivation was obvious. Somebody was leading them.

Up ahead, two rats pushed a big baby stroller onto the road.

What the fuck? Mat’s foot bobbled on the accelerator, then kept steady pressure.

“Please don’t be a baby. Please just be an IED,” he prayed.

Did a tiny hand rise from the buggy? Mat prayed in monosyllables to an unfamiliar god.

“No-no-no-no-NO!”

A skeleton-thin man lit the baby buggy on fire, then pushed it, into Mat’s path. It exploded in flame, like it’d been doused in gasoline or lighter fluid. He hit the stroller at thirty miles per hour and the flame blasted in all directions. Mat couldn’t see anything but fire cascading up and over his windshield, but there was no meaty thunk under his tires, no tiny hand slapping against the glass. It’d just been an ingenious, trash-tech IED: an empty baby carriage, and the ploy had almost worked. Mat had to think hard before reaching the conclusion that he hadn’t, actually, shit his pants.

Would he have slammed on the brakes if he’d seen a baby? Mat honestly didn’t know.

The buggy engulfed the hood and bullet-resistant glass in flame. Mat worried about the vulnerable wires and hoses under the hood if gas seeped inside. He hoped the wind sucked it all away.

Would it be weird if a few coke bottles of gasoline killed a military vehicle? Mat had seen weirder things than that over in the sandbox. For now, the truck seemed okay. The engine growled and the road flew past.

As the smoke cleared, the second phase of the ambush appeared.

“Fuck me!” Mat gasped as he leaned toward the windshield.

The highway between the two towns was arrow-straight, except for two curves that snaked between a pair of bogs. Before the first curve, the rats had launched the buggy trick. Past the bend, a line of dead cars suddenly appeared across Highway 79.

Mat roared obscenities as he stood up on the brakes.

Three weeks earlier

McKenzie City Hall

McKenzie, Tennessee

Joint Security Committee and Food Committee Meeting

The town of McKenzie, Tennessee, population 3,547, had responded as well as any town could to the collapse of America. They moved straightaway to preserve food, water and energy resources. They even struck a mutual security agreement with the neighboring hamlet of Henry—five miles Northeast on Highway 79.

Henry, Tennessee had 475 people and 3,500 pigs in various stages of fattening. Securing Tosh Farms commercial hog complex meant the survival of McKenzie. Losing it meant starvation—the numbers weren’t complex.

“Sheriff Morgan?” The mayor wouldn’t start a meeting without Morgan. Maybe the mayor had always deferred to the sheriff. Mat didn’t know. He’d been living on the East Coast before the Big Nosedive. He’d wandered into McKenzie, weeks before, looking for medical help for his girlfriend.

Gunmen like Mat were held in awe in McKenzie. Mat had a gun, and a sterling resume as a U.S. Army Ranger, so their unquestioning respect suited him fine. He’d lost the girl to gangrene and ended up with her little brother as his ward. So what if she had turned out to be the love of his fucking life?

“Sheriff, we’re ready to start.” The mayor smiled and sat down.

Mat wasn’t clear on how town committees worked. This committee was apparently a mishmash of security people and food people meeting to discuss defense of the hog farms.

“Protecting an area of operation the size of the pig farms, five miles from town, is probably more than we can handle,” Mat said, launching into his area of expertise. It was what Sheriff Morgan