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

One man against three, him with only five bullets. He had no idea how they were armed, but based on their stories, he knew they had guns and plenty of experience using them.

He had a good idea where they were: three bends above the impoundment dam he and Isaiah built, nestled deep in a bend in the river. The marauders hadn’t lit a fire, but Cameron could smell them anyway. As he’d starved these last weeks, his sense of smell had transformed into a superhuman ability. At a primal level, the smell of any other mammal was the smell of meat. Their cloying body odor might as well have been a neon sign, pointing the way to their camp.

His brain worked slowly, and thoughts came like oatmeal being poured out of a tea kettle. He reached the conclusion that to attack these men alone would be suicide. In the dark, amidst the brush, he couldn’t see to shoot his rifle. Even if he had a thousand rounds of ammunition, hitting one of them would require more dumb luck than he’d experienced in months.

Cameron worked his way to a standing position using a tree as a handrail, and shuffled through the brush, away from the camp. He had no choice but to move very slowly—if he did anything more than stop-start-stop-start he got winded. Being three-quarters starved forced a man to be sneaky. He made no surplus movement, and no surplus noise. When Cameron waded back across the shallow, sandy river, dawn colored the eastern horizon.

He heard Isaiah’s wailing as soon as he emerged from the cottonwoods. The man sat on the homestead porch, his legs dangling over the side, kicking at the air. He reminded Cameron of a boy whose dog just got ran over. He was a weeping, snotting basket case. He didn’t judge the man, though. One of the first things they’d lost to starvation was control of their emotions. Cameron had undergone his share of crying jags.

“Wipe your face and pull yourself together,” Cameron wheezed as he caught his breath against the porch. “We’re going after her.”

“You...you know where she is?” Isaiah’s tearful eyes glinted with hope.

“Yes, but we need to go now. Just you and me. They’re over a mile away.”

In starvation terms, it was a long, long way.

Isaiah gathered his shotgun and poked his head inside to let the women know where they were going. Cameron didn’t bother to climb the stairs. He’d need every ounce of energy just to get back.

“Do they have food inside?” he asked.

“Yeah. Wheat kernels.”

Cameron nodded. “We need to eat before we go. We should eat the women’s portions too. This is a winner-take-all kind of deal.”

Isaiah ducked inside again and came out with four bowls of cold, wet mash. They didn’t bother with utensils. They poured the joyless slurry down their throats and abandoned the bowls on the porch.

“Let’s go,” Cameron said and waved Isaiah off the porch.

Cameron followed his nose the last two hundred yards into the snoring camp. The girl must’ve fallen asleep too because there was no simpering.

On the way, he’d worked up a plan, but not the kind of plan he would be sharing with Isaiah. It was the man’s daughter at issue, and it was only right that Isaiah should take the goat’s share of the risk. It wasn’t as though either of them had the energy to debate it anyway.

“You go around that way,” Cameron whispered. “Hit them from that side and I’ll come at them from this side.” He motioned Isaiah along the back trail. The night before, the raiders hadn’t so much set a sentry as made one guy sleep on their back trail—a human tripwire of sorts. Cameron sent Isaiah on a collision course with the sentry while Cam prepared to shoot the other two in the back.

Isaiah’s shotgun was barely big enough to kill a rabbit. The twenty gauge shotgun was a lot smaller than the twelve gauge shotguns police carried. The big, stumbling, half-crazed polygamist wasn’t going to do much in a fight, but he could draw attention while Cameron went to work winning this thing. To Cameron, that felt as square as a preacher’s soul. Isaiah should be grateful Cam was willing to risk his life at all. The marauders were hardened, practiced killers. So was Cameron, but it was three-against-one—or three-against-two if he counted Isaiah, which he really didn’t.

He’d told Isaiah to “hit them from that side,” but those instructions would mean next-to-nothing to the man. It sounded more promising than “go over there, stumble around like an ox, trip over their trail guard and wake them up.”

In the strengthening morning light, Cameron could already see one of the sleeping men through the underbrush. He’d shoot that guy first, the instant Isaiah made himself known. He held his rifle against a tree and peered at the sleeping man through the ancient riflescope atop the Mosin-Nagant. The other two bastards and the girl weren’t visible. The three were spread out in the dimples of sand beneath the canopy of the cottonwoods. There were no tents, or tarpaulins. They’d settled to ground, bundled up and fell asleep like animals. It made them exceedingly hard to find.

The sleeping man shucked off his sleeping bag in the mounting warmth of the morning sun. The movement startled Cameron and he pressed the trigger by reflex. Luckily, the safety was set and nothing happened. He exhaled and quietly clicked the safety lug to fire. The sleeping man settled in and shifted his rifle to the other side of his sleeping hole. Cameron caught full view of the black AR-15 rifle, as well as the handgun strapped to the man’s belt. They slept armed, and it made sense they’d have the most-lethal firearms available. They’d been raiding and upgrading for months.

“We have you surrounded,” Isaiah bellowed. “Come out with your hands up.” The copse of trees erupted.

The man Cameron had in his scope sprung from his bed and flashed