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

flesh. He’d been shot before, and he remembered the pain. He was still whole at the moment. His body was hollowed out by starvation, but no blood leaked out of him.

The thought of food gripped him even tighter than his fear of having his head blown open. In the middle of a gunfight, sex, looming death, it didn’t matter. Food was his god. His holy creed. His salvation. The raiders would have some food, probably. They might be dead or wounded, and if so, he could eat their food.

Cameron crawled to his knees and looked around. More light poured through the canopy than before. It was mid-morning.

“Cameron?” Isaiah called for him, but his voice wheezed and tapered.

Nobody was shooting and there was a chance they’d won, but how was he supposed to know for sure? Isaiah was probably shot and the girl might be shot too. The marauders had fired hundreds of rounds in every direction. Cameron sure as hell wasn’t going to rush over and attend to Isaiah. The hero had been knocked out of him by the apocalypse months ago.

He’d needed to locate the three marauder assholes before he did anything else. Their food wouldn’t be far from them.

Cameron army-crawled on his hands and knees through the shattered green and toward where he’d heard them whispering. There were no whispers now, but that could mean a lot of things. He wasn’t going to jump to conclusions. He’d only barely survived. His consciousness wobbled and memory intruded on the tiny battlefield.

“Don’t stand around giving each other hand jobs until the game’s good-and-proper won,” his dad used to say, way-too-loud, when ten-year-old Cameron’s Pop Warner football team was winning a game at half-time. The other parents always treated his dad to sidelong glances, even thought Cameron was typically one of the best players. His old man was one of “those parents” at games, and if he were totally honest, Cameron might a similar parent now, with his own boys.

“Don’t stand around giving yourself a hand job,” Cameron whispered to himself as he stalked the blown-apart grove. “The game’s not good-and-proper won yet.”

Ahead, through the grass, he saw a boot against the base of a tree. It was attached to a leg, both motionless. The camouflage pant cuff had slid up to expose a white tube sock and a hairy leg. Cameron pushed his rifle out in front like a spear, finger on the trigger. He felt fairly certain he’d racked the bolt this time. He believed he had three bullets left.

A man stared back at him from the ground. His expression was difficult to read, but it seemed to ask some mundane question like, “Did you remember to pack the salt shaker when we left camp?”

Cameron noted the red hair. The black beanie was gone. The back of the man’s head had been raggedly removed. Another dose of adrenaline climbed up his spine. Cameron shivered. It was the emotional shockwave of victory. He’d slain this man. Definitively.

He struggled to re-engage his brain. He needed to think about what to do next. Isaiah called out for him every minute or two, but Cameron filed it away under “not my fucking problem.”

A better weapon. Of course. He needed a better weapon.

Cameron slid up behind the red-haired corpse and used it like a protective sandbag. There was an AR-15 next to the body in the dirt. He didn’t think the guy had shot it before Cameron clipped him in the dome, but he slid the magazine out of the receiver and checked. A stack of brass stared back at him from the depths of the curved magazine. He couldn’t tell how many rounds, but it was more than a few. Enough, probably. And the rifle’s scope was modern, open and clear. A little, red light gleamed in the middle of the optic. Cameron dumped his Mosin-Nagant in the dirt.

He took his time searching the man’s body. It was a damned treasure trove of equipment. These bastards had probably improved their gear with every home invasion. Redhead had tricked himself out like a special forces operator.

He forced himself to stuff the foil-wrapped energy bar that’d come from the man’s pocket, still warm, into his own pocket. For now, Cameron must attend to the threat of death. He needed to find the vipers in the lawn before he turned his eyes to the chicken coop. He folded himself back to the ground, unwilling to even crawl along on his knees for fear of having his head blown off.

With the AR-15 cradled in his arms, he crabbed along the contours of the earth like a centipede. After fifteen minutes of slow, fruitless slithering, he came upon a helmet on the ground and a bedroll beside it. He ignored the supplies, strewn about, and followed the tamped grass away from the sleeping place. He kept his belly tight to the nap of the ground with his dick dragging behind it. The adrenaline came in waves and he forced his mind to slow its mad churning.

A shape materialized in a shaft of light, five yards ahead. The bottom of a boot. It shifted, tilted, then returned to upright.

Alive!

The adrenaline hit hard again, like a miserable drug trip that refused to end. He could see no other boot, which made no sense to his addled brain. A man—probably wounded—lay on the ground, the sole of his boot pointed toward Cameron. But he could see nothing else.

If he came up to his knees, the third guy might shoot him. If he shot at the boot, the other guy might rush him. Cameron should’ve taken the redhead’s big knife, but even if he had, how would he kill a man from under his foot?

Screw it, Cameron surrendered to the adrenaline.

Blam, blam, blam, blam!

He riddled the bottom of the boot with bullets, probably sending lead up through the guy’s ballsack. The echoes died and the copse of trees returned to silence. The boot stilled. A bullet had punched a hole in the