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

He’d always imagined that survival would be a ruthless, dog-eat-dog affair and that he’d do whatever he must to safeguard his family, like all the apocalypse shows he’d watched: Mad Max, the Postman, The Road, The Walking Dead. He’d shout at the TV screen when they put emotion ahead of brute survival.

“Comeon Rick! Why’d you tell those sonsabitches where you hid the cans of beans!” He’d yell with the fourth Michelob Ultra in his hand. “Lettum starve, you sappy idiot. They’re gonna die anyway!”

Yet when faced with a zombie apocalypse of his own, at every turn, Cameron had played it like one big, happy family. A hundred times he could’ve screwed the polygamists but he shared instead. He’d done, for the most part, his half of the work despite knowing damn well he shouldn’t.

But that ends now, he scolded himself as he reached the log pile. The polygamist was not going to survive his wounds. Without iodine, antibiotics and a surgical team, Isaiah would never be anything more than a black hole where they sent calories to die.

Cameron cleared out the river sand and tumbleweeds from the stack of logs. He set the tumbleweeds aside to serve as camouflage later. He slid the backpacks into the cavity, then moved a log over the gap. Then he shoved tumbleweeds into the cracks.

“Are we going for help?” the little girls voice shattered the silence.

Cameron startled and dropped the tumbleweeds. The rifle sling slid off his shoulder and into the crook of his arm. “What?” he said like a fool.

“Are we getting help for my dad?”

She’d followed him halfway back to the house. She looked at him with big, green eyes, like she could hear his thoughts.

Maybe kids always knew. Maybe they just didn’t know how to say what they knew.

As a boy, Cameron had always known his dad was a prick—at least that’s how he remembered it now. “Never a borrower, nor a lender be,” his dad always said, as though it was in the Bible. When Cameron or his brother asked to stay the night at a friend’s house, that’s how his dad always said no—as if they’d be in debt to little Jimmy Whatshisface’s mom if Cameron ate her ketchup meatloaf.

But kids always knew. Cameron had known, even back then. When you’re a real prick there’s no hiding it from the kids.

The girl stood still and watched as Cameron finished the camouflage job. He hadn’t answered her question. Instead, he worked on his supply cache, despite the fact that it was no longer a secret.

He’d avoided thinking about his own dad these months of apocalypse. Cameron left Southern California in a mad rush on the precipice of chaos. He hadn’t spared a worry for his dad. His old man didn’t hit his mental radar until he and Julie reached Las Vegas. Cameron assumed he died in his carbon-copy bungalow in Pasadena, California, on his half-collapsed couch, surrounded by Louis L’amour books and cheap scotch.

His brother, Tommy, lived in Phoenix and the last time they spoke, while the world crumbled, Tommy was high-tailing it to their sister’s survivalist compound in Utah. As far as Cameron knew, their dad died alone.

“But doesn’t everyone die alone?” he thought he heard the little girl say.

“Huh?” Cameron pivoted back to her. Had she read his mind again?

“Are their kids alone? Where are they?”

“What kids?” Cameron asked. He suddenly remembered why this little girl struck him as being so creepy. She was like the little blond in the movie Poltergeist who showed up silently behind her mom and stared, then said the damndest things.

“Their kids,” Isaiah’s daughter replied, pointing back to the thicket at the dead marauders.

At first, he chalked it up to her Quaker worldview. Every man she’d ever met over twenty-five years old had at least one wife and children. But then again, where were their children? Other than the redhead, all the marauders had been in their thirties or forties. Cameron had gone through their gear, so he knew them from the inside out. Porno mags, jewelry, booze, playing cards—he had a window into their cauterized souls and there hadn’t been a single family picture.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

As he recalled the dead men’s faces, he formed first an idea, and then a certainty: every one of the dead men had children, once upon a dream. When faced with the choice, when the shit hit the fan, they’d packed up and struck out on their own. Their kids had probably been at the ex-wife’s place, doing small time in juvenile detention or running amok with the rioting masses when time came to pull stakes and make their way in this fucked up world. They’d left their kids behind. That’s what a piece of shit does.

That’s what his own dad had done. Sometime in the 1990s, his mom had gotten a little thick around the middle. Her womanly curves settled into Russian blockiness, as was the way with her people. She always came home smelling like Mexican food after shifts at the restaurant. Even as a boy, Cameron found that smell off-putting. His dad must’ve found it downright disgusting. Fajita-fucking, every night. Take it or leave it.

Family life in a three-bedroom in a cookie-cutter neighborhood in Anaheim must’ve caught up with the old man. He bailed.

There were other women, but probably no one specific. He’d thrown in the towel. He packed up his shit and moved to a one-bedroom in Pasadena where he didn’t have to smell stale Mexican food in his bed.

Cameron finished hiding the cache, stopped and stared at her. She was a pretty little girl; green doe eyes, a pleasant face, glowing, ruby-tinted hair. He wondered if she had any Russian blood. Maybe she had the expanding-hip thing in her future like a genetic time-bomb. More likely she was English. Most of these religious nutjobbers got their crazy from Puritan ancestors, at least that’s what he’d seen on the History Channel.

“I think those men ditched their kids,