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

“Sounder,” Charles Jones, Senior corrected.

“What?” Mat asked.

“A group of pigs is called a sounder.” Chuck Senior was dressed in well-worn green coveralls with a toothpick in his mouth. He looked every inch the swine farmer.

“How large of a sounder can we move in a semi truck?” Mat asked.

"We can move fifty butcher-ready hogs in a livestock trailer,'' said Charles Jones Junior.

Chuck Junior wore a collared shirt and jeans. He carried himself like a businessman.

“But even if we could move them, McKenzie couldn’t keep them alive in city limits. And we can’t slaughter them all-at-once. There’s nowhere to refrigerate that much pork. If we're going to keep 3,500 pigs—and hopefully at some point breed them—we have to house them where we can care for them: at the complex in Henry. That many pigs can’t live in peoples’ yards. The pigs would get sick and so would the people.”

Mat raised his hands in surrender. “Alright. Sounds like we’ll be running convoys and patrols between the two towns.” He studied the map spread out on the meeting table. “That’s a five-mile umbilical cord between two secure zones. Chuck Senior and Junior, how many of these farms are there and how far apart?”

Chuck Senior pointed at the map they’d spread out: “Hogs are spread over six locations within three miles of Tosh, here in the center. That’s the sow farm. That’s for breeding, mind you.”

Chuck Junior held up a hand and made eye contact with each of the pig farmers in attendance, including a frightened-looking executive in a wrinkled suit from Tosh Farms. “We think we can pull back to headquarters, plus two wean-to-finish farms just outside of town. We’d shut down the others to make a smaller perimeter.”

“Wean-to-finish?” asked Mat.

“After a pig is weaned from its mother, it goes to a wean-to-finish farm to put on another two hundred and fifty pounds. Bottom line: we can pull the operation back to a mile-wide circle around the town of Henry. We’ve already started.”

Mat sucked in a breath and exhaled. Chuck Senior was no country bumpkin. He’d already seen the vulnerability of their situation and taken action, but building a perimeter around a mile circle, plus the four-mile-radius around town, was a security nightmare. The twin towns would be like a Forward Operating Base with a combined eighteen miles of perimeter and a five mile cordon in between, with a steady stream of indigenous threats, numbering in the tens of thousands.

“What heavy vehicles do we have for convoy duty between here and there?” Mat looked up from the map.

Deputy Wiggin answered. “Um. There are a few box trucks in town, but I think we can do better. The Feds gave us a deuce and a half. A military truck.” He grinned like a kid. “I’m not sure why.”

The heavy truck made no sense for a small-town sheriff’s department, but nobody had understood the Federal Government, then or now. It was a homeland security thing, and Mat was now very involved in homeland security. The deuce-and-a-half would be perfect.

Mat spoke up, “Sheriff? We don’t have veterans with combat experience, right?”

“Combat experience?” repeated Sheriff Morgan. “Smith and Rickers served. They drove trucks or counted band aids or something. We have Gulf War vets in town, but they’re old as the hills.”

Mat nodded. “I spoke with Smith and Rickers. They worked convoy duty in Afghanistan, so that’s good. But they’ve never been in a gunfight,” he added. He could see in their eyes they didn’t understand. Driving truck and gunfighting were about as closely related as pet grooming and bull riding.

The town’s Gulf war vets were over fifty years old by now and probably a few thousand beers past their Best If Used By date. War was a young man’s game. He needed young, experienced combat vets. High school and college-age kids might have to do. Then again, he didn’t have any bullets for training. He barely had bullets for fighting.

“Roadblock! All stations: run the bastard!” Mat keyed his radio and stomped on the accelerator. He aimed the deuce-and-a-half for the seam between two of the dead cars.

Four sedans had been parked end to end across the road. If the rats had used twice the number of vehicles in an overlapping pattern, Mat would’ve been in deep shit. As it was, he had a pretty good chance of spinning two of the cars out of the way by hitting the gap. The convoy might sail through.

The deuce-and-a-half hurled into the roadblock and only the three-point belt kept Mat from face-smashing the windshield. Upon impact, his torso yanked back so hard against the harness that his brain smacked around inside his skull. For two seconds, his mind struggled to re-load it’s operating system.

When he came around, he saw he was through. The deuce-and-a-half had only lost ten miles per hour. Mat had lost five IQ points.

He lurched around in his seat to check the rearview mirror. The livestock hauler behind him clipped the nose of a sedan. Then the driver, Chuck Jones Junior, massively over-corrected. The rig performed three, ever-increasing swerves until the trailer flipped over. Then it took the cab with it. The engine screamed as the drive wheels clawed at air and the rig slid across the road base on its side. The engine died as the rig skidded to a halt in a storm of gravel and shredded blacktop.

Mat slammed on the breaks and the deuce growled to a stop. He ground the gears into reverse and stomped on the gas. He roared back to the livestock hauler just as the sheriff’s cruisers skidded up behind it. The rig was like a beached and bloodied whale.

Deputy Smith leapt out of the cruiser and bounded up the side of the big rig. He reached inside the shattered window and dragged Chuck Junior up and out of the cab. Mat and Deputy Rickers took up defensive positions behind the ruined quarter panel of