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

he didn’t have the words. Should he tell them about Perez and his oxy habit?

Jim Jensen jumped into the gap left by Mat’s hesitation.

“Of course, you’re right.” Jensen gestured toward Mat, now standing beside him. Mat didn’t know about what he was right about, but Jensen nodded at him with an unctuous smile. Gwen Sizemore passed Jensen the plastic, PVC cannon.

Nobody would be satisfied until they knew what the big gun did. A new weapon was a hell of a lot sexier than building a wall out of junk in the freezing rain. Mat meandered around the table and dropped into the closest chair, helpless to stop the tide of Jensen’s oratory.

“Again, thank you Sergeant Best. Without you, we wouldn’t have made it this far. Now it’s time for the town to really dig in and support you.” Jensen then talked about how the town’s ingenuity was its strength—about how they’d solved a water quality problem thirty years back using science.

It was an exhibition of carefully chosen words and phrases designed to gather the committees to Jensen’s way of thinking. He talked about their shared fears, and the staggering number of the refugees around them—12,000 and growing. He stoked the revulsion, outrage, and fear the townsfolk already felt. He preyed upon their fatigue. He feasted on their frustration.

When Jensen shifted to the “science” of leaving food, poisoned with botulism, for the rats to find, Mat saw way too many heads nodding agreement.

Mat wanted to stand up and scream, so now we become Nazis? But before he could find the words, Jensen bent the room to his artful turn.

He held out his hands and offered reason to go with the science. “These people are dying. For all intents and purposes, they’re dead already.” Jensen talked about the “peace of death” in one’s sleep as the botulin toxin slowed the responsiveness of the diaphragm.

It was Susan Brown, the biology teacher, who finally interrupted his roll. “Mr. Jensen, I believe you may be exaggerating the peaceful nature of death by botulism poisoning.”

Jensen didn’t miss a beat. “Well, Susan, I can’t deny we’re discussing death, and death is certainly unpleasant. But avoiding death, for the refugees, is not a reasonable possibility. We’re all logical people, here. We understand facts. Winter is far from over and the desperation and peril that surrounds us will double, then double again. Eventually, refugees will swarm over our wall. Eventually, they will cannibalize us. They will eat our children. I’m not exaggerating.”

Apparently, Susan Brown couldn’t disagree because she said nothing in response.

Jensen continued. “I propose we task Sergeant Best’s night patrols with depositing food laced with botulism in the woods surrounding our town.”

“What’s the cannon?” Mat blurted out. He didn’t have the words to stop the inevitable vote on mass poisoning, so he tried distraction instead.

“This,” Jensen said, and hefted the white, bulbous gun, “is an air cannon that launches glass jars. It’s the solution to your bullet shortage, Sergeant.”

The gun was five feet long, made of heavy, plastic irrigation tubing. Underslung beneath the main barrel, a compression tube gathered air pressure from a compressor to launch a glass jar. The “trigger” was some kind of pneumatic ball valve on the knuckle between the compression tube and the cannon barrel. Mat had seen the same design for potato guns when he was a kid back in Santa Barbara. Somebody on the committees gasped, but with a thrill instead of a shock.

Mat knew he had lost the fight against WMDs.

“We can launch canisters of anthrax, or better yet, mustard gas, at anyone who approaches our town perimeter.” Jensen patted the barrel of the cannon like a good Labrador retriever. “If a refugee camp commits crimes against our town, we can surround them and bombard them without ever stepping foot into the danger zone.”

“I’m sure you’ll address issues of wind, and the risk of gassing the town,” Sheriff Morgan spoke for the first time. “You’re getting to that part, right?”

Jensen smiled and nodded. “I still have a battery of tests to perform before I can present anything solid. I brought the cannon to show you my progress.”

“Are we going to vote on the botulism thing,” the loud guy from the food committee said.

Sheriff Morgan interrupted, and his voice carried great authority. “Beatrice asked me to share something with you, and now’s as good a time as any.” Sheriff Morgan unfolded a half sheet of paper he’d been gripping the entire meeting, and read with a voice that made it instantly obvious: he was reading words from the Bible.

“His disciples came to Him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and already the hour is late. Send all these people away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and find bread; for they have nothing to eat.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ And they said to Him, ‘Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give them something to eat?’ But He said to them, ‘How many loaves do you have? Go and see.’” The sheriff finished reading the passage and sat down without explanation.

Silence hung in the room, broken only by one member whispering to another. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Another low voice countered, “Thank you, Sheriff.”

Both committees voted on the botulism plan, and while not everyone agreed, it passed.

Candice had just finished a sponge bath when Jim Jensen burst into the house with his ego smoldering. She heard him coming and wrapped a towel around her body before he stormed into her bathroom.

“Your little friend’s adopted father, or whatever he is, wasn’t even a speed bump. We were worried that he’d try and stop our innovations, but I blew him away like flatulence in the proverbial wind.”

Candice had no idea what Jim was talking about. She was having trouble concentrating on anything other than the fact that she was naked, wet and vulnerable. An excited Jim was a dangerous Jim.

“What happened?” asked Candice