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

as she considered whether there was enough room to slip past him without making it obvious she was fleeing.

“The rifle jockey voted against our botulism plan.”

“Oh,” Candice said, and edged closer to the door. “That’s terrible.”

Jim seemed to notice her near nakedness for the first time. His speech slowed as his eyes ran down her body.

“I won, of course. He can barely string two sentences together. The committees are all behind me now.”

Jensen smiled as he caressed the terry cloth towel where Candice had tucked it near her left breast.

“I’m the only one who can save this town, Candice,” he said with a husky edge. “Right?”

“Yes. We need you.”

Jensen gazed through her, lost for a moment. “Yes, the town needs me. And I will save them.”

Jensen‘s fingers plucked at the tucked corner of the towel. It came free and fell.

Candice had learned how to minimize the pain and humiliation of his advances. She did what women in her circumstance had done for thousands of years. She complied with her body and pushed her mind far, far away.

Twenty minutes later, Candice ran down the middle of the street, the nighttime rain mingling with her tears. She often exercised at night. It was how she decompressed after being touched by him.

After a time together in her bedroom, Jim had left her for his lab. She had thrown on sweats and bolted from the house.

Only a few lights burned in the homes of McKenzie, mostly candles. Almost every night for the last week, it’d drizzled a cold, sallow rain, tainted by smoke from the big cities and the refugee camps that surrounded them.

She left her normal exercise loop and followed a series of turns that would lead her, inexorably, to the home of William and Mat.

She lived two lives: one of a girl and the other of a woman. She only, really belonged to one, but the flavor of smoke on the rain demanded she bow to the reality of this tortured world. Thirteen years old or not, they all lived in a time that ate young ladies for dessert. Gone were the lipgloss days when a newly-minted teenager was still years from womanhood.

Jim Jensen was indeed her lifeline, but to die an orphan might be better than to live like this. In the night rain, she ran toward the boy, and away from the secrets.

“Sergeant Best. May I have a word?” The sheriff waited for Mat in the foyer of the city building. Mat had just finished his nightly team leader meeting. He was bone-tired, but the sheriff never wasted his time. If he had waited around to talk, it must be important.

“Mrs. Morgan and I are leaving.” It was the last thing Mat expected to hear. “Now I can see that you’re upset, but hold on a moment.” Sheriff Morgan raised hands, palms out, urging Mat to calm.

Mat didn’t wait. “If you’re bailing on this town, what the fuck am I still doing here?” He bristled.

“No, no, no. It’s not like that. We’re not running out on the town...”

“...because I wouldn’t blame you if you bailed. We’re like those German towns near the death camps—those people who stood around while the SS genocided the Jews. Except we’re the ones with the poison gas this time.”

“It’s not necessarily about that,” the sheriff explained.

Mat exhaled his frustration. “If you leave, there’ll be no stopping Jensen.”

“Jensen’s poisons are part of a bigger dilemma; questions of survival and morality. For Beatrice and I the answer has become clear: we’re going out to help the refugees. We need to do all we can for those who suffer. It’s the oath we took when we chose to follow Christ. The collapse didn’t change that. This badge didn’t change that.”

“And the town? What’s the answer for the town? We can’t all follow you to join the fucking Peace Corps. They’ll overrun the town in a day.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Morgan agreed. “But when I ask God what I should do I hear the same answer again, and again. It’s the refugees, Mat. The people you call rats. That’s where God wants Beatrice and me. I don’t think he’s going to answer any of our other questions until we keep our word and obey His commands. You see what I’m saying, Mat? Bea and I aren’t abandoning the town. We’re keeping our word of honor. There’s no way we can stay here while the town poisons those who suffer. We can’t be party to it.”

“You’ll die out there,” Mat argued. “She will die. Your wife will die, probably while you watch.”

“I know that’s what it looks like. She knows too. But a promise is a promise. And our faith isn’t just for good times. We leave tonight. We’re all packed. We’re going out to look for Dr. Hauser’s group. I’ll keep my radio on me and, of course, my truck’s got the high power mobile transceiver.”

Mat surrendered to the inevitable, his hands on his hips. He seized the big man’s shoulder. “I’ll pray for you, I guess.”

“You will?” The sheriff grinned. “I didn’t peg you for a praying man.”

“I’m not. But I’ll make an exception for you.”

William’s world wobbled in a weird, drunken spin while Candice spoke. She said words like “touched me down there” and “made me promise not to tell” but he couldn’t put the words in an order that made any sense to his twelve-year-old mind. They struck him as gobble-de-gook; an acidic, word soup that burned a festering fissure across the face of William’s world. The words seared into one another, smoked and fumed, then poisoned all hope left in the world.

At first he felt confused, but the more she mumbled at him, in front of his pathetic fire as the rain pattered outside, the more his anger rose and clarified.

He’d been angry before. Heck, he’d been angry ever since Mat told him the plan to pawn him off on Gladys Carter. But this was a different color of anger.