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

rushed. Both Mat and Rickers put rounds into him and he went down hard, flipping over backward, just like in the movies.

A refugee in orange coveralls broke into a sprint along the shoulder, right down their throats. Juan Cabrera blasted him with buckshot and the guy vanished off the road and into a pile of trash.

Was that a prison jumpsuit or an orange dress? A flicker of color in the tall grass caught Mat’s eye. Yellow silk? A child’s coat? There were children in those fields. Mat despaired, Please God, don’t make me shoot kids today.

He breach-checked his rifle in order to yank himself back to reality. His mind had flickered for a moment, right in the middle of a firefight. He poked his head over the fender of the semi for a tactical assessment.

The fight had lulled. The rats numbered in the thousands, but they were no fierce Zulu warriors. They wanted a meal, not victory. He and his men had killed a dozen or more of them—their bodies littered the road. The slayings gave the field of refugees pause. Without religious fervor or a warrior’s creed, they were legion, but confused.

Mister Loudmouth Leader shuffled around behind the wreckage. He wasn’t going to leave well-enough alone. The bastard screamed, inciting the masses, “They’re trying to take our food! Stop them! Stop them! They’re taking the pigs away! Get them! GET ‘EM NOW! GET ‘EM NOW!”

Thousands jumped from the winter-dead, knee-high grass and stormed toward Mat’s team. The ARs and shotguns barked a steady, murderous rhythm, and the rats stumbled over each others’ bodies. The rush faltered and the rats slunk backward behind clumps of shrub and tall grass. The dead and wounded littered the ground. Their moans were like piles of sorrowful demons, torn from the breast of hell.

Snick-snick-snick, Mat’s guys consolidated ammunition from half-empty mags.

The air tasted of burned powder and the sweat of his mens’ terror. The pigs’ screams had almost vanished like the background noise of a busy dungeon.

The armed rats behind the blockade fired willy-nilly at his team. Mat shot two young women rushing onto the road, one wearing what looked like a green ball gown and the other in a cocktail dress. The woman in the ball gown hurled a spear before a round punched her chest. The makeshift spear clattered to the ground at Mat’s feet.

Was that a Zulu, a woman or a mirage? The sparkles around the edge of his vision had graduated into lightning bolts. He rubbed his eyes so hard it made them ache.

A wave of rats attacked from the roadblock. Guns, knives and clubs flashed. Mat’s knot of men answered with a wave of thunder. Deputy Smith ran out of rifle ammo, drew his revolver and fired into a man’s belly at the same moment he jammed a stick into Smith’s eye. Smith shrieked, and fell back into Juan Cabrera, who killed two guys with one blast of his shotgun. The wounded remnant of the rat attack scurried back to the smashed-up cars.

Mat needed to end this. Things weren’t going well. He didn’t know if the problem was the whiplash from the crash or the absurdity of the jacked-up zombie bullshit. He knew he couldn’t keep this up for another forty-five minutes.

He sprinted for the semi trailer without telling his guys what he was doing. The time was ripe for some special forces, Hail Mary shit. The dumped-over pig hauler rocked with the violent thrashing and ear-piercing wails of the swine.

He bounded up on the trailer, which was now on its side, and yanked the last remaining cross-pin free from the half door. The trailer gate crashed to the ground. Pigs shot out, like fat, pink cannonballs, scattering in every direction. The first wave of hogs bowled over a knot of refugees rushing Mat. One guy hit his head so hard on the asphalt Mat could hear the plack sound from atop the hauler.

The rats’ attention flashed to the bolting food. “The pigs! There they go!”

A mighty torrent of three hundred-pound animals streamed from the trailer and into the fields. The refugees dashed after them, but the pigs blew through them like living, stampeding, wrecking balls. Rats in the field went down in swaths. Yet others swarmed into the melee, trying desperately to get their hands on some bacon.

“Rickers and Jesus, cover fire on the roadblock,” he screamed. Now, Mat knew what to do. It was high time to roll up the HVT—the High Value Target. Mr. Loudmouth Leader was fresh out of cannon fodder, and by demanding the guns, he’d put himself in Mat’s gunsight. Mat couldn’t shoot thousands of refugees—at least not today—but he sure as hell could take down the party planner.

Mat ran to where Deputy Smith lay sprawled on his back with both hands over his eye. Mat hauled him to his feet and half led, half dragged him to the passenger side of the deuce-and-a-half. Then he circled his hand in the air, the signal for Wiggin, Rickers, and the Cabrera brothers to rally on him.

Two of the rats at the roadblock fell to their gunfire. That left five rats focused on the gunfight, and only four with guns. Mat alone was worth twenty armed rats.

“Juan cover Smith and provide overwatch. You three push the center of the road. Don’t take any risks. Move up, cover to cover. Keep a steady pace of fire. I’m flanking to the right. Don’t fucking shoot me. No shooting toward the right shoulder of the road. Got it?” It would be a test of Mat’s brilliant new idea: the quick-and-dirty L-ambush training-under-live-fire. What could go wrong?

Mat signaled forward, and his three shooters pressed up the center of the road, leap-frogging to the police cruiser and then pushing toward the blockade. The AR15s sent steady waves of lead into the roadblock. The rats managed only wild, unaimed shots in return.

Mat slid down the road embankment and darted forward. The hundreds of rats on that side were otherwise occupied with