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

so that they’d have two angles on the target, but given two successful trades, he figured he could fudge security this time. He wanted a minute alone with his wife. They needed to talk. He needed to come clean with her about some things.

There’d been enough food at the homestead for once—boring food, to be sure—but enough food to ease them back from the edge of desperation and toward some form of normalcy. It was time to become a proper clan, and that couldn’t happen with unspoken schisms and broken loyalty.

Julie lurked behind a solid wall of depression since escaping the polygamist town over two months before. She spoke very little, and mostly just to the children. She did the minimum to survive, and often stared at the mountains of Zion for hours. It hadn’t seemed strange before, because they’d all been doing the minimum to conserve energy. They’d all done a lot of staring off into the distance, dozing in the daylight. But now, with food in their bellies and energy coursing through their veins, Julie was the only person still listless.

Cameron didn’t begrudge her depression. Julie’s world had gone from decorating turkey-themed cupcakes for the boys’ pilgrim festival to being shot at, forced into marriage and then starvation. She’d come face-to-face in the night with her husband screwing another woman. She hadn’t said a word about it—Julie hadn’t said anything about anything—but the time had come to make things right. Plus, there was the question of Ruth’s pregnancy to discuss, with both Julie and Isaiah. The clan would need to strike a new accommodation, if only to drag the truth into the light. At least Isaiah was a polygamist, and he’d been “eternally married” to Cameron’s wife in a weirdo ceremony back in the polygamist town. Isaiah would probably understand that relationships in the red desert wastelands weren’t always tidy.

Isaiah’s leg had responded well to the traction in-line. Coupled with a diet of carbohydrates, he was on-the-mend. He couldn’t stand on the leg yet, but the pain had backed off thirty percent, he said. The shin had gone from the dark red of simmering infection to the yellow and purple of a healthy bruise. With a crutch fashioned from barnwood and a tight splint, he could hobble to the privy under his own power.

The seedlings under the cold frames had exploded in green, and they now pressed against the glass in a profusion of growth. The new, daily challenge was to replace the covers each night without breaking stems or damaging leaves.

The Grafton clan, as they called themselves, was healing, and after a couple more trades, they’d be provisioned well enough to survive until the green grass of springtime.

Cameron’s attention snapped back to Ruth, on the highway with the traders from Rockville. She hovered over another bucket, checking the contents. There appeared to be no surprises. She lifted two buckets, climbed down the highway embankment and trudged across the field toward the big cottonwood where they’d stashed the guns. Everything was going according to pattern.

“Jules,” Cameron called his wife by her nickname. “I wanted to say: I’m sorry for all of this.”

“Huh?” she looked up from studying the grass.

“I’m sorry for how this turned out. I’ve been a shit husband, I know.”

Julie’s face turned in his direction, but he couldn’t read her expression.

“I mean,” he stammered, “I’m sorry about Ruth. I don’t know what happened. I don’t love her. The hunger had me in its grip, and I wasn’t myself. I’ve made some awful decisions.”

“Ruth?” the question floated in her eyes.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m ending it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was never love. Just sex. And not really even sex, per se. There were no feelings, you know?” He was rambling.

She blinked three times. “Wait. Are you telling me that you had sex with Ruth? You cheated on me with a horse-face polygamist?” She went to stand up.

Cameron grabbed her belt and pulled her under cover. “Stay down, Julie. They’ll see you.” Apparently, she had not seen he and Ruth that night in the trees.“You don’t get to tell me what to do, you...pig.” Julie broke free and pushed her way up through the blackbrush. It was more words than she’d said to him in a long time, and he was astonished at the sudden intensity. He hadn’t thought she was capable of it anymore.

“You fucking asshole,” her voice launched into a high warble. “You screwed her in the same house with our sleeping children? Do they know?”

“No. I mean we never...did it in the house.”

“You cheated on me with her?” Julie shrieked.

“Lower your voice and get back down. They’re going to see you.”

“You don’t ever get to tell me what to do ever again.” Julie was on her feet now, and her rifle barrel drifted in his direction. He had bigger problems than screwing up the trade.

“Point that rifle away from me. Julie—stop and think.”

The corral that’d penned in her anxiety, terror and cataclysmic loss seemed to burst its fences all-at-once. The wild-eyed ponies of her ruined wonderworld caromed onto open ground, and bolted for the horizon. She arched her back and howled with rage.

Halfway across the clearing, carrying the last two buckets, Ruth froze. The fat cowboy and the men in the truck jolted toward the scream. Cameron sprang at Julie’s rifle barrel and batted it aside.

BOOM!

The round from her rifle went into the ground. Cameron lunged at the barrel, yanked it out of her hand and stumbled into the clearing.

Boom, boom, boom. Zzzzt-crack.

The men in back of the truck from Rockville opened fire. Cameron’s own AR-15 jumped out of his hand like it’d been smacked with an aluminum baseball bat. He threw himself sideways into the blackbrush and scrambled to his knees.

An invisible golfer hit Julie in the head with a golf club. Her head cocked at an unnatural angle, like lifting her ear to the sky to identify a strange sound. A bloody divot of scalp chipped off her skull and cartwheeled into the