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

underbrush. Her scream died instantly in the breeze. Her legs crumpled and she folded sideways to the ground. Slumped against the blackbrush, the fury in her face gave way to mute amazement. Her sightless eyebrows lifted as if to say, “What’s that you said, Cam?” She lay motionless, like a boneless puppet of herself.

Cameron’s brain ceased to function. He was buried in the blackbrush, ass-over-tea kettle. He was eye-to-eye with his dead wife. She didn’t blink, just stared, an eternal question setting in forever across her eyes.

What’s that you said? her face wondered.

Part of Cameron‘s brain wanted to continue the argument. It needed to explain. “I’m sorry for shtupping the horse-face polygamist. Don’t worry about that. It’s not like I got her pregnant or anything.”

Boom, boom, boom....Boom, boom.

Cameron’s fear dragged him back to the violent present. He scrambled to the edge of the briar and gazed at the highway. Bullets sizzled through the air, but they no longer seemed focused on his position. Julie—their primary target—had disappeared from view. Now their bullets hunted phantoms along the tree line.

Ruth low-crawled under the sage toward where she’d left her rifle. New waves of gunfire erupted from the hill on the opposite side of the road. Men scampered down the hillside, running from sagebrush to sagebrush, firing into the riverside bramble. Cameron counted the men as they rushed forward. He thought there were a dozen. It was an ambush, and it was probably always going to be an ambush. Rockville had been poised to screw them this morning. By freaking out, Julie sprung the trap early.

Cameron crawled past his rifle in the brush. A bullet had sliced through the aluminum breach. It looked like someone had taken a welding torch to the upper receiver. That rifle was finished.

He grabbed Julie’s rifle, hanging from a dead branch, and scrambled deeper into cover. He left her body in the blackbrush, her blank face still working through the confusion of a world catapulted into the absurd.

I don’t understand. What did you say? You cheated on me with a polygamist chick?

Cameron retreated fifty feet from the clearing before climbing to his feet and running. Bullets sluiced through the thicket, burning holes in the underbrush and knocking chunks off the cottonwood bark. Ruth appeared ahead on his path, gathering her rifle and backpack. She grabbed the two buckets she’d dropped earlier.

“No, no, no. They’re coming. More than a dozen. Leave the food,” he shouted.

She did as she was told and ran behind him in a crouch, her huge, polygamist dress swirling around her feet.

They waded the Virgin River and struck out directly for the Grafton homestead. The pock-pock-pock of gunfire across the highway slowed, then stopped. The ambush had paused for the moment, probably regrouping before pursuing them into the thicket. Cameron had no doubt they would follow their trail. Why prepare an ambush if not to pursue and take back all they’d traded?

Cameron waved Ruth forward.

“Where’s Julie?” Ruth heaved for breath.

“She’s dead.” He shook his head. “They’ll follow us for sure. We need to get back to Isaiah.”

As they ran through the trees and broke into the open pasture around the cabin, Julie’s voice echoed in his head.

What did you say?

They’d been together fifteen years, and now they’d never be together again. All those long years keeping house, raising kids, arguing about bills. A lump of lead, a chip of skull and it was gone.

Their life together was over. Compulsive, reckless sex had ended it—or had it been a bullet that ended it? His mind reeled. It had happened so fast. But he knew this for sure: her death was on him, as sure as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. He’d pulled it with his dick and a thoughtless treachery. Julie had deserved better. Depressed or not, she’d deserved better than Cameron Stewart.

Even with her surging skirts, Ruth pulled ahead of him across the pasture around the homestead. Isaiah stood on the porch, holding himself up with one of the posts. The children gathered beside him, terrified by the sound of gunfire. Cameron poured on the speed. He needed to get to Isaiah. Isaiah would know what to do.

“They’re coming!” Cameron bellowed as he ran. “Right behind us.”

Isaiah shouted something to the children and they rushed inside. Ruth fell behind Cameron’s exhausted sprint. Cameron needed Isaiah—needed to know what to do next.

“How many?” Isaiah asked as Cameron closed the distance.

“Fifteen, I think,” Cameron heaved as he took the steps two-at-a-time. “More than we can fight. Julie’s dead.” He bent over and struggled for breath.

Pain wrestled on Isaiah’s face. His leg must’ve been on fire.

“Get the kids in the truck and get out of here,” Isaiah said. He choked on the pain, swallowed and said again, with resolve, “You take Ruth and the children. I’ll make a stand.”

“That’s stupid. We all get in the truck and go,” Cameron argued.

Isaiah shook his head emphatically as he battled personal tides of agony.

The boys and Leah rushed out of the cabin carrying buckets of food. The little ones had bedding in their arms. They ran to the truck, threw everything in the truck bed and ran back inside for more.

Isaiah spoke with unaccustomed authority. “I’ll make a show of defense. The Rockville militia needs to think we’re pinned down, or they’ll cut you off on Wire Valley Road. If they have radios, they’ll call back to town. They’ll ambush you as you go past. They’re after our guns and the food. The only way out of here is to go past the back side of Rockville. It’s the only escape route over the butte. Cameron, you need to go now and let me do my part. Get Ruth and the kids out. Save my family.”

“That’s stupid,” Cameron repeated, but he knew Isaiah was right. They were on the opposite side of the river, and the only road out of Grafton doubled back past Rockville. If the militia knew they fled with the supplies, they’d ambush them and shoot