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

“We are a family,” she hissed.

Cameron closed his eyes and exhaled. His resolve evaporated. The headlights in the fog rolled forward, slowly. The rumble of engines and men carried on the fog. The truck would soon be surrounded. Cameron shucked off his backpack and let it fall to the pavement. A new, cleaner resolve formed within him, a dogged resolve in the face of futility. Ruth was right. They were a family, and they could still die like a family.

“Leah, take a gun,” he said. “You too Denny. Get in the bed of the truck and get ready to shoot anyone who isn’t us.” Cameron wrapped a free arm around Denny and hefted him over the side of the truck bed.

Denny began to cry. “I don’t know how to shoot.”

“I know. I know, Denny. It’s okay. Just do your best. Here, take your brother.” He passed the child to Denny and gathered an extra rifle from the truck. He ran the slide on an AR-15 and passed it to Leah, then lifted her into the truck bed too. Denny sobbed quietly. The fog around them carried a timeless truth, plain to all, young and old—this was where everything ended. This is where their light would finally bleed away into the mist.

“You get in too.” Cameron pointed Ruth into the truck bed. “I’ll be over here, to get an angle on them. Don’t shoot until you see the men. Don’t shoot at the lights.”

Ruth stepped onto the bumper, swung her skirt over the tailgate and settled in for the fight. They were all crying now. Cameron too.

The headlights were no more than a hundred feet out now, and Cameron heard the rumble of heavy equipment. Tanks, maybe.

Before his last stand, he held Denny’s chin in his hand, leaned over the wall of the truck and looked him eye-to-eye in the dim. “I love you Den-ster. You’re a man now. This is what men do. No matter what happens, we protect them. Okay?”

The boy sniffed back his tears and nodded in the dark. “No matter what,” Cam repeated.

I guess this is what we have left, Cameron thought. We keep our word to the dead.

“Occupants of the truck, come out with your hands where we can see them,” a bullhorn blared out of the mist. “We will open fire if you do not.” The vehicles crunched forward on the pavement. The shapes of men passed in front of the headlights, like a pack of wolves circling.

“This is your last warning. Surrender your arms and step out in front of your headlights.”

Cameron stepped to the hood of the truck, leaned over and took aim at the shadows. With everything he had left, he bellowed, “Let’s dance, motherfuckers.”

One last jackrabbit to chase. One last bar brawl. This was something Cameron knew how to do.

The bullhorn crackled. Another voice took over.

“Who is that? Tell me your name or we shoot.”

Some faint hope rattled in Cameron’s head, like a memory of a dream of a time that existed before memory.

“I’m Cameron Stewart and I’m about to kill a stack of you assholes, so shuttup and fight,” he yelled.

“No shit?” the bullhorn answered. “I’ll be da—“ the bullhorn cut out. Another man’s voice continued without the bullhorn. “Don’t shoot.” It shouted. “Cameron. Don’t shoot. It’s Tommy. It’s me, Tommy.”

Cameron’s mind stutter-stepped. A shadow grew before the headlights; bigger than a man, monstrous in the fog. The towering shadow threw off spectral rays of light around it. “Don’t shoot me, Shithead. It’s your brother, Tommy.”

Cameron clicked his gun to safe and fell back to the truck bed. “Put down your guns. Denny, put it down. Carefully. Leah, Ruth. Put your guns down. Lay them down.” The truck bed clattered with rifles. The sobbing and muttered questions continued. Cameron ignored them.

“Don’t shoot. It’s me, Tommy.” Cameron’s brother materialized from the fog and into the thin light around the truck. He wore military camouflage and had a big rifle slung across his back. He held his hands up. “Is that really you, Cam? I’ll be dipped in shit. We found you. Out here in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

Cameron had been lost, but now he was found. The brothers hugged; their own, lost clan restored.

20

Sage Ross

Chambers Ranch

La Grande, Oregon

Captain Chambers tasked Sage to work with the ‘arrest team’ on combat training. That’s what he called the ten high-school-aged boys chosen to slip into Wallowa County with Sage and Captain Chambers. The plan was to arrest Commissioner Pete off his porch in the dead of night—when he went out to pee.

The captain chose the boys from La Grande High’s receivers and backs. He whisked them away to his ranch outside La Grande, telling their parents they were ‘training to defend Union County.’ Once sequestered at the ranch, they learned basic combat firearms and put a finer edge on their cardio fitness. The captain armed them with department AR-15 rifles, and kitted them out in assault vests.

“This county leaks gossip like a rusty bucket,” he told Sage. “Nobody can know what we’re doing until it’s over.”

They’d been at it for two weeks, and the boys were probably as solid as they were going to get. If Sage had been the golden child of the La Grande P.D. before, after his last mission into Wallowa, he was their patron saint. The captain treated him like the son-he-never-had.

Sage had traversed twenty-five miles of wilderness and infiltrated to the Commissioner’s doorstep, even checking the gas levels and keys on the snow machines. It didn’t seem like a big deal to Sage at the time, but the captain talked about it as though he’d crept into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and secretly impregnated the tyrant’s girlfriend.

Armed with Sage’s intelligence, they had a clear plan to infiltrate and exfiltrate, and they knew when the Commissioner got up to take a piss. From that point, things moved down the tracks like a locomotive with a drunk conductor and a