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

without the thunder. Nothing happened. The gun wavered in front of William’s face. Mister Jensen smiled, reached around to his back and brought out a gleaming revolver.

William’s arms dropped and he stared at the gun, trying to understand why it had failed to fire. He’d done everything right, but maybe not in the right order.

Mr. Jensen pointed the snub-nosed gun at William and took three steps forward. Then he looked over his shoulder at his open garage and appeared to reconsider.

Jensen waved them away with his gun. “You kids run along now. The rats are attacking en masse and I’m the only one who can stop them. Take refuge at the middle school. Go on.” He stomped menacingly, and William’s legs betrayed him by faltering backward. Candice tugged at his arm.

“Come on, William. We need help. Where’s your dad?”

William had no idea where Mat was. His head swam with fury and humiliation. Mr. Jensen had gone back to loading the van.

William tossed the pistol in a bush, and they both ran back the way they’d come.

Mat Best

Smith Street HESCO barrier

McKenzie, Tennessee

The McKenzie community college and Smith Street met in an inverted corner cut out of the northeast perimeter of town by a huge hayfield. It’d been easier to place the HESCO barrier on paved road than setting the foundation across a muddy field.

The smoke-and-pig aroma drifted over the college, into the gaping field and northeast through the bustling woods around Caledonia Creek reservoir.

The Paw Paw Lane neighborhood had been lost to the town when the perimeter left out over a hundred homes as well as the Christ’s Temple Apostolic church. It would’ve required another two miles of HESCO barrier to protect them. The residents and the pastor relocated to the community college campus. Refugees instantly squatted in the cluster of starter homes on the edge of town.

Now the rats emerged, like creatures awakened from rain-soaked hibernation. The smell of cooked meat and charred wood drew them onto the overgrown lawns and trash-strewn streets where children once rode scooters and played frisbee. They carried weapons, most of them. Nobody seemed to go anywhere outside the town perimeter without a weapon of some sort.

Mat watched from atop the Smith Street HESCO barrier, panning his binoculars up and down the four-lane highway that separated the Paw Paw neighborhood from the rest of town.

The rats had no way of knowing the smell came from inside the town perimeter, nor would they care. Mat learned the overwhelming power of smell when he’d half-starved during field exercises in Ranger School. After a few days of starvation, even the slightest food smell struck like rebar upside the head. It caused physical pain in the nasal cavity and dragged a man forward like a nose ring on a rope.

The rats moved like zombies, driven by their gnawing hunger and weakened by atrophy—stumbling, sniffing, abandoning their mewling children. Mat watched in wonder as the wind dragged his enemy from their hovels and drew them toward murder. He guessed there were a thousand of them, and the woods hadn’t begun to empty yet. This was just the three streets of split-level homes.

Mat marveled at the power of smell—it could’ve been such a simple weapon. If only he’d considered using it before, it could’ve helped the town. He could’ve lured rats away.

With wind sweeping across McKenzie, the scent of cooked meat pulled an army of desperate souls toward the wall, and toward a do-or-die, winner-take-all clash with the townspeople.

His mind swirled with visions of bullets, poison gas, cannons, and walls. Like so many commanders before him, he struggled against fighting the last war in his mind instead of this war.

Today, he didn’t face an enemy army, or insurgents bent on toppling a government, he fought locusts. They would gobble every morsel of food, ruining what they could not eat. Mat remembered seeing rats “butcher” a captured pig with pocket knives, bare hands, and teeth. In their desperation, they wasted most of it.

“Cabrera. This is Actual. Report,” Mat spoke over the radio. He’d already called in all available perimeter guards, and everyone in town who could wield a gun, or even a bat. This fight would be for all the marbles. The town would live or die right here on the Smith Street HESCO, in the next thirty minutes.

The tornado siren continued its doleful wail. It was the pre-set signal for everyone to rush to defense, but it would take time to get the word out as to where. Where would they make their stand? On the other side of McKenzie, the townspeople would have no idea of the crushing masses hurdling themselves across the fields.

“Sergeant, this is Juan. We’re moving out now. ETA five minutes.”

“Bring everyone you see on the street. Everyone,” Mat ordered. “This is all-hands. I’ve got over a thousand enemy combatants converging on my position.”

“Fuck me,” Cabrera swore over the radio.

Gray, cotton swirls of smoke drifted over the college, across the field and into the woods. Mat didn’t know if the smoke was a sign that they were getting the fire put out, or if it meant the surrounding neighborhoods had caught fire too. The town could easily burn from the inside out, but that wasn’t Mat’s problem. The fire crew wasn’t even on the same radio frequency as him.

The refugees poured across the highway like a flood. They plunged off the edge of the blacktop and into the fringe woods around the Carroll hay farm.

The highway was over a mile away from Mat’s position on the HESCO barrier, and the rats disappeared as soon as they hit the trees. They’d cross a half-mile of pasture, another windrow of trees, and then they’d appear on the edge of no man’s land, south of the Carroll’s cluster of homes. Mat prayed Old Man Carroll had evacuated ahead of the wave of zombies. The Carroll’s had been unwilling to abandon their family homestead to the predations of the refugees. They’d been fending them off