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

The first rats surged onto no man’s land just as the QRF arrived.

“Spread out along Smith Street,” Mat ordered on his radio. “Be prepared to displace along the barrier wherever the fighting gets heaviest. They’ll hit us in five mics. I have eyes-on across the field. Use the poles whenever possible. Shoot anyone carrying a firearm. Good copy?”

His team leaders acknowledged and sprinted to their positions up and down the four hundred yard stretch of wall.

Luckily, the pork-laden wind cut across one of their best sections of HESCO; their most-defensible position. They’d stacked logs from the lumber yard, wired them together with bailing wire, then piled vehicles behind the logs to stabilize them. The logs would be easy for a healthy man to scale—eight feet tall at the most—but atop the logs was a wobbly, six foot chainlink fence. The starving rats could scale it, Mat had no doubt, but his defenders would ram them with the greased poles through the holes in the chainlink. So far, he could see less than a hundred defenders atop the Smith Street HESCO, but more were coming. A hundred or two against thousands.

Mat scanned the tree line. Hundreds of rats surged into no man’s land, then lurched into the swirling scent of cooked pork. Mat picked out a man with a double-barrel shotgun, wading through the muck with the rifle at port arms. Mat slid the barrel of the SCAR heavy through the chainlink alongside a post.

The wind sighed against the fence, sending a gentle sway along its length. Mat let his sight picture undulate with the post. He waited for the glowing red chevron of the ACOG to pass over the man’s torso and he timed his trigger press to match.

Whoom! The SCAR barked. The man fell face down in the mud. Two men following flipped him on his back, and one snatched up the mud-caked shotgun.

Whoom! Mat blew a hole in his chest.

He couldn’t allow himself to get tunnel vision this time. The moment he turned his attention elsewhere, another rat would pick up that shotgun, but Mat was in command, and he had to watch the whole battlefield.

He keyed the team radio. “The tree line is five hundred meters. Hold fire until they’re under two hundred meters. Acknowledge.”

Range by fire, Mat thought grimly. His AR would’ve struggled with this distance and the crosswind. This was no urban gunfight. This was a siege—a merciless ocean of desperation against whizzing bullets and a few hundred defenders, if they even got to Smith Street in time.

Mat had killed the only two guys he could see carrying obvious firearms. At least six hundred rats stumbled in the field, through the mud toward the town. When they got another hundred yards closer, Mat and his men would have to shoot anyone who looked threatening, which would be everyone, and then they would run out of ammo.

Inevitability swamped him. The weight of the six remaining magazines in his vest felt like a stretching length of paracord, holding him dangling over the abyss. When those mags ran dry, the sea of enemy would overwhelm his position, and whether they killed him or not, he and William, and everyone in the town, would starve.

Hundreds more crossed the highway in a mighty wave. The smell of pork would empty a thirty-square-mile swath of woods. The pock-pock-pock of his men firing into the ranks of rats picked up tempo and Mat’s worry rose with it; a savage, clawing futility.

“Save your bullets for people with edged weapons,” he coaxed over the radio. “Use the poles on everyone else.” At most, there were two thousand rounds of ammunition along the half-mile of wall. He could see almost that many enemy, at a single glance.

Another three hundred rats staggered out of the woods and onto the field of battle as Mat dropped his transmit button. “Save your ammo for people with serious weapons,” Mat spoke to himself. He didn’t bother to push transmit. The rats were upon them.

Gladys Carter Home

McKenzie, Tennessee

“Miss Carter! Hold on. Miss Carter.”

The voice of one of her P.E. students shook Gladys out of her call to arms. She bounded off her porch, dressed in full military kit, on her way to the rally point at the baseball diamond.

“Miss Carter, help!”

It was Candice McClaughlin, Jim Jenkins’ step-daughter. She was with Sergeant Best’s son, William.

“Miss Carter. We need help. My step-dad—er Jim—is doing something he shouldn’t. He’s going to shoot the poison gas.”

Gladys stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the kids, not understanding. “The town mucky-mucks said okay to the poison?”

“No, I mean the other stuff. The mustard gas. He’s loading it into a van right now,” the girl explained while her hands flailed at the air.

Gladys wasn’t at the top of the information food chain. It was entirely possible that this morning’s mass attack on the north HESCO called for such weapons. She would never use mustard gas on people, but her vote barely mattered.

“There’s an attack across from the college. You two need to get to the school to shelter until this passes.”

“No, Miss Carter,” William barked. “You don’t understand. Mr. Jensen’s been touching her. He’s been touching Candice.” The boy turned to the girl. Her eyes fell to the sidewalk.

“Mother of God,” Gladys muttered. The truth clarified, suddenly. Her head raced forward to catch up with something her gut already knew.

“And he’s going to do something bad with that poison gas. I know it,” William said. “Mr. Jensen was acting weird. And talking weird too. He pointed a gun at me and said that he was the only one who could save the town. He’s a psycho, Miss Carter. And he has poison gas. Lots of poison gas, and cannons to shoot it.”

In her rational mind, Gladys knew that using poison gas without the town’s say-so and committing pedophilia landed on two unrelated squares. But in her human mind, she felt the two things criss-cross like