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

Something clicked in her brain, like the last tick of a grandfather clock before the bell goes gong-gong-gong.

Jim Jensen is a motherfucking sociopath.

She knew something was off about the man. She’d seen his shuffles and half-steps on the high school campus, like the feet of a basketball player hankering to step back for the three-point shot. She’d watched him do his little dance in the staff room, and while passing through clusters of kids. Something had been off about the man. Something just wasn’t right, but it hadn’t been until the girl’s eyes dropped to the concrete that Gladys fully understood.

Click.

That dude’s a true-blue psycho, and he has weapons of mass destruction.

“Does anyone else know?” she asked the kids.

They shook their heads.

“Find your dad. Find Mat. Tell him what you told me. Hurry.” The former WNBA player launched from her yard in a ferocious sprint—a pace she could maintain all the way to that cocksucker’s house on Forrest Avenue.

Jim Jensen wasn’t home. Gladys turned in circles on the sidewalk in front of his house.

No van. No jars of poison gas. No ego-maniac pedophile in the yard or in the house.

While Gladys spun, she caught snippets of info from her QRF team radio on the wall, six blocks north of Jensen’s house. All the town’s defenders had dashed to Smith Street to fight off a huge attack. She’d been called to join them on the HESCO, but now she had bigger possums to fry.

The explosion. The column of barbecue smoke over the town. The tornado siren. The rattle of gunfire.

She put it together bit-by-bit. The pork drying facility at the lumberyard burned, and the clouds of pork smell had stirred the refugees into a frenzy.

Jim Jensen probably planned to counter-strike the mob with poison gas. He might see it as a way to prove to the town he was a hero, someone special—someone who could abuse his step-daughter while the town looked the other way, as though that was ever going to happen. Gladys had been molested by her dad’s friend, and that’s exactly the kind of shit that sonofabitch would’ve come up with in his twisted head.

Where had Jensen gone? She forced herself to slow down and think.

Jensen had poison gas and a cannon that launched jars. Her combat team was lined up on Smith Street. The best place to launch gas into the mob would be the community college football field. Maybe.

“Gladys to Sergeant Best,” she radioed for the tenth time. Nothing. Either his radio was out-of-range or Mat was busy fighting for his life. Gladys fingered the short antenna on her radio. She’d forgotten the longer one on her kitchen counter.

Gunfire rattled to the north. Smith Street. Her team.

The football field. That’s where Jensen would go, she felt certain.

She ran north up Nolan Street and cut across a backyard with a pretty white gazebo and another yard with a truck up on blocks. It was a mile to the football field, give-or-take. She’d be there in less than eight minutes.

Gladys heard a sonorous thumping, like the first bars of the song Stand By Me—like a rhythmic mortar, firing six shots in a row. She’d never heard anything like it, but she knew in her gut: the town of McKenzie, Tennessee had just joined Sadaam Hussein and Benito Mussolini in using chemical weapons against their own citizens. She poured on the speed and fired herself like a missile toward the sound.

Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

Mat Best hadn’t ever heard that sound on a battlefield, but within a few seconds realization dawned: Jensen was launching poison gas into the rats.

Thunk, thunk.

It was Jensen’s pneumatic cannon. He’d built a multi-barrel version.

During the time it took for Mat to reach a conclusion, he’d killed two men and a handgun-wielding woman churning across the field of hay stubble and mud. A few rats turned back in the face of the rifle fire, but for every rat who faltered, ten more appeared on the edge of the woods.

The Carroll farmhouse had been completely overrun. The woods teemed with a human flood that reminded Mat of rats he’d seen overflowing a burning field in Iraq. Rank upon rank of desperate people drove each other forward, pushing, shoving and lurching into the wind. Mat was already down to three mags.

The first wave hit the HESCO barrier at the eastern end of Smith Street. Mat didn’t dare shift resources in that direction. The human tidal wave would strike along the entire half-mile-long stretch in the next thirty seconds.

“They’re getting through!” one of the Cabrera brothers screamed into his radio.

“Monica, this is Mat. Send all newcomers to the east end of the line. Repeat, have the townspeople head to the east end. If the rats get over, the townies have to beat them back.” Mat knew it wasn’t going to happen, even as he ordered it. Ninety-nine percent of the townspeople weren’t capable of the level of violence required to survive this. It was a scrambled egg mess of a battle. The rats on the east end didn’t even pause on top of the HESCO to fight the defenders. They leapt over and ran for the smell of barbecue. Mat’s men were little more than speed bumps.

Up and down Smith Street, townspeople fought, wrestled and clung to the rats that’d made it over. The townies were five times as strong, because they’d been eating actual food, but they had none of the desperation of the rats. The refugees fought to get past, and when they did, they disappeared into the neighborhoods like filthy water down a drain.

The rats that lost their fight with the townies either stayed down or crawled back to prop themselves against the inside of the HESCO. But even then, half of them caught their breath, then made another run for it. Once a rat was over the wall, there was no way to get them back on the other side.

Mat watched an elderly lady with a revolver