Honor Road

by Jason Ross

  Honor Road

  Sequel to Black Autumn Travelers

  Jason Ross

  Adam Fullman

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Meanwhile…

  Also by Jason Ross, Adam Fullman & Jeff Kirkham

  Free Preparedness 10 Step Manual

  About the Authors

  Preface

  A post-civilization world would astonish us all, gunfighter and gardener alike. In this novel, we tell the bare-knuckle truth—and this time, it might leave a scar. Forgive us for stripping away layers of literary comfort and dipping into stark tales of starvation and twisted honor.

  Honor Road is the direct sequel to Black Autumn Travelers, the stories of Mat Best, Sage Ross and Cameron Stewart. We rejoin them in the nightmarish abyss of lost civilization, two months after the Black Autumn collapse.

  Army Ranger Mat Best scrambles to defend the Tennessee town that struggled and failed to save his love, Caroline, from the ravages of gangrene. He stands between her orphaned brother, William, the town and tens of thousands of desperate, feral urbanites starving to strip the town bare.

  Seventeen-year-old Sage Ross flees the charred and broken farm of the Holland family in western Washington state. He faces a perilous, winter mountain climb, then a chain of impossible choices that he must brook before continuing his homeward journey to Salt Lake City, Utah.

  Cameron Stewart, the insecure family man, surviving on luck and fury, flees a black-hearted polygamist enclave in northern Arizona with his family, then drops them into the gristmill of starvation. Hunger takes them down dark roads, and Cameron commits foul acts in the midst of his delirium. Will his wife and children pay the ultimate price for his dishonor?

  “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.

  Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

  Homer, The Odyssey

  Cameron Stewart

  Six weeks before.

  Highway 59

  Outside Apple Valley, Utah

  * * *

  Did you screw him?” Cameron seethed.

  Julie answered low and angry, “We. Were. Married.”

  “Don’t ever say that again. Don’t you ever fucking say that again. You weren’t married. That’s just whacko cult shit. Did you screw him or not?” Cameron’s hands flew up and down in front of his face like furious pistons.

  She stole a glance at the pickup truck idling beside the highway. Four passengers stared straight ahead, avoiding their eyes. A man watched in the reflection of the driver’s side mirror—the big, extended kind for pulling trailers.

  “Yes, Cameron. I had sex with him. Is that what you want me to say? I did. They made me marry him and, yes, there was a wedding night. You were in a coma. The boys needed protection.”

  The sun set over Utah Mountain, and the chill of evening gnawed at the warmth coming off the blacktop. Cameron cradled his Mosin-Nagant rifle. Forty-five minutes before, he’d fled a polygamist colony in the confusion following the killing of their Prophet.

  Cameron, Julie and the boys had been their prisoners, but he’d turned the priesthood inside-out with a killing spree. He’d made them pay to play. Oh yes, he had.

  The rifle was all Cameron had in this world. Julie’s hands were empty. They had no vehicle. No backpack. No buckets, bags or suitcases. She and the kids escaped with the clothes on their backs.

  The boys milled around the shoulder of the highway, pretending not to listen to their mother and father argue.

  Cameron stared hard at the pickup truck, idling, waiting for the couple to reach a decision. The asshole behind the wheel was the son of the dead prophet, the heir apparent to the cult. He’d probably called dibs on Cameron’s hot wife as soon as they’d ambushed and captured his family six weeks before.

  What a difference a day makes, Cameron thought as he shot daggers from his eyes at the round, blonde-haired face in the mirror.

  They’d shot Cameron through the neck, stolen his wife, his boys and his supplies. But Cameron had his revenge. He’d broken the back of their cuckoo collective and left the remnants tearing at each others throats. No doubt, that’s why this dipshit polygamist in his Shit-kicker-mobile had come along with his truckbed full of gear. He was making a run for it. After his father was exposed as a sex weirdo, then gunned down by the elders in a “blood atonement,” the son grabbed what he could and got out of town. His other wife sat in the passenger seat, her hair piled up in a doo like it was the nineteen eighties. Three small heads bobbled around in the back seat.

  Cameron pictured himself walking up to the driver-side window, pointing the Mosin at the man’s head and blowing his brains into the polygamist chick’s lap in a shower of blood and shatter-proof glass.

  Why do they call it shatter-proof glass if it blows into a million pieces?

  His mind did a little loop-de-loop. It’d been doing that a lot since he got shot and spent a week in a coma. Maybe it’d started on the drive through Las Vegas, he corrected. The last two months had been a horror show. He’d set a personal record for killing dudes. He’d gone from zero to...he didn’t really know how many.

  Not counting the Prophet Rulon—because he hadn’t actually pulled the trigger on that crazy, old coot—he’d smoked six polygamists. Seven, maybe? Rulon’s son, idling in the truck, would be Number Eight.

  “You have to promise me not to hurt him, Cameron,” Julie hissed, interrupting his loop-de-loop right at the top. He came crashing back to earth. “Cam. Can you hear me? We need to go. Right now. And you can’t hurt Isaiah. You need to promise me that you won’t touch him. He’s got what we need to survive—stuff. Supplies. He has a place to go. He can’t go back to town. They said they’ll shoot him too if he returns. He’s willing to take us with him, but you have to control yourself.”

  Cameron stared back toward town. Truck lights zoomed around like an anthill kicked over by a kid. Soon they’d send out trucks and horsemen, and they’d scour the red rock plains looking for the gentile who’d taken down their little heaven on earth. They weren’t going to forget about Cameron. He’d shot too many of their stalwart sons and exposed too many of their dirty secrets. He felt the heft of the rifle, and the weight of the bullets in his pocket. He had just five more rounds.

  “Boys,” Cameron yelled. “Get in the back of that truck. Push stuff out of the way and make yourself a place to sit. You too,” he said to Julie. “Tell your Celestial Husband that if he tries anything, I’ll put a bullet in the back of his head.”

  “He’s not like that. He stopped for us because he’s decent, Cam. He’s a decent man. Say whatever you want about the polygamists, but Isaiah isn’t like his father. He stopped for us because he gave his word to protect me and the boys.”

  Cameron grunted. “I’ll be sure and put him up for Father of the Year. Tell him what I said, Julie. And if you screw him again, I will kill him.”

  She glanced at the boys, pr
obably to see if they’d overheard that last part. Cameron felt his face redden with shame.

  How could he say something like that in front of the boys about their mother?

  If his own dad had done that, he would’ve beat the shit out of him—no matter what his mother had done or who she’d screwed. He would’ve dropped his old man on-the-spot with a three-punch combination.

  Pop. Wham. Thud.

  “Nobody talks to my mom that way,” he’d say.

  Another loop-de-loop of the mind, and there he was, being a classic piece of shit, right in front of his boys.

  Julie shook his shoulder. “Cameron. Please keep it together. We need you. It’s life or death right now and we’re scared. Real scared.”

  Cameron loosened his grip on the Mosin-Nagant. All the blood had been wrung out of his knuckles.

  “Okay. Where are we going?” He stepped onto the truck bumper and over onto the pile of junk in the back.

  Julie followed him up and into the truck bed. She wore the designer jeans he liked, the ones that showed off her long legs. A shockwave of jealousy ran up his spine.

  Had she worn them for the polygamist? Had he peeled them off, with saliva in his mouth and lust in his eyes. How many times had they done it?

  “Cameron. Did you hear what I said?”

  “What?” The truck rumbled forward and gathered speed down the highway. The chilly breeze built a swirling tempest of wind around the shattered family.

  “I said: he’s taking us over the mountain to a place we can hide. It’s an abandoned town his dad owned. He thinks we’ll be safe there. He’s not a bad person, Cam.”

  “Shit,” Cameron scoffed. He pointed the rifle at the man’s back, through the sheet metal of the truck cab. The kids were in the back seat. He pointed the rifle at the sky instead.

  “He’s decent,” she repeated over the wind. “You’ll see.”

  2

  Sage Ross

  Present Day.

  * * *

  Holland Farm

  Wallula, Washington

  * * *

  The burned farmhouse came as no surprise. Sage saw the orange glow on the horizon three days before. Even though every edible bit had been taken from the smoldering wreck, scavengers from the highway shuffled among the ruins, flipping over boards and picking through piles of blackened rubble.

  Between the scorched remains of the two giant cottonwood trees, a charred body lay twisted in ankle-deep snow. He couldn’t tell if the corpse belonged to the Holland family or if it’d been a scavenger who caught fire and burned to death. Whoever it was, the Hollands were either dead or on-the-run, which amounted to the same thing these days. Refugees were dead people who hadn’t gotten the memo.

  Sage had been a guest at the Holland’s house when the refugees first came from the highway. The farmer’s daughter died that first night. The rest either moved on or died later, defending the farm.

  Sage hadn’t been around to see it. He’d left them to their hapless cause. Nobody could survive this close to a highway, not with hundreds of acres of farm to protect. The desperate and dying citizens of Seattle, Yakima and Richland had come from hundreds of miles to pick clean the countryside, just as the frosts of winter crisped the ground and grayed the skies.

  For now, Sage didn’t have to worry about scavenge, though he would soon be a refugee himself. He carried a treasure trove on his back. His Grandpa Bob had set him up with enough food and equipment to last at least three more months. For six weeks now, he’d kept his head down, living in a cave carved into a crust of stone, hiding behind a camouflage wall of tumbleweed and sagebrush.

  The same equipment that kept Sage alive also kept him rooted, unable to travel toward his family home in Utah. No matter how Sage packed and re-packed his gear, he couldn’t carry more than six days of food on his back, and to get home, he needed to cover 600 miles between Washington State and Salt Lake City. Even at twenty miles per day, a pace unlikely given the weight of his pack, his food would hold out for 120 miles—480 miles short of home.

  But even more than calories, the peaks gave him a lump of cold lead in his gut. The Blue Mountains soared five thousand feet on the eastern horizon, looming between this place and the farmlands that stretched between Wallula and Utah.

  He’d backpacked with his father and sisters many times, but it’d never occurred to him that live-or-die backpacking involved a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t calculus of weight and calories. The more calories, the more weight; the more days he could hike, but he’d make less distance because of the weight. The less calories, the less weight, the fewer days he could hike, but then he would make more distance.

  There was the variable of footwear to consider as well. No matter how good the pair of boots, he knew his feet would blister and foul if he carried too much weight too far too fast. The immutable bedrock of math, physiology and calories anchored his journey to the inexorable conclusion: six days of food and thirty pounds of pack weight were all he could carry, and that wouldn’t get him even a quarter of the way home.

  He couldn’t stay in eastern Washington much longer. He’d been dipping into his Grandpa’s food less and less because of the rabbits, onions, and roots he’d added to the stew pot. But very soon the snow would bury edible plants and force animals into hibernation. He’d already noticed that lazy rattlesnakes and sunning lizards had vanished. It was more difficult for him to dig up onions left by the harvester in the stiffening ground. Most of all, he burned more calories working in the cold. His hunger after foraging gnawed at his ribs in a way he hadn’t felt during the friendly days of fall.

  Snow had given him an advantage when it came to snaring rabbits. He could tell where the rabbits lived and travelled. After each snowfall, Sage tracked rabbit prints between field and burrow. With the tracks, the mystery surrounding the hunt thinned; he now knew where the rabbits lived and where they scampered. Armed with a sure knowledge, the pace of trial and error quickened. He deduced the best snare wire—barbed wire proved too thick, but light fishing line worked perfectly. He learned he’d been losing rabbits because his loops were too large—a loop the size of his fist caught more bunnies. Snare height mattered too—three fingers above the snow yielded best results.

  To learn those lessons required hundreds of repetitions, but Sage had nothing better to do in his autumn hermitage than supplement his food with wild game and edible vegetables. As a result, he only burned through about half the freeze dried he’d brought with him from the Olympic Peninsula in his now-rotting car.

  But against a 600 mile trek, he feared that starvation would seize him like a cougar on a mouse—skillful trapper of rabbits or not. He’d watched from afar as hundreds had died of starvation on the interstate. At seventeen years old, he’d come face-to-face with death more times than he could count. He knew how quickly the Reaper would take a man, and he’d lived hard enough over the last months to see the truth: he was not his mama’s special snowflake. He was grist for the mill—another fleshy body Mother Earth would grind apart in her churn through the relentless seasons.

  Given the skills he’d learned this fall, Sage felt cautiously optimistic he could extend his food by a factor of two. That’d get him 240 miles before he became another beggared refugee.

  As he watched the half-dead stragglers pick at the burned-out farmhouse, a heavy sigh escaped him. Even with good forage, he’d die if he stayed here much longer. The winter would commit, the winds would embolden, luck would weaken and his life force would dribble away into the cold earth. His cave would become his tomb if he stayed.

  The farther he ranged to set rabbit snares, the more likely he’d kick over a nest of refugees with enough spunk to hit him over the head with a rock or stab him with a knife. Eventually, he’d be discovered and he’d have to defend himself.

  If the refugees caught him, they’d kill him for his backpack and his rifle. They might even eat him. He’d seen that recently too. Cannibalism. Human bones picked clean. Most of
the refugees from the interstate had already surrendered to hunger, violence and disease. They were a peril slowly resolving itself—a self-licking ice cream cone, as his dad used to say.

  Sage hung the binoculars on their harness around his neck and looked about, making sure he hadn’t been spotted by vagabonds. He let out another deep sigh and lingered for a moment, grieving the fate of the Hollands.

  He cinched the sternum strap on his backpack and trudged east across the fields paralleling Highway 12. Even walking the dirt roads near the interstate could lead to a confrontation. With only a slight crescent moon, he couldn’t travel at night yet, which would’ve been his preference.

  Fortunately, the crop land of eastern Washington was crisis-crossed with irrigation canals. Walking in the deep irrigation ditches seemed the best compromise between speed and security, even though the route wasn’t always direct. He could pick his way along the frosty, ice-pocked bottoms of the empty canals and generally follow the highway toward the unwavering base of the Blue Mountains. The farmlands of Eastern Oregon beckoned beyond, but the climb might take his life. He gave himself fifty percent odds.

  The agricultural communities on the other side of the mountains called to him. Not just for resupply, but as a chance to prove his worth. As Sage moved along the gridwork of frozen canals, he pictured himself as an ancient, wandering young man; cast between huddled caverns and riverside hovels. At the dawn of time, teenage males probably wandered these same wildlands in hopes of finding a cluster of humanity that might welcome their hearty hands and willing souls. If, perchance, a young lady caught the eye—one who hadn’t yet been claimed by a seasoned, mature man—so much the better. Young men had probably always burned with a desire to arrive, to contribute and to mate, and it had propelled them into the frozen unknown for aeons.