Honor Road

by Jason Ross

  Cameron looked his brother in the eye. “This is my family now. Ruth and all five kids. I made a promise.”

  Tommy nodded. “Maybe you’ll tell me your long story too. Honestly, brother, I’d given you up for dead. The kind of man you were when you left Anaheim...that kind of man doesn’t last long out here.”

  The words stung, but the sting meant little against all he’d lost, and all he’d seen destroyed.

  “I’m not that man anymore,” Cameron admitted.

  Tommy stood up from the metal bench. “I can see that. Unfortunately, all that grit landed you in the middle of an even-bigger shit-storm. Sorry ‘bout that.”

  “Don’t apologize. Nothing’s guaranteed anymore. We eat sandwiches when there’s sandwiches. Tomorrow, maybe there’s nothing. Every day is a gift.”

  Cameron helped Ruth untangle herself from the metal picnic bench and round up the kids and their mess. He herded his family toward the pickup truck, now full of gas.

  He wondered what it all meant. All of the children had survived. His and Isaiah’s. Every one.

  For thirty thousand years of human survival, protecting the children had been enough. As Cameron climbed into another man’s truck, with another man’s wife, he regarded the kids crammed into the old pickup. At last, their bellies were full, and for the moment they were safe.

  He counted that as a win.

  23

  Sage Ross

  Zumwalt Prairie

  Wallowa County, Oregon

  * * *

  It was the brightest morning Sage had ever seen, and he’d forgotten his sunglasses. The snow sparkled for ten miles in every direction.

  Aimee Butterton stood by his side, dressed in a snow suit and wearing snowshoes. They’d been working their way close enough to the elk for Sage to attempt a shot with his 30-30, but so far, they’d bumped the herd twice without getting within three hundred yards.

  Their next gambit would be to push the herd toward another hunting party farther up the slope of the Zumwalt to the north. Maybe the elk would hit those guys’ wind, double back and run past Sage and Aimee. There were six elk herds they could see from their location and ten hunting parties working them. The elk would eventually get harassed enough to filter into the forests at the edge of the prairie and disappear for the day.

  He and Aimee had permission from Wallowa to hunt the morning, so it’d be now or never. It was mid-January and Wallowa County had graciously offered permission for Union County hunters to cull the elk herd to reasonable numbers. Union County needed meat to hold them over through winter and spring, when their own cattle would be ready to butcher, so Wallowa gave them permission to take a thousand elk. It’d put a big dent in Union County’s need for fat and protein.

  “You’re going to have to shoot,” Sage said. Aimee’s father’s rifle could reach a lot farther than the 30-30.

  “You sure?” Aimee asked with a tilt of her head.

  “Yes. Obviously.” Sage couldn’t entirely conceal the irritation in his voice.

  “You okay?” she asked as she shucked a round into the 30-06. She handled it with ease and familiarity—glancing down to check for brass as the cartridge slid home. He hadn’t asked, but he was sure she’d killed deer and elk many times before.

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice flat.

  The elk turned when they caught scent of the other hunting party, and they angled back across the rolling prairie. They looked like they might come within four hundred yards.

  “If they come close enough, you take the shot,” she said.

  That wasn’t going to happen. The elk had seen them before and elk weren’t stupid.

  Sage, on the other hand, still felt pretty stupid. He’d been used by a crooked cop, a disgruntled daughter, a housewife spy mastermind and an affable rancher. As down-homey as they all seemed, they were all serpents and he had been their prey. He understood why they’d done it, but it was a thing, now, between he and Aimee. Deep down, he found that being played like a wandering puppy did not make him hot like a hound dog. Quite the opposite.

  Commissioner Pete had used him for good cause, but Sage’s life had been on-the-line the whole time, and it’d been without his consent. If they’d told him what they were up to, he might’ve helped. At least, he’d like to think he would’ve helped. To say he felt butt-hurt would be an understatement.

  “I don’t think this is going to work out, Aimee.” Sage didn’t know how else to express his feelings of helplessness and betrayal.

  Aimee looked him in the eyes with sadness, but not surprise. She nodded and turned back to the approaching elk. They’d picked their path and the herd was committed. They’d give her an opportunity.

  Sage and Aimee slid out of their backpacks and set them on the snow as a bench rests for her to steady her rifle. It’d be a long shot—at least three-fifty. She’d take it prone.

  “I don’t blame you. What we did to you wasn’t cool,” she whispered. The elk already knew they were there, but they’d cut close enough anyway. They had no other option.

  Sage grunted. It didn’t really matter. He couldn’t go back to Union County without risk of reprisals from what was left of The Five. He wasn’t welcome in the Butterton home now. Mrs. Butterton blamed him for Captain Chamber’s arrest. It wasn’t clear if she knew about Aimee’s part. Mrs. Butterton would forgive blood a lot faster than she’d forgive him.

  Sage lived with the Lathrop family now on their ranch in Wallowa, and he’d be there through the winter. The big snows had begun, one or two a week, and the risk of travel toward Utah had escalated beyond reason. He could set off again in the spring—strong and healthy.

  The elk spread out in a single-file line and side-hilled across the slope between the couple and the other hunting party.

  When the elk reached the closest point, Aimee settled into the scope, let out a slow breath and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle roared, then settled on the packs. A cow elk stumbled, turned around once, then fell sideways onto the snow. The herd danced in circles, confused, then the lead cow tucked her head and trotted forward, continuing on their way. The others stepped around the fallen companion. The diminished herd loped toward the tree line, then disappeared.

  Aimee looked up and smiled. The elk was her family’s only meat for the duration. It was fortunate she’d put one on the ground, given that their former patron was now locked in the Wallowa County jail.

  “Please tell your mom I helped with this,” Sage said. “I care about you. Your family’s hospitality meant a lot to me.”

  Aimee nodded. “She’ll come around. Chambers wasn’t good for her.”

  Sage nodded. One part of him wanted to argue—to rail on her for not trusting him with the truth. He felt like he’d played the part of one of the bad guys, but he should’ve been one of the good guys. He blamed Aimee, partially, for him coming down on the wrong side of the raid.

  The other part of him knew they’d been struggling for their own survival and using any means necessary to achieve it: Chambers, Commissioner Pete, Butterton, and even Sage Ross, none had behaved with any particular nobility. They were all serpents when it came down to it.

  Sage would have to live with his doubts and his guilt. Arguing with Aimee would achieve nothing. All that mattered, really, was the meat.

  Nourishment. Survival. Spring.

  “I’ll bring up a snow machine,” Sage said, instead of arguing.

  Aimee smiled. “I’ll get to work quartering her out.”

  Sage snowshoed toward the machines. They’d dragged an empty sled behind for just this purpose. When he got a hundred yards away, he turned around and watched her. Aimee hung the rifle over one shoulder, her pack over the other, and her slightly-larger-than-his ass worked hard, stomping up the rise toward the dead animal. She reach it, set down her pack and gun, dug into the bag, then plunged her knife into the hide, unzipping the belly like a duffle bag.

  He would’ve loved to stay and watch her—a woman o
nly a few generations removed from the women who settled this valley in the wake of Lewis and Clark. Aimee would need his help in a few minutes to roll the elk over to get to the other side, so he couldn’t tarry. He set off again for the snow machines, thinking about the women of the frontier. He’d always imagined them as beasts of burden, doing the homestead work, caring for the children, and keeping house while their men hunted, fought and lead the way, but now he wondered if that was even remotely true.

  How many times had those frontiersmen looked up from their adventures only to realize they’d been nothing more, really, than puppets on a string? Servants to a wiser clan?

  Sage stopped again on the next hill. Aimee wedged her shoulder under it’s blood-streaked rump, pushing with her legs to get the three hundred pound beast rolled over far enough to pull back the hide covering the elk’s rear quarter. She struggled competently in her own world of hide, snow and blood.

  He shook his head in amazement. She’d lied to him, cajoled him and kept him on track with a plan only she and her aunt fully understood. She’d taken down a powerful man, with a militia army of hundreds. Then, just now, she’d killed an elk twice her weight and set to quartering it without even glancing around for help.

  Would he ever be that strong?

  He knew that he probably wouldn’t. But the human race would go on—carried on the shoulders and in the hearts of the true warlords.

  24

  Mat Best

  Clear Lake Bog

  McKenzie, Tennessee

  * * *

  Four weeks later

  * * *

  It looked like cold, miserable work to Mat. Two hundred of Dr. Hauser’s people stood butt-deep in the bog, pulling cattails up from the roots and loading them onto rafts made out of empty milk jugs. Every so often, they shouted and flailed after dislodging yet another cottonmouth. The swamp must’ve been infested with them.

  “Can they eat those?” Mat asked Gladys Carter.

  “The snakes or the cattails?”

  Mat smiled. “I know they can eat the snakes, but is there really any nutrition in the swamp reeds?”

  “Some parts of the cattail, sure. They can eat it raw or dry it, grind it and make flour.” She shifted around on her walking stick. “It makes more sense to feed the cattails to the pigs, though. The pigs eat the whole thing—root, leaves and all. A human can only digest the tender center of the root.”

  “Look who’s becoming the resident biologist,” Mat joked.

  “Naw, that’d be Susan Brown. Biology was my minor.”

  Mat had come out from town to visit the swamp lands to see how Gladys was healing. Her breath came with obvious difficulty. She moved like a fawn with a broken leg. It was anyone’s guess if she’d recover from the lungful of anthrax and mustard gas.

  “So, we trade the refugees our pigs for their cattails? Explain that to me. The Tosh Farms guy told me, but I didn’t quite follow.”

  Gladys smiled, obviously proud of what they’d worked out. “We trade them five piglets on credit. They raise them on cattails and give us back a two hundred pound pig—or they will when they have them fattened up. Then Tosh farms finishes the pigs with a couple weeks of grain.”

  Mat understood but felt like he should keep her talking. He’d heard somewhere that having a purpose gave sick people a reason to heal. Gladys had taken the Rat War harder than most, and she’d paid a bigger price as well.

  The townspeople buried almost a thousand dead refugees in a mass grave on Carroll’s field. The guilt and the shame of it was almost more than the town could bear. Down in the bog, many of the cattail pickers were townsfolk practicing a wet and painful redemption for Jim Jensen’s sins.

  Gladys had taken part in both the Brashear wood massacre and the Rat War. She wasn’t about to blame it all on the pedophile. They’d all lost their way, to one degree or another.

  Gladys must’ve read his mind. “I still can’t figure out how our imagination so utterly failed us,” she lamented. “We were surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of wetlands, chock-full of cattails. We had the piglets. Tosh euthanized an average of fifteen percent of their piglets because they didn’t have the space in their barns to bring them up. Refugees were starving and raiding while we were sitting on a calorie machine. An acre of cattails raises up forty pigs, and we have thousands of acres of the stuff. The swamps are so hard to harvest, we never considered it. The refugees could’ve been considered an under-utilized workforce instead of a threat. Piglets plus cattails plus refugees equals survival—for all of us.”

  Mat overheard a lot of hindsight lately: we should’ve thought of the cattails before. We should’ve known that Jensen was molesting his step-daughter. We should’ve put down our guns and seen the refugees as human beings.

  “Us and them,” Mat agreed.

  “What’s that?” Gladys asked with genuine interest.

  “Us versus them. It’s easy to see the world like that. It feels kinda right, but it gives a person tunnel vision. When you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail.”

  Gladys inhaled, closed her eyes and nodded. Mat wondered what effect remorse had on her healing. At least she was moving around outside, in the winter sunshine, breathing fresh air, and doing something about her personal guilt.

  Mat saw a flash of color down in the swamp, among the slogging, heaving workers.

  An Afghan wedding gown? A bright orange dress?

  No, he decided. It was just a guy in an orange road worker’s jacket. The people around McKenzie struggled together to survive. At least for they day, nobody would be killing anybody.

  Gladys described the work, “Susan thinks they’ll produce a hundred pounds of pork to every seven hundred pounds of cattail. Hauser’s people are eating the center part of the shoots for now, and feeding the rest to the piglets. We’re advancing the refugees ten fattened hogs per week, just so there’s a little meat in their stewpot. That’s what passes for a small business loan these days.” Gladys smiled at her own joke.

  “How many refugees are in the program?” Mat got to the second reason he’d ventured three miles outside the HESCO barrier. He wanted to understand the threat. They were far from being out of the woods.

  “Dr. Hauser says five thousand have taken the oath. They keep a pretty good record of it. They make them sign their names in a book—give their word of honor not to steal. Even the kids sign it.”

  Mat nodded. It still terrified him; being surrounded by thousands of organized refugees. If Hauser decided to screw them over, it’d be a serious war this time.

  But so far, the raids on the town had dropped to almost zero. Hauser’s ring of organized refugee camps had accepted responsibility for patrolling and turning away refugees who refused to conform to the treaty between the camps and the town of McKenzie. Mat thought of Hauser’s refugees as a three-mile buffer zone of semi-pacified aboriginals. Historically, that hadn’t always worked out for the British Empire, but Mat was willing to give it another try. The Creek Campers had definitely proven themselves worthy.

  Hauser’s group had come through for McKenzie when push came to literal shove, and many of those folks had died or were maimed from exposure to the anthrax and mustard gas lingering on the battlefield. Some of Mat’s men had been struck as well, but nothing like the Creek Campers that fought the refugees hand-to-hand. A quarter of them had gotten sick.

  “Where’s Susan Brown? Is she helping with the pig enclosures?”

  “No.” Gladys began the slow walk to her electric golf cart. “The Tosh people train the refugees on how to raise pigs. They’re trying to remember the old ways of fencing in an austere environment. Susan is in Jensen’s lab synthesizing more penicillin.”

  “Does it actually work?” Mat hadn’t heard good things.

  “It saved my life.” Gladys shrugged. “We used up all the real antibiotics the day Jensen gassed us. Since then, Susan’s been making it out of bread mold. It’s not a strong antibiotic, but it holds the anthrax at bay long
enough for the immune system to do its job. Most of the time, at least.”

  “How’re you feeling about Jensen?” Mat probed. He meant, how are you feeling about ventilating that sonofabitch?

  “I wish he’d survived my bullets and the poison gas so I could beat the shit out of him.” She smiled, but the bravado played across her face like eternal sadness.

  “Candice is going to be okay,” Mat reassured her as he helped her into the driver’s seat of the golf cart. “She’s got a good family now. So does William.”

  “Is that why you came all the way out here? To say goodbye? Mission accomplished for Mat Best?” Gladys’ face showed her disapproval as clearly as if the words were stamped on her forehead.

  Mat chuckled. With this lady, what you saw was what you got.

  He slapped his thigh. “Nope. I’m staying. Through the first of spring, at least. I have brothers and my folks on the West Coast, and eventually I need to go to them. For now, McKenzie’s my home.”

  Gladys smiled, this time for real. Her approval landed just as quickly as her disappointment had fled.

  “Welcome home, Mat Best. It’s about damned time.

  Would you enjoy seeing Honor Road,

  and the White Wasteland series made into a movie or show?

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  Much appreciated!

  Meanwhile…

  Noah Miller

  Walnut Canyon National Monument

  Three Miles outside Flagstaff, Arizona