Honor Road

by Jason Ross

Noah Miller would either disintegrate in a mile-high fireball or wake up in another life with his wife and daughter. Either way, in the next few minutes, his story would end.

  He revved the 650 horse engine of the dune buggy and it growled like a two hundred pound panther. Even in the face of oblivion, he grinned. A man couldn’t help but rejoice in fine machines. Like a Greek hero, he would cross the river between life and death surrounded by treasure: a $130,000 carbon-fiber dune buggy, a $50 million tactical nuke and a half-full bottle of Leadslingers whiskey.

  The carbon-fiber, supergrade plutonium, kamikaze dune racer would fly off the mountain, into the heart of Flagstaff and vaporize the enemy forever.

  Noah wasn’t concerned with his own death. No thoughts of his own fate tormented him as he thumbed the red, plastic cover on the detonator, up-down-up-down-up-down. There were hundreds of American slaves in Flagstaff and his brother-from-another-mother, if he was still alive, would be down there.

  Noah had duct-taped the detonator to the chrome-plated stick shift of the Tatum Dragon—an immense dune buggy once the privilege of men with more cash than good sense. He’d traded fifteen gallons of gas and an MRE for the buggy.

  The taped-up detonator was the size of a paperback novel, with a red, plastic cover over a toggle switch. The switch woke the detonator and the clacker-bar grip made it go “boom.” Noah had been fiddling with the red cover as he hauled ass across the Arizona desert, circling the town of Flagstaff like a vulture hunting for a way past the coyotes.

  Up-down-up-down-up-down.

  Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.

  Three days before, Noah and his men smuggled the cylindrical, three-foot-long Tomahawk nuke from Ellis Air Force Base, where the U.S. government had hidden it in an underground bunker. The remnants of Ellis command had joined the Arizona resistance after the battle of Dry River Refinery. They’d followed the cartel army back to Flagstaff, and later sent Noah to collect the tactical nuke from the Air Force base.

  With the warhead and the buggy, Noah would slag the narco invaders, garrisoned in Flagstaff, along with hundreds of innocent Arizonans. It wasn’t the first city Noah had annihilated, but it would be his last. At least this time he’d die with them.

  Up-down-up-down-up-down.

  Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.

  There had been a lot of hoopla about which lives mattered, back in the Stupid Days before the collapse.

  Black Lives Mattered. Blue Lives Mattered. Trans-pedo-nose-pierced Lives Mattered. All Lives Mattered. Noah couldn’t remember the whys and wherefores of the ceaseless, clickety-clack arguments on the internet. He did remember the fat, comfortable fools who argued. Half of them were dead now, at least in the Southwest. He didn’t know how many had died in the cities back east. Maybe all of them.

  In the Stupid Days, they’d all but forgotten about slavery—consigning it to the wood pile of history. But just four months after the world face-planted into its own briar of selfishness, technology and limp-dick comfort, slavery came flying back into vogue, like the Bee Gees and bell-bottom pants.

  An off-color crop of freedom fighters had sprung up in Arizona and they chased the slavers into the soon-to-be-radioactive heart of Flagstaff. Now, Noah and hundreds of others would die to end slavery. Hopefully, the next time America wrote history, it would remember better.

  In the immortal lark of the movie Team America, World Police: “Freedom isn’t free. There’s a hefty, fuckin’ fee.”

  Indeed.

  Noah gunned the engine, punched the shifter into gear and popped the clutch. His head slammed into the headrest. The tires clawed at the dirt and the front end danced with ferocious power, threatening to take flight. In a fury of gravel and dust, Noah Miller yee-hawed as he rode the warhead toward both victory and death.

  Nine Weeks Earlier.

  * * *

  Black Panthers

  Nackards Corner

  Phoenix, Arizona

  * * *

  “I don’t see no white militia, the boogie boys, the three percenters and all the rest of these scared-ass rednecks. We here, where the fuck you at? We’re in your house... let’s go!”

  Black Panthers, Facebook post, October 6th, Black Autumn

  * * *

  Willie Lloyd had no clue why he was shooting at the cops, except that they always shot at the cops and the cops always shot at them.

  Hell, he wasn’t even sure the dudes across the boulevard, hiding behind the CVS Pharmacy were cops at all. They used to be able to tell the cops apart because of the chunky mustaches and the 1950s haircuts. Now, two months into the Boogaloo, everyones’ hair and beards were shaggy. It was like Bible times. But Willie could tell which dudes where his brothers, ‘cause they were black, shaggy or not.

  That pretty much summed it up. His boys were black and the boys on the other end of his gun barrel were white. Not that the cops had much to fear from Willie Lloyd—bossman of Black Panthers, Phoenix faction; Willie Lloyd couldn’t shoot for a damn. He’d been a felon since he was nineteen, but he was no hard-ass gangbanger criminal. He’d gotten rolled up in some trouble with his big brother and that’d been enough to give him a criminal record. When you had a felony record, carrying guns became as risky as carrying dope. After his short stint in prison as a kid, he pretty much followed the instructions given by his parole officer, which included no guns. Willie had joined the apocalypse not knowing a mag release from a meatball.

  In the last two months, that had changed. He had a lot of guns now, plus a couple hundred soldiers. Willie and a handful of his men were in another skirmish with the cops—the kind of firefight where nobody really focuses on killing the other guy, Bullets fly like insults; lots of noise but not a lot of physical contact.

  Six shaggy-faced white men busted out from behind the CVS and ran full-tilt across Southern Avenue. They ducked behind the burrito joint and bullets chewed at the tan stucco behind them.

  They were definitely cops. They sprinted like a bunch of defensive linemen—short, fat and squatty. All butt, no body—as his boxing coach used to say. Phoenix cops had either been pumping a lot of iron or taking ‘roids. Most of them were fire plugs with shoulders that ran up to the bottom of their jaws instead of stopping at the base of their necks.

  Willie waved five of his guys back to the Ranch Market. When they dipped through the the store, they’d grab a few more brothers and head off to flank the burrito place. This wasn’t the first time they’d done this dance with the cops. They did it every two or three days. The cops wanted to push the Panthers out of the Ranch Market. It was an attempt for supplies, like every skirmish these days. Willie sheltered twenty families in the Ranch, along with fifty black soldiers. They weren’t going to be driven out by a handful of cops. The cops were wasting their time.

  Little by little, Willie’s men came out to join the fight. In no version of this story were a dozen cops going to overrun them. His boys would trade rounds until the cops got the picture. Nobody needed to die to figure that out, but accidents happen when guns are involved. He wished he could just tell the cops and save them the bullets and the grief. Cops were suckers for doing things the hard way.

  Willie and the Panthers owned the CVS pharmacy as well as the market, but it was lunchtime and all but one of his lookouts had beat it over to the Ranch for lunch. His last remaining dude on top of the pharmacy lobbed rounds over the side of the roof, but three of the cops were keeping his head down pretty good. Willie would have to position a guy on top of the strip mall behind the pharmacy after this skirmish—another ring of defense.

  Willie countered every move the cops made. It was like playing rock-paper-scissors with guns. He win again, and then they’d come back three days later with “Okay, best out of seventeen?”

  Each day, he and his Black Panther boys strung out further around the neighborhood. They currently held down four little malls, a school and a water tank over on Baseline Road. His men and their families had already eaten up most of the food
in the Ranch Market. They’d soon need to find another place to scavenge. Willie worried that they wouldn’t find it this time. In Phoenix, two months after the collapse, scavenge had become scarce, and there were a lot of dead bodies to prove it.

  Most died inside their homes instead of in the streets, which didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Phoenix homes were hot-as-hell without air conditioning. Even with all the windows open in December, they were hot boxes during the day. People had resorted to removing big chunks of their roofs so their homes could breathe. These days, most anyone still on their feet had fled the city seeking water. Those who had stayed were bulging corpses, splayed out in their beds, naked and stewing in their juices. There wasn’t anywhere in Phoenix a man could go without smelling them.

  The Harbor Freight next door to the Ranch Market had been pretty damned useful, and Willie would hate losing it when they moved on. The cops had no way of knowing the market was almost tapped out. They risked their lives over empty shelves.

  “Yo, dawg.” Will’s nineteen-dollar WalMart radio beeped then chirped. They still hadn’t figured out how to get the radios to stop chirping before every transmission. They’d thrown away the instructions.

  “How many times I gotta tell you: we don’t know who you mean when you say ‘dawg.’” Willie explained into the radio. A smattering of rifle fire popped around the burrito joint. Gunfire was so common these days that it’d become like a barking dog; no big deal.

  “Well, whatcha want me to call you? You are da Big Dawg.” Chirp.

  “Just call me Willie.” Chirp.

  “Then dey know your identity.”

  Willie sighed. He had twenty IQ points on most of these guys. That’s why they’d put him in charge. But, sometimes, it was painful being the smartest guy. “What do you want, Mo?”

  “Them cops is backing off.”

  “Good. Send someone for your lunch, and hole up inside the Harbor Freight in case they rally.”

  This was getting old. Even the adrenaline of a gunfight barely got his blood moving. It’d been weeks since anyone had even taken a bullet.

  They skirmished with the cops. They skirmished with the Arizona State Militia. They even skirmished with the damned Neighborhood Watch, before they split out of town. Food was running out and the threat of the Mexican cartel hung over all of their heads. It’d been weeks since they’d seen a convoy through their hood, but that didn’t mean the cartel was gone. They’d come back, and he wouldn’t stop them with his ragtag bunch of brothers. Aside from Terrence and maybe Mo, there wasn’t a street soldier in the whole group. They’d all been workaday, middle class black Americans when everything went to shit. Willie drove a forklift for Costco. They called themselves Black Panthers because what the hell else were a bunch of black guys supposed to call themselves? Willie had voted for Trump. Twice. But that was then and this was now.

  “Yo. Boss Dawg,” the radio chirped again. It was Mo. “One of ‘em is comin’ out with a white T-shirt tied to a pipe.”

  “Hold up, Mo. I’m coming. Don’t shoot him.” Willie jumped up and trotted back toward the Ranch Market. He used the tire shop like a bullet shadow between him and the pharmacy, where the cops were still trading rounds with his man on the roof. He ducked into the Ranch, went out the back door of the breakroom and ran around to the side of Harbor Freight. Mo was there, beside the tan-painted cinderblock wall, watching with suspicion.

  Mo pointed toward the burrito joint. “He stepped back behind the Mexican food place, but he’s still hanging that T-shirt out. You see?”

  Willie used to eat at that place at least once a month. He loved their smoked chicken and cream half-pounder.

  “Come on out. We ain’t gonna shoot ya,” Willie shouted. “Tell your guys at the pharmacy to stop shooting.”

  The cop holding the pole with the T-shirt leaned out then ducked back, probably trying to tease a shot if one was coming. Nobody fired. The skirmish died down and the corner quieted. After a few seconds, the cop stepped all the way into the clear. He waved the flag, as if to punctuate the sincerity of the truce.

  Willie stepped out from behind the Harbor Freight and pointed the barrel of his gun at the ground. They walked slowly toward one another and met in the middle of Central Avenue.

  “What makes you think you can loot the market?” the cop argued when he reached the yellow line in the middle of the street.

  Willie barked a laugh. “That’s what you start with? Bitching at us for looting?” He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Brother, you need to get with the times. There’s those who get and those who get got. That’s it. There ain’t no more looting.”

  The cop shook his head as though Willie was a disappointing teenager caught smoking weed behind shop class. “Those supplies are needed for the war effort. You and your Nubian warriors are burning them up, partying like it’s nineteen ninety-nine.”

  “Oh, dawg. You going waaaay back with your racist smack and your music references. You’re like the un-cool cop on Starsky and Hutch. I’m gonna let it pass because I’m only half black myself. If I was full black, I might have to knock out a few of those pearly whites that make yo mama proud.” Truth was, Willie didn’t give a shit about racism. It didn’t get under his skin. He knew racism when he saw it, and he’d seen plenty, but he wasn’t compelled to correct ignorance. They could just keep on keepin’ on being ignorant motherfuckers for all he cared.

  The cop shifted on his feet, and in that moment, Willie knew everything he needed to know about the two-hundred and sixty pound man. He knew he could do anything he wanted with him.

  When a man got set to fight, he either went heavy on his feet or he went light. This guy planted his feet like an oak tree, and that meant he wasn’t within a country mile of Willie’s fighting class. Reflexively, Willie was already light on the balls of his feet, his knees flexed, his hips fluid and ready to dip and dodge. If Officer TrunkDick took a swipe at him, Willie would drop the gun and have some fun. He’d allow a couple haymakers from the cop, duck around them, do a little dance. He’d bounce around to the big guy’s right—the cop already telegraphed that he was a righty—and then he’d fire off a Willie Lloyd Special. Not that it was all that special; just a three punch combo that ended with a lightning jab to the throat. In ninety-nine-point-nine percent of street fights, the jab to the throat was the spunk-taker, rage-shaker, and friend-maker. Plus it had the added advantage of not jacking up his hand. After ten thousand hours in the boxing ring—in Philly as a kid—street fighting was like cheating to Willie. There were no rules, and the other guy almost never had more than a few fights under his belt. Willie had hundreds. After a fast-as-a-blink combo with the jab to the throat, all but the most skilled boxers would be at Willie’s tender mercy, and he could help them up off their knees, offer a few soothing words, slap them on the back while they tried to breathe and establish brotherly relations.

  Nothing made Willie happier than dominating a man, and then offering him the hand of fellowship. It was where the two sides of Willie Lloyd met: the vicious street thug and the Warrior for Christ. He never felt as at-home as when he was knocking the shit out of a dude then apologizing after.

  But not today. There were too many guns around. There were more cops behind his favorite burrito joint, and there were Panther brothers watching them from behind the Harbor Freight. Either group could punch a hole in Willie, standing in the middle of the street, if things got violent.

  So Willie soothed the angry cop. “Settle down, Hoss. You don’t want to do what you’re thinking about doin’. It won’t end like you think it’s gonna end.” Willie said the words with a confidence born of taking a thousand punches and delivering at least that many in return. Apparently, the cop heard it as intended and his feet un-rooted themselves from the asphalt.

  “What do you mean when you say war effort?” Willie asked.

  “We’re taking the fight to the Mexican cartel in Flagstaff. We’re filling a semi trailer with supplies and meeting up with
the resistance north of here. They’ve enslaved the population of Flagstaff, and once they get their footing, they’ll enslave all of us too. That probably doesn’t matter to you, though. I bet you’re on the bean-slinger payroll.”

  “Oh, I see what you did there.” Willie clicked his tongue and saluted. “You pulled a double racist slur—that takes talent. Your momma must’ve taught you well. So you figure all the mud bloods are working together, because we’re all criminals, and we all don’t give a shit about slavery, so long as we’re not the slaves. That’s some high level intellect at work, Dog. They teach you that strategical thinking in community college, or did you come by it watching CSI?”

  “So you’re asking me to believe you’re not with the drug dealers?”

  “We’re not cartel. Would we be barricaded in a Ranch Market eating cornflakes for dinner if we were cartel?”

  The cop snorted.

  Willie’s mind churned. He’d heard rumors about the cartel wintering in Flagstaff, but this was the first he’d heard of a coordinated defense mounted by American patriots. Truth was, his group was running out of options. The markets would run out of food in a couple weeks, give or take. Every new market, distribution center or restaurant they’d probed recently had been ransacked or was occupied by another gang. It’d been ten weeks since the stock market crash and Willie could see dark at the end of the tunnel. He had a lot of mouths to feed, and the city was nearly scavenged out. He needed a longer-term solution.

  “So are you going to let us into the market or not?” The cop stabbed a thick hand toward the front door of the Ranch.

  “Naw. That ain’t going to happen. Our families are in there,” Willie said. “Tell me where the fight against the cartel is going down and we’ll think about it, but we definitely ain’t fighting under no cops. I need to know what you boys got planned and we’ll do what we’re gonna do. Tell me where and when we meet up.”