Honor Road Read online

  He could contribute to a community. If he could feed himself, as he had these last two months, he could help feed others. He ran his hands through his lengthening, brown hair as he journeyed away, forever, from the Holland farm. His ultimate destination would be Utah, but he would mount a mighty struggle against the space in between.

  Sage recalled the promise he’d made to his dad, the last time they’d spoken over the phone. It seemed like years; another lifetime ago, but it’d only been six weeks. He’d promised his father that he would do whatever it took to survive. Somehow, his old man had known the journey would crumble into a gauntlet of terrors. The world had only just begun to burn at that point, but his dad must’ve sensed it falling into a pit of chaos that would devour cities and render men down to blood and grease.

  In that nearly-forgotten world of telephone calls, before the collapse and while still a rebellious teenager, Sage’s word hadn’t meant a hill of beans, so he hadn’t considered his promise overmuch at the time. He’d broken his word to his parents more often than he could count. Now, after all he’d survived, he made good account of his promise, every word. He would claw a living from the nap of the earth in order to survive, but in the ice fields of winter, he wasn’t fool enough to believe he could do it alone.

  Those lonely young men who dwelt in caves and hunted wooly mammoth had undoubtedly learned the same lesson as Sage in the stoney swales of eastern Washington: foraging alone through the winter was a death sentence. Cooperation was the first, elemental tool of survival. Without the ties that bind men to clan, Sage would forfeit his promise to his dad, and surrender his ghost somewhere on the snow-bound plains of Oregon or Idaho. He’d learned enough to be useful, but survival would require much more than skill. He must wrap himself in the threads of civilization—find a tribe, a town, or a family with a fighting chance of survival, and then ally himself to them.

  The entire region—the eastern onion fields of Washington—had been too close to the pandemonium issuing from Seattle and Portland. The frank physics of the internal combustion engine and the size of a tank of gas doomed the Hollands and their farm, along with every hearty family between the Cascades and the Blue Mountains. The death throes of the old, broken society plowed them under. Sage had no choice but to cross over the towering dam of earth that’d held off the blood tide from Seattle. The tsunami of feckless men and their huddled women couldn’t venture beyond the limits of a tank of gas, but with his new knowledge and his backpack, Sage likely would.

  Beyond the Blue Mountains lay a mystery. Sage regarded the snow caps in the distance, peeking over the ledge of his irrigation canal. It’d take him a week to reach the foothills, and he knew he could survive that far. He had less confidence in the five thousand-foot climb over the snow-socked crags, but what lay beyond offered him a chance to reconnect with real people—and to resupply his backpack.

  Sage glanced over his shoulder, hurrying away from the red and orange painted sky. With the icy hands of sunset already pawing at the back of his neck, he searched for a nighttime refuge. He wouldn’t have time to set many snares before sleep, but he would try a few. His own tracks in the light snow, overlaying the tiny tracks of the rabbits, might betray his passing, and attract the human carrion-eaters. He would craft a way for his tracks to lead away from his sleeping den.

  He sighed again, the only complaint he allowed himself these days. Everything in this new, ancient way of life required meticulous consideration. He wondered how many calories he burned just thinking about it all: minimize threats, conserve energy, and reap life-force energy from the land. Survival was a colossal pain in the ass.

  He smiled against his internal bitching. He’d been alone for a long time, and his mind, he supposed, had subdivided into several personalities in order to argue with itself.

  Good God, he swore. He’d give his left nut for someone to talk to.

  He swept a too-long lock of dark hair out of his eyes and kicked a tumbleweed, then chided himself for the wasted energy.

  He spotted the rotted, hanging door of an old root cellar, and in the distance, an abandoned-looking farmhouse. The root cellar had been dug into a hillside, probably fifty years before, ten yards off the irrigation canal. No cars, other than a rusted-out old truck, sat around the farmhouse. Sage thought he might take shelter in the root cellar. Refugees would hit the farmhouse before they’d search the surrounding grounds. He’d hear them and make his escape if it came to that.

  Sage adjusted the straps over his shoulders again and backtracked along the canal bottom until he cut a rabbit trail. He traced it to a den, set two snares, then looped around in the dark, in a spiral pattern, to the half-collapsed cellar. He’d leave enough prints circling his final sleeping place that anyone following would alert him passing by. He’d learned not to walk straight to his bed.

  Surviving alone was a lot of work. He wouldn’t miss that part if he ever found a new home, or God-permitting, made it back to his family.

  3

  Mat Best

  Highway 79

  Northeast of McKenzie, Tennessee

  * * *

  The rats had human faces. Mat Best caught glimpses as they vanished, screaming, under the bumper of his behemoth, deuce-and-a-half truck. His knuckles popped white on the steering wheel. The face of the third rat of the morning flicked from anger to defiance to horror as it grunted and disappeared beneath the army green hood. His rat companions dove off to the shoulder at the last second. They must’ve convinced themselves that the truck would stop or swerve, and that they’d score a tasty meal—maybe a roadside BLT or a ham sammich.

  Not today pals. No stopping this train between here and the slaughterhouse. Mat pretended he hadn’t heard the bump-and-crunch from under the rear tires.

  Highway 79 reminded him of an Afghan goat trail. The Tennessee Transportation Authorities’ incomplete repairs had stripped the road bed to nothing. Heavy rains in October demolished the remaining track.

  The same rains that killed Caroline, Mat churned. The same rains that dumped her bike and gave her a lethal dose of flesh-eating bacteria.

  The jacked-up road and thirty-mile-per-hour speed of the convoy allowed plenty of opportunity for rats to attempt an ambush.

  But not today, rats. Today, you get a giant helping of O.D. green radiator grill right over your filthy mugs.

  Mat was lead security for the convoy—out in front of a livestock hauler full of pigs. The Porky Pig Fun Run, his security team called it. This was the first of two trips slated for the day that’d bring a hundred live hogs into Mackenzie to be butchered, dried and preserved; 27,000 pounds of pork on the hoof. The Tosh Farms complex held thousands more pigs, and they had to be protected-in-place. The pigs were the key to survival for the town of McKenzie—an immense bank of living, breathing, eating, shitting post-collapse wealth. They were also an up-at-dawn security nightmare. Thousands of starving refugees surrounded the farm and the town, knives out.

  Mat’s four-vehicle, seven-man convoy should’ve been sufficient for the pig transfer between Tosh Farms and McKenzie. The convoy team was made up of his best men. Mat was the only guy with actual combat experience in town, and he’d been asked to lead security, which was a lot like being thrown into the middle of a swamp with a pocket knife and asked to eradicate the alligators.

  Seemingly, word had gotten out about The Porky Pig Fun Run. Thousands of rats lined the roadside to watch the truck-loads of meat cross the vulnerable five-mile gauntlet between the “mutual security zones” of McKenzie and the neighboring berg of Henry, population 475. The town of Henry handled the pigs. The town of McKenzie handled the security. That was the deal.

  The rats were castaways from the urban hellscapes surrounding the small towns: Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Louisville. When the economy took the Big Dump, thousands of city people flooded into the Tennessee countryside, where food actually grew.

  The watchers along the road weren’t Mat’s problem. They could have their drooling fa
ntasies about pork chops and applesauce. Today, though, the rats had grown a pair. Mat had never seen them coordinate like this before. It was a ragged attempt, but the new motivation was obvious. Somebody was leading them.

  Up ahead, two rats pushed a big baby stroller onto the road.

  What the fuck? Mat’s foot bobbled on the accelerator, then kept steady pressure.

  “Please don’t be a baby. Please just be an IED,” he prayed.

  Did a tiny hand rise from the buggy? Mat prayed in monosyllables to an unfamiliar god.

  “No-no-no-no-NO!”

  A skeleton-thin man lit the baby buggy on fire, then pushed it, into Mat’s path. It exploded in flame, like it’d been doused in gasoline or lighter fluid. He hit the stroller at thirty miles per hour and the flame blasted in all directions. Mat couldn’t see anything but fire cascading up and over his windshield, but there was no meaty thunk under his tires, no tiny hand slapping against the glass. It’d just been an ingenious, trash-tech IED: an empty baby carriage, and the ploy had almost worked. Mat had to think hard before reaching the conclusion that he hadn’t, actually, shit his pants.

  Would he have slammed on the brakes if he’d seen a baby? Mat honestly didn’t know.

  The buggy engulfed the hood and bullet-resistant glass in flame. Mat worried about the vulnerable wires and hoses under the hood if gas seeped inside. He hoped the wind sucked it all away.

  Would it be weird if a few coke bottles of gasoline killed a military vehicle? Mat had seen weirder things than that over in the sandbox. For now, the truck seemed okay. The engine growled and the road flew past.

  As the smoke cleared, the second phase of the ambush appeared.

  “Fuck me!” Mat gasped as he leaned toward the windshield.

  The highway between the two towns was arrow-straight, except for two curves that snaked between a pair of bogs. Before the first curve, the rats had launched the buggy trick. Past the bend, a line of dead cars suddenly appeared across Highway 79.

  Mat roared obscenities as he stood up on the brakes.

  Three weeks earlier

  McKenzie City Hall

  McKenzie, Tennessee

  Joint Security Committee and Food Committee Meeting

  * * *

  The town of McKenzie, Tennessee, population 3,547, had responded as well as any town could to the collapse of America. They moved straightaway to preserve food, water and energy resources. They even struck a mutual security agreement with the neighboring hamlet of Henry—five miles Northeast on Highway 79.

  Henry, Tennessee had 475 people and 3,500 pigs in various stages of fattening. Securing Tosh Farms commercial hog complex meant the survival of McKenzie. Losing it meant starvation—the numbers weren’t complex.

  “Sheriff Morgan?” The mayor wouldn’t start a meeting without Morgan. Maybe the mayor had always deferred to the sheriff. Mat didn’t know. He’d been living on the East Coast before the Big Nosedive. He’d wandered into McKenzie, weeks before, looking for medical help for his girlfriend.

  Gunmen like Mat were held in awe in McKenzie. Mat had a gun, and a sterling resume as a U.S. Army Ranger, so their unquestioning respect suited him fine. He’d lost the girl to gangrene and ended up with her little brother as his ward. So what if she had turned out to be the love of his fucking life?

  “Sheriff, we’re ready to start.” The mayor smiled and sat down.

  Mat wasn’t clear on how town committees worked. This committee was apparently a mishmash of security people and food people meeting to discuss defense of the hog farms.

  “Protecting an area of operation the size of the pig farms, five miles from town, is probably more than we can handle,” Mat said, launching into his area of expertise. It was what Sheriff Morgan had asked him to cover. “Can we move the pigs into town?”

  “Sounder,” Charles Jones, Senior corrected.

  “What?” Mat asked.

  “A group of pigs is called a sounder.” Chuck Senior was dressed in well-worn green coveralls with a toothpick in his mouth. He looked every inch the swine farmer.

  “How large of a sounder can we move in a semi truck?” Mat asked.

  "We can move fifty butcher-ready hogs in a livestock trailer,'' said Charles Jones Junior.

  Chuck Junior wore a collared shirt and jeans. He carried himself like a businessman.

  “But even if we could move them, McKenzie couldn’t keep them alive in city limits. And we can’t slaughter them all-at-once. There’s nowhere to refrigerate that much pork. If we're going to keep 3,500 pigs—and hopefully at some point breed them—we have to house them where we can care for them: at the complex in Henry. That many pigs can’t live in peoples’ yards. The pigs would get sick and so would the people.”

  Mat raised his hands in surrender. “Alright. Sounds like we’ll be running convoys and patrols between the two towns.” He studied the map spread out on the meeting table. “That’s a five-mile umbilical cord between two secure zones. Chuck Senior and Junior, how many of these farms are there and how far apart?”

  Chuck Senior pointed at the map they’d spread out: “Hogs are spread over six locations within three miles of Tosh, here in the center. That’s the sow farm. That’s for breeding, mind you.”

  Chuck Junior held up a hand and made eye contact with each of the pig farmers in attendance, including a frightened-looking executive in a wrinkled suit from Tosh Farms. “We think we can pull back to headquarters, plus two wean-to-finish farms just outside of town. We’d shut down the others to make a smaller perimeter.”

  “Wean-to-finish?” asked Mat.

  “After a pig is weaned from its mother, it goes to a wean-to-finish farm to put on another two hundred and fifty pounds. Bottom line: we can pull the operation back to a mile-wide circle around the town of Henry. We’ve already started.”

  Mat sucked in a breath and exhaled. Chuck Senior was no country bumpkin. He’d already seen the vulnerability of their situation and taken action, but building a perimeter around a mile circle, plus the four-mile-radius around town, was a security nightmare. The twin towns would be like a Forward Operating Base with a combined eighteen miles of perimeter and a five mile cordon in between, with a steady stream of indigenous threats, numbering in the tens of thousands.

  “What heavy vehicles do we have for convoy duty between here and there?” Mat looked up from the map.

  Deputy Wiggin answered. “Um. There are a few box trucks in town, but I think we can do better. The Feds gave us a deuce and a half. A military truck.” He grinned like a kid. “I’m not sure why.”

  The heavy truck made no sense for a small-town sheriff’s department, but nobody had understood the Federal Government, then or now. It was a homeland security thing, and Mat was now very involved in homeland security. The deuce-and-a-half would be perfect.

  Mat spoke up, “Sheriff? We don’t have veterans with combat experience, right?”

  “Combat experience?” repeated Sheriff Morgan. “Smith and Rickers served. They drove trucks or counted band aids or something. We have Gulf War vets in town, but they’re old as the hills.”

  Mat nodded. “I spoke with Smith and Rickers. They worked convoy duty in Afghanistan, so that’s good. But they’ve never been in a gunfight,” he added. He could see in their eyes they didn’t understand. Driving truck and gunfighting were about as closely related as pet grooming and bull riding.

  The town’s Gulf war vets were over fifty years old by now and probably a few thousand beers past their Best If Used By date. War was a young man’s game. He needed young, experienced combat vets. High school and college-age kids might have to do. Then again, he didn’t have any bullets for training. He barely had bullets for fighting.

  “Roadblock! All stations: run the bastard!” Mat keyed his radio and stomped on the accelerator. He aimed the deuce-and-a-half for the seam between two of the dead cars.

  Four sedans had been parked end to end across the road. If the rats had used twice the number of vehicles in an overlap
ping pattern, Mat would’ve been in deep shit. As it was, he had a pretty good chance of spinning two of the cars out of the way by hitting the gap. The convoy might sail through.

  The deuce-and-a-half hurled into the roadblock and only the three-point belt kept Mat from face-smashing the windshield. Upon impact, his torso yanked back so hard against the harness that his brain smacked around inside his skull. For two seconds, his mind struggled to re-load it’s operating system.

  When he came around, he saw he was through. The deuce-and-a-half had only lost ten miles per hour. Mat had lost five IQ points.

  He lurched around in his seat to check the rearview mirror. The livestock hauler behind him clipped the nose of a sedan. Then the driver, Chuck Jones Junior, massively over-corrected. The rig performed three, ever-increasing swerves until the trailer flipped over. Then it took the cab with it. The engine screamed as the drive wheels clawed at air and the rig slid across the road base on its side. The engine died as the rig skidded to a halt in a storm of gravel and shredded blacktop.

  Mat slammed on the breaks and the deuce growled to a stop. He ground the gears into reverse and stomped on the gas. He roared back to the livestock hauler just as the sheriff’s cruisers skidded up behind it. The rig was like a beached and bloodied whale.

  Deputy Smith leapt out of the cruiser and bounded up the side of the big rig. He reached inside the shattered window and dragged Chuck Junior up and out of the cab. Mat and Deputy Rickers took up defensive positions behind the ruined quarter panel of the truck, scanning the road with the barrels of their AR-15s.