White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

Evan bobbed his head. “Well, sorta. It was a long quarantine in the Expo Center, and we were bored as hell…”

“Do you have the bottles, at least?” Jeff interrupted.

“Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. We kept the empty bottles. We have all the drugs too. I don’t even know what half that shit is. We took it with us so it wouldn’t create more crime in Zombietown. I mean, we weren’t going to do the drugs or anything.”

In truth, there might be a little less marijuana in the drug stash than when they seized it, but not so much as anyone would notice.

Jeff waved away the tortured explanation. “We need the booze bottles, filled with water. Get me five or six old pallets,” Jeff turned to Randy, his adjutant. “I need a car—not a truck—all the drugs, and the biggest ghetto-blaster stereo you can find…with fresh batteries.”

It was exactly like a scene from the old TV show MacGyver.

A distressed woman: “Oh my Lord, a Soviet-era warhead is about to explode and its antiquated computer must be disabled or it’ll start World War Three!”

MacGyver: “Hold on! Does anyone have a ball-point pen and a condom?”

Jeff Kirkham was that guy. With Jeff, it always came down to a list of gadgets and materials. Unlike MacGyver, Jeff could bring to bear firearms, ordnance and extreme violence. One could say that Jeff had a much larger “operational toolbox” than Angus MacGyver, probably owing to the fact that Jeff had been a real operator in the real world working for the State Department of the United States of America.

Or the Mormon Church, depending on which episode you watched.

That night, they partied.

Jeff’s team stacked the pallets high, splashed them with unleaded, and put a match to the biggest bonfire Evan had ever seen. The flames rose fifty feet into the air. They’d been instructed to dance around the fire, drinking their fake booze and head-banging like Whitesnake.

They’d opted for Five Finger Death Punch on the ghetto blaster instead of Whitesnake, but the effect was the same—fifty grown men rocking it out like high school dip shits with a crystal clear winter star-scape burning overhead. At some point, a little real booze might’ve made it into the mix. Evan could neither confirm nor deny it.

As the morning light peaked over the Wasatch, Evan got a sunshine finger of “death punch” through his eyeballs and into his throbbing head. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and climbed across the bodies of his fellow partiers. At some point during the evening, he’d tossed his sleeping bag in the back of one of the MRAPs. They’d left Tanya and the kids back at the Lion’s Den, as Wheaton insisted they call the shipping container fortress. Evan had been free to party without feeling sheepish in the morning. He could enjoy his hangover guilt-free.

Four other guys snored and stirred as the hatch door of the MRAP let out a squawk. Evan climbed down and found a bush to water.

Jeff was already awake, nursing a coffee and watching the prison. A tiny streamer of grey curled up from the almost-dead coals of the bonfire. During the night, everything had stilled in Salt Lake Valley and a bracing cold was just beginning to give way to the sun. The inside of the tin can MRAP had been cold as balls.

Being careful not to breath his morning breath on Jeff, Evan stepped up beside his old friend.

“There’s more coffee—still hot—on the hood of the Ferret,” Jeff said. He pointed toward the armored vehicle with his coffee cup.

Evan walked back to the MRAP, dug out his favorite mug, poured himself some morning juice and returned to Jeff’s side.

“How’s this going to play out? Do we hit them at night?”

“Nope. Not this time. This time, we negotiate,” Jeff smiled. Evan knew that smile, and he knew that “negotiation” would almost certainly be the wrong word for what was about to happen.

As a punishment for losing the NVGs, Evan sent Colton to parlay with the criminals. Of all of the team, Colton looked most like a meth-head anyway. He was still at that post-pubescent age where he was skinny as hell. Each of his six-packs had a six-pack.

The parlay had apparently gone well and the hoodlum horde had bought off on deal. Colton trotted back to their position and gave them a “thumbs up.”

“They’re down for the git down,” Colton gulped for air, still jumpy. “They want the drugs more than they want their women. Their exact words were, ‘we can always get more whores—lots more where we got them.’”

Jeff turned to Evan with eyebrows raised, as if to ask, “Good enough for you?”

“Yep,” Evan nodded. “As soon as the women clear the prison, we burn ‘em out.”

They’d sent Colton in with a written offer, so he couldn’t cock it up by running his mouth.

“We have two pounds of black tar heroin, a hundred and fifty bags of white, three pounds of weed, three pounds of crank and two hundred pills of oxy. We want sixty chicks and all the kids you got in trade. Fresh meat wanted!”

Evan added a smiley face after that last line, just to make it extra-creepy. Apparently, the criminals wanted to deal and they’d taken the offer as-advertised.

Jeff and Evan held back more than half of their drug cache and almost all the oxycontin for future trade or medical treatment. They were careful not to offer too much. They needed to get all the women and children out, so they asked for way more girls than they thought the criminals would actually have inside, and they were careful not to make the deal too sweet.

The bonfire party seemed to have convinced the dirt bags that they were another gang and not the cops. Time would tell. Jeff and Evan bet on greed, drugs and garden variety stupidity. Jeff had been an undercover narcotics officer for the DEA for a short time