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

the freeway, a quarter of a mile out from his battle line and picking their way up the freeway toward a frontal assault on Jeff’s few rows of men.

He perches above the car-choked battlefield with enough elevation to observe the far side of the river—his weakest flank. He jerks his binoculars to the west and surveys the far side of the Jordan River for the fiftieth time. He sees nothing on Redwood Road. Of course, the artillery threat isn’t all fake. Jeff has planted over three hundred pounds of explosives on the sides of Redwood Road, stealing design tips from the IEDs he saw in Afghanistan.

But nobody appears to be advancing on the west side. If they do, Jeff will pull his entire force back into Salt Lake Valley and his set-piece battle will devolve into a guerrilla war of attrition. If he knows one thing about warfare, he knows nobody wins an urban guerrilla campaign. Everyone loses. Maximum violence needs to happen here and now in this mountain pass, if only to avoid a slow bleed for weeks to come.

In his mind, the fundamentalists take the bait hook, line and sinker. They follow the easiest line of drift up the freeway. Their main force slows their march as they creep closer to his line of riflemen, and probably sense his opposition.

Fingers hover over triggers. Eyes search through optics. The valley of the shadow of death is upon them, palpable.

Jeff’s men wait.

The fundamentalists bump closer, one car at a time. The space between cars widens as they close within three hundred meters of the concrete blockade. Jeff has placed over a hundred concrete Jersey barriers in defensive tiers—six layers deep—across the waist of the freeway, over the shoulders, and blocking the frontage roads.

Still, the fundamentalist army closes with their position, and still Jeff’s army holds its fire.

Into the ambush they skitter, like bewildered squirrels toward the trapline.

As the fundamentalists reach the two hundred meter mark, the space between vehicles expands—fewer and fewer vehicles to hide behind. The enemy is forced to pile up thirty, forty, fifty men behind each car. They push forward—driven by the men behind them—but the front men hesitate and move slower. They bunch up. The spacing between cars increases a little at a time, barely perceptible from behind, but increasingly obvious at the front of the army. Two hundred meters away from Jeff’s low, concrete fortress, there are no vehicles to hide behind. A six hundred foot no-man’s land gapes before the southern attackers.

Still, Jeff waits. More and more enemy pile behind the sparse cover on the edge of the gap. Jeff can feel their yearning to charge the gap, and their subconscious awareness that it’s an ambush. He can sense the prodding of their commanders, urging them into a peril none of the leadership can see with their own eyes.

Jeff taps his thigh to a tempo only he can hear. His nervous system buzzes along with the radio chatter. His heart beats in his ear in time with the anxiety of the enemy, now trapped in the roadway. His scalp tingles as the pause stretches, engorges, distends.

He taps his leg to the building rhythm.

Tap, tap, tap-tap…tap, tap, tap-tap.

Jeff exhales a long breath and nods to Zach.

Zach barks into the radio, “Go Alpha”—the go-code to the bank of twenty mortar men

The concussive baseline joins Jeff’s tapping.

Whoompf, whoompf, whoompf! Whoompf, whoompf, whoompf!

Paint canisters filled with napalm hurdle through the air, hanging for eternal seconds in the gray sky. Finally, they lose the fight against gravity and plunge onto the roadway. The blacktop greets them with a baseline of its own.

Thunk, thunk, thunk-thunk. Thunk, thunk, thunk-thunk.

Napalm bursts in giant blooms of chemical syrup, coating cars, the road, the men.

Jeff’s soldiers behind the Jersey barriers open fire and shoot targets of opportunity. They rake the bunched-up attackers with angry lead hornets.

Pop! Zzzzt. Pop! Zzzzt. Pop! Zzzzt.

Zach pushes buttons on what looks like model rocket controllers, which is precisely what they are. He torches off hundreds of massive directional claymores, pipe bombs and IEDs hidden in the cars—built in the Homestead metal shop from scavenged fireworks.

Claymores roar up and down the jumble of cars, discharging tens of thousands of furious ball bearings in and between the vehicles, adding a hammer and ping of metal to the booming thunk of the mortars and the shrieking buzz of the bullets. Small pieces of gasoline-soaked rags flitter from the claymores. They drift to the napalm-slick asphalt, where they give birth to a blanket of flame.

Ka-whoosh!

Flame engulfs the battlefield and sooty, black clouds roll skyward, stinking of man flesh and burning plastic.

The screams of the enemy join the symphony. Their shrieks overtake the buzz of the bullets and the ping of the shrapnel. Their wails of agony carry the symphony into impossible octaves. The reptilian demons come to feast. The gods of Olympus turn their heads to watch. The devil himself stops torturing souls in hell to enjoy the orchestra of suffering.

Men are drilled through with steel. Men broil in napalm. Men’s skin bubbles and blisters without escape from the chemical onslaught. The sudden rise of hell turns even the bravest men back, but it is too late, even for the brave.

Jeff orders the long-shooters to rush forward on the escarpment to the east. The commander replies calmly and moves his men to the lip of the bluff over the I-15, armed with scoped hunting rifles. Their large bore, soft-tipped hunting rounds remove mens’ arms, their legs, the tops of their heads. Almost every bullet fired finds ripe flesh. The trained hunters, laying prone and using glass optics, methodically exterminate prey from above.

Boom. Boom. Boom-boom.

The battlefield wavers as the fundamentalists send two hundred reserves up onto the elevated bench to wipe out the snipers.

Jeff’s hunters face opposing hunters with scoped rifles, so they crawl back behind the cover of concrete, conceding the plateau.

But as the fundamentalist army takes the bench, Jeff radios Evan, holding back on the mountain top. Evan rolls to the cliff’s