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

‘Clowns to the left of me,

Jokers to the right, here I am,

Stuck in the middle with you.’

Where should they go, folks? Radio me if you’re in-theater and you’ve got a not-so-hot spot for our folks at Bagram. They need a Bug Out Location. Let’s steer them out of the hot zone.”

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

JT heard Jeff had returned home from the state prison, so he searched high and low, eventually finding Jeff in the “Chef’s Kitchen” cooking up something that smelled like a combination of skunk balls and motor oil.

“Mister Jeff,” JT shouted as he came as close as he could stand. Jeff worked in a biohazard suit and a gas mask.

Jeff looked relieved at the interruption, He left the kitchen nook before removing his mask.

“What’s up?” Jeff looked like hammered shit underneath the mask, like he’d been doing speed, drinking moonshine and smoking cuban cigars all night.

“I got that AStar in the air and did a little test flight this afternoon. Old Man Burke hooked me up with a proper charge on the battery and bam! we got ourselves an air force.”

“We have an air force? Can the Air Force even function without air conditioning?” Jeff asked. JT had served as a TACP, an air force ground fighter who imbedded with Special Forces units to coordinate air strikes. He’d had very little exposure to air conditioning during his military service, but slams against the “chair force” were to be expected.

“Hardy-har-har,” JT rolled his eyes. “Do you want an eye in the sky or not, ground pounder?”

“Yes,” Jeff conceded. “I would enjoy a little air support, if you would be so kind.”

“I did see something up north. Have you guys made contact with Ogden?” Ogden was the northernmost city along the Wasatch front.

“We haven’t heard squat from Ogden. I figured it for a hole in the ground like every other city.” JT had Jeff’s undivided attention. “What’s the news?”

“For starters, they shot at me over Ogden. I didn’t get a close look, but the fact that there were fifty guys in one place shooting at the same helicopter should tell us something.”

“Did you take any rounds?”

“No. I was already pretty high. I can’t say for sure, but it looks like they’ve fortified the city by dragging train cars in a big circle. The place looks like a forward operating base. Hill Air Force Base is inside their perimeter.”

“Remind me,” Jeff asked. “What kind of aircraft do they have at Hill?”

“I don’t know. I’m assuming they have F16s and a bunch of utility aircraft. I didn’t see any helicopters. Probably no Warthogs. Nothing scrambled to intercept me. Maybe they’re still figuring out the logistics to get aircraft flying. It’s a bitch without full support teams and I doubt they have ammunition anyway. We haven’t seen anything in the air for months.”

Jeff pulled his gas mask back on. “We’ll worry about Ogden later. We’ve got problems enough for now without borrowing new ones. Get your helicopter ready for war.”

Jeff hadn’t slept more than two hours in three days. His newest plan against the fundamentalists had more holes in it than Bin Laden. Jeff was the only guy who could plug them all, so he worked night and day. At some point, he’d need to bank up some sleep so he could command the battle.

He spent all evening in the Homestead’s chef’s kitchen, cooking chemicals and organics. It was the only place with a working overhead fan. The toxic burn in the air drove everyone out of the wing of the house and Jeff worked alone, in silence, oblivious to the outside world. He wore a full hazmat suit, complete with a biochem mask, filters, gloves and even shoe covers. The air became so noxious that he’d been forced to set up a plastic membrane to separate the chef’s kitchen from the rest of the house.

Around two in the morning, he nailed the recipe of yellow paste then went into full-scale production. By seven a.m., he had two, six gallon vats of the chemical weapon. As Jeff loaded the vats into the cargo bed of his OHV, the sunrise warmed the gray sky over the Wasatch, turning the clouds yellow. He needed to run the slurry down to the new machine shops at the bottom of the hill.

As soon as he’d returned from the county line, Jeff ordered his men to expand the Lower Barricade to encircle two light industrial machine shops. It created a funky bulge in their tidy, square perimeter, but if they were going to build weapons, they’d need more shop space than the Homestead could offer, and Jeff didn’t want to monkey with explosives so close to women and children.

Teddy hauled the Homestead’s two largest diesel generators downhill the evening before. It still only allowed them to run two or three machines at a time, but he’d designed the claymores and IEDs to utilize common hardware, so the amount of machining would be minimized. Even so, making five hundred of anything—even easy parts—was its own brand of difficult. Jeff needed all hands on deck to build the munitions required to stop a two or three thousand man army, if that was even possible.

During the two months between massive civil disorder and the flu, the Homestead had actually done a lot of trading for salvage. Zombies scavenged stuff for the Homestead, and they did it for payment in bread. Jeff hadn’t been forced to send any of his own guys on “trade missions,” which he knew from experience could be dicey in the barbarian world.

Instead, Jeff could slap anything he wanted on the big white board at the Upper Barricade, and hungry zombies would rummage it up for him—usually in a day or two. It was always a balls-to-the-wall competition for the zombies to see who could get the trade goods to the Homestead first and get paid. It’d been like Jeff’s own caveman Amazon Prime.

Jeff was a hoarder at heart,