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

and he’d accumulated a massive stockpile of “treasures” just inside the Upper Barrier neighborhood. He’d commandeered an abandoned home with double garages to use as his personal stockpile of salvage. He’d shown the stockpile to Tara and she called it “Jeff’s Clutter Cavern.” His hoarding had been a point of contention between them back in the day. Now that he had his own salvage yard jammed into a multi-million dollar home. At least now, Tara could laugh about it.

Well, she used to laugh about it. After the damage to her lungs, her big, Jewish laugh had been strangled back to a low chuckle, and even then it usually collapsed into a coughing fit.

During the time of robust trade, when the zombies still imagined they might survive the dark times through hustle and enterprise—before the flu—Jeff scored the complete contents of a fireworks and blasting manufacturing factory in the west desert. Jeff had placed “Explosives” on the white board first thing. He hadn’t expected much to come of it, but one clever zombie had shown up with a sample box of flash powder, TNT and fuse. Jeff conducted the negotiation personally, and it’d cost him two ounces of gold Krugerrands and twenty 300 watt solar panels to acquire the location of the explosives plant—something that would’ve cost nothing back in the days of Google Earth.

The Homestead went straight to work transporting every last speck of the explosive material back to Jeff’s Junkyard. It’d required an armored column with forty guys to safely transport it across the width of the state, from the west desert wastelands to the Homestead, perched on the Wasatch Mountains.

Flash powder and black powder weren’t ideal for claymores and IEDs. Nothing could hold a candle to the destructive power of C-4 plastic explosives. No other explosive was as stable and as fast-burning as C-4. But black powder, flash powder and good, old fashioned gasoline were nothing to sneeze at, either. Jeff could make do without the military industrial complex. One might even say he was born for it. He had a special gift; the unique ability to cobble together redneck killing machines out of garbage. Jeff’s spirit animal was a three-legged, junkyard pit bull.

Going to war with welded-together scrap wasn’t anything new to Jeff. More and more, this place and this scenario reminded him of Afghanistan. He’d spent years forging rough men and rusty machines into a killing force against the Taliban. After well over a decade of traveling back and forth to AF, fighting continuously, Jeff and his local commandos had invented their own form of overwhelming force. They sucked hind tit when it came to U.S. air cover, fancy drone strikes and C-130 gunships. They’d been forced to turn Afghani salvage into devastating weapons and a lot of those weapons had originally been Russian.

In truth, Jeff liked it better that way. Rugged, rusty and reliable, the three Rs of the modern Viking.

It made Jeff remember the Norseman. He hadn’t seen him in his dreams for weeks, but he thought he’d felt him kicking around in his psyche; guiding Jeff toward wisdom and temperance. Giving him small pushes. Staying Jeff’s heavy warfighter’s hand—like at the prison just before the last few women burst onto the prison grounds.

Secretly, Jeff felt guided, even fated on his path.

As he drove down the mountain toward the machine shops, his mind drifted. The haze of sleep-deprivation had put him on auto-pilot, past the checkpoints and through the Lower Barricade. When he arrived at the machine shop, he couldn’t remember a single second of the drive down.

He backed the OHV up to the loading doc, hopped out and hustled around to the man-door. There had been twenty-four hour shifts of Homestead workmen cranking on armament for the last two nights, and the morning shift change was coming up soon.

Jeff pushed through the machine shop door and emerged into…nothing. The lights were out. The generators weren’t running. The machines sat silent.

“Hello?” Jeff called. His voice echoed. “Anyone here?”

Something rustled and a piece of metal hit the floor with a clang. Jeff drew his Glock and stepped behind an old lathe.

“Mister Jeff?” a voice replied.

“Wali?” Jeff lowered the handgun.

“Sorry. Sorry. I fell asleep. Sorry, Mister Jeff. I looked for you. I couldn’t find you.”

“I was in the kitchen all night. What the hell is going on?” Jeff holstered the gun and waved around the quiet shop. “Where’s the night shift?”

“They’re leaving,” Wali explained. “I tried to find you.”

“Who is leaving, Wali?” Irritation flooded his addled mind.

He’d never been blind-sided in combat. He’d been ambushed plenty, but he’d never been taken by a flanking maneuver in the middle of a fight. This must be what it felt like.

Shock, mystery; struggling to catch up, the words coming too slow.

It didn’t help that Wali spoke rudimentary English. Wali looked like he was gathering his thoughts. Undoubtedly, he was translating from Pashtu into English.

“Teddy. Tye. Benjamin and his sons. Donald Ross. More people too. I don’t remember names.” Wali pushed his hair out of his face and repeated himself. “I tried to find you.”

“Fuuuuuck!” Jeff roared. Wali didn’t flinch. “Where the hell are they?”

Wali shook his head. “I waited here for you. Maybe they’re already gone.”

Jeff whirled on his heels and stormed out of the dark machine shop and toward his OHV. Wali followed and helped him unload the slurry of weaponized chemicals onto the loading dock.

“You want that I come with you?” Wali asked.

“Stay here and guard that,” Jeff pointed to the yellow jugs. “Don’t let anyone touch it, and for the love of god, don’t spill it.”

Jeff didn’t wait for acknowledgement. He jumped in his OHV and drove off, back up the mountain road.

He found Tye loading goats into a livestock trailer on the driveway into the Homestead. It was full-morning.

As Jeff’s OHV blasted through the gates, Tye approached with his hands out.

Tye spoke as soon as Jeff killed the engine. “I’m sorry, bro. I couldn’t find you to talk. This is our last load