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

him. Jacquelyn wasn’t sure how many people had been told about the underground orphanage at the Schaffer house. The little stowaway had to be kept absolutely secret. If the Homestead committee discovered the women had been feeding and caring for a baby, there would be hell to pay. Jacquelyn doubted that even Jenna Ross could brook the consequences that would befall them if their breach of rules was discovered. The group of women who visited Baby justified their dishonesty by telling themselves they were only giving him a bit of their own share of food, not taking anything from anyone else.

But the Homestead had learned a hard lesson about letting emotions get in the way of survival, and that lesson had cost lives, including the life of Jacquelyn’s husband. Emotion got people killed, and when the group set rules, they were to be obeyed. They had solidarity on that now, with every man, woman and child agreeing to a utilitarian approach to decision-making, one that eschewed emotion in favor of bare bones survival.

They’d been unified on that, until Baby arrived.

Once again, the ladies had found themselves putting their emotions—their love of a stranger’s child—ahead of the Homestead. Ahead of common sense. Jacquelyn felt the weight of that simple truth. She knew they were breaking their word and they were being stupid. The math of survival didn’t lie, and only a fool argued against math.

At the same time, she knew with certainty that caring for Baby was the right thing to do. It wasn’t just the right thing to do in terms of morality, it was the right thing to do in terms of survival. Caring for Baby was more than a right decision, it was a survival decision. She had no idea how she knew that, but she would stake her life on it. In a way, she was staking her life on it.

If Jacquelyn were forced to defend that idea—that caring for Baby was critical to their survival—she couldn’t do it. There were no words to describe her certainty. She knew it exactly the same way that she knew the asshole with a baseball bat had gone straight to hell. She could invent a reason that sounded credible to justify how keeping Baby made sense, but it would be bullshit. The truth was, she just knew.

Her mind floated back to the Gospel of Mary. Perhaps that inscrutable certainty had been what the woman, Mary, had described to Peter.

Jacquelyn shook her head, clearing the cobwebs.

She had seen this phenomenon picking up steam at the Homestead: people were becoming increasingly mystical. They searched for meaning, finding profundity in the smallest coincidences. The psychologist in her head classified it as a predictable side effect of having their culture stripped away like acid on a birthday cake. People turned toward meaning when their coping mechanisms failed. People turned toward faith.

As a therapist, Jacquelyn didn’t exactly have a problem with that, though she’d been professionally trained to discount faith. But people needed meaning. It was one of the tiers in Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs. God and faith fit the bill perfectly, satisfying a person’s drive to connect to a larger framework of purpose; it helped the pain, suffering and loss seem like they might come to ultimate good. Another part of her mind counter-argued, that such a built-in need was unique to human beings. No other animal had it. If humans needed connection to a higher power, maybe they had been created that way on-purpose.

Hogwash.

She was letting herself think in circles. The supernatural hit-and-run she’d experienced in the library had unseated her. She had let the magical-thinking child in her go wild for an hour and now it was splashing in the bathtub, tossing bubbles and flooding the bathroom floor— probably ruining the ceiling below.

It was time for Grownup Jacquelyn to take control and get back to reality. Reality was a new hell where a rosy-skinned mother of twenty-five could be crippled, maybe for life, by a raging asshole with a Louisville Slugger.

Frank W. Todd Toyota Dealership

Murray, Utah

Even in the middle of the city, Evan marveled at how dark the night had become. There wasn’t a scintilla of artificial light, which worked well for he and his recon team. Their night vision goggles, or NVGs, exalted them to superhero, gods-of-war status.

“Tommy. You’re clear to rock. Deal those shitbags out of the deck.”

Tommy clicked once to acknowledge the order. Evan sat back in his lawn chair behind the up-armored OHV, his AR-15 across his lap as though relaxing on a camping trip. He slowly brought the rifle around, still in his lap. He keyed the infrared laser mounted on the foregrip and the laser split the night, cutting a pencil-thin rod between his muzzle and the head of the man stalking up beside a Toyota Tacoma with a samurai sword. Only Evan could see the certainty of the man’s death, since the infrared laser was only visible through Evan’s Gen 3 NVGs.

BOOM!

Evan’s rifle bucked and the side of the man’s head exploded onto the truck, spraying blood and gore across the hood.

“That’ll ruin your modeling career,” Evan quipped out loud.

The ragtag army of zombies that attacked them that night fell for the same trap the Homestead recon team had set every night since leaving home. Fighting American zombies had a lot in common with fighting Islamic jihadists. Even the simplest tactics worked, and they just kept on working.

Evan’s team had leap-frogged from one car dealership to the next, making their way across Salt Lake Valley one dealership at a time, wasting anyone who absolutely, positively had their heart set on murder.

His team cut a wide swath, drawing killers from a quarter mile away. The small group of six men, two light armored vehicles and a motorcycle attracted just about every malicious dickbag within earshot. The main boulevard, State Street, ran like a fat artery down the middle of Salt Lake City and it bisected the majority of the rougher sections of town.

It wasn’t