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

anything in particular about car dealerships. They just happened to dot State Street at regular intervals, and Evan’s team figured out where they kept their keys. It’d been the same with every dealership from Orchard to Murray. The Sales Manager kept a red box on the wall with all the keys. Evan had no trouble picking the locks.

Each night they would park the cars bumper-to-bumper, creating a corridor from State Street to a stockade surrounded by vehicles, four cars deep, at the back of the dealership. Setting up the stockade took the team about forty-five minutes, and the process reminded Evan of a Roman Legion setting up camp, only with the benefit of internal combustion engines instead of shovels and tents.

Once inside the stockade, Evan and his men could eat, sleep, drink booze, tell jokes. It didn’t matter what they did. The murderers outside skulked around, scoping them out during the day then coming at them at night. The fight showed up like clockwork every night.

It wasn’t like any of his guys were at much risk of getting killed. His team had state-of-the-art night vision, assault rifles, tons of training and thousands of bullets. They even had an armored vehicle and two up-armored OHVs, not that they’d been necessary.

Every night Evan placed an overwatch shooter on top of the dealership building and then put a team of two guys at the street entrance to the corridor of cars, asleep on the floor of a Toyota van or in the bed of a truck with a shell. They’d block the exit after the party got started. The zombies could’ve crawled over the wall of cars, if they felt like getting creative, but none ever did.

Human beings rarely pushed past the easiest lines of drift. If Evan gave them a clear path, the zombies would always take it. As a precaution, Evan and his guys set the car alarms, so if anyone did climb over the stockade they would light up like the Disneyland Light Parade.

But the douchebags always attacked right down the open corridor. After a few nights of clearing out predators, Evan realized he had become complacent. His “tactical lawn chair” pretty much put any doubt to rest. For a minute, he even considered spray-painting the word “TRAP” on the asphalt with an arrow pointing down the corridor between cars. It probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Even the newest shooters on Evan’s team could see: their little police action had begun to feel like paint-by-numbers slaughter.

Right was on their side; they never killed anyone who didn’t come at them first with lethal intent. But for all that, the sheer easiness of the fight felt somehow wrong.

Step One. The overwatch guy let Evan know how many zombies enter the corridor.

Step Two. Evan deployed his tactical lawn chair and let the zombies three-quarters of the way down the hundred yard corridor of cars.

Step Three. The blocking swung into position.

Step Four. Evan blasted some holes from the tactical lawn chair and bottled them up tight.

Step Five. Evan dodged behind the ferret and the blocking element went hot.

Step Six. The blocking element mopped up.

Step Seven. Evan reset for more zombies.

Rinse and repeat.

This time, after Evan wasted the first zombie, the rest dropped to the ground or tried to cram between the cars in the corridor, which wasn’t possible, since they’d parked the cars bumper-to-bumper. Evan hopped out of his tactical lawn chair and ducked behind the ferret, where the rest of his guys had piled up to avoid stray bullets. Tommy’s blocking team hiding in the van opened up fire from behind, and the night roared with gunfire for ten seconds. Then everything went silent.

Like smoking jihadists in the sandbox, the whole routine made Evan a little sick. He and his men were on-the-move across Salt Lake City and the movement drew attention. Nobody else was moving anywhere in Salt Lake, so by definition they were big targets. It’d been damn strange because they’d seen almost no one in three days—except the zombies attacking them at night.

Evan had expected to see stragglers and strugglers, but instead, Salt Lake hung silent, like a cowboy ghost town. He had to wonder: how were people getting food and water if the streets were dead-empty?

“Dude. I like to win as much as the next guy, but this isn’t cool.” Tommy exhaled, returning from the gunfight. He dropped into one of the camp chairs and propped his AR against the arm rest. “We just executed like nine guys. They couldn’t even shoot back. We pretty much just shot them all in the head. Makes me want to puke.”

The rest of the team filtered back to the circle of chairs around the campfire and sat down.

“Did Billy relieve you guys in the van?” Evan asked, handling work before chitchat.

“Yeah,” Tommy answered.

Evan spoke into his radio. “Everyone reset. Jake, you still good on the roof?”

“Roger,” Jake’s voice squawked over all the radios around the campfire.

“Well…” Evan plunked down his lawn chair near the fire, “I hear you, Tommy. I like to help people too. Hand to God, that’s what I’d prefer doing. Problem is, I don’t know how—other than doing what we’re doing. In all fairness, those ass-spelunkers are trying to kill us. There’s that to consider.”

“Why aren’t we seeing any civilians?” Tommy wondered out loud.

“I haven’t seen a single kid since we left Oakwood,” another guy added.

“Let’s think about this,” Evan talked as the wheels in his mind turned. “There’s no possible way everyone’s dead. No possible way. Human beings are very good at staying alive, and a million people don’t just die in three months. Some of them are dead—we can smell that much—but a lot of them are still alive.”

Nobody around the fire had Evan’s experience in war zones, so they didn’t interrupt.

“There’s a reason we’re not seeing civvies during the day, and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because of knob jockeys like these guys we just wasted.”