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

Evan poked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the dead zombies. “If women and kids go out in the daytime, they get raped. That’s how it works in CrazyTown, boys and girls.”

“Could we offer the zombies some of our food? Maybe put it outside as a little peace offering or something? Don’t we have plenty?” Tommy asked.

Evan shook his head. “Here’s the problem: you don’t want to feed the warlords and you don’t want to feed the murderers. The first people to step forward to take aid during a war are usually the ass pirates who are committing most the murder. Happens everywhere.”

Tommy grabbed a plastic bottle of booze by the fire. He took a hard drag from the bottle and dropped back down in his chair. “So how do we help the real people; the ones who are hiding?”

Evan shrugged. “Probably the best thing we can do for them is to keep killing fuck-stick criminals like these mokes. Our crew is like a naked chick and they’re like hungry mosquitoes. We keep hanging our tits out and they keep coming to take a suck. If we blow away most of the Hajjis, I’ll bet these neighborhoods come back to life.”

Tommy hit the bottle again. “These aren’t Hajjis, boss. These are Americans we’re wasting, and we’re slaughtering them like hogs in a pen.”

“I hear you, soldier. They’re some pretty shit-astic Americans, right? They’re some red-white-and-blue spank monsters. Just think of this as our own little eugenics program. We’re culling the bad genes out of the herd. Salt Lake City, say goodbye to all the black-hearted assholes.”

All six radios around the fire spoke at once. “Four more zombies coming down the pipe.”

“Back to work, boys. Time to make America great again.” Evan stood up, grabbed his AR and his tactical lawn chair and headed toward the Ferret.

While he sat in the chair, probing the corridor between cars with his IR laser, Evan mulled over the conversation. This incoming batch of zombies must have heard the shooting from before, and they sure as hell could see the nine bodies on the ground. Apparently, they weren’t completely brain-dead, because they hung up at the entrance to the death trap. It nagged at Evan, since he had two of his men hiding on the floor of a van, just a few feet from where the zombies stood.

Meh, his guys would be okay. His overwatch shooter, Jake, would smoke anyone who tried to get in the van. They still had redundancy built into the plan.

“Zombies are backing away,” Jake radioed. “They look like they’re moving on. Our little party didn’t pass the smell test, apparently.”

“Roger,” Evan radioed back. He would hang out in the lawn chair for a bit longer, just in case the zombies found some new reservoir of motivation. Maybe they would remember some long-forgotten tidbit of Anthony Robbins and try to awaken their mass murderer within.

Evan liked to hear his men challenge the morality of war. Tommy had a heart. The thought pleased Evan, knowing his own heart had taken a few dings over the years. As long as nobody jacked with the chain of command, the idea of war deserved to be picked apart. In his two-decade experience shooting for the Army and then the CIA, Evan reached the conclusion that old, white men were just as guilty of making hasty, abominable decisions when it came to killing as dirtbags. Truth be told, he’d done way more than his fair share of the heavy lifting and he never regretted the moments when he questioned the morality of the killing.

When his own men started bleating about unnecessary killing, Evan gave them some leeway. He indulged the conversation.

A part of his soul cringed about the fireside conversation earlier, when Evan had painted the zombies as criminals. Indeed, most of the zombies attacking them probably were criminals from before.

Most of them. Not all of them. Evan had seen enough human desperation to know that even good people sometimes picked up a gun or a knife to feed their family. Some of these zombies, face-planted into the asphalt, were actually fathers making a fatefully bad decision. They still needed to take a dirt nap, and Evan and his team would send them to nappy time with the same bullets as the hardened criminals, but his guys didn’t need to know that. Let them think of all the zombies as low-lifes. True enough, and it helped get the mission done.

Evan hated himself a little for the marginal dishonesty. He couldn’t help but think of himself as another in a long line of aging white men, justifying the act of war.

In his defense—sitting in his tactical lawn chair—he wouldn’t send other men to do the killing for him. He’d do his share.

5

“What kind of person survived the collapse?

The first to fall were the weak: the elderly, the very young, the chronically ill. Then, the less-obvious victims: those living in large metropolises, people vulnerable to the flu, people living in densely populated countries.

With the most-vulnerable subjects removed from the dataset, we see a pattern shift toward the counter-intuitive. The majority of the most intelligent Americans then died. High intelligence correlated, at roughly seventy-four percent, to death from starvation.

As would be expected, the most intelligent tended to pursue the most-highly specialized occupations and also landed them in careers that divorced them from personal responsibility for their physical welfare. In other words, very few of the college educated had any idea how to grow their own food, start a fire, or shoot a gun. The less education a person had, the more likely they were to understand the fundamental skills of survival.”

The American Dark Ages, by William Bellaher North American Textbooks, 2037

Residence of President Richard D. Thayer

Prophet Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Orchard Heights, Utah

President and Sister Thayer sat on barstools at their granite counter, eating spaghetti and meat sauce in silence.

The brown and black-speckled granite countertop wrapped around the island sink and continued in