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

psychology class. It’d been on “human heuristic fallacies.” In other words: Thinking Habits That Make People Consistently Stupid.

Apparently, the human brain had tripped-up during the process of evolution and it’d developed bad wiring around certain kinds of decisions. People made wonky choices when it came to things like predicting the weather or deciding to fold a hand in poker. The human brain had a penchant for systematically underestimating risk.

Emily felt one of those errors in decision-making coming on strong, and she couldn’t give a shit less.

She couldn’t be exiled. That could never happen to her. She could never be kicked out of her father’s Homestead for breaking the rules.

“The Availability Heuristic.” The term popped into her head from some long-ago memorized crib sheet; “when something hadn’t happened recently, it seemed almost impossible that it could happen at all.”

Her prefrontal cortex lifted up a finger and objected: rare things weren’t impossible.

Case in point: the current, cocked up world, where people starved and shit themselves to death.

Everyone had once thought starving in America was impossible because no living soul had ever seen it happen. But, come to find out, rare does not equal impossible. It was entirely possible that her father wouldn’t be able to protect her from the consequences of flouting the rules.

Her intense love of children had been part of what had gotten Emily accepted into the best schools in the country. Through high school and college, she doggedly served the hungry kids of Africa returning over and over during high school breaks. When she visited them, she went to the wall, loving the children until her sandals literally fell to pieces. On her college applications, her list of “extra curricular service” read like a Catholic nun hopped up on meth. She’d worked tirelessly every year of her life for the well being of children.

The child in her arms would be the second baby she harbored, illegally, with Homestead resources. Technically, the baby wouldn’t be inside the Homestead. The baby would reside at the Schaffer house. The mostly-male Homestead committee could rot in hell if they didn’t like it. While she breathed, she would help suffering children.

Emily found this baby in the Lower Barricade tent city when she’d gone to bring one of the guards a new radio. After handing off the radio, she threw caution to the wind and took a walk among the throng of refugees huddled around the Homestead employment tent.

Emily wasn’t afraid to walk through the refugee city. She’d clocked plenty of time with the poor in Africa and with the homeless of Salt Lake City, and she’d killed more men than she cared to remember since the collapse. Loaded with weapons and practiced in martial arts, she felt like a badass—and she also felt like she should be doing more; more for those who suffered, and more for the children.

Deep in the choke of refugees, she came upon a single mother with a baby. The baby was crying and the mom was unresponsive. Emily had never seen a child like this before, not even in Africa: her thin arms flailed like washrags and her eyes rolled around in her head. Her belly was bloated and hard like a softball. Emily couldn’t find a pulse on the mother. Without considering the consequences, she scooped up the baby and walked away, shielding her from the horror of her mother’s glazed eyes.

Emily found a nook where people wouldn’t see, and fed the baby three peanut butter pouches from her vest. The little one slurped up the food. Emily switched to giving her sips from her CamelBak, filled with water and electrolytes. After twenty minutes of small bits of food and sips of drink, the baby quieted, and Emily confronted a serious problem. There was no damned way on earth she was going to abandon this baby. She’d already slipped one baby into the neighborhood. Why not one more?

In for a penny, in for a pound.

She slid around the back side of the employment tent and fast-walked to her OHV, lowering the baby into the passenger footwell. The baby girl cooperated and didn’t make a peep, probably free from hunger for the first time in weeks.

Emily hopped in, cooed baby-talk, and raced up the road.

Fuck it, she shouted into the wind.

“Mr. Ross,” the radio transmission jolted Jason out of a trance. He’d been staring at his dead computer screen again. “There’s someone from Mill County at the Upper Barricade asking for you. He says you owe taxes.”

Nothing about the statement made any sense, but Jason decided not to ask for clarification. He’d want to see this for himself in any case.

Jason keyed the mic. “I’ll be down in five minutes. Have him hold outside the fence.”

For a moment, a thrill went up his spine. Had the government been reconstituted? He’d happily pay taxes if it meant going back to the days when his biggest worry was another half point of return on his investments.

He looked out the window at the valley below. A hundred little fires still burned, threading up into an indolent cloud of smoke stretching from the refineries to the south to the murky slope of Ogden to the north. Nothing had changed. No column of relief supplies rolled down the freeway. No string of rail cars clacked and rattled toward them with food. No green helicopters thundered across the sky returning order and authority.

Jason kitted up: battle belt, handgun, plate carrier vest and finally, his rifle. He de-coupled the two-point sling and switched his rifle to the one-point configuration. It’d make it easier to drive the OHV.

He headed out of his office and slid into the OHV, roared through the Homestead gates and down the winding streets of the Oakview neighborhood. He thought about the first time he visited this neighborhood before buying the tract of land that would become the Homestead. His first impression had been of a Mormon enclave—a redoubt of American conservatism and clean living. When the chance came to buy