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

turning to optimism and then outright respect. Jeff’s accomplishments could not be denied. A man after his father’s heart, Jeff became a strong man too.

Strong as he might be, in the moment when it mattered most, Jeff had come very close to losing his family in a cataclysmic battle against fifteen hundred gangbangers. By the slimmest of margins, his army of two hundred had held them back until the last moment, when a contingent of Jeff’s men showed up with two Ferret armored vehicles stolen from the National Guard Armory. With armor behind them, the gangbanger army ran like rabbits. But they lost five hundred lives and killed thirty of the Homestead.

Jeff had made mistakes—mistakes born from his obsession with control. He’d led the Homestead to a victory of sorts, but he knew in his heart that his mistakes had cost them. He’d picked fights, unnecessarily perhaps, and men had died.

With his ironclad self-confidence on the ropes, Jeff didn’t quite know how to lead anymore. He hadn’t discussed his misgivings with anyone. He was forced to admit that protecting his family was nothing like taking down Al Queda cells or assaulting Taliban compounds. The prices here were higher, the manpower irreplaceable, and the imprint of death indelible. He couldn’t keep losing Homestead people and expect to keep this place together. If they lost this place, they were screwed. There would be no “bugging out.” If they left the Homestead, they would be refugees. In this world, refugees were as good as dead.

The mob incursion into the Homestead had cost them fifteen more lives and three of those lives had been non-combatant women. The Homestead had killed hundreds of intruders, but even in victory, they couldn’t maintain these losses. Every casualty from his defensive force would require at least a month of training and over a thousand rounds of ammunition to replace. That was the bare minimum to get men combat-ready at a basic level. Otherwise, a dude with a gun was almost guaranteed to shoot themselves or a friendly in the heat of battle. War was bad enough, without friends shooting friends.

Jeff trained these men like he had a hundred times before and he played it by-the-numbers. This time, though, the numbers weren’t adding up to the kind of margins he needed. They’d almost lost the Homestead twice in ninety days. Eventually, they would roll a seven, and everyone he cared about would die.

He needed a bigger force and a greater buffer of security around the property, that much seemed clear to him. Protecting the community and his family depended on a half-dozen crucial decisions every day, decisions like the one he now faced.

Should he train up the neighborhood Mormons?

He had decided that he would, despite Jason Ross’ vehement disagreement. He’d take another stab at trusting the Mormon, starting with the members closest to the Homestead. He wouldn’t trust them with his guns and ammo. Guns and ammo were like money. Even Afghan fighters back in the ‘stan sold the 7.62x39 for a buck a round as soon as they could get away with it. Men did what they must to feed their families. For now, Jeff would give the Mormons a few feet of rope to see if they were ready to stop hanging themselves.

Jeff hopped in his OHV and bounced down the hill toward the local church house to inspect the neighborhood recruits. Everyone had heard rumors of Salt Lake neighborhoods that’d been ransacked by criminals or burned to ash by roving gangs. Half the Avenues neighborhood had supposedly been killed or driven out. That news, and the recent mob incursion across their neighborhood, had finally kickstarted the locals into organizing for war.

The neighboring LDS stake consisted of six congregations, two church houses, and fifteen hundred men, women and children. If he invited the locals into his command, they would add a buffer around the Homestead of about half-a-mile to the north, south and west. The Homestead backed up against a steep mountain range with good lines of sight and open fields of fire. Homestead forces would continue to patrol that boundary on their own. If the Mormon stake could add another layer of patrols, roadblocks and overwatch, that’d buy the Homestead an early warning system, if not a thirty minute delay before being called upon to fight for their lives.

Beyond even that, Jeff hungered to know the sitrep statewide. A looming force on the Idaho or Nevada border could be a life-or-death threat to them, and they wouldn’t even know it. The Homestead now controlled serious assets—a hospital, a pharmacy and a refinery. It was conceivable that a coordinated adversary could be rumbling toward them at this very moment.

The Homestead needed a longer view than just protecting their own. They needed reconnaissance and intel. They needed to understand threats in this valley and even beyond this valley. If Jeff had learned anything from almost twenty years of combat, it was that ignorance of far-off threats could certainly kill you.

In the Mormon chapel parking lot, about a hundred men stood in rows, some wearing hunting camouflage, others in jeans and polo shirts. Most of them were over fifty years old. About two-thirds of them looked like they could run a mile without puking, which surprised Jeff. Before the collapse, fifty year olds had become the new thirty year olds, or some such bullshit.

In any case, the wealth of the Orchard mountainside neighborhood appeared to translate into an above-average level of fitness. Most of the retirement-aged men looked like they could actually walk up the mountain without collapsing, though gun skills would be a different matter.

All of the men in the church parking lot held firearms. They must’ve pooled their guns and redistributed them to put a gun in every man’s hands. Jeff didn’t have a problem with that, so long as they could handle the guns safely. He only saw a couple of duck guns, which would need to be replaced with rifles. For the most part, the