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

He set the gun down and went back to scanning with the binoculars. The little girl finally reached the pawn shop. She’d splashed half the water on the snow-patched sidewalk. Her tiny footprints stretched between the pawn shop and the park and back again. It wouldn’t take a Mohican tracker to figure out where the girl had gone, nor what she was doing.

The zombie men had definitely seen the whole thing. They’d likely come at them at night—for the girl and the mother. Evan knew the ways of evil men and he knew that the security breach had already killed the girl and her mother, or consigned them to sex slavery.

He sighed, breached checked his rifle and changed out his mag.

Evan wasn’t going to let that happen. Something in his gut told him that his life had just become a whole lot more complicated.

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

Of all the dumb things to get twisted up about in the apocalypse, masturbation had to be the brass ring. The young man across from Jacquelyn wept like a soul damned to hell. He’d just told her that, when he was alone on perimeter duty, he would…what had her husband Tom called it? Spank his monkey? Flog his bishop?

As a therapist, Jacquelyn knew that her profession regarded masturbation as normal and healthy. But, as a long-lapsed member of the Mormon church, she understood his anguish.

Prohibited sexual immorality, for Mormon teens, included a long list of activities, including feeling up, oral sex, and french kissing. Even giving back rubs was frowned upon for unmarried Mormons.

When a Mormon committed a sin, they were supposed to confess that sin to their bishop, risking an embarrassing censure. The bishop would usually forbid them from taking the sacrament, speaking in church, praying in church, or some such shameful penance. It was a bit of a thing, she recalled.

With the Homestead on quarantine because of the flu, the Mormons in their group could no longer access the neighborhood bishop, so they were coming to Jacquelyn instead.

While the young man talked through his anguish, her mind worked the problem. If she told him that masturbation was normal and healthy, what would that accomplish? Did she really want to be the person dismantling his religious beliefs? At the same time, was she capable of towing the Mormon line on morality, even though she didn’t believe a damn bit of it? She had no idea what a Mormon bishop should say in this situation.

And that would be a lie…

Jacquelyn had just lied to herself. She knew it wasn’t the first time. Maybe it was one in a long string of lies she’d been telling herself.

While the young man talked and cried, and while she dished out the honed platitudes and encouragements she employed to keep a patient talking, Jacquelyn remembered: she’d once confessed to a Mormon bishop. More than once, actually.

It'd been her senior year in high school, and the garage sale mess of sexual attraction had finally set up shop in her psyche. She thought of the boys around her as interesting and obnoxious, in equal measure, until the summer of her junior year. One morning, she caught sight of herself in her bedroom mirror. It was an oval mirror, set in a pink frame on the vanity that her dad had given her for her thirteenth birthday. The mirror framed her body, in bra and panties, from across the room.

She turned sideways and the thought came unbidden: I look sexy.

From then on, she noticed boys noticing her, and the liquid feedback loop lit her up like a street lamp. She came alive to a new reality—where men had their place. Something deeply primitive told that their place, given the right moment, would be between her legs.

She was a good Mormon girl at the time, but the dour church rules made the prospect of sex seem more interesting rather than less.

She’d always been a stalwart believer in the LDS Church. Lock, stock and barrel, as they say. She had every intention of getting married in the Mormon temple, virgin and unsullied. She pledged as much in her Young Women’s class and during the innumerable fireside chats where adult speakers emphatically pressed them to “choose the right.”

One night, early in her senior year of high school, Jacquelyn had gone on a date with her bishop’s son. They’d been sitting next to one another every morning in seminary class, and their joking had led to dating, and their dating had led to a night in the rain, bundled up in the back of his Jeep. They’d pulled into an empty parking lot to talk and spend the fleeting minutes of their curfew in caresses and kisses.

The young man, Pete, pulled away from Jacquelyn and reached into the back of the Jeep, bringing out a tiny, plastic cooler with two dainty soda drinks and a cluster of red grapes. They shared the romantic delight while listening to a “mix tape” he’d made for just such an occasion. She remembered the eighties band, The Cure—Strange Attraction—on his cassette player.

Laughing, he pulled her from the car and coaxed her up onto the flat hood of the Jeep, careless of dents, basking in the warm rain of early fall in Utah.

Six months went by the summer lost,

Obsessively the letters dropped,

The same soft blood smooth flowing hand.

She leaned her head back and danced with him, the hood plunking and popping as they swayed to the music and the rain.

As the song changed to Howard Jones, What Is Love, a wet chill ran down her spine.

Pete helped her down and into the back seat. Eager for warmth and touch, she let herself fall. They kissed deeply, his tongue reaching, spiraling around hers. His taste pulled her over the breach; sultry and almond. She felt her body react, matching his taste with her own molten rush of desire. His hands slipped under her panties and her back arched.

Moments later, it