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

can shoot,” she answered. She took the Beretta from Evan, slapped the mag home, worked the slide and set the safety. She slid the gun back under the magazine.

“Do you have any intel on the guys who shadowed your kid?” Evan had already forgotten the girl’s name. Kennedy? Carter? Reagan?

“It’s only been three days since we had to go outside for water, and Berkeley hadn’t seen anyone. Maybe they’re camping in the park? How do you know they’re criminals?”

Evan guffawed. “Any zombie shadowing a little girl is a criminal.”

“Okay,” the woman didn’t sound convinced. She repeated, “If you could keep an eye out for a water barrel of some sort, that would go a long way toward making us safe.”

“Mm-hm,” Evan half-agreed, already planning his next op in his head.

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

Jeff Kirkham gauged the performance of everything in life based on utility. How well did that thing or person do its job?

If a person served an important function, they got high marks. If a person served a marginal function, or performed it poorly, they got low marks.

Interior decorators, yoga instructors and hair stylists did not fare well in Jeff’s system of utility. He was pleased to admit that he had zero sense of aesthetics, since aesthetics were for lightweights. Anyone who made things look or sound pretty for a living would have to sit at the back of the Kirkham bus.

His wife, Tara, had taken to calling him “Ron Swanson,” which forced Jeff to sneak-watch a couple episodes of Parks and Recreation, just so he would know what she meant. He ended up binge-watching all seven seasons one time while she was out of town. His final conclusion: he LOVED the fact Tara called him Ron Swanson.

The Libertarian, no bullshit, plain spoken, outdoorsman from the TV show could be a dead-ringer for Jeff Kirkham, except that Jeff was a twenty-nine year Green Beret and could incapacitate Ron Swanson with two dozen different weapons.

In one of the later seasons of the show, Ron Swanson leaves government to start his own construction company which he calls, “Very Good Building & Development Company,” since Ron Swanson “wanted to convey the quality of his work without seeming flashy.” No spin. No aesthetics. Just utility. He was Jeff’s kind of guy.

But, lately, Jeff had begun to awaken to several inconvenient truths about his own utility. For one thing, he no longer felt rock hard. As he aged and his body began to experience the wear-and-tear of hundreds of combat missions, bits and pieces of Jeff functioned with decreasing utility. For one thing, he couldn’t hear out of his left ear. For another, his back hurt every single second of the day. Secretly, he struggled to read fine print if the light wasn’t just right.

Worst of all, his mind had been doing weird shit. His conscious and subconscious mind had been at odds, like “confused water” on the ocean; when a current goes one way and the wind goes another and white caps jump around like popcorn.

For the first time in his career, he'd suffered serious losses. In two battles and several smaller clashes, he’d come out alive, but lost far too much. He could not look his wife in the face and guarantee the outcome of the mission: that his family survive the apocalypse.

He felt certain that his in-laws were dead. How could they still be alive after three months hunkered down in a cabin in the woods? The thought of his father-in-law brought him back to thinking about his dreams.

Vivid dreams dogged his sleep. These weren’t the fuzzy dreams that abated with the light of day, either. He remembered every detail of every dream.

As he stood with his third cup of coffee that morning, watching a new, black stallion in the Homestead livestock enclosure, he raked through his mind with a vengeance. Something was profoundly wrong and it struck a chord of doubt. If his mind was a fortress, he’d just discovered that fifty tons of dirt had eroded from underneath the walls.

The black stallion was the problem. It was unavoidable proof that Jeff’s mind had become less reliable, less useful.

To his untrained eye, the stallion was the most extraordinary horse he’d ever seen: big, athletic and perfectly comfortable staring him down. In the continuum of “fight or flight,” this big, black bastard had no “flight” in him whatsoever.

A white mark ran around the the stallion’s left snout and transitioned into a white squiggle along the length of its head like a lightning bolt.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this stallion. Jeff was dead certain he’d seen it in his dream with the norseman—after he’d passed out fighting the mob in the Homestead. He’d seen this exact same horse. The big Viking guy had been mounted on him, and Jeff had the same thought—that the white squiggle on the stallion’s face was shaped like a lightning bolt.

Not only did he remember the horse from his dream, but he remembered that he’d thought about the horse since, wondering if the norse Vikings actually had horses. He’d even considered looking it up in the Ross library.

Had he convoluted the memories in his head? When a man couldn’t count on his hearing, that was one thing. It happened to everyone, especially when they hung around firearms and explosives. And, every man eventually lost his perfect eyesight. No one could fault Jeff for that. But not every man lost control of his mind. Not every man had his imagination run away with him.

“Hey Jeff.”

Tye, the Homestead livestock guy, interrupted Jeff’s ruminations. “You like our new member of the Homestead?” Tye gestured toward the black stallion.

“Yeah. Where’d you get it?” Jeff asked.

“A guy down in the valley had a bit of horse property, but he couldn’t get hay anymore. So, he traded us this horse for a half-dozen solar panels. It was a screaming deal.”

“How far down the hill?” Jeff asked. It was a strange question, but he needed to know.

Tye cocked his head. “Almost