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

Evan gave the go signal and the team split to both sides of the gap and slipped behind the dumpsters.

A body stirred in the ramshackle mess. The guy staggered over to one of the dumpsters, whipped out his tackle to take a piss.

Mid-stream, the guy jumped straight up in the air and screamed like a little girl. Apparently, he’d spotted Colton crouched three feet away, and had pissed all over himself in terror. It would’ve been hilarious had the guy not grabbed for a handgun in the back of his pants.

The courtyard filled with booms and flashes as Colton got in a belly-to-balls shooting match with the guy. The pisser crumpled to the ground and, everything went quiet, except for the clickety-clack of Evan’s guys changing out their half-spent mags. Footsteps scampered in dark corners of the Turkish bazaar.

“Report.” Evan radioed.

“I’m good. No holes, I think,” Colton radioed back. His voiced echoed off the walls of the buildings and all six radios at the same time.

Gunfire opened up from five locations at once inside the trading post. Peaking around the corner of his dumpster, Evan picked out two clusters of flashes coming from the bazaar and three muzzle flashes coming from doorways. Only two of the buildings had a second story, so he wasn’t being hammered from above, at least not yet.

They should’ve set up overwatch, Evan realized. He hadn’t planned on a firefight during a recon mission.

His men countered with withering fire and, little by little they silenced the pockets of resistance—probably scaring the zombies back with blown up cinderblock frag as much as anything. Zombie gunfire went wild in the darkness—only occasionally zinging into the dumpsters. None of the guns Evan had seen earlier had anything approximating night sights.

His own men drilled directly into the muzzle flashes using their NVGs and IR lasers. The starbursts of rounds hitting doorframes confirmed that his guys were hammering the shit out of the resistance. With NVGs, it was never a fair fight.

But the whole shebang was getting risky, even with NVGs and fire superiority. New pockets of gunfire kept kicking off around the courtyard, and shooting finally opened up from one of the second story windows.

Evan couldn’t see a way to end this in their favor, even if they were utterly plastering the zombies. His guys had probably gone through half their mags already. There were too damn many zombies.

Evan still didn’t know why they had clustered there in the first place. Maybe this was a zombie fort built around a zombie warlord. In any case, he’d tasted all he wanted from this shit sandwich. He hadn’t really learned a damned thing about this Zombietown.

“Put down that last shooting position and pull back. We’re done here,” Evan ordered over the radio.

His team doubled down on their fire, silenced the opposition, and pulled back to the alley. Except for the occasional pop, the enemy fire evaporated.

They worked their way back to State Street and Colton crept up to Evan.

“Bro. I lost my NVGs back there.”

“What?” Evan half-shouted. “…the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Yeah, sorry, man. The NVGs popped off the mount when I tangled with that dude taking a piss. I think I banged into the dumpster and they came off my mount. I searched for them but they must’ve slid somewhere I couldn’t reach.”

Evan wanted to hit the kid. The NVGs were irreplaceable.

“I can go back and get them in the morning,” Colton offered.

“Sonofabitch!” Evan yelled into the creeping dawn. “Just keep moving, Colton. We’ll worry about the NVGs later. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Evan abandoned protocol and led the men back toward the safety of the car dealership.

“Are we safe? Now that you attacked the camp?” The hot mama—Tanya—struggled to make sense of Evan’s post-action report.

She showed her teeth as she talked, and she had perfect teeth. Her lips curled up at the edges, like she was in a perpetual state of coy premonition. He’d caught a glimpse when she’d turned to pick up the baby and her butt ran slightly “plus size” but it bumped out in all the right directions. In any case, a bit of cushion didn’t mean nearly the same thing three months into an apocalypse as it’d meant back in the phony world. Nowadays, it meant that this woman knew how to take care of herself. A little body fat meant you weren’t dead weight; that you could hold your own.

Evan rubbed his face. This worried mother seemed only concerned with the results of his recon—whether her children were safe or not. She didn’t seem at all interested in a war story.

“We don’t know,” Evan admitted. “We ruined their night and we might’ve shot some of them, but we don’t know if that’s enough to make them leave. I doubt it. I don’t think so.”

“Can we just ask them to leave?” she wondered.

Evan hadn’t thought of that. After last night, the zombies might leave if he ordered them to. It might also touch off another skirmish.

Come to think of it, Evan could’ve asked them to leave before the assault. With even a solid show of force, chances were good that they might’ve left. If he’d rolled up with the Ferret and ripped into the Turkish bazaar with the belt-fed machine gun—even shooting high—they might’ve taken the hint. He knew that hajis wouldn’t typically stick around after armor rolled up. Even when it was just an armored personnel carrier, hajis usually bailed like rats on a sinking ship.

But, zombies weren’t hajis, as Tommy pointed out. They had no religious agenda. No reason to stick around and die fighting. These “tangos” didn’t have a boner for killing American soldiers. Evan needed to shift gears in his head for this new brand of warfare.

“Did you find a water barrel?” Tanya asked.

“Um. Not yet.” The water barrel hadn’t even crossed Evan’s mind. “We’ll get it today.”

Evan didn’t know how he was going to do that. In all likelihood, the zombies