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

that she’d been forced by the orphanage to keep her cards close to her chest. She and her daughter were vulnerable, now, and she couldn’t afford to be calling her husband to accountability. He was too dangerous. Like a lioness with a broken paw, she stayed by the den, kept her cubs close and kept her head down.

She’d asked everyone with any chance of knowing how to prepare acorns as food, but no one had ever done it before. Tye scratched his head when she asked. He thought they needed to be chopped up and steeped in boiling water to remove the tannins, whatever tannins were. Then the acorns could be dried, ground and added to wheat flour to extend it.

In theory, it sounded easy. In practice, finding acorns under a crust of snow and leaf decay proved extremely difficult. Below her on the hillside, twenty women and children knelt on the ground like moles, digging through the snow and occasionally dropping an acorn into old paint cans.

Half the acorns had been drilled through by some sort of worm. The nut meat inside had turned black, but Jenna decided they should keep the ruined ones anyway.

Tara Kirkham climbed the hillside with her paint can and dropped down to her knees beside Jenna. She pawed through the snow. Her little boy followed and went to work at her side, sifting haphazardly through the mess. He was already covered in mud spatter. Tara was pretty filthy too.

“Do you think we should make a sifter screen and shovel the leaves and snow onto the screen? Then we wouldn’t have to dig with our hands.”

Jenna looked at Jeff Kirkham’s wife with wide eyes. “You realize I have no idea what I’m doing, right?”

Tara laughed. “You don’t say?”

Jenna laughed too, the pain in her hands was almost too ridiculous to bear.

They both looked down on the Homestead below. It’d taken them over an hour to scale the snowy and slick mountainside to reach the biggest oak trees. They could barely be called trees. The tallest ones were twelve feet tall and most of them were “scrub oaks,” under four feet. To get to the big ones with acorns, they’d climbed through two small valleys and up a steep hillside. Going back to grab a few tools, or the mythical screen that Tara described, would take an hour and probably five hundred calories.

“Maybe let’s collect what we can by hand and bring up the screen and shovels tomorrow—if we even have a wire screen at home,” Jenna decided.

They were forever discovering simple items—like wire screen—that they didn’t have at the Homestead.

Just carrying shovels to the forage site would be a major feat. The Homestead was a mountainous property and carrying anything anywhere burned a lot of energy. They’d expanded the border to include over 2,000 acres and three deep canyons cut across the land. The ridges between the canyons rose over 1,500 feet.

The backside of the Homestead property, the side that bordered Teller’s Canyon in Salt Lake City, used to be a threat, but no one had crossed over the ridge from Salt Lake in over a month. There simply weren’t the calories for a refugee to scale it. The Homestead had reduced their perimeter guard to a skeleton crew on every border against a mountain.

Jenna went back to work pawing through the wet slop, sorting out the occasional acorn. She wondered if they were burning more calories than they were foraging, but it didn’t matter. Jenna had something to prove.

“I don’t know how you can do it,” Tara exclaimed. “my hands are icicles.”

Jenna shrugged. “Jason thinks we’re at risk of running out of food.”

Tara huffed. “We’re at a lot more risk of being destroyed by enemies we don’t know. Our food makes us a target. We need to expand our reach, make friends and secure the entire state. The whole region, maybe.”

Jenna wiped off an acorn and plunked it in her can. She paused to look Tara in the eyes. “Jason says we should stick tight to home. He thinks we’ll draw attention to ourselves if we show force outside of the neighborhood and that it’ll cause conflict. He thinks we don’t have the resources to be venturing out.”

Tara shook her head. “Jason thinks. Why should I care what he thinks? He’d never seen civil disorder until three months ago. He doesn’t know the first thing about what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti. He has no idea what desperate people are capable of in a situation like this.”

Jenna pulled off her gloves and stuffed her wet hands in her jacket pockets. “He knew enough to store up the food we’re eating and the bullets we’re shooting.”

Tara argued, “It was a hobby to him—it was dumb luck that history served up a collapse right now. He didn’t understand the signs or know the landscape. He knew the economic forecast and drew the obvious conclusion. That doesn’t mean he knows anarchy. He hasn’t seen enough of the world at war to measure the broader risks.”

Despite her tightly-woven fury with Jason, Jenna felt the compulsion to defend him. Tara ate Jason’s food every day and lived on his land. Her criticisms seemed to flow very easily for a woman who’s family had been saved by the foresight of her husband.

“We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if Jason hadn’t prepared. You’d be in that cabin with your family, and you probably wouldn’t have made it.”

“Maybe so,” Tara dusted off her hands. “But because Jason had the chops to lead the Homestead then doesn’t mean he has the chops to lead the Homestead now. If we don’t get our heads up out of the sand, something’s coming for us—something we don’t expect. Jeff wasn’t the only one serving in the sandbox. I was there too. One thing I learned about living among enemies: however hard you’re working to defend yourself, they’re working twice as hard to kill you.”

Orchardview Boulevard

Oakwood, Utah

Jeff Kirkham walked, alone down