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

Orchardview Boulevard through a winter fog that sulked like a bad head cold over the neighborhood. He left his OHV at the base of the Homestead hill, at the Upper Barricade, and walked from there. He needed time to think—to make sure he wasn’t about to commit a cataclysmic mistake. For the first time in his life, he was making a decision on one hundred proof, raw emotion.

All Jeff wanted in this world was to ensure his family’s survival, and he couldn’t convince himself that what he was about to do would help achieve that goal. Not at all. He could see only risk and entanglement. Still, he trudged up the ice-slicked walkway toward the door of President Richard Thayer, prophet of a church in which he no longer believed.

The damned dreams, Jeff swore as he knocked on the door.

He had another dream the night before. This one shorter than the others. He rode on horseback beside the norseman, who sat astride the black stallion with the lightning bolt nose. The two men rode across a rolling, grassy hill toward a towering mountain. Jeff’s wife, Tara, rode beside them on her own buckskin mare, dressed in leather armor, her helmet tied to her saddle with a leather thong. She looked like she’d been born to ride the big mare.

“Where’s the battle?” Jeff asked the norseman.

“There will always be a battle somewhere, but today. Today we ride.”

“So, are we part of your army, then?” Jeff asked.

The norseman smiled. “You've always been part of my army.”

Jeff woke up to the dawn breaking outside his window, the yellow curtains turning to peach by degrees.

He knew at that moment he would speak with the Mormon prophet and offer his services. The norseman and the Mormons had nothing in common, necessarily. The norseman was no follower of Joseph Smith—not a smiling Utahn, or even a Christian, for that matter. Jeff supposed a viking would be a pagan. The norseman had mentioned nothing about religion.

But in his dream the night before, Jeff simply knew what to do next: he would speak to the Mormon prophet and would offer to lead the Mormon army.

The decision made very little sense considering the information he currently possessed. The Mormons didn’t have any food or resources, and the northern half of the church was in shambles. It had powerful enemies, especially if the southern church really intended to take Salt Lake County under its control. Jeff had no good reason to get involved in their fight.

The Homestead, on the other hand, had enough food, supplies and a well-trained security force. Ross wasn’t doing a stellar job of handling the politics, but Jeff would take up the slack and could probably keep Ross functioning. With a new flu, it would be a hell of a lot safer inside the Homestead than anywhere else, with their doctors, nurses and stockpiled medicine.

The Homestead remained his family’s best bet for continued survival, despite the close shaves with destruction they’d faced since Black Autumn. Getting involved with the Mormon army wasn’t going to make things safer for Jeff and his family, at least not on its face.

Jason Ross and some of the others would pitch a fit. Jeff would definitely face backlash, and maybe even an attempt to remove him as head of security.

But the dreams weren’t going to stop until Jeff listened to his gut, and his gut told him to command the Mormon army. He sensed a promise in the dreams that it would turn out for the best, and that taking control of the Mormons might be a critical factor to their survival in the coming months. He had no idea how he knew that, but he knew it nonetheless.

Jeff knocked on the Mormon leader’s door.

“Good morning, Master Sergeant Kirkham. To what do I owe the honor?” The Mormon prophet, Richard Thayer, greeted Jeff with authentic pleasure.

“Good morning, President. I thought maybe we could talk about preparations for an incursion by the southern Mormon forces.” Jeff soft-peddled his true intention.

“Yes. I supposed we should. Please, come in.”

Jeff made his way to the same couch where he and Vanderlink had argued about the MRAPs.

“Do we hear anything new about Elder Burnham and the fundamentalists?” President Thayer asked.

“The chatter we hear leads us to believe they’re making good on their threat to form an army. My recon team hasn’t arrived at the south end of the valley yet. I asked them to clear a safe corridor down the center of Salt Lake on the way, so they should arrive at the Traverse Mountains in a day or two. So far, they haven’t encountered anyone from the south.”

“Sounds like status quo, then,” the prophet sat back. “Not good news but not bad news either.”

“I’m afraid we can’t wait for the bad news. Nothing encourages a fight more than the dream of an easy win. We need to meet the fundamentalist Mormons with an army of our own, and we should do it at the border of Salt Lake and Utah County. We can’t allow them to fan out across Salt Lake.”

President Thayer closed his eyes and sat back. “You’re suggesting I call up Mormon men to fight Mormon men.”

“It is your best chance at avoiding a battle at the walls of the temple, where you will be forced to fight whether you like it or not.” Jeff knew that the Mormon church had already raised an army once before to protect Temple Square and the church offices. They would almost certainly do it again if an army threatened to take the temple by force, even a Mormon army.

“If we agree to do this, would you accept a calling as head of our armed forces?” The Mormon president leaned forward in his seat.

“What would that entail, exactly?” Jeff asked, thinking about all the bullshit requirements of Mormon orthodoxy. No coffee. No whiskey. It was all nonsense, in Jeff’s book.

President Thayer must’ve read his mind because he laughed. “I would like you to lead our armed forces.