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

picket appeared around a bend in Redwood Road, the highway bisecting Camp Williams, an Army National Guard training camp, now gutted by fire. The army base had burned in a wildfire after the collapse leaving all buildings in cinders, but the snow redeemed the scene in white.

As Chad rolled up, two men hopped out of the deuce and a half and waved him down. Each man carried a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, more like they were headed out to bag an elk than going to war.

“Howdy. Where you headed?” one of the young men asked.

“I’d like to join up. I’m a no-shit Navy SEAL, and I’ve been stationed with the northern Mormon church. Who’s the big boss? He’s going to want to talk to me, pronto.”

Chad wanted to go straight to the top and get the magic started. He was on a mission from God, and while he flew through Salt Lake Valley on his bike, the sense of purpose had picked up speed like a meteor fireballing its way toward Earth; finally a mission worthy of his gifts.

In his mind, he vacillated between launching a Fifth Column revolution and becoming a polygamist himself and spawning a massive family of bad asses. He’d grown partial to the idea of taking the army over and using it as a lever to turn the Mormon church in whatever direction God told him to turn it. Either way, he felt on course for great things.

The guards didn’t know how to process his “take me to your leader” thing.

“Um. Do you have an ID?” the kid in charge asked.

Chad laughed. “You mean an ID that says I’m a Navy SEAL? Not really. I could shoot you before you unslung those rifles and prove it to you. Would that help?”

The men looked at each other, but neither was dumb enough to touch his rifle.

“I’m just kidding,” Chad flashed his million dollar smile. “I’ve got a Naval Special Warfare ID in my backpack somewhere. Take me to the boss and I’ll dig it out for him. Scout’s honor.” Chad had never been a Boy Scout, but he held up a salute anyway. He didn’t know if it was a Cub Scout salute or a Boy Scout salute, but the two guards were sufficiently rattled by his threat that they didn’t quibble.

One of the young men lifted his camouflage hat and aired out his head. He looked confused. “I’ve never met a Navy SEAL before. Are you a Mormon?” They had him there.

Chad grew up in the midwest. He’d churched with the Baptists, the Anglicans, the Methodists and he even banged a Pentecostal girl once. But he’d never had much luck with Mormons.

“I’m not exactly Mormon,” Chad admitted. “But I’m looking forward to finding out more.”

He didn’t know it, but Chad had said the magic words—the one phrase Mormons loved to hear. The young men brightened like Chad had offered them twin sisters.

“Really? Well, I have a Book of Mormon right here in my bag. Will you commit to read it? I’ll mark out a few chapters…”

Chad didn’t typically read books less than a hundred years old, but with what little he knew about the Book of Mormon, it might be older than that, even if Joseph Smith wrote it himself.

“Hell, yeah,” Chad answered, drawing a perplexed look from the guards. “Bust off that holy book, boys. I’ll read it tonight.”

The junior man rummaged around in his backpack and handed Chad a beat-up looking, blue-bound Book of Mormon. “I might have taken a few notes on the pages,” he apologized.

“My favorite kind of book,” Chad said honestly. He had a lifelong love affair with paper books. He’d built and abandoned more than one impressive library of old tomes, leaving them behind as his life took dramatic turns such as military service, divorce, the apocalypse, and this time, leaving his friends to rush off on a crusade.

“Now, where’s the big boss?” Chad rubbed his hands together and steered the Mormon boys back to business.

Barkley’s Sand & Gravel Pit

North Frontage Road

The young guards led Chad to a sprawling gravel mine up against the Traverse Mountain and he got his first look at the encampment of the southern army, or “Army of Helaman,” as they liked to be called.

Around three hundred men were encamped on the hundred acre flat. The gravel mine had been gouged into the rolling foothills of the ridge. Over decades, men in backhoes had scraped away the gravel to build the tens of thousands of miles of paved road that had once been the thumping circulatory system of Utah commerce. Now, it was three-quarters covered in ice.

But the birthplace of the Utah roadways could be found here, in the choke point between Salt Lake and Utah valleys, where the gravel to make roads had been peeled away, leaving a slushy plain, just big enough to assemble an army.

Chad propped his hands on his hips and worked his way around in a circle, taking in the view and picking over each terrain feature in his mind.

The southern army was bush league—of that there was no question. He hadn’t seen a single military vehicle other than a few deuce and a halfs, and men wandered in and out of the gravel yard without any security challenge whatsoever. But the spot they’d chosen to set up was crackerjack by anyone’s standards.

Salt Lake and Utah valley ran north-to-south, along the base of the Wasatch Mountain range, just like the rest of the Rockies. In a few places, ancient ridges poked out from the granite mountains, probably under the liquid onslaught of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. From both sides, the ridges of rubble and sand reached into the flatlands and joined in one fortress-like wall between the two valleys.

The Jordan River ran down the middle, and it’d washed away a hundred million tons of rubble in a thousand foot slot through the mountains. Smack dab in the middle of that slot, some enterprising, Mormon roughneck had once dug