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

expected big things and God could ask a man to jump through whatever burning hoops He felt like setting up.

“I’ll read it all,” Chad nodded at the blue book.

The Elder cut loose a ragged cough. Chad leaned back. Sickness could level an army faster than bullets.

When the cough subsided, the Elder answered, “When the Holy Spirit tells you of the truth of the Prophet Joseph, you’ll be baptized by immersion for the remission of sins.”

Chad nodded. He pictured himself, being baptized in a silty river. They’d have to bust up the ice, first. It’d hurt, and that would be good. He had a feeling he was going to love the Book of Mormon.

“When do we go to war?” Chad asked, maybe a little too eagerly for Mormon decorum.

“That’s up to the prophet,” Elder Clawson punted. “Until then, we abide his will.”

9

“The Enlightenment—the philosophical engine that inspired the Declaration of Independence— had a virus: the assumption that reason alone could right all wrongs and cure all suffering.

In a one-two punch against traditional faith, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed not only the victory of the Enlightenment in western politics, but an explosion of technological advancement, giving weight to the notion that man could solve all his own problems without consulting God.

Science became a replacement faith, offering data and argument where mankind had once relied upon the mercies of God. With the Black Autumn collapse of science and technology, survivors scurried back to traditional faiths. Stripped of the daily touch of technology, mankind looked to the heavens.”

The American Dark Ages, by William Bellaher North American Textbooks, 2037

Celestial Room

Latter-day Saint Temple

Salt Lake City, Utah

When President Richard Thayer looked around the room, he didn’t feel so alone, even though everyone wore a mask.

Seven surviving members of the second-highest Latter-day Saint counsel sat around the most sacred room in Mormondom: the Celestial room of the Salt Lake City Temple.

Given the temple setting and the masks they wore to ward off transmission of the flu, Richard Thayer struggled to place himself in this bright room with men in business suits. His mind kept winging off in strange directions, unable to fully reconcile the pristine place with the sickening reality outside its walls.

Filled with fussy cream couches and white wall-to-wall carpet, the Celestial room contrasted sharply with the suffering and death Richard had passed to get here. Nobody arrived in this holy room without seeing hundreds of snow-frosted dead bodies stacked on the curbs like the week’s garbage. People were dying en masse from the flu, like a barbarian inside the gates, allowed inside by hunger and cold.

Everyone in this meeting was a high-ranking member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, the second-tier leadership body of the LDS church.

Without preamble, President Thayer confessed to his peers that he’d broken his word—that he’d taken food after swearing that he would not. The leaders listened behind their masks while Richard Thayer described in vivid detail the moment he violated the agreement by eating the MRE. He finished his confession and the other men sat quietly for almost a full minute.

“Thank you, President Thayer,” one of them broke the silence. “It’s been a very difficult time for all of us, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we are grateful you survived. Very grateful. Perhaps we can discuss reforming the Quorum of the Twelve, with your permission, of course.”

And then they moved on with business.

President Thayer sat dumbfounded, still emotionally high-centered on his confession. He’d lived with his guilt so long, he couldn’t imagine it as nothing more than a footnote in a meeting. It dawned on him that some of these men might have compromised their church position to in order to survive too. If he were looking for censure, he wasn’t going to get it here.

“President Thayer. Do you know what resources the Church still controls? What can we do about this flu?” One of the brethren broke Richard out of his reverie with a direct question.

What good is a church if it can’t address the suffering of its members?

President Thayer spoke, “The First Presidency deployed all emergency assets of the Church immediately after the collapse of the stock market. We sent those resources to the stakes with the least financial means, hoping the wealthier stakes would have more food to share among themselves. At this point, I believe many stakes have exhausted their food storage and they’re in desperate need. We have no resources as a church. I’ve made contact with roughly thirty percent of our Stakes of Zion in Utah. In short, only about twelve percent of our Utah stakes are doing okay. The rest are either in deep suffering or they’re incommunicado.”

“What’s the status of worldwide church members, as far as we know?” another man asked.

“The emergency ham networks broke down in pockets after we lost power. Even some of the wards close to here have gone radio silent. Mostly, we lost them to lack of electricity, since solar power is the only electricity left.” President Thayer took a deep breath. “It’s possible that this flu will trend similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918. We might see tens of thousands of church members die in the next few weeks just here in Salt Lake. We have no idea how the saints are faring around the world. Our contact with them is sporadic.”

The Elders waited in stunned silence. Accustomed to marshaling the brute force of fifteen million attentive members and and hundreds of billions in assets, nobody knew what to do when they couldn’t access their members or their cash.

“What’s our spiritual answer to this crisis, then?” another brother whispered behind his mask.

For almost every LDS faithful, including the eight men seated in the room, the moment simply did not compute. According to apocalyptic prophecy, Jesus should’ve already appeared from the cloud-steepled sky, heralded by trumpeting angels. Despite being one of the religions that preached the apocalypse, the specter of decomposing church members—most of