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

to the Homestead late, not part of the original seventy-five families who worked it up into a survival compound. He was the brother of Kathy Jones, the wife of the guy who ran the beekeeping for the Homestead.

Like half a million tiny slaves, the bees on the Ross farm cranked out honey, though they were currently asleep for the winter. But the Jones family kept the beehives humming, and when Black Autumn hit, they were allowed to invite an extended family member to join. Ryan had been their pick.

But Ryan had extended family of his own, and he’d broken the rules of the Homestead by slipping them food through the barricade. He’d hadn’t been caught right away. Homestead folks came and went through the barricades almost daily, conducting Homestead business and trades with the outside world. But when the flu surged up against their boundaries and the Homestead withdrew from the world, his larceny was exposed. Breaking the rules meant exile, and exile usually meant death. It’d certainly meant death for Ryan Bernhardt.

Jacquelyn had taken it to heart, given that she’d been breaking the rules too. What had befallen Ryan Bernhardt could certainly befall Jacquelyn Reynolds.

When the super flu hit Salt Lake and Mill County, the struggle to survive intensified by an order of magnitude. From her post behind the Upper Barricade, it seemed that nearly everyone had died from the flu outside the Homestead. It’d gone deathly still in the refugee camp and Jacquelyn could see a dozen dead, frozen people.

She knew it couldn’t be total extermination—one hundred percent fatality rates weren’t in the nature of viruses. That would defeat the virus’ core objective: to utilize the host to proliferate. Killing the host too fast stopped the horror show before the host could pass the virus to someone else. Killing hosts killed the virus.

Jason Ross announced a drastic solution for the Homestead: utter isolation and ironclad punishment. He used the story of a rural town—Gunnison, Utah—to justify his clampdown.

The rural town of Gunnison managed to entirely escape the Spanish flu, the same flu that infected over 10,000 Utahans in the year 1919. The small town beat the disease by taking draconian action: they didn’t allow anyone in or out. Even train passengers passing through the railway station were advised that, should they step foot onto the rail platform, they would be arrested and quarantined. Roads were closed. New visitors were immediately incarcerated.

The town emerged from the epidemic without a single case of the Spanish flu. Merciless martial law saved them, and after witnessing the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States, nobody in or around Gunnison complained about the extreme measures that’d been taken by their mayor. In retrospect, extreme measures had been warranted. This had been the story Ross told anyone who would listen, and it was how he justified the killing of Ryan Bernhardt.

If not for her own guilt, Jacquelyn might look at the twisted body of Ryan Bernhardt and see him as a lamentable, but necessary, fatality. Ryan had been caught passing food through the Upper Barricade to his sister and her family. Sharing Homestead food with outsiders was an offense that carried the penalty of exile. Everyone agreed that sharing food with outsiders represented a serious threat to those inside, especially given the added flu risk. Nobody knew how long the collapse would last, and every lost meal from the Homestead stores could result in death-by-starvation in the coming months. Sharing food had been compared to incremental murder, killing the families of the Homestead one-bite-at-a-time. The gangbanger invasion had convinced everyone they stood within easy reach of annihilation.

Homestead men wearing respirators came by Jacqueline’s post at the Upper Barricade twice a day, scooped up bodies in the bucket of a front end loader, carried them across the neighborhood and dumped them in a mass grave in the middle of what had once been the Mill county golf course. The Homestead couldn’t allow bodies to pile up around their gates because of any one of a number of other diseases.

Coronavirus, Swine Flu and Avian Flu in the twenty years prior to the collapse had educated America on the real dangers of contagion. Homestead members understood well enough how an airborne flu could jump across physical barriers. The general population of the Homestead had been more than happy to support Ross in closing their gates and issuing black-and-white edicts. However scary Jason had become these last few weeks, the contagion was much scarier.

When Ryan Bernhardt broke the rules, the Homestead committee marched him out the gates. In a last moment of grace, they gave him a bucket of food and a dust mask. Food and mask notwithstanding, Ryan Bernhardt soon died, almost certainly a victim of the flu.

Even so, the Homestead would not side-step the flu like the town of Gunnison in 1918. This flu had already jumped the gap and defeated Jason’s martial law.

There had been three deaths and thirty-seven Homestead men, women and children now suffered in plastic-shrouded bedchambers. Nobody knew for sure how the flu had slipped into the Homestead. If it was discovered, the orphanage would be the likely suspect, and Jacquelyn would be the one marched out the gates.

How could making the right decision result in such a wrong outcome?

Jacquelyn had plenty of time to consider her miscalculation, standing in the cold as a guard at the Upper Barricade. With many serving in the infirmary, guard duty had been relegated to mothers with children. It was like “bring your kids to work day” in the icy cold, while packing a pistol.

Her kids were inside a tent behind the barricade. They were content enough to huddle inside, wrapped in piles of blankets. She could hear their muffled play, squawks and arguments. So long as they stayed inside and kept away from every living soul, Jacquelyn would allow them to squabble.

Since the rise of the flu, neither she nor the children had been within ten feet of an uncovered human face. Even