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

the twice-daily distribution of food had been engineered by Homestead management to eliminate human contact, with cooks wearing full Tyvek coveralls, respirators and gloves. They loaded the food on plates and covered it with their dwindling supply of Saran Wrap. Staying ten feet apart, each head of household approached the feeding table, stacked as many plates as they had family members, and walked away.

Considering her dome tent with the kids bouncing around inside, another wave of guilt washed over Jacquelyn. With the Homestead rules, she’d played it fast-and-loose when it came to the orphanage. With her own kids, she played it rock solid. No exceptions. Complete quarantine discipline. Maybe she deserved whatever punishment she received.

Her kids didn’t deserve to suffer because of her mistakes. So far, nobody with kids had been thrown out of the Homestead, so she didn’t know how it would be handled if she were exiled. Really, the only thing left for her to do was to pray.

She’d been doing a lot of that lately. With her crushing guilt and the invisible menace of the flu, she had ample cause to plead with God. She hadn’t gone to the orphanage in almost two weeks, protecting her three children instead. For two weeks, her list of adult friends had been reduced to one mystical patron in the sky, formerly lampooned by she and her cynical friends as “the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

She exhaled her regret into the midday cold, humbled by her own ignorance on more levels than she could name. She remembered those high-brow conversations with her atheist friends, usually around goblets of red wine and plates of cheeses. Her memories of those friends were like scenes from an old movie. To a person, they were probably dead, twisted into pretzel poses just like Ryan Bernhardt.

Looking back, she saw how her ego had blinded her, another brick in her wall of guilt. Now in desperate times, a convicted woman yet to face her crimes, she appealed to a god she had until recently written off as being “the opium of the people.” The only thing that’d changed was that her life and her children’s lives now hung in the balance. After four months of the collapse—four months of terror, discomfort and loneliness— the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn’t sound amusing anymore. Her history of arrogance made her stomach shudder.

She recalled the old saying: there are no atheists in foxholes, and it made perfect sense to her now. But beyond the sudden need for God, something else was at play. The supernatural world, if there was such a thing, had picked up speed in the wake of the death of technology and the rise of terror. She’d been hearing references to the supernatural around the Homestead on an exponentially-increasing scale.

“I have a strong premonition that I should…”

“I prayed about it and it feels like God wants me to…”

“I’m having strange dreams and I think they’re telling me…”

Prior to the collapse, she could count on one hand the number of times in therapy sessions when someone claimed supernatural intervention. At the Homestead, she heard it four times a day. There were no atheists in foxholes, indeed.

A front end loader tractor trundled past her, slipping on the icy roadway as it crabbed between the concrete barricades. It clanked and thundered into the refugee camp. Four Homestead men without kids followed the steel beast to provide security. The machine drowned out the reassuring sound of her kids fighting in the tent.

The more she thought about Jeff Kirkham calling her “a pastor,” the more she realized that “pastor” and “therapist” had only become different jobs in the last thirty years. Indeed, as Jeff had pointed out, for almost all of civilization, priests had counseled those who suffered. Only since the 1960s had psychotherapy taken off as its own thing, separate from religion.

As far as Jacquelyn was concerned, though, nobody would want a rule breaker as a pastor or a therapist. Even if they didn’t “catch” her and the other ladies of the orphanage, Jacquelyn knew in her heart she couldn’t keep her guilt concealed. She would eventually have to face the consequences of her decisions, but she couldn’t drag her children down with her.

If God really hovered up there in the sky, maybe He might help her find a way so her children didn’t end up on a pile of frozen bodies.

Damn…if only Tom were here…He had never stopped believing in God, no matter how educated she became. As always, he would know what to do.

Maybe, if his soul still floated around out there somewhere, maybe Tom could put in a word with the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” If Tom could pull that off, she would never dismiss God again.

Not ever. Not on her life.

Homestead Infirmary

Oakwood, Utah

Jeff Kirkham’s wife Tara lay in her plastic bed chamber, her lungs rattling like a bad shopping cart. He sat in a folding chair as close as he could, given the clear, plastic barrier between them.

For hours at a time, he stared through the milky partition, trying to decide if she had begun to change color. Jeff feared the cyanosis most of all—the flu’s tendency to choke off the lungs and turn the patient a dark, dark blue from lack of oxygen. Caucasians who suffered flu cyanosis looked absolutely African-American.

All three of Jeff and Tara’s boys had passed through the flu, though they side-stepped the worst of the plague, sickening for several days and then slowly emerging. None of them got pneumonia, Thank God.

But Tara had gone down for the count, and Jeff understood that odds were slim she would recover. The doctor had called it ARDS, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Her strong immune system chewed its way through the virus and her lungs at the same time. If she survived the ARDS, she’d still have to survive the pneumonia that would likely follow. For once, he wished she weren’t so strong.

Fit, clear and smart, Tara had always wrestled life straight to the ground. As a mother