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

Tennison Residence

Oakwood, Utah

It’d been a long time since President Richard Thayer had done the simple work of a lay pastor. His duties for the church had taken him around the world, and his work had evolved toward corporate obligations—speaking, meetings, decision-making. He’d almost forgotten the beating heart of the calling—the quiet ministrations of a man of God: troubled marriages, addictions, confessions, sickness and death.

Holding a man’s hand as he died filled him with faithful abandon. Richard forgot all else. He knew direct contact with the flu could kill him, mask or no mask. Throwing himself into the hands of the Almighty, doing the work of comfort, carried him away from worry like a bird caught in a brisk wind.

The dying man was a neighbor and a member of his ward. Richard had barely known him by name due to the duties that kept him away most of the year. When he was home, his celebrity as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve generated an invisible forcefield around him. Rank and file Mormons were afraid to bother him, and he’d been more than a little complicit in giving that impression. But the one-two punch of armageddon and the flu wiped the slate clean of hypocrisy. Every religious leader, probably in the entire nation, had become a simple pastor.

President Thayer sat patiently as the mid-forties father suffered through his final, feverish moments on earth. The man’s wife and children wept in the next room, behind a quarantine curtain they’d stapled between their kitchen and dining room.

Richard pictured the man’s soul as he prayed peace on him, because the physical body had indeed become monstrous. The dying man’s headed lolled in agony as he wheezed stale air from his lungs and hauled back what little he could. His red-rimmed eyes bulged as if straining to lift a car off a child.

His nosebleed never ceased, never slowed. A steady thread of blood rolled from his nostril building up a thick dam of black crust over his lips, stubble and mouth. When he coughed his wracking, tearing, clatter, the blood crust blew apart into fragments and pattered onto the bedding.

His bulging eyes latched onto Richard. They were the eyes of a drowning animal. Richard held the gaze and smiled. He exhaled and released all the tension in his face. He ignored the indigo lips and sweat-speckled brow of the monster that clawed at his hand. He ignored the putrescence of the man’s bowels. He saw only eternity in the red-riven whites of the man’s hemorrhaging sclera.

The N95 mask Richard wore had arrived in Utah in a box marked “Garage.” Back in Georgia, he’d helped his grandson sand and paint a Cub Scout pinewood derby car. The smell of spray paint lingered in the mask, and it brought back memories of his grandson shaking the can with both hands, enjoying the throaty rattle of the marble.

He wondered if his grandson was still alive.

Richard reminded himself to be present with the dying. He would die a little too with the man. That was the part of the job description: to drift across the threshold of life and death, a silent companion, unafraid and brimming with hope.

As a young LDS bishop, he’d struggled with this part of the job until he realized he could carry something in his eyes that perhaps no one else in the dying person’s family could—an utter lack of horror.

There was nothing to say to a dying person, really. Sometimes, it was unclear if they could even hear. But Richard had never died with a person when they didn’t, at the same time, lock eyes with him, at least for a moment. In his face, Richard tended his faith—pure and unshaken by the spectacle of death. His eyes. His face muscles. His smile. He relaxed them and surrendered this moment to the vastness of life. He could tell the dying, with his eyes, that passing through the veil would be an act of peace. A rejoining to something greater.

The father vomited a thin, green gruel. Half of it lodged in his airway, rattling like the marble in the spray can.

The man’s back seized in a hard curl, like a snake when someone steps on its head. The vomit dammed the last threaded passages in his lungs. Richard could hear the vertebrae snap and crackle as every muscle fought against inevitable drowning. His face whipped back to Richard and his eyes bulged even more, terror wrapped in surrender, folding into eternity.

The clawing hand relaxed and then it stroked Richard’s hand. The man—the father of the weeping family— returned from the sea cliffs of pain for a final view of the cobalt horizon. His eyes drifted back into their sockets. His face softened. Bile dribbled out of the corner of his mouth.

“Sweet travels,” Richard whispered as he held on with both hands. The soul of the man drifted away in a long hiss.

South Towne Expo Center

Salt Lake City, Utah

With new orders to hunker down and quarantine while the flu passed, Evan and his team took a lower profile, and abandoned their strategy of using car dealerships as fortresses. They had no desire to attract sick people, criminals or otherwise.

Instead, they holed up inside the massive South Towne expo center, where they could drive the Ferret and their up-armored OHVs inside, out of the wind and snowfall. They clustered their vehicles and cots in the center of the dark exhibitor floor, where they had sweeping fields of fire on all sides. Other than a rotating overwatch on the roof, the squad locked down for the duration of the flu—quarantining themselves away from any contact with the infected.

Evan had ditched the gold chain warlord not long after leaving Zombietown. He cut him loose when they crossed I-215 with a dire warning that he’d be shot on sight if he ever returned.

In the two days since, several pieces of information had clicked into place in