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

he is being swept ahead of a surge of the Islamic Caliphate. That’s right now, IN EUROPE. Not Syria. Europe. Unbelievable.

What Charles tells me: there were already twenty-six million muslim immigrants in Europe when the balloon went up. Of all the Europeans, nobody attended church more regularly than muslim immigrants. The collapse happened, the mosques organized, radicalism took the pulpit and the Caliphate popped into existence right in the middle of France, Germany and Great Britain. Without a strong central government post-collapse, there wasn’t anyone to stop them from seizing infrastructure and taking possession of military stockpiles. In three weeks, they went from being scraggly foreigners to the being the biggest, baddest crew on the continent.

My new official motto: believe everything, folks. I’m even wondering if the Rothschilds engineered this whole thing for their amusement. They’re sitting back in their Doctor Evil chairs right now, stroking their creepy cats and enjoying the freak show.

On a side note, if you’re a young lady and you’re turned on by my dulcet tones and deft mastery of current events, I’m available for dirty talk on this frequency at 3:00 p.m Geneva Time…”

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

“They say the flu’s dying down. Only one new case today in the infirmary,” Jenna reported. Jason’s wife, sounded like she wanted something from him and the idea made him want to flop his head down on his desk.

He didn’t feel like connecting. They lived in a world where death and despair garnished every moment. Jason didn’t know if three of his missing children were alive or dead. They never made it home, and if they survived the collapse, they could easily have been taken out by the flu. Young adults had been hit hardest of all. The Homestead lost eleven lives and a few still hung on by a thread including Tara Kirkham.

In the midst of all the chaos, his wife wanted to chat with him about daily news and it raised his blood pressure like someone chewing gum in his ear.

They hadn’t had sex in two months, and frankly Jason had stopped noticing women entirely. On his list of things he wanted, sex didn’t even register. Constant peril scrambled a fifty-year-old man’s sex drive. At least it had in his case.

He pined for his kids to come home. He wished he hadn’t shot that boy. He hated Jeff Kirkham for threatening to rip the Homestead away from him.

If chi were a real thing, Jason’s chi looked like a runny omelet.

When he built this place, he didn’t spare a moment to consider how hard it might be to keep it after a collapse. It’d been an up-at-dawn battle to hold at bay enemies from within and enemies from without.

His reports estimated a fifty percent death toll from the flu, down in the valley, and climbing. At least that would mean fifty percent fewer people trying to wipe the Homestead off the map.

“Who’s the latest case?” Jason looked up from his desk, as though taking a report from a subordinate.

“Betsy Drew. But it’s looking like her case is milder than most.” Jenna sat down in a chair, apparently intending to stay a while.

“That’s to be expected,” Jason turned his chair to look at some notes. “Flu epidemics generally go down in virulence with time.”

It gave him pleasure to say the word “virulence,” his broad vocabulary a vanity. “I wonder if Betsy had time to teach an assistant how to grow the poppies. We can use the opium as a cough suppressant for the next epidemic.”

Jenna gave him a sideways glance. “We won’t trade opium as a recreational drug, though, right?”

The last thing Jason needed was his wife second-guessing him. “Would that be a problem for you? The more opium we distribute, the less people try to kill us.” Jason was being argumentative. They would never be able to produce enough opium to pacify the zombies.

“You don’t mean that,” Jenna backed off. “No matter how bad things get in the world, you’d never become a drug dealer.”

Jason closed his eyes and inhaled. Of course, he would never become a drug dealer. She didn’t know, nor could she understand, the killing he had done, but he wouldn’t deal drugs.

“Now that we can breathe a little easier,” she crossed her legs and sat back in her chair, “maybe we can take some time for us…maybe, sneak off to the cabin in the back of the property and spend some time together.”

Neither of them had come down with the flu. Nor had their daughter, Emily, even though most of the other medical personnel had been infected. Jason and Jenna Ross were probably in the clear, but today, Jason would no more “take a little time” for his marriage than he would chew off his own finger. He couldn’t stand the thought of it—the idea of connecting with another person, even his wife, felt repellant. Something in him had gone stale and hard and he had no desire to soften it.

He’d just put the city tax scam to bed and led the Homestead successfully through the flu—if he could call eleven deaths a success. Now was not the time to soften. He’d served his family and friends like a mule, putting aside personal needs in favor of their safety and survival. He carried their burdens, even if they didn’t know it. This woman sitting casually in his office asking for intimacy didn’t have a fucking clue of the internal prices he paid to protect her from death. Like everyone else, she’d been along for the ride, probably telling herself that they’d just been lucky.

That luck had a name: Jason Ross, and he’d paid huge prices to make it happen. He’d burned himself up from the inside out and committed a long list of acts he would never have imagined possible, and he’d done it all to protect them. They now survived in an exacting world, and he quietly paid the toll on their behalf.

Now, she wanted “some time together,” as though he could