White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

to disaster areas. As an international church with more members outside the U.S. than inside, they couldn’t justify silos of emergency grain in Salt Lake City when the saints in Mexico City would starve.

Instead, the Church moved their emergency reserve into a massive investment fund that stood at the ready should disaster strike. But in their minds, they’d considered only natural disasters. They hadn’t contemplated a disaster that would render paper money, written contracts and digital currency useless. Their hundred billion dollar “rainy day fund” had vanished like a pleasant dream in the first rays of sunshine.

The Church still maintained a cache of emergency supplies in Salt Lake City, but the majority of those supplies were held in trust for FEMA, and the government agency had gone silent four days after the collapse of the stock market. Without the government to tell the Church what to do, the decision had been put to the fifteen: how should they deploy food and medical supplies owned by the United States?

While detractors liked to impugn the Mormon leaders as rich, selfish men, in President Thayer’s experience, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. To a man, they were reasonable, selfless men who balked at the idea of putting their own needs first. While the world might criticize their rigid theology, they could not honestly criticize their generosity.

That goodness, in the wake of the atomic bombs and the economic collapse, would ultimately be the death the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. When it became apparent that the United States would not bounce back from the collapse, the brethren voted unanimously to refuse to save themselves. In one of the most unified decisions President Thayer had seen them make, the fifteen voted to decline all food, medical supplies or help from the FEMA stores and from the members of the Church. The Spirit of God had never been so strong as when they agreed on this course of action, a course that would cost almost all of them their lives.

The impact was almost immediate. Four of the brethren died within a week from lack of medical intervention. Within a month, three more perished from “old age.” All of the fifteen had maintained a year’s supply of food storage, as commanded by earlier Mormon prophets, but many of them had moved to Salt Lake City, away from their family homes in order to serve as church leaders. They had food storage, but only half of them could actually get to it.

They shared their food with one another where possible, but civil disorder made it difficult because their homes were spread across Salt Lake City. Some eventually died from lack of food and water, and one elder died from a home invasion robbery. Within nine weeks, all of the fifteen were believed dead except for Elder Thayer. Based on the rules of ascension, he now bore the mantle of President of the Church. It was his job to reconstitute the fifteen apostles from the First Quorum of the Seventy—the next level of leadership— assuming he could find enough of them alive. Succession would follow the principles put in place by Brigham Young, and the Church would survive.

But would it do anyone much good?

The cellular telephone network had crashed. The hearty corps of Mormon ham radiomen in Utah maintained some communication, but most of the ham operators were elderly themselves, and many died for lack of medicine. Several of the ham repeaters on the mountaintops were pillaged for batteries and solar panels. Swaths of the state went dark on the ham networks. Even when repeaters did work, ham radio waves criss-crossed with confusing messages, contradictions and conflicting reports. Never before had the invisible net of ham signals been so crowded, but the increase in words generated less clarity rather than more.

President Thayer’s neighborhood ham operator became his lifeline to the handful of LDS leaders who’d managed to survive. He felt confident that, when safe enough to travel, he could bring the Seventy together, and they could reconstitute the highest offices of the Church.

He should feel hopeful, he told himself. He should feel like Moses coming out of Egypt, expecting God to part the Red Sea.

But Richard Thayer was no Moses. When it came right down to it, he’d sold his faith in the Lord for a meal.

If he were the kind of man who cast blame, he would blame it on their condo. Reluctant to buy a larger home in Salt Lake—their children and grandchildren all lived in Georgia—the Thayers purchased a condominium instead of a full-size home. The condo had no space for dozens of five gallon buckets of wheat, fifty-five gallon drums of water and all the accessories needed to process food and maintain survival. Once Elder Thayer fell into his all-consuming calling in the highest council of the Church, he forgot about food storage. Many of the other fifteen found themselves in the same predicament and had paid the ultimate price for their oversight.

If he were another kind of man, President Thayer might blame his failing on his wife’s health. Melinda’s Type One diabetes required a special diet. She needed to eat at regular intervals. At sixty-three years old, she was still vulnerable to an untimely death if she went hungry for an extended period of time. Melinda had insisted they eat Brother Vanderlink’s Meal Ready to Eat.

Melinda hadn’t been present that day in the temple with the Quorum of the Twelve when the spirit had poured out a clear confirmation that they starve rather than tax the resources of the members. She hadn’t seen those old men, willing to lay down their lives, knowing they would pass into eternal life with clean hands. Try as he might, President Thayer failed to communicate the sacredness of the moment to her. She couldn’t understand that he should die rather than eat. Melinda stood fast, unwilling to watch her husband starve.

She had always been her own woman. Her righteousness was beyond question in his mind, but no matter