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

“What if they’d checked the glove box when they were outside the gate?” Evan asked.

“Hmm. I didn’t think they would. That would’ve been bad, if they had.”

“How about you and I talk this shit through ahead of time? Just an idea.”

Jeff scratched his chin. “Maybe we should. Next time.”

“Almost one thousand yards even,” Jeff said to the mortar operator as the man dialed a threaded rod on the front of the mortar tube. To Evan, it looked like a piece of heavy sewer pipe reinforced with another pipe welded around its base. The reinforced tube—it probably weighed ninety pounds—was propped up by a chunk of one-inch threaded rod with a big wheel welded into the middle that set the trajectory. Evan stood amazed, yet again, at how fast the wheels in Jeff’s mind turned, especially when it came to inventing new and improved ways of killing people.

“FIRE IN THE HOLE!” the mortar man shouted.

Whompf! The mortar boomed and a full-sized paint can whirred into the winter sky, tumbling end-over-end and quickly disappearing from view. Jeff switched from his range finder to binoculars, scanning for impact. The paint can struck the ground a quarter mile away with a distant thunk. Jeff switched back to his range finder.

“It looks like you overshot by two hundred yards. Dial back three degrees—six turns of the wheel.” Jeff looked to Evan. “That was actually the first field trial with napalm in the cans. We didn’t have time for testing at the Homestead.”

The mortar operator nodded and spun the dial on the threaded rod.

While the operator reloaded, Evan asked, “Are you planning on using that thing against the fundamentalists? Napalm’s a cocksucker against people. They invented the term ‘scorched earth’ just for napalm.”

Jeff shook his head. “You weren’t there for the battle against the gangbangers. Not for the whole battle, anyway. I would’ve tried any possible atrocity to stop them. There wasn’t a war crime I wouldn’t have considered committing when I saw fifteen hundred men crawling up that road to put their hands on my family.”

“FIRE IN THE HOLE!” the mortar guy shouted again.

Everyone plugged their ears.

Whompf! The cannon barked again and this time the paint can splashed just to the side of the closest prison building.

“Adjust two degrees right and set all mortars to that trajectory.”

“Affirmative, Mister Jeff.” The mortar man motioned to his men to bring the other five mortars online.

An hour later, Evan counted six building on fire and at least fifty men dead in the prison yard. He’d sent his riflemen in the two MRAPs to cut off egress from the opposite side of the prison compound—one MRAP to each side of the back fence. As criminals scattered from the burning buildings, the men leaning against the armored vehicles cut them down.

Whompf, Whompf, Whompf! Three mortars fired their canisters in sequence. Evan watched as two of the three splattered on the roof of the next building in line. The third one went wide and exploded amber napalm across some kind of a sport court.

One of Jeff’s men behind an MRAP fired a series of bottle rockets, whooshing in waves toward the building the mortars had just hit with napalm. After several salvos of fireworks, the roof erupted in flames, crackling like chickens doused in gasoline.

As they’d seen with six buildings before, ten minutes after the roof caught fire and the napalm slurry of petroleum cooked through and dripped into the innards of the building, the toxic fumes and mounting heat forced everyone inside to flee.

Like rats before the flood waters, Jeff’s mortars drove marauders out into the open one building at a time, flushing them toward certain death, either by flame or by bullet. Inside, roofing material, conduit, plexiglass and flooring was on fire, the petroleum plastics giving up their oil to the intense heat.

A tornado-thick column of jet-black smoke twisted into the clear winter sky, heavy with the stink of poisons. The fuel-rich fire screamed through the gaps in the concrete, setting the baseline for a rock concert of death; the flaming roofs crackling, the heat howling, the rockets shrieking and the mortars booming. To Evan, it felt like cooking away the chemical iniquity of the old world in a righteous, black-dipped genocide.

Evil must perish for good to flourish, he supposed.

As fire engulfed the next building in line, men fled from the side doors only to be mowed down by gunfire.

“I wouldn’t want to piss that guy off,” Wheaton said in a sidelong comment to Evan, looking to Jeff Kirkham as the firelight danced in his eyes.

“Jeff you mean?” Evan lowered his binos and turned to Wheaton. “Oh, he hates you. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal. He hated your show. He thinks you’re a total asshole.”

Wheaton had been an ultra-conservative shock-jock podcast celebrity back in the old world. It was how he’d put together such a big group of dudes to join his compound. They’d been the “Lions, Not Sheep” group back in the day—a bunch of bearded conservative professionals who shot ARs together and had their own Fight Club.

“Really? Jeff hates me because of my show?” Wheaton asked, confused and a touch worried.

“Hah! What the hell do you think?” Evan smiled. “Jeff’s been around the world and he knows how shit really works. Do you think a guy like that gets his panties in a wad about a bro who mouths off about feminists?”

Wheaton laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t have thought a guy could be a U.S. operator and wear ladies underwear, but then I met you… I wouldn’t put anything past you guys.”

Another half-a-dozen rapists ran from a burning building toward the next structure in the prison complex. The men behind the MRAPs dropped half of them, and the other half made it to the next concrete structure and ducked inside.

“Sucks to be them,” Evan remarked.

“Move the mortars up,” Jeff ordered.

It’d been a long, dirty afternoon. Evan believed in the killing they’d done, but still, he felt like he needed a