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

he left, Jeff had short conversations with half the Ross clan—Old Man Burke, Donald Ross—but he hadn’t gotten a good read on where they stood on the Homestead coup. It seemed to Jeff that they didn’t know how they felt about it. Situations like this took time to percolate. Loyalty could be tricky, especially when a person found that they’d backed the wrong horse. Loyalty didn’t always track with reason.

Jeff had placed Doc Erik in charge of the Homestead while he was away. Erik was the only doctor to keep his wits about him when the gangbangers attacked, and he’d been the only doctor to always pack a sidearm. These were slim qualifications for leadership, but Jeff hadn’t done much to build personal relationships among the Homestead community. He didn’t have any depth with most of those people. He’d left all that to Jason Ross. If he was going to lead this thing, he’d have to play catchup on the political front. The thought made his stomach hurt.

Better not to think about it too much. The Homestead needed Jeff for now. So long as they felt an existential threat, the “support personnel” at the compound wouldn’t allow themselves the luxury of nitpicking military leadership. As soon as the looming threats were in their rearview mirror, all bets were off. With any luck, someone else would step up to political leadership by then.

He didn’t mind it much, if they undermined him. The quibblers and nitpickers could have the job—just so long as they weren’t making colossal mistakes that put his family at risk. Jeff wouldn’t even have removed Ross if it weren’t for his total meltdown.

But, that wasn’t the whole truth, though, was it? Jeff removed Ross for more reasons than incompetence—reasons harder to justify in the harsh light of day. He’d felt something move him, and he’d just gone with it. At some point, maybe he might talk the whole thing through with Evan.

He’d almost gone there with Evan after the prison shake and bake—talked about his dreams and the decisions they’d set in motion. But the moment had passed. It was a good thing, too. Jeff had gone to war hundreds of times, and he’d seen guys “bellybutton gaze” before—waxing spiritual and melodramatic about war. Killing and witnessing death brought that out in men. Mysticism. Magical thinking. Philosophical pondering.

There was a time for offloading angst, but now wasn’t the time. The fight was far from over, Jeff could feel it in his bones. He could hash out the grand questions of the universe later when the death dealing was done.

Jeff strode over to Evan with a request. “I’d like to move up and get some eyeball time on the Point of the Mountain pass.” Jeff explained. “I can move alone up to the ridge above the county line, but can you cover me from a couple hundred yards back in one of the MRAPs? I don’t want to touch anything off prematurely. I don’t want the fundamentalists to know we have armor, either.”

“Sure, buddy.” Evan agreed. “I guess we hit our quota today. We probably don’t want to cook any more bad guys at least for a few days. Am I right or am I right?”

Jeff nodded. “I’m definitely over it. It had to be done, but I won’t be telling my grandkids about that prison thing.” The whole affair had been revolting, but he never let squeamishness intrude on his war fighting decisions.

Jeff hopped into the OHV and Evan loaded a crew into the MRAP. Jeff climbed in his OHV and motored off, the ponderous MRAP rumbling behind him, keeping pace.

Jeff had lived near this area before the collapse, so he knew the streets. He resisted the hard-wired impulse to drive home to his old place, and instead took a hard right up onto the bench that ran along the escarpment bench that skirted the midpoint of the Traverse Mountains. After half a mile, the empty residential street gave way to dirt track. Back in the day when people used to entertain themselves with sports, this area had been a hang gliding park. Now it provided an overview of the fundamentalist encampment and the carved-in stretch of the I-15 freeway that might soon become a battlefield.

Jeff crept up to the edge of the overlook and saw immediately: the flu had not killed the fundamentalist army. Not at all. Their camp, a quarter mile south of the Point of the Mountain, bustled with activity; men and machines moving up and down a tidy grid of tents. More men and vehicles trickled in from the south.

Jeff knew, heading south from that point—all the way to the desert around Las Vegas— stretched three hundred miles of precious agricultural production that might someday become the breadbasket of the region. North from Salt Lake City, they had nothing that could compare in terms of food production—not until the roads ascended into the potato country of Idaho.

It would be difficult to get a read on enemy numbers from this far, but Jeff had done it before. He guesstimated that the encampment already had two thousand men and they were getting close to their full fighting strength. Even from over a quarter mile, he could see men welding armor plates onto trucks, the intense light of the welders flickering through the late afternoon haze.

Jeff scanned the encampment with his binoculars, discerning no military organization in the traditional sense, but it seemed pretty, damned organized even so. The grid made the tents easy to count. With fifteen rows and ten columns, and with most quadrants holding six tents, that would be nine hundred tents. Averaging three men to a tent, they would number around 2,700 men. But about a third of the tent spots were still vacant, so on the low side, they’d be facing 1,800 men.

Jeff remembered the saying, “Hold hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.” He must not be very good at hoping, because