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

Eighteen hundred men might as well be eighteen million men. Jeff wasn’t sure he could field two hundred to oppose them, even if he talked Wheaton into throwing his men into the mix. His northern Mormon army hadn’t even begun to mobilize yet. He needed to get back and get the wheels turning or they’d be overrun by polygamists and fanatics without even putting up a fight.

For a moment, the encampment, tucked in a gravel mine up against a snow-frosted rubble wall, looked like ruthless death. There was no Mad Max vibe; no leather-and-chain post-apocalyptic chaos. It looked, for all the world, like a Nazi German forward operating base, ramping up to roll into Poland and crush the Polish horse-mounted cavalry with the Nazi’s relentless war machine.

It made him think of Tara back at the Homestead, still wheezing like a kinked straw. She’d finally come home to the family suite in the big house. She still couldn’t take twenty steps without stopping to catch her breath.

Somebody over in the fundamentalist army was counting on 2,700 men for the big push north or they wouldn’t have built the camp to that size. So even the idea of 1,800 was a wet dream. Jeff must plan on eating the whole enchilada: 2,700 enemy.

With the loss of Big Cop—Vanderlink had disappeared after Jeff kicked his ass—the northern Mormon army was in shambles. Right now, the Mormons local to Temple Square and Mill County were mustering. At his army’s core would be a hundred and fifty men from the Homestead including SOF guys, Afghan commandos and the forces he had trained from locals. Jeff would leave a skeleton crew to prevent another mob incursion onto the property. Mobs weren’t nearly the size they once had been.

Jeff watched the men bustle around the southern army encampment like ants, and he wondered what kind of heart for killing they would bring to battle. It was going to come down to that, he was afraid: who would be the cruelest and the most resolute; who would unleash the greatest violence first.

Jeff had been born, bred and baked-to-perfection when it came to bringing destruction on the battlefield. Never had history seen such utter brutality as the kind white men—Germanics, Brits and Norse—leveled against their enemies. America elevated that legacy of death and destruction to a high science, and Jeff Kirkham spent his entire adult life at the very tip of that spear. It wasn’t for luck, either. He was good at it.

A coil of black smoke still pulsed out of the prison two miles to the north like an exclamation point. He couldn’t see the yard full of cooked and twisted creatures, but he knew they lay where he’d left them—a warning to other criminals. He had used weapons of mass death, and no small amount of guile, to wipe out a criminal army. Their death pall dominated the landscape for miles around. He swiveled back to the fundamentalist encampment in its pristine lines and cheery, bustling activity. Jeff’s eyes narrowed.

In the dark corner of his mind, he guarded a black, leather trunk. In it, a host of demons waited, yearning to breathe fresh air and devour living flesh. They’d snacked at the prison and it’d only made them hungrier.

Jeff cracked the lid on the trunk, and the demons swirled out and around him, like eager reptiles, eyes blacked and jaws snapping at the air in a greedy rhythm.

Snick, snick-snap, snick-snick.

Jeff pointed a finger at the tidy camp and sent them. They flew away like raptors, and pulled his soul with them.

Jeff closed his eyes and imagined the work they would do together.

The first thrum of battle kicks off, just as Jeff has seen scores of times before. The enemy can’t yet be seen climbing up the mounting freeway, but the electricity in the air portends, they are coming.

In the middle of the I-15, Jeff has positioned the cars just so, offering false cover to the approaching army, inviting them to leap-frog between the steel carcasses, lending a sense of safety, pulling them into the arms of mayhem.

On the ridge of the Traverse Mountains, Evan and Wheaton’s men hold the high ground. They pour withering fire, with three belt-feds, on anyone foolish enough to attempt to flank them from the back side. The three dirt roads and the one paved road on the Utah County side of the mountains are booby-trapped with enough explosives to kill an armored vehicle and tear a chasm in the road at the same time. If the fundamentalists send vehicles up the road to engage Evan, they won’t make it far.

Across the Jordan River, the west boundary of the battlefield, Jeff has ordered a dozen, old Howitzers brought up from Fort Douglas, Army National Guard. While the fort doesn’t stock a single bullet or artillery shell, the antique Howitzers look like a garden of death. Having placed the real, vintage Howitzers in front and the fake Howitzers of sewer pipe in back, Jeff hopes the fundamentalists will avoid the “artillery field,” which is good, since Jeff doesn’t have a single artillery shell. He’s made a show, for the previous two days, of “testing” the artillery—shooting deconstructed firework explosives. With scarcely forty of his troops on the west side of the Jordan River, Jeff prays the fundamentalists won’t call his bluff.

He wants the enemy to come down the middle of the I-15 freeway. He’s given them a dry surface, good cover and an obvious solution. He’s ordered Evan to pull back from the edge so his men on the high ground can’t be seen from the main battlefield. Considering the overwhelming force of the enemy, their officers should take the bait and attack head on—straight down the I-15. The simplest plan is usually the best plan. Jeff might have done the same thing if roles were reversed.

In his mind, the rumble of attacking men grows. Jeff can imagine the fundamentalist army now, flitting between vehicles on