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

this world, and aspire to the honors of men, that they do not learn this one lesson—that the rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven…”

He was alone in his living room, so he smiled as he considered the smoke hanging over Salt Lake.

The term “Mormon” had become a sideways insult; prohibited slang among the faithful. But President Burnham felt comfortable using it in this context. To him, it spoke of the less faithful and less willing to do the hard things God had commanded.

“The Mormons.” The very term sounded mealy-mouthed and trivial. It implied all the ways the peculiar people of the Church had compromised their strange, sacred ways in order to be more likable and more acceptable to the world.

Rex Burnham felt like Moses, being commanded to warn the Egyptians that their first-born children were soon to be slaughtered. But he wasn’t warning the Egyptians. He had been called to testify against the Saints as well. He would call them to repentance, and make them see why they suffered as much as the unbelievers.

“Because of your sins. You burn because of your sins, Salt Lake City.”

President Rex D. Burnham, framed by the arresting view from his mansion window, turned to the Provo Temple, two blocks away. It glistened alabaster and gold in the last light of day. No fire touched its walls, just as no smoke stained the Utah Valley sky even with the world collapsing around it.

He’d placed the natural gas and propane storage facilities in Orem under his personal control the moment the stock market crashed. He ordered regular deliveries of propane to each church in Utah Valley and commanded the congregations to cook and eat their meals together.

Wood fires were prohibited and unnecessary, since all food preparation was conducted under the watchful eye of the bishops and the stake presidents.

In fact, virtually every resource in Utah Valley had been placed under church control: sanitation, agriculture, electricity, justice and defense. The grain silos and stockyards were guarded by the faithful and distributed through President Burnham’s clear and unwavering system of distribution. The valley had been locked down tight from the first whisper of an apocalypse and the Lord had placed him, President Rex Burnham, at the juncture of authority and leadership to ensure a perfect transition from a muddled democracy to a seamless theocracy. God ruled Utah Valley and He did so through President Rex D. Burnham. His boyhood bishop’s prophecy had arrived.

So Utah Valley gleamed, threatened only by the smoke lapping over the Traverse Mountains from Salt Lake, and the steady waves of crime that flowed around their northern guard stations.

But, that wasn’t entirely true. Criminals and smoke weren’t the only threats to their perfect millennium. They were threatened by something else as well: twenty-two men, to be precise.

When the collapse tore the guts out of the United States, Elder Rex D. Burnham was Number Twenty-three in the ascension to the position of President of the Church. The fifteen of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were above him, as were seven others in the First Quorum of the Seventy. He knew that four of those seven held callings overseas, and there was no chance they would return stateside in the midst of a crisis. He believed one other Seventy and possibly two apostles had also been traveling when the nuclear bomb went off in Los Angeles harbor. That day, all flights into the U.S. had been suspended. If he was right, that left fifteen men who were in the United States to claim the Presidency of the Church ahead of him and twenty-two men with better claims to the presidency of the church.

If he knew one thing for certain, it was that God wanted him at the helm. It’d been proven in countless ways, both spiritually and materially. The rise of Utah Valley alone was proof positive. Whatever those twenty-two other men could claim in the way of seniority, they lacked in righteousness. They had pandered to the Gentiles—every one of those twenty-two—and their half-baked gospel had deviated so far from the plain words of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young that the founders wouldn’t even recognize the Church today.

“…by their fruits ye shall know them,” he quoted scripture again.

If those other priesthood leaders had been righteous, why had they burned like chaff before the fire?

Rex Burnham had been called as another chapter in the firestorm—he would cleanse the Church of its lukewarm and complacent priesthood. When the snowbanks thinned in February, opening the pass between Utah and Salt Lake Valley, his army of saints would write the final chapter of Armageddon. They would make a clean sweep of the Church and restore the fullness of the true gospel.

“Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” President Burnham quoted Revelations from his bay window, toward the north, toward Salt Lake City.

The passage from the Book of Revelations, planted in his mind by the Holy Spirit, put to rest any thought he might have about bowing to any of the twenty-two. The time had come for him to take up the burning sword of righteousness.

2

Shortwave Radio 7150kHz

4:00pm

“Welcome to the Snowpocalypse, good people of Planet Shortwave. This is JT Taylor, Alcoholic of the Apocalypse, fellow Drinkin’ Bro, broadcasting from a prepper redoubt wedged in the butt-crack of the Rocky Mountains. These good folks have given, me, your humble servant, sweet refuge from the collapse of society in exchange for a solemn promise that I will not, under any circumstance, impregnate their daughters and wives. So far, so good.

I woke up yesterday to a thousand zombies in my yard, trying to cram our food in their pie holes. Folks are getting desperate, so stay frosty, sweet princes of the Drinkin’ Bros network. We’re going to start seeing nasty shit unlike anything since Mad Max took down Thunderdome.

It’s been over two months since we’ve had anything approximating a ‘guv-ment.’ How