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

the transmission, then people. One of the main rotor blades must’ve severed the tail boom because the boom rotated slowly away from the dismembered airframe, pin-wheeling lazily toward earth, the tail rotor still spinning. To say the helicopter “crashed” would be untrue. It had literally devoured itself.

JT suddenly felt very vulnerable and his head whipped to starboard searching for the second enemy helo. The remaining chopper, a Bell 212, must have seen the destruction of its mate, because the Bell switched to flying evasive maneuvers, trying to shake JT off his tail.

It took JT a second to realize his mistake. He’d sacrificed airspeed to give his gunners a better shot. He needed to catch the other helo as it ran for its life. JT dipped his nose and traded some of his altitude for speed, setting off after the Bell 212.

If not for the explosion of a helicopter smashing into the earth near his roaring motorcycle, Chad would never had heard his radio.

“Chad ANSWER!” Jeff Kirkham shouted from Chad’s pocket.

Chad went into a power slide, recovered and stopped the bike. He dug the radio out while he marveled at the helicopter burning just two canyons over.

“Go for Wade.”

“We’re about to get eaten alive down here. Now’s the time for you to kill whoever is giving the orders.”

Chad didn’t actually know who was giving orders. He hadn’t checked in with southern command for over thirty minutes.

“Um. Okay. I guess. I’ll figure something out. Wade out.”

He turned and pointed his motorcycle downhill. He took off like Tom Cruise on afterburner—all dreams of besting Evan Hafer abandoned. When he flew past his column of trucks, Chad just waved.

What the hell else was he supposed to do?

“Go LETHAL,” Jeff ordered into his radio and then to the men around him. “Lock and load, men. From here on out, this is the real deal. Kill them.”

His unit commanders radioed back, confirming the order.

The enemy infantry had rallied with the arrival of their helicopters. They capitalized on the advantage and pushed forward up the freeway. Thousands of men prepared to rush the gap between the dead cars and Jeff’s concrete barricades.

Jeff decided to ignore the helicopters. He heard a thunderclap shriek in the sky and he hoped that it had been one of the enemy and not JT. No helicopter could survive that sound.

But the risk of a few dozen rounds from the sky wasn’t their biggest problem. Two thousand men were coming hard at their position in a dedicated, frontal assault.

Jeff radioed his mortar men, with one last trick. “Plan Delta. Repeat. Plan Delta,” They had come down to their last resort: napalm.

“Set distance at two hundred and fifty meters and fire at will. Mortars free.”

For the tenth time that day, Evan wondered what the hell Jeff was thinking. It was like he’d joined PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Ass Pirates.

Jeff had just lobbed a shit ton of napalm into no man’s land ahead of the fundamentalists instead of into the fundamentalists. Not only had Jeff expended some of their finite supply of people cooker, but he’d buried the entire battle space in black smoke. Evan couldn’t shoot accurately into the enemy if he wanted to. He hoped the fanatics didn’t choose this as their moment to attack, because Evan couldn’t do shit to help.

The only good news, as far as Evan could see, was that the tempo of battle had slowed. He only heard a few rifle pops and the fundamentalist army seemed to have pulled back a little to escape the choking smoke.

Evan checked on Tanya, then ran down the same field-expedient maintenance list that he used for a 249 SAW. He swapped out the barrel even though the 1919 was barely even hot. He hadn’t shot enough to do more than warm it up a little.

Chad bent the throttle and flew his motorcycle along the edge of Traverse Mountains. He barely touched ground, and then only on the high spots. He barnstormed through the fundamentalist encampment like a biplane.

The command post had moved up for the battle—elevated now on the far end of the gravel yard, where command could see a portion of the I-15 freeway. But now, the entire horizon was blanketed in black undulating smoke.

The dirt bike slid to a stop just short of the command tent. Two guards ran out with their handguns drawn, recognized it was Chad and lowered their weapons.

“Elder Clawson!” Chad yelled for his CO. He still hadn’t worked out what he was going to say or do.

He’d been working on a vague plan to tell them he’d failed to take the ridge and the enemy was poised to obliterate them in a flanking maneuver. The plan had the unfortunate shortcoming of making Chad look bad, so he searched his mind for any possible alternative.

Chad rushed into the HQ and came face-to-face with the dead prophet, President Rex Burnham.

“What…I thought you were…”

The man smiled. “Dead?” the prophet finished Chad’s sentence. “Where’s your faith, Brother Wade?”

“Who was?…”

“I’d loaned my cot to my aide-de-camp while I attended to matters at home,” Burnham looked at Chad crosswise. His eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you happy to see me alive?”

“Do you have a report from the ridge?” Elder Mitchell Clawson pressed Chad. The former small town police chief looked like he was coming apart at the stitching. “Do we hold the flank? Did your men take the ridge?”

“Nevermind that,” the prophet interrupted. “As I was saying before we were interrupted: Elder Clawson, order a full attack—directly up the freeway, smoke or no smoke. Do it now, please.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t factor in the status of our flank—the high ground—before we order a frontal assault?” Elder Clawson worried.

“Please follow my orders, Elder. Or are you having a crisis of faith as well?”

Elder Clawson picked up the radio and issued the orders. Chad’s mind spun, pawing through options and grasping at Hail Marys.

“Brother Wade, I sense Lucifer in you,” Rex Burnham waved the