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

out of his eyes and kicked a tumbleweed, then chided himself for the wasted energy.

He spotted the rotted, hanging door of an old root cellar, and in the distance, an abandoned-looking farmhouse. The root cellar had been dug into a hillside, probably fifty years before, ten yards off the irrigation canal. No cars, other than a rusted-out old truck, sat around the farmhouse. Sage thought he might take shelter in the root cellar. Refugees would hit the farmhouse before they’d search the surrounding grounds. He’d hear them and make his escape if it came to that.

Sage adjusted the straps over his shoulders again and backtracked along the canal bottom until he cut a rabbit trail. He traced it to a den, set two snares, then looped around in the dark, in a spiral pattern, to the half-collapsed cellar. He’d leave enough prints circling his final sleeping place that anyone following would alert him passing by. He’d learned not to walk straight to his bed.

Surviving alone was a lot of work. He wouldn’t miss that part if he ever found a new home, or God-permitting, made it back to his family.

Mat Best

Highway 79

Northeast of McKenzie, Tennesse

The rats had human faces. Mat Best caught glimpses as they vanished, screaming, under the bumper of his behemoth, deuce-and-a-half truck. His knuckles popped white on the steering wheel. The face of the third rat of the morning flicked from anger to defiance to horror as it grunted and disappeared beneath the army green hood. His rat companions dove off to the shoulder at the last second. They must’ve convinced themselves that the truck would stop or swerve, and that they’d score a tasty meal—maybe a roadside BLT or a ham sammich.

Not today pals. No stopping this train between here and the slaughterhouse. Mat pretended he hadn’t heard the bump-and-crunch from under the rear tires.

Highway 79 reminded him of an Afghan goat trail. The Tennessee Transportation Authorities’ incomplete repairs had stripped the road bed to nothing. Heavy rains in October demolished the remaining track.

The same rains that killed Caroline, Mat churned. The same rains that dumped her bike and gave her a lethal dose of flesh-eating bacteria.

The jacked-up road and thirty-mile-per-hour speed of the convoy allowed plenty of opportunity for rats to attempt an ambush.

But not today, rats. Today, you get a giant helping of O.D. green radiator grill right over your filthy mugs.

Mat was lead security for the convoy—out in front of a livestock hauler full of pigs. The Porky Pig Fun Run, his security team called it. This was the first of two trips slated for the day that’d bring a hundred live hogs into Mackenzie to be butchered, dried and preserved; 27,000 pounds of pork on the hoof. The Tosh Farms complex held thousands more pigs, and they had to be protected-in-place. The pigs were the key to survival for the town of McKenzie—an immense bank of living, breathing, eating, shitting post-collapse wealth. They were also an up-at-dawn security nightmare. Thousands of starving refugees surrounded the farm and the town, knives out.

Mat’s four-vehicle, seven-man convoy should’ve been sufficient for the pig transfer between Tosh Farms and McKenzie. The convoy team was made up of his best men. Mat was the only guy with actual combat experience in town, and he’d been asked to lead security, which was a lot like being thrown into the middle of a swamp with a pocket knife and asked to eradicate the alligators.

Seemingly, word had gotten out about The Porky Pig Fun Run. Thousands of rats lined the roadside to watch the truck-loads of meat cross the vulnerable five-mile gauntlet between the “mutual security zones” of McKenzie and the neighboring berg of Henry, population 475. The town of Henry handled the pigs. The town of McKenzie handled the security. That was the deal.

The rats were castaways from the urban hellscapes surrounding the small towns: Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Louisville. When the economy took the Big Dump, thousands of city people flooded into the Tennessee countryside, where food actually grew.

The watchers along the road weren’t Mat’s problem. They could have their drooling fantasies about pork chops and applesauce. Today, though, the rats had grown a pair. Mat had never seen them coordinate like this before. It was a ragged attempt, but the new motivation was obvious. Somebody was leading them.

Up ahead, two rats pushed a big baby stroller onto the road.

What the fuck? Mat’s foot bobbled on the accelerator, then kept steady pressure.

“Please don’t be a baby. Please just be an IED,” he prayed.

Did a tiny hand rise from the buggy? Mat prayed in monosyllables to an unfamiliar god.

“No-no-no-no-NO!”

A skeleton-thin man lit the baby buggy on fire, then pushed it, into Mat’s path. It exploded in flame, like it’d been doused in gasoline or lighter fluid. He hit the stroller at thirty miles per hour and the flame blasted in all directions. Mat couldn’t see anything but fire cascading up and over his windshield, but there was no meaty thunk under his tires, no tiny hand slapping against the glass. It’d just been an ingenious, trash-tech IED: an empty baby carriage, and the ploy had almost worked. Mat had to think hard before reaching the conclusion that he hadn’t, actually, shit his pants.

Would he have slammed on the brakes if he’d seen a baby? Mat honestly didn’t know.

The buggy engulfed the hood and bullet-resistant glass in flame. Mat worried about the vulnerable wires and hoses under the hood if gas seeped inside. He hoped the wind sucked it all away.

Would it be weird if a few coke bottles of gasoline killed a military vehicle? Mat had seen weirder things than that over in the sandbox. For now, the truck seemed okay. The engine growled and the road flew past.

As the smoke cleared, the second phase of the ambush appeared.

“Fuck me!” Mat gasped as he leaned toward the windshield.

The highway between the two towns was arrow-straight, except for two curves that snaked between a pair of bogs.