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

he could do with the men he’d been given. The kid next to him had killed a few mule deer, but killing men was a different game. When it came to soldiers, Blue Army took what it could get. Deer hunters were a heck of a lot more useful than computer programmers, and he supposed he was lucky to have a spotter at all.

Vanderlink wondered: how could Blue Army soldiers like this kid—his spotter—be away from their families? All but the temple quadrant of the city had slid into mayhem. Most of the Mormon congregations survived the initial die off by pooling resources and gathering around the bishopric. Every one of those congregations was supposed to have a “communications specialist” with a ham radio certification. Out of the two thousand LDS congregations in Salt Lake, Blue Army had spotty comms with about four hundred of them. He shook his head when he thought about how unprepared the members of the Church had ultimately been.

Before the balloon had gone up, in his home ward up in Oakwood Hills, hardly anybody would listen to Vanderlink when he talked in Sunday School about the coming collapse and how the U.S. Constitution was already hanging by a thread. They’d always change the subject and move on, brushing him off like some kind of nutcase.

Now, those prissy members who’d given him the cold shoulder in Sunday School had no doubt in their darned minds who had been right all along. They hid like rabbits in their basement while he defended the holy temple. With a full cellar, a food storage plan and survival skills galore, Vanderlink had shown up on the prophet’s doorstep with survival rations—not those other simpering lightweights. He’d been the one to heed past prophets’ warnings about doomsday and he’d stocked his food storage better than anyone. Vanderlink had been the personal savior to the prophet—a modern day Orrin Porter Rockwell.

“130 yards to the first guy, now,” his spotter broke his reverie.

He guessed the spotter kid had been a student at the University of Utah or maybe sent by the kid’s father from a large Mormon family. The Temple Square protection detail was cobbled together after the Avenues attack from the families who could afford to help protect church headquarters. Everyone else in Blue Army had run back to their homes as soon as the area had been cleared of gangbangers.

Vanderlink could have called in the MRAPs to interdict this group of looters. It would’ve been easy enough, and the light armor police transports would likely have scared them away. Instead, he readied himself, assessing the mens’ intent.

During his fifteen years in police work, his frustration had mounted, year after year, as he followed procedure instead of doing the right thing. So often he knew in his heart when a perpetrator would not stop killing, drugging or robbing people; the Holy Spirit testified to him when criminals were lost to outer darkness, or at least doomed to the Telestial Kingdom. As a city cop, Vanderlink couldn’t send evil men to the next life to face judgment. There was a process he had to follow.

Policy and procedure—the modern “secret combination” of evil—protected men with sinister hearts and persecuted men with just hearts. Due process, criminal rights, badge cams and piles of paperwork sounded like reasonable measures to ensure justice, they had the opposite effect, serving Satan and hobbling the righteous men who guarded the gates of Zion.

Vanderlink had always known that a time of justice approached. He listened intently as a boy as President Spencer W. Kimball and President Ezra Taft Benson prophesied of the coming dark age when evil would run rampant across the land and when the saints would gather to save the Constitution of the United States.

Vanderlink spent his life preparing for that day, gaining skill and experience, storing food and weapons and reading deeply into Holy Scripture. Like Porter Rockwell, the avenging angel of Brigham Young, Jack Vanderlink had been born at the perfect moment to stand with a sword in his right hand and the Book of Mormon in his left. He hadn’t held a calling in the church higher than Elder’s Quorum Counselor, probably due to his wife divorcing him, but Vanderlink knew that his current calling in Blue Army was no less important than a General Authority of the Church.

His so-and-so ex-wife might have denied him the chance to one day become a bishop, but Vanderlink knew the Lord had kept him in reserve for even greater things. In the apocalypse, before the second coming of the Lord, Jack Vanderlink would be like the sword that slew Laban in the hands of Nephi. He would be the arm of God as it swept this land free of corrupt ditherers and whoremongers.

Another spike of adrenaline hit Vanderlink as he studied the filthy men through his riflescope. The unmistakeable shape of a baseball bat appeared from behind the layered coats of one of the men. Another man scuttled over to a dumpster in the middle of the street. Vanderlink thought he saw a metal pipe in the man’s hand.

Weapons.

Adrenaline hit him again.

“Distance.” Vanderlink ordered.

“About 150 meters,” his spotter replied.

The perp with the baseball bat made as if to run up to the next point of cover. Vanderlink flicked the safety off his M14 and settled into the sandbags. Vanderlink savored the rush of holy righteousness.

The scruffy man with the baseball bat bolted for the next pillar and Vanderlink squeezed the trigger.

“WHOMF!” his big rifle bucked and the man dropped, mid-stride, his shoulder nearly ripped from his body by the soft-tipped hunting round.

Vanderlink popped out of his shooting stance and clapped his spotter on the shoulder. “Blood atonement, brother! You can almost feel an angel with a flaming sword standing over us right now. Darn it all to heck!”

The would-be gang of looters, minus one, bolted back down the street, running pell-mell away from Temple Square.

The young spotter regarded Vanderlink with a blank expression. “What do we do with