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

3

“The most important invention of the last two thousand years was hay. In the classical world of Greece and Rome, and in all earlier times, there was no hay. Civilization could exist only in warm climates where horses could stay alive through the winter by grazing. Without grass in winter you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization. Some time during the so-called dark ages, an unknown genius invented hay. Forests were turned into meadows, hay was reaped and stored, and civilization moved north over the Alps. So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin, and later to Moscow and New York.

But what happens to Vienna, Paris, London and Berlin the moment mankind forgets to store up hay? What happens when, just once, mankind forgets to harvest feed for the winter? How does livestock survive over winter then?

Sadly, mankind realized too late that wherever snow covered the ground, the animals would die. Two billion people died in the Black Autumn collapse before mankind remembered this ancient truth: surviving northern latitudes requires careful planning.”

The American Dark Ages, by William Bellaher North American Textbooks, 2037

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

How could Audrey look so cold? Chad wondered.

She’d been an absolute bitch at times, yet she had always been warm. Even her anger came off as something red-hot, an anger that begged a man to lose his temper, argue late into the night and then resolve the whole thing with slam-off-the-headboard makeup sex.

The memory that kept coming back to Chad as he stood over her lifeless body, spread out on a white, plastic folding table, was of holding her around the waist when she wore her white sweater. It always left his own shirt looking like he’d wrestled a rabbit. Chad wondered what animal fur that sweater had been. Alpaca? Cashmere? Chenille? Was a chenille an animal?

He closed his eyes and remembered how the sweater, and her warm hips underneath, felt on his forearms. Holding her around the waist had been the mental snapshot that put him over the top when he decided to marry her, as disastrous as that decision had been.

Audrey had never been a skinny girl. She wasn’t a fat girl. She’d always been solid: a woman a man could push up against and feel some resistance. When Chad held her around the waist, getting that damned fur all over his shirt, it felt like holding a womb. When he pictured being married to her, what popped into his mind was Audrey pregnant or carrying a baby. She typified motherhood, certainly more so than his own sinewy, alcoholic mother.

At that time in his life, when he decided to marry Audrey, Chad had just survived SEAL selection. He finished BUD/S and was on his way to school to become part of the fiercest, most highly-trained assault force the world had ever seen, a U.S. Navy SEAL.

His personal victory—beating the odds and surviving the ferocious test of Hell Week—sent Chad spinning in a sense of sun-dappled fate—like he’d been permanently installed at the top of the world. That, and the $40,000 bonus paid by the U.S. Navy, convinced him he could marry virtually anyone and their life would be forever touched by fortune. Despite the warning signs, hubris garnished his thoughts unceasingly. It felt like run at blackjack when a guy “just can’t lose.”

So he married Audrey right in the middle of his military career, never admitting that the odds were stacked against them. As he regarded his dead ex-wife on the plastic table—the puckered flesh of her wrists gaping open like the mouth of a fish—Chad faced facts: he had failed her, both as a husband and a protector.

Before her dad installed her in Chad’s Jeep, and in Chad’s care at the brink of the collapse, Chad promised to protect both Audrey and little Samantha. Chad gave Robert his word. But once again, he’d gone to war and left the man’s daughter to fend for herself.

Audrey had screwed up and killed their little girl. She’d made a simple mistake that any woman might’ve made and that Chad wouldn’t have made in a thousand years. If he’d been there, standing guard over his family, they would both still be alive.

He thought about little Samantha two days before on this exact same table. She’d been blue—visibly blue through her transparent baby skin. He couldn’t remember if she’d already been dead when he saw her last or if that’d been when she was still in a carbon monoxide coma.

Chad clawed at his hair until the pain blotted out the memory.

His ex-wife had died alone, behind the cook shack, surrounded by filthy snow. The twin gouts of her blood burned holes straight through the snow and vanished, as though her life force hadn’t even existed, and it happened while Chad Wade ran around town, adventure-drunk, with a gun in his hands.

A special place in hell waited for men like Chad, and the stone in the pit of his gut felt like God putting him on notice that he wouldn’t get away with it forever. His gallant warrior routine might swoon the ladies and impress the gentlemen, but God would not be mocked.

Chad figured he should touch Audrey, maybe kiss her goodbye.

Instead, he stood stock-still until sufficient time passed that he could escape the stifling room and get out to the crisp winter.

Instead of kissing her goodbye, Chad decided to offer his life. It seemed a fair trade; kissing her would’ve been so half-assed, so bourgeoisie. Between he and God, Chad knew they were beyond apologies and kisses. His atonement would have to be a grand gesture, an epic Hail Mary of sacrifice and blood.

In the dizzy spin of seeing his ex-wife dead on a plastic table, Chad released every tie binding him to man. The ropes that held him to earth—professionalism, friendship, commitment—all went slack in his hand, as though the giant holding those ropes on the other end had suddenly