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

no other reason than to keep him from driving the Homestead into the ditch.

Ross Homestead

Oakwood, Utah

It seemed like people wanted a piece of Jacquelyn, all day, every day. Not only did she care for the mental and spiritual needs of dozens of Homestead friends, but most days she could barely stay on top of her own grief. Several times a day, like a snowball gathering speed down a hill, she would start crying and struggle to stop. One time, she cried for over an hour straight.

As “preventative maintenance” for her mind, she sought out a place to hide, a place where she could meditate and carve out a little stillness. Unfortunately, the only places indoors not jam-packed with people were the rooms that weren’t heated, like the Ross family library.

A wing of what used to be their steepled living room, the library ran floor-to-ceiling with books stacked on limestone shelves, bracketed inside limestone pillars. In a past life, Jacquelyn had been an avid reader, and the Ross library held some of the greatest written works, fiction and non-fiction, of all time.

Better still, people avoided the place. Because of the stone, the library held the winter cold like a tomb. She’d stashed a thick blanket under the couch and the setup brought her the solitude she craved.

Jacquelyn slipped into the back corner of the library, pulled out her blanket and curled up in the corner of the couch.

She spent much of her time in the library talking to an invisible someone—someone who understood her and who could share the weight she carried. Sometimes it seemed like she whispered to Tom’s ghost. Other times, she spoke to her mother who had passed three years before the collapse. If she were being completely honest with herself, she supposed conversing-with-an-invisible-someone might be called “prayer.”

She chalked it up to the apocalypse. As it wore on, something supernatural drew her, calmed her and even renewed her a bit. As a mental health professional, she understood how unstable the human mind could be; every human mind, not just the crazies. Everyone rose and fell on a tide of emotion, circumstance and relentless, gland-cooked hormone. To gain even the slightest control of those tides, a person had to admit that their emotions wandered around like a drunken homeless guy on New Year’s Eve.

Jacquelyn admitted that the drift toward prayer, if that was even the right word, probably had as much to do with stress as anything. Culture shock and grief were the emotional cocktails she sipped all day, imbibing from the first rays of sunshine until her head hit the pillow. She would fully expect everyone to drift toward an existential state of reflection, given the death and suffering around them. Jacquelyn was no exception.

With her professional assessment complete and duly noted, Jacquelyn burrowed into the couch and cut ties with reason. She set herself adrift on emotion, taking her wherever it may.

She sat up and ran a finger across the spines on the bookshelf, just to hear the rat-a-tat-tat of her finger on their bindings. She halted on a thin volume and read the spine: Ancient Gnostic Gospels.

The word “gospels” would normally have turned her off, but she slid the book out anyway. The cover told her nothing: a nondescript image of some stone carvings and rotted pages. She flipped through the book and stopped at The Gospel of Mary.

She didn’t know much about the Bible, but she knew enough to know there wasn’t a Gospel of Mary. She’d read The Da Vinci Code and remembered something about feminists and conspiracy theorists getting hot and bothered over Mary and the Knights Templar. Like all conspiracy theories, it amounted to nonsense built on nonsense.

She skimmed the Gospel of Mary out of feminist curiosity. It was a fragment of an old writing of questionable origin. One little passage grabbed her attention: Peter the Apostle asked Mary to tell them about Jesus, and Peter lamented that Jesus had loved Mary more than the rest of them. The page went on to offer the perfect description of what Jacquelyn had been feeling these last couple weeks: a third voice in her head; not her own mind, not outside her mind, but a voice inside her and somehow parallel to her.

She closed the book, returned it to the shelf.

Was that what religion had been talking about? Some third voice—a mashup of imagination and intuition? Because, that might describe her own mental meanderings.

She set back on the little couch, wrapped the blanket around her, closed her eyes and let her mind wander.

A thought barged in. More a picture than a feeling. She saw the Holy Bible; that old, musty book that she had long thought of as a tool of male control. Only now, she felt it come uncharacteristically alive, expanding with an emotional halo that made no rational sense.

Jacquelyn opened her eyes, a little shaken by the stutter-step. She stared across the library at the biggest, clunkiest bible she had ever seen, set on a wooden stand on its own shelf. She swore she must have known it was there; the biggest book on the shelf. Among several thousand books and small items of sculpture, she hadn’t consciously noticed the bible until now.

She stood and lifted the huge book and cracked open the first page, the binding creaking with age and disuse. Someone had written the Ross family tree inside, going back seven generations. Jacquelyn eased the cover closed and set the bible back on its stand, afraid she might damage a family heirloom.

She folded up her blanket, slid it under the couch and left the library, meandering through the empty stone corridors of the Ross home.

The Bible. Maybe it deserved another look. Maybe it deserved greater consideration. She had always written it off as male propaganda, but that was back when harping on the president or getting in arguments about politics seemed life-or-death important. With people starving outside the Homestead and cutting their wrists inside the Homestead, she literally