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

already carrying her six-inch fighting knife in her hand when she emerged onto the great lawn.

Even two months after the collapse, Emily was still the only female on a QRF. The collapse had yanked her out of her second year of med school at Johns Hopkins University. Not only did she serve as the field medic for QRF Four, but she’d spent the time training in combat.

When Emily’s unit burst onto the open, now overrun with a mob, she didn’t have to make the decision to fight. She’d killed men in battle and she knew how it felt to let the training take over.

Emily charged into mortal combat with a man twice her weight. The two of them danced in a circle. He carried a big knife and a golf club. He swooshed the golf club through the air in an “X” pattern like a Bruce Lee movie. He smiled with malice, revealing mottled teeth that hadn’t been brushed in a long time.

While Emily danced, she worked her back around to the Homestead itself. She needed a clear backstop.

After a couple side steps, the man followed her around to where nothing was behind him but the hill. She tossed the knife to her left hand and in a blur, whipped her handgun out of her holster. Emily shot the grinning man twice in the chest and once through the nose. He pitched sideways into the snow without a grunt.

Shooting unsupported, with both right and left hands, was part of her daily firearm warmup. Killing a man six feet away required very little thought. She holstered her Glock and collected the man’s big knife, which gave her a knife in each hand. She surveyed the melee across the great lawn, the main drive and up to the big house. Emily paused—worrying about her mom, her dad and her siblings. She spared a thought for her new friend, Gabe.

Gabriel lay incapacitated in the infirmary, having been through a dozen surgeries since Emily shot him. He’d once been nothing more than the nineteen-year-old brother of the gang leader who’d assaulted the Homestead. Now he was her friend, and one of the few Homesteaders her age.

Emily herself had conducted the first two surgeries on Gabe’s bullet wounds, stitching up his tattered GI tract and swabbing out the debris and infection. Between surgeries and during many late-night conversations, they’d become something more than doctor and patient. She believed Gabe was nothing like his brother, and her assurances—not to mention the strength of her family name—had bought him temporary permission to stay.

Emily pushed her worries away as a woman shrieked like a Banshee and rushed her with a rusty ax. Emily stepped backwards, timing her counter-move. When the next swipe came, Emily lunged forward and trapped the ax-arm between her two knives in a downward-facing “V.” Then, she drew them both up, slicing the woman’s arm to the bone on both sides.

The ax dropped to the snow and the woman clutched her arm, screaming at such a high-pitched it fried a circuit in her brain. Emily stumbled away to search for her unit. A woman with a half-severed hand was as good as dead in this world. There was no reason to kill her.

Despite the chaos and the failing light, Emily could tell this was not gang army that’d attacked them six weeks before. These attackers were desperate trespassers—in the hundreds or thousands.

Catching sight of her unit, she backed into their formation. By standing back-to-back, her group of eighteen fighters presented only their strong-sides and denied the enemy the chance to attack their flanks and back.

Her commander, Josh, shouted orders above the din. “Move toward the upper food lockers.”

Her QRF unit trundled across the Great Lawn and toward the underground lockers where most of the food storage had been stashed. It seemed the most likely, and most vulnerable target and had been assigned to them in case of an incursion.

They neared the lockers, but were unopposed. The lockers hadn’t been touched.

Jason Ross—Emily’s father—had built the low-profile, cold storage rooms into the ground. The mob hadn’t known where to look for food. The lockers held the bulk of it, stored in five gallon food-grade buckets.

“Move toward the solar control hut,” Josh shouted over the roar.

Each QRF unit had been assigned Homestead defensive priorities. The food storage lockers were QRF Four’s primary responsibility, but standing guard over them would draw attention to the food, so they shifted to their secondary objective.

Moving through the forest, QRF Four encountered scattered intruders. They shot most of them with their AR-15s, since the risk of over-penetration to the Homestead was minimal in the forest. By the time they reached the solar control hut—a glorified shipping container—they’d killed another ten intruders.

The control hut was at the top of a small hill, so when they emerged from the forest, the battleground spread below them. Emily’s throat tightened when she saw it. Their plan for Homestead defense had been fatally flawed right from the start. They’d assumed that trespassers would be like the gangbangers that’d attacked them before. This was nothing like that. Starving “zombies” didn’t give a shit about Homestead assets and solar panels. They wanted food in their mouth. The attackers had bypassed all the sensible targets, and rushed the food they could smell.

The Homestead’s plan to protect major infrastructure had QRF units running around protecting unchallenged assets. The majority of chaos centered on the food preparation shack. Dinner preparations had been underway when the attack had come, so the cook shack was the only place with food in the open.

“Screw it. Let’s protect our families,” Josh ordered, abandoning his orders and rushing toward the zombies flocking toward the smell of soup.

Jason Ross had been researching wind power down in his gun vault when the Homestead alarm wailed. He’d been scouring his library trying to figure out how to get the wind turbines running.

Someone else probably should have done the research instead of him, since he was the political leader of