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

the Homestead and had a stack of other things to do, but researching wind turbines, figuring out ancient Native American acorn-rendering or untangling the mysteries of potatoes in the winter fed his introversion.

Because of his decades of experience in business, he was good at mediating squabbles between feuding families or making snap decisions about winter planting rotations. He could slap on a wise face, tamp down his own opinions, and understand the other person’s point of view. He could feign neutrality and make everyone feel adequately heard. He could pretend to ignore some idiot's churlish posturing, then varnish over it in a way that brought peace back to the tribe.

In short, he was a master bullshitter. Jason did it for the Homestead, and he paid a personal price for it. He suffered fools, then closed the door behind them to pour himself a drink.

Booze patted down the frayed ends of his prefrontal cortex.

He used to be able to do the job standing on his head. He used to be able to do it without the alcohol, back in the days when business was still a thing. After the Black Autumn collapse, he’d shifted his primary focus to killing instead of cooperation. That’s when the alcohol had begun in earnest.

Alas, Jason Ross had been a high achiever in war too.

Give that man a gold star. Not only could he negotiate a win-win deal, but he could kill a shit-ton of men in battle. That’s called being multi-talented, folks. That’s called being a man-for-all-seasons.

Yes, he’d killed men—some of them in a fair fight and some of them before they even knew they were dead.

Do not pass Go, shit bags. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

After working the death-dealing side of the cooperative equation—wiping a problematic person off of the planet instead of hearing him out—team building seemed like such a colossal drag. It felt like slogging through the muck of the human ego. Smoothing feathers seemed so tiresome when a flatulent fool could be shot through the face instead.

That afternoon, after a few hours of seeking first to understand, then to be understood, Jason turned to seeking first to imbibe something amber. Then, he sought some time away where nobody could find him—behind a heavy door with a coded lock.

When the alarm blared, it barely penetrated the concrete walls of the vault where he hid. He dropped the wind turbine book on his reloading bench and flipped into combat mode like waking up from an afternoon nap.

He’d trained with firearms alongside the special forces veterans of the Homestead for years. He could run any gun in the vault like putting on his pants.

Jason grabbed a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun off the wall and stabbed a half-dozen 9mm magazines in his pocket from the plastic drawer marked “MP5 Mags.” He slammed a mag home and slapped down the charging handle.

It was probably not a drill. He would’ve known about a drill in advance.

He spun the wheel lock on the inside of the vault, swung the heavy door open, stepped into the gap and came nose-to-nose with three strangers. Standing in his basement were a dirty-looking man, a ragged woman and a male teenager. The strangers’ jaws dropped at the vision of firearms that appeared behind the vault door. This far into the apocalypse, firearms were literally worth their weight in gold.

The man put his foot in the vault door, despite the MP5 in Jason’s hands.

After a few heartbeats, Jason understood the situation; the only conclusion he could reach was that the Homestead was overrun. Seeing filthy strangers in the door of the vault caused a two-second hiccup in his OODA Loop—military slang for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Essentially, it confused him. The intruders were equally flummoxed, and they’d shown up to a gunfight with nothing but knives.

Jason flicked the MP5 to full-auto and dumped half a magazine into all three from point-blank range. Their bodies dropped where they stood, as though their joints had come unhinged. The roar of the sub-machine gun rendered him temporarily deaf.

Jason climbed over the corpses, suddenly frantic to the get the vault closed and locked behind him. Inside the vault, his radio hadn’t been able to send or receive, so he’d been incommunicado. Once outside, the radio exploded with chatter. Gunfire thumped and thudded outside in a chaotic rhythm.

Still uncertain, Jason did the natural thing: a tactical reload. He dropped the half-empty mag of nine millimeter rounds into one pocket and replaced it with a fresh magazine. Just then, two more strangers charged into the anteroom outside the vault, probably attracted by his shooting. Jason loosed another burst from the MP5.

As they dropped in the hallway, Jason’s blood ran cold. Beyond the two intruders one of the young men of the Homestead, Richey Chapman, slid against the wall, dragging a red swipe down the plaster. Jason had probably shot through the intruders and hit one of his own. The boy must’ve been chasing them.

His first instinct was to rush to the boy and render aid, and he took three steps before pulling himself up short. If the Homestead lost control of the gun vault, all was lost. Strangers ran among them—he knew that much for sure. If the intruders got to the guns and ammunition, they could kill every soul in the Homestead and not only take the compound, but hold it.

Jason left the bleeding boy and turned back to the vault. He dragged the bodies out of the doorway one-at-a-time. Only six people in the Homestead knew the combination to the vault, and if he could get the door locked, their guns and ammunition would be safe.

Moving dead bodies was harder than it looked on TV. The filthy woman’s shoulder hung up on the doorframe and was partially stuck under the man. He could bench press her body weight in the gym, but moving her dead body was like trying to lift a hundred and fifty pound trash bag full of mud. Jason barely