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

dragged the woman out of the way when eight more intruders thundered down the hallway toward him.

He dropped the woman and fired a controlled burst, driving them back around the corner. Terrified that he might hit another friendly, Jason scanned the hallway and forced himself to think through the booze haze. He had to buy himself more time to get the vault door closed.

Grabbing a pant leg in one hand and aiming his MP5 in the other, he strained to get the man’s body clear of the vault door. He accidentally touched off another burst of submachine gun fire and inadvertently drove them behind the wall. Finally the man’s body pulled clear of the doorway. Jason went back for the final corpse—the teenager.

Just then, the intruders made their charge. Hearing them, he turned back, leaned around the corner and fired a long burst. The front line dropped or faltered, and the rest of the gang tripped over their bodies. Jason kept up the fire, dropping some and slowing the rest. His magazine went dry but he had the next mag near-at-hand.

The last of the attackers realized they were on the crappy end of a fatal funnel, and they retreated back behind the corner. The Homestead kid Jason shot wasn’t moving—his eyes were open and glazed. His body sagged to one side.

Jason ran back to the vault, and with a last explosion of effort, dragged the dead teenager clear of the door, pulled the door shut and spun the tumbler.

The vault secure, he turned to the hallway, crouched and covered the only way in. He did a quick inventory of his mags and found that he had three full mags. He conducted another tactical reload. His pride in gun handling went sour in his mouth.

He could run all the tac reloads in the world but it wouldn’t change the truth: he had just killed a friendly.

Everyone loved Richey Chapman. The kid was a good kid. One of the bright spots in an otherwise bleak-ass world. Even as Jason protected the most critical asset of the Homestead, he knew this careless shooting changed everything for him.

He’d been drinking. He’d been hiding, and he’d killed a good kid.

He might have been the one guy who’d predicted this collapse and invested a small fortune in their survival. He might have been the man who kept everything together through masterful leadership. He might even be the guy who single-handedly mowed down the gangbanger flank in the war.

But none of that mattered—Jason Ross was now the man who shot Richey Chapman on accident.

Negligent discharge. Blue-on-blue casualty. Friendly fire.

Some things, a man could move past. Other things left a mark.

Chad Wade stood on the roof of the hospital watching the Homestead burn. He yearned to race up the hill with his men and join the fight, but he knew leaving his post would not only jeopardize a hard-won asset, but would forever end any confidence Jeff Kirkham had in his ability to follow orders.

The professional thing to do was to stay put. The battle at the Homestead would be over before he and his team could reach them anyway.

“Fuck!” Chad screamed into the frigid winter haze.

His family and friends were fighting for their lives and all he could do was watch from the roof of the hospital, his dick in his proverbial hands.

Over the last two months, boredom had worn on Chad. He yearned to take action—any action. It was like an angry weed pushing through the dull monotony of the daily duff of survival.

Chad hung the binoculars on their lanyard around his neck and yanked his short sword out of its scabbard. He ran his finger along the razor-sharp blade for the twentieth time that day. He’d talked Jason into buying Cold Steel gladius swords for the Homestead armory. Basically a pointy machete, the ancient Romans had used the gladius to conquer half the world. Now, it was available on Amazon for $19.95.

Well, it had been available on Amazon—back when there used to be an Amazon. He hadn’t given a crap about modern amenities back then. He hadn’t even signed up for Amazon Prime.

A quarter of his adult life, he’d lived out of his car and that’d been just fine with him. But the BOREDOM and the sheer LABOR of living like peasants in the apocalypse, made him yearn for the days when he could run around drunk with his buddies until they got the cops to finally chase them.

Chad hadn’t realized it back then, but half the fun of life would get vaporized by anarchy. If he’d known, we wouldn’t have been so chummy with the concept of lawlessness.

He’d been a Navy SEAL before Black Autumn, and that earned him a vote when it came to preparing the Homestead. He’d needled Jason Ross for weeks about the gladius sword.

“They were the pinnacle of hand-to-hand combat. The Romans built an empire with these little bastards. We need to train with them. I’m serious.” Jason finally relented. Apparently, it was easier to buy them than to talk Chad out of it. Jason bought two dozen. After that, the gladius swords hung in a rack, gathering dust.

Then a dirty bomb went off in Saudi Arabia and a small nuke cratered Los Angeles harbor, both in the same week. Combined with a jittery stock market, trucker troubles and a hacker attack on the power grid by the Russians, America slid off a cliff. After two months, the survivors measured that cliff in miles, not feet. Nobody had come to help and the land’s ability to support a population of three hundred million with backyard farms and wild forage proved laughably inadequate, not that anyone could grow anything in the dead of winter anyway.

So the gladius swords came out of storage and Chad got to claim them as his genius idea. As with every idea proffered by Chad, Jeff Kirkham had rolled his eyes at the rack of swords. Some prejudices fade, but others never die. An Army