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

to fly her, and that meant a pretty good chance of falling from the sky due to some detail he might easily miss.

There were four helos in the airplane hangars around the North Salt Lake Regional Airport. JT and the Amigos had busted into all the private hangars and they’d done an inventory of all aircraft. Jeff Kirkham wanted JT to get a helo in the air to extend their recon north and west. The little airport was two miles from the Homestead, on the border of the Mills County foothills and the wetlands of the Great Salt Lake. Jeff sent JT with two Amigos and a couple of Afghans to check it out.

Hot Therapist Jackie told JT that the Homestead pulled all its house staff into its survival community when Black Autumn went down, including the three Mexican landscapers. Everyone called them the Amigos because, apparently, calling someone a “Mexican” sounded racist. They were from Mexico. They called themselves Mexican. JT had no idea how calling them “Amigos” was any less racist than calling them Mexicans, but “Amigos” had a nice ring to it, so he went with it. In any case, the three landscapers were some of the most useful humans on the property. Not only did they know where all the skeletons were buried, so to speak, they knew how to get shit done.

For that matter, the Afghans were pretty damn useful too, though they didn’t speak as much English as the Amigos. In a strange twist of fate, the Homestead had half a damn village of Afghan refugees. They’d followed Mister Jeff to America when they were awarded refugee visas for their service “defending the interests of the United States.”

Jeff Kirkham had been an advisor to their commando unit in Afghanistan, so they’d grouped up in Salt Lake City where they had a friend. The families of Muslims comprised the hard-working backbone of the Homestead security force. They’d been trained by Jeff himself, and seasoned in loads and loads of insurgent combat. Defending a clan during the civil disorder was “same day, different continent” to those guys.

The short drive across the narrow slip of neighborhoods gave JT the heebee jeebies. There were piles of frozen bodies on every street. It looked like folks had dragged their dead to the curb and called it good. The ground was frozen solid and there wasn’t enough wood to cremate. It was like trash day in Hades.

As JT and the Amigos picked through the airplane hangars, the Afghan guys took up security positions and hunkered down. The sun busted through the clouds as the morning drew on. JT smiled when he caught one of the Afghans basking in the rare bit of sun on his face.

One of the helicopters looked like it'd been in pieces before the collapse, probably for maintenance. Another was on the tarmac tied down and looters had lit the cover on fire, for reasons JT could not imagine. The third helo was a tiny MD 500, and fourth was the AStar, in pristine condition, ready to take to the skies. It’d been locked in a hangar with a little bachelor apartment. By the smell of it, the owner had probably lived there, and protected his home from looters for as long as he could before the stink of his turd-choked toilet drove him out. This low in the valley, the sewer had backed up like a constipated hooker. JT had seen several other low places where the sewer system had blown out in rivulets of shit that coursed out onto the streets. The refuse from the Homestead and the McMansions on the hill had to go somewhere. Apparently, it’d gone down. If there had been any Liberal journalists still alive, they would’ve busted a nut writing a Vox article about how the shit of the rich had literally flowed downhill into the basements of the lower class.

Luckily, the helicopter’s owner had stuck around long enough to defend his bird, and JT would be the happy beneficiary. They rolled it out of the hangar to escape the stink, then JT went to work.

Flipping toggle switches in the cabin wasn’t encouraging, though. He was unfamiliar with the AStar, but it seemed like the power from the battery might be running low, unable to even crank the starter. When he hit the ignition button, he heard nothing but a series of clicks—probably the solenoid tapping lethargically against the ring gear.

He flopped back in the pilot’s seat and thought about it. He could spend the rest of the afternoon searching for a generator, then looking for gas to power the generator. But, how would he even know if the jenny put out the right voltage for the AStar battery?

He unbuckled and went searching for the battery. He found it in the “squirrel cheek” compartment behind the starboard passenger door. The battery didn’t look all that different from a car battery, except for the big, two-prong plug on the side. JT congratulated himself for not trying to figure it out on his own. The battery didn’t look like it was twelve volt, which put charging it beyond his personal expertise. Better to get it back to the Homestead and let Pappa Ross, the designated Homestead tinkerer, figure it out.

He wrestled the battery out of the compartment and duck-walked it over to the Ford F-150. Their drive across the valley had been a horror show, but JT hadn’t felt particularly threatened. The level of civil disorder had fallen off a cliff since the flu. Apparently, knocking out the hungriest fifty percent of the population reduced crime.

Even so, JT didn’t want to spend any more time outside the wire than necessary. He tossed the battery in the back of the truck and whistled the men back. The Amigos had taken to scavenging gear out of the poop-stank hangar and they’d accumulated a pile of interesting stuff in the back of the Ford. The Afghans trotted over and hopped in the cab. The Amigos