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

had, once upon a time, felt the moment creeping up—until the Big Chill. Now, he was stuck in the nether zone of a non-relationship. She had him on the hook, but refused to reel him in.

He wanted to go up to her and shout, “Hey WOMAN. Look around. This is the no-shit A-POC-A-LYPSE. You and your spawn need overwatch and you ain’t gonna do better than this gunslinger right-here-in-front-of-you. Drop the cold shoulder and let’s do this.”

But…

To catch the man-fish, you gotta let the boy-fish be.

Evan sighed. He gathered his patience. He took a deep breath.

Tanya and the kids sat in the back seat of his OHV and he was in the front, riding shotgun. Berkely tittered about her dream the night before and Tanya played along, asking questions and showing limitless interest in the prattling.

The radio hacked into his thoughts with a garbled blast of static.

“This is Evan. Repeat last.”

“Evan, Colton. Hold up. Let me scope this out up ahead.” It was Colton the Kid. He was running point on the motorcycle.

The team had begun lining up for the climb to Traverse ridge and it’d taken them onto the east bench and a bedroom community of Salt Lake called Draper. It’d once been the agricultural hinterland of Salt Lake. Now the upper escarpment was dotted with little mansions, and some not-so-little mansions, capitalizing on the view of Salt Lake Valley and the Kennecot Copper Mine. They said you could see the Kennecot from space with the naked eye. Evan had never been to space and he never would given the collapse, so who fucking cared?

Ping!

Something hit the Ferret and Evan knew exactly what it was.

“Colton. Pull back NOW,” Evan radioed.

“Get down,” he barked at Tanya and the kids. “Turn around!!” Evan yelled and made the circle-in-the-air sign. “All stations. Turn around and pull back one click.” He’d scarcely heard the rifle’s report off in the distance, and the shot had been garbage, but any sniper fire was enough to reset their fun-meter.

Evan got the Ferret turned around and Colton raced back on the dirt bike. In the process, three more bullets slapped down around them. The fire was sporadic and ineffective, probably a half mile away by the sound of it. Evan had a pretty good read on the direction—it was coming from some sort of low, boxy structure dead ahead.

He orchestrated the tactical withdrawal of the column, and they re-formed a quarter mile back up the road.

“Tommy. You want to join me for a little walk?” Evan bounced his binoculars on his chest. “We need a look/see before we ruin that guy’s day.” They were still under orders to clear the corridor and take down criminal targets of opportunity.

“Roger that.” Tommy reached into the OHV and grabbed his binos.

They trotted up to the same spot in the road where the shooting had begun. The two men dropped behind a mound in the park strip and glassed. Binoculars worked twice as well with a steady rest.

“The hell?” Evan swore, his eyes glued to his binos. “Is that a big lion painted on the side of that white shipping container?”

Tommy glassed it for a moment before responding. “Roger that, boss. It’s a big ass lion head.”

“I think I know the guy who lives there.”

“No shit?” Tommy set his binos on the dirt mound.

“If I’m right, I know the sumbitch who’s shooting at us. I shouldn’t be surprised that he survived.” Evan chuckled. “He’s too mean to kill. You got anything white?”

“Just my BVDs,” Tommy answered.

“Well, bust ‘em out, homeboy. Are you afraid I’m going to look at your little pecker?”

Tommy laughed as he flipped over to take his pants off without standing up. “If you’d actually seen my dong, you wouldn’t be talking shit.” He squirmed out of his pants and pulled the underwear off, arching to keep his bare ass off the snow.

“Muchas gracias,” Evan took possession of the dirty underwear, pinching the waistband between two fingers.

Tommy got his pants back on and flipped over on his belly, continuing the mission “commando style,” balls-in-blue-jeans.

Evan waved the BVDs over his head, got up, and walked toward the distant wall of shipping containers. Clearly, it was some sort of fortress and Evan felt ninety-nine percent sure he knew the Lord of the Manor. The sniper rifle remained quiet. Evan stopped and waited a full minute. A white flag appeared on top of the shipping container.

As they approached, a burly guy with a massive, white-fringed beard came through a set of metal doors, six men at his side with AR-15s. Evan spotted men on top of the shipping containers, covering he and Tommy with rifles.

“What the fuck, Wheaton?” Evan shouted as they closed the distance. “Why are you shooting at me? And why are you such a shitty shot?”

“Holy balls! Is that Evan Hafer?” the bearded guy belly laughed as he motioned for his guys to relax.

Evan sauntered over, stepped into a bro handshake and embraced Wheaton. As he broke the embrace, Evan hung the dirty BVDs on Sean’s shoulder.

“I brought you an extra pair of underwear in case you shit yourself when you saw it was me you’ve been shooting at.” Evan tugged at Wheaton’s voluminous beard.

“Dude,” he brushed the underwear to the ground with the back of his hand. “What are you doing out here? We were thinking about killing you and adding your tank to our collection of Mad Max cars.”

“Good luck with that,” Evan countered. “You have to get past the belt-fed first.”

“We thought you were those pecker-lillies from the prison coming to give us a fisting.”

“We don’t know anything about the prison,” Evan said. “Have you been making friends over there? Are they your kind of peeps?”

“The prison’s a cesspool of shit bags, and we’ve been hunting them for over a month. We’d love to burn ‘em out, but we haven't figured out how. The guys inside have guns, so we can’t just shoot our way in. Not everyone’s a Special Forces bad ass.”

Evan shook his head.