White Wasteland Read online

  White Wasteland

  White Wasteland Series, Book One

  Jeff Kirkham

  Jason Ross

  White

  Wasteland

  * * *

  A Post-apocalyptic Saga

  * * *

  ReadyMan Series Two

  * * *

  by Jeff Kirkham, Fmr. Army Green Beret

  & Jason Ross

  * * *

  © copyright 2021

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Meanwhile…

  Free Preparedness 10 Step Manual

  1

  “Like a cascade of boulders, each rock passing energy to the next, the collapse of the American Empire started small. Nobody imagined a dirty bomb in the Middle East could trigger a militia uprising in a two-horse town in America, force the death of a massive power plant, gut-punch the stock market, unleash civil disorder on the West Coast, and scare two Filipino tribesmen into detonating a nuclear device. Alone, none of those events was capable of toppling the most expansive empire the world had ever seen.

  But where one boulder will fail, an avalanche may yet succeed.”

  The American Dark Ages, by William Bellaher North American Textbooks, 2037

  * * *

  Ross Homestead

  Orchard Heights, Utah

  * * *

  Jeff Kirkham’s thermal scope swarmed with hundreds of white hot bodies converging on the Homestead. With snow covering the forest floor and the afternoon moving toward evening, he could see their heat signature, even through the forest canopy.

  His radio erupted in chatter. “Intruders, Zone Four.”

  “Intruders, Zone Five too.”

  “Break, break, break.” Jeff interrupted. “Prairie Fire. Prairie Fire. Prairie Fire. All units pull back to defend Homestead. We’re being overrun!”

  Jeff dropped the priceless FLIR thermal monocular in a pocket on his chest rig and charged down the trail to his off-road OHV vehicle. He slapped the door latch, popping it open and tossed his considerable, muscle-bound bulk behind the steering wheel. As soon as the engine turned over, he stomped on the gas and roared down the trail, narrowly avoiding flipping it around the snow-slick, hairpin corners.

  As Jeff raced toward family and friends, now fighting for their lives inside the Homestead fence, his right hand bobbled the tomahawk in and out of a loop on his battle belt.

  Jeff carried the ATC tomahawk on twenty-four deployments around the world with the Green Berets—from the Philippines, Haiti, Iraq and the endless mountains of Afghanistan. He’d never once used it in hand-to-hand combat. He justified the tomahawk’s place in his kit by telling himself that it inspired fear in his enemies. It harkened back to the Norse warriors. He didn’t know if he really was nordic, somewhere in the muddled crisscross of American breeding, but the warrior code of the Norse spoke so strongly to his soul that, if nothing else, he believed himself an adopted son.

  In the failing light and with friendlies everywhere, the tomahawk would be his go-to weapon. As a Special Operations Force “SOF” commando, it had been burned into the stringy core of Jeff’s brain stem: never, ever, send a bullet downrange without control of what it will kill. Or, in the rules of shooting: know your backstop. Shooting in and among the men, women and children of the Homestead could lead to a “friendly,” blue-on-blue casualty, and Jeff would no more risk that than he would fire bullets willy-nilly into his own home. Odds were good he would need a blade.

  Jeff heard rifle and handgun fire in the heart of the Homestead compound. This would be a battle like no other he’d experienced, he felt it in his bones. This was the fight he’d feared most since coming home to a broken nation—the kettle of human misery finally boiling over and sweeping his wife and boys up in the churning chaos. A mob.

  They had a lot of stored food at the Homestead—and that might be their death sentence. The group had prepared for collapse to an almost obscene degree: food, water, defense, power, medicine, communications. When the world upended and the teeming mass of urban consumers didn’t just lay down and die, the Homestead’s larders went from being a good thing, to being a very bad thing.

  They were a plot of oat grass surrounded by a million starving cattle. Only, these starving cattle carried guns and knives. These starving cattle would kill every one of his friends and family for one more meal. These cattle had blown through the outer ring of Homestead defense in an overwhelming surge of numbers and would chew straight through the Homestead’s ability to survive the winter.

  As the OHV howled around the bend in Crestview Drive, Jeff’s worst nightmare appeared, teeming through the Homestead gate; hundreds, maybe thousands of famine-struck people.

  Jeff’s team had reinforced the perimeter fence around the thousands of mountain acres, and for what it was worth, that effort funneled the mob through the main gates. Jeff hadn’t seen a soul climbing the chain link fence and razor wire.

  Even so, the mob had made short work of the fortifications at the main entry. They’d already pushed through the heavy gate, charged up the four hundred meter driveway and were spreading throughout the compound like a plague of locust.

  The mob had originated from the refugee camp clustered around the North Barricade, a mile down the hill. Jeff had seen them flooding up the serpentine streets of the Oakwood development. The refugee camp had built slowly next to their outer barricade. It filtered around Oakwood Heights over the past month. They were desperate people hoping for table scraps from the Homestead and the once-wealthy neighborhood that surrounded it.

  Oakwood had been a wealthy, hillside enclave in “the before”—the kind of neighborhood that handed out full-size candy bars on Halloween; the kind of Mormon suburb with more than their share of food storage. At the upper edge of that neighborhood sat the Homestead.

  Through the rumor mill, through suburban mythology, maybe even through the raw intuition of human desperation, tens of thousands of nearby residents knew about Oakwood and the Homestead. They somehow smelled the food from across their smoldering valley and they’d come family by family, and now in a mad rush, to take that food.

  It would do them no good. They could consume every last calorie from the Homestead and Oakwood Heights and by this time tomorrow, they would be hungry again. Their numbers were far too great. The brutal math of modern urbanization offered no mercy when it came to calories. By a hundred-to-one deficit, Salt Lake City and every city in America would starve. The just-in-time inventory in stores and the dead ships, rusting containers and silent trucks guaranteed that nine-in-ten American families would suffer the long goodbye of famine. Nothing could be done about it. The die had been cast when the nuclear bomb had gone off in Los Angeles and the panic had run amok.

  All Jeff and his friends could do was to preserve this last knot of civilization, perched precariously on the hillside like a stone temple to the memory of America. Even though he knew these pillagers were just hungry people, they were also insatiable beasts; the would-be murderers of his wife and sons.

  He would fight them like the Taliban, like Al Queda. He would kill them with fresh hate, like he had the enemies of America in places around the world. Countrymen or not, this mob had come to bury his chil
dren, and he would kill them.

  Jeff stomped on the gas and plowed his OHV into the mob massed at the Homestead gates. Bodies thumped under and over the hood of the OHV. The weight of human flesh eventually slogged the the vehicle to a halt.

  He drew his tomahawk, jumped from the vehicle and faced a grimy, crazed man brandishing a crowbar. Jeff whipped his tomahawk up and drove it down with tremendous force, splitting the front of the man’s skull down to the neck meat. The crowbar thunked into a snow pile and disappeared.

  Jeff struggled to free the blade while a woman charged him. She screamed and swiped at him with a kitchen knife. He abandoned the tomahawk, stepped inside her swing and punched her hard in the wrist. The wrist snapped like a dry branch and her blade fell. He brought his left hand around and chopped her where the neck met her shoulder. Her shrieks of pain died mid-gasp, and she dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  Reining in his adrenaline, Jeff yanked the tomahawk free from the grimy man’s skull. He scooped up the woman’s kitchen knife, slipped it in his belt and rushed inside the gate to join the fight—but recognition passed between he and the next man—a Homesteader named Gayland. Jeff grabbed Gayland’s shoulder and stepped past him, pulling him back-to-back.

  “On me! On me!” Jeff shouted as he waded into the mob, fighting steadily toward the big house and toward his family.

  Jeff brought all his martial arts training to bear. Focused violence was the key—then methodical thinking—followed by more focused violence. Above all, he must keep breathing. His barely-healed gut wound and weakened system would kill him just as fast as the sword of his enemy.

  Calm—then focused violence. Calm—then focused violence. Above all, breathe.

  He repeated the mantra in his head as he launched himself forward into the churning crowd.

  The intruders carried crude weapons; tire irons, knives, clubs and baseball bats. The mob had blown through its ammunition in the first moments of the attack, leaving them to fight like medieval peasants, with whatever weapons they’d scrounged.

  The Homesteaders had ample ammunition, but it wouldn’t save them. Jeff fought his way past women and men laying waste to the intruders with Homestead handguns and MAC-10 submachine guns. They played loose with their firearm discipline, but Jeff had bigger problems.

  Hundreds, maybe a thousand starving intruders had breached the gates of the Homestead. This was a mob incursion, without battle lines and without anywhere to fall back. Within ten minutes, almost all ammunition on both sides was gone and the scene went from battle to slaughterhouse.

  Even after hundreds of gunfights in his career, Jeff had never witnessed hand-to-hand combat on this scale. As he fought, he struggled to understand. It looked like a medieval battlefield. Men with training, strength and confidence, like knights of old, laid waste to lesser men. But the numbers in the mob were beyond comprehension. At some point, not even knights could defeat this many peasants.

  He’d been training the Homestead forces for two months, and they practiced hand-to-hand combat and knife fighting more than anything. With over a thousand enemy against two-hundred Homesteaders, that training appeared to be their only hope.

  Weakening steadily from his four stomach surgeries, Jeff chopped and parried his way through one enemy after another, taking most of them down with a single, well-placed blow from his tomahawk or fist. Jeff and his wingman fought their way methodically toward the Homestead bunkhouse—toward their children.

  A wild-eyed intruder waving a large hunting knife, confronted him. Jeff took advantage of the easiest play in the book and raked his razor-sharp tomahawk across the man’s knife hand, opening the knuckles in a gout of blood.

  The man shrieked as blood gushed from the bone-deep wounds. He dropped the knife and seized his ruined hand in shock. Jeff pommel struck the man in the throat, dumping him in a whimpering heap.

  Gayland struggled to keep up as they dodged from one knot of men to another, taking advantage of attackers with their backs turned. Jeff’s defenders fought in mutually-supportive knots as Jeff had taught them, leaving the backs of the intruders exposed to a “rover” like him.

  One after another, Jeff worked his way around the phalanxes of his fighters, hitting men from behind and severing enemies’ Achille’s tendons and hamstrings with chops from his ‘hawk. Rather than commit a coup de grace and tie up his tomahawk in gristle, Jeff opted for shallow, crippling, strikes.

  It didn’t take much to incapacitate a starving man, and Jeff hacked, parried and moved with liquid calm, leaving behind him a wake of enemy on the ground flopping like fish.

  It was total pandemonium—hundreds of souls shrieked and clamored. So much death and misery in one place at one time threatened to overwhelm him, but Jeff tuned it out. He channeled the chaos and used it to focus himself.

  Another intruder, this one a beast of a man—stepped up to Jeff with a ferocious leer. The man towered over Jeff’s five-foot seven frame. He could see it in the man’s eyes; this was the kind of man who would murder to keep his family alive. He could relate, but it changed nothing.

  Jeff’s powerful build and corded shoulder muscles should’ve given the man pause, but it was easy to pass Jeff off with a quick glance as a man small-in-stature, with a bit of a middle-aged belly. Only a careful eye would see that Jeff had logged tens of thousands of hours lifting weights and training for personal combat. The hulking intruder had the advantage over Jeff by fifty pounds and three inches of reach. The big man leered.

  Jeff pulled the kitchen knife from his belt and flicked it forward toward the man’s left hand, readying his tomahawk in his right. Only one man-in-ten-thousand had studied bladed combat. Jeff believed this man was no match for him, but he wouldn’t take it for granted.

  The big man had a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire that extended his reach even farther.

  Jeff rehearsed the counters to a baseball bat in his mind: stay outside the arc until moving in for a kill. Take advantage of the follow-through. Sucker the swing, then bite.

  As expected, the big guy poked the end of the bat at Jeff a couple times and then wound up for a crushing blow. Jeff rolled backwards at the waist when it came. The bat swooshed past his face at full speed. The power of the missed swing carried the bat around to the man’s weak side. Jeff rocked forward at the hips and smashed the back of the man’s hand with the sharpened beard of his tomahawk.

  No need to get creative. The easy win is usually the best win.

  The big man’s eyes flicked from malice to shock. His grip on the bat loosened, yet he didn’t drop it despite the blood pouring down the grip. His pinky dangled by a thin strip of flesh.

  Jeff took a breath, checked his six and stepped back as the man gathered himself, panting like a wounded dog.

  Jeff needed to get moving. The battle for the main driveway wasn’t his biggest concern. Jeff could see that his men were winning control over the central corridor. His bigger concern was the women and children in the bunker. He needed to put this raging bull on the ground and move on.

  Jeff feinted to the left, dodged right and hooked the bat with the tomahawk. He whipped downward and hauled the bat over to the weak side. The big man reacted slower this time, opening up for a split second. With a lightening-quick jab, Jeff sunk four inches of the kitchen knife between the man’s ribs. His expression went from shock to wonder, only now coming to the conclusion that he might die.

  Jeff couldn’t leave this combatant standing on the field, even wounded. Crippled, he might still injure or kill one of Jeff’s men. But Jeff was wheezing. The dump of adrenaline no longer held back the fatigue that threatened to drag him down. He was running out of steam fast.

  Reversing his feint, Jeff parried again with the kitchen knife. The befuddled man whipped to his weak side to protect the new wound. Instead of following through, Jeff came around with the tomahawk, stepped inside the reach of the bat and buried it in the man’s neck. Jeff stepped through, brushing the man’s side. He
jerked the tomahawk free. Blood exploded from the deep gash and the big man dropped to his knees. The bat fell to the snow.

  Jeff’s own consciousness grew cloudy around the edges. Every breath felt like cold fire in his aching throat and lungs. He put a hand on Gayland’s shoulder and pulled him toward the bunkhouse.

  A mass of scattered intruders flooded the grounds. They raced from one building to another in search of food. Like Roman armies of old, Jeff’s men knotted up in groups and fought in phalanxes. But the women and children had no such training or protection. While his men were winning the fight, they might lose still lose their families.

  A man blocked his way to the bunkhouse. Jeff gathered himself for another round of mortal combat. Jeff had killed or disabled perhaps twenty men and women, but adrenaline could no longer sustain him. No amount of steady breathing would hold back the fog that threatened to envelope him.

  The man facing him was nothing special, except that desperate men always were. He carried a hunting knife and a trashcan lid as a shield. Jeff launched himself at the man with a fury, beating the trashcan lid over and over with the tomahawk until the man cowered below it. Jeff punched through the lid with the spike end of his tomahawk. A severed finger fell to the snow and the man howled. Jeff stepped around the shield and stabbed the kitchen knife into the man’s ear with a ferocious side-hammer.

  The burst of violence brought the curtain down on Jeff too. His lungs clawed at the air for oxygen. His old wounds brayed and his cells went watery all at once. His ears rang, like a dial tone in his head.