Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) Aaron Ritchey (read a book .txt) 📖

Chapter Three

Preacher stole a kiss after a Sunday brunch

Said Jesus was in his pocket, but I have a hunch

He says that to all the pretty girls in town

Got a pocketful of pretty he wants to spread around

—Renee Crowell

(i)

WHILE I TRIED ON THE boots, Sharlotte walked over to me. The wooden leg I’d fashioned from a dining room table leg squished in the snow. The foot was covered with a slipper. Kinda grateful I’d lost both of mine.

“Cavvy, what are you doing?” Sharlotte asked.

Dutch drifted over to us as well, and that jackerdan answered for me. “She’s looting the bodies.” Then to Wren, “I thought you said your little sister wasn’t much of a fighter. Dang, but did you see what she did? She went all Henrietta Bonney on those ARK skanks.”

Henrietta Bonney was a ruthless gunslinger on Lonely Moon, the Juniper drama so popular out in the World.

Dutch grinned. “Wren, girl, you might’ve done the same thing.”

Wren tousled my hair. “Yeah, I done taught her well.”

I stood and again pushed Wren away. “You didn’t teach me nothin’. And I didn’t plan anything that happened. Actually, what I did was stupid right down the line. I got lucky over and over. And I don’t expect our luck to last all that long. So instead of patting each other on the butt and acting all proud ’cause we killed a bunch of people, we need to get after Edger.”

“Weren’t people,” Wren said. “We killed Regios.”

I gave her a glare for correcting me. Then on my dang freezing, torn-up feet, I marched past them to the Marilyn and climbed the ladder. Marisol and Rachel watched me from the Audrey. Wide-open eyes stared at me from white faces still pale with fright.

I remembered feeling like that, as if the fighting was bad, but the aftermath was worse as my brain tried to understand all the horror, all the near-misses, all of the trauma; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Stress after trauma. I understood that, but I wasn’t feeling it. I wasn’t feeling anything, and such a cold numbness in my heart scared me.

What was I becoming?

Whatever it was, I could still be Christian about it. “Marisol, Rachel, you okay?”

Both nodded in unison like spooked toddlers.

Marisol was the first one to burst into tears. “I accidentally shot at Wren. I triggered a missile, and it nearly killed her. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tears tracked down Rachel’s cheeks in sympathy for Marisol, ’cause when we cry, we cry together. Unless whatever part makes you weep gets too cold for tears.

I knew Rachel also cried ’cause we hadn’t rescued our boys. Rachel loved Pilate and was wishing for some kind of romance between them, but she was a cloned super soldier and he was a Roman Catholic priest—kind of—so yeah, star-crossed lovers.

“Will Wren forgive me for almost killing her?” Marisol asked.

I shrugged. “Prolly. You won’t be the first, and you won’t be the last to take a shot at my sister.”

That didn’t help anything, Marisol continued to weep.

“Really, it’s okay, Marisol,” I said. “You weren’t trained in combat. We can’t expect you to be perfect.”

“Were you trained?” she asked in a sobby little voice.

I recalled what Pilate had said to me, how I’d been born battle-weary, loading Mama’s clips during the firefight with Queenie when I was far younger than Marisol. Then after months of warfare, yeah, I’d been trained. On-the-job training.

“Yes, I was,” I said. And left it at that.

Sharlotte crawled into the gunner’s seat above me, while Wren slammed the passenger seat door. She and Dutch had collected extra ammo, some rifles, and a few backpacks to carry it all in. She’d stowed some of the weaponry in the trunk and kept some up front in the driver’s seat with me.

“Let’s get on after ’em,” Wren said.

Dutch took his seat in the Audrey, and we were off, running down the flat patch of highway that once would’ve been asphalt, but which salvage monkeys had long ago cooked into road coal and only mud was left.

Again, we chased after Edger and the remnants of her unit. Once again, we were on a dead run toward Independence Pass.

(ii)

From my uncertain memories of geography class, I thought Highway 82 would curve around and head east to Aspen and then up and over Independence Pass, which in the old days they used to close in the wintertime ’cause they couldn’t keep the roads cleared.

I figured it to be mid-October. It meant we should be safe, but if the storm continued and our luck ran out, we might find ourselves walking into our graves on Independence Pass.

We had a long night ahead of us and all I could think was that we needed Edger in her Humvee and APC to run out of fuel. All of those engines, drinking in diesel, liter after liter after liter.

I remembered the snowmobiles that had chased us after we’d freed Micaiah from the office complex out of Golden. If they were normal gas, it meant they had shielding for the spark plugs ’cause a gasoline engine needs constant electricity to run. Diesel engines worked differently. More and more I was thinking they were simple gas engines and the ARK had shielded the electricity. But why keep such technology a secret? I didn’t know. Micaiah said he didn’t know either, but that boy could lie.

I took over driving again while Wren sat in the cockpit next to me. Every once in a while, she’d swing out to clear the windshield of snow, but I still couldn’t see much. Just night and swirling snow and the ghostly outlines of the highway in front of me.

Wren used the auxiliary feeds to keep our steam engine fed with coal and water, but we’d soon run out. However, the engine grew hotter as things went, and it kept us all warm. Thank God. Eventually we’d have to find dry wood to burn, and feeding the hungry engine would become a fulltime job without coal. And we needed clothes and