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

chalkdrive to the news media in Kansas, and the world might get the cure to the Sterility Epidemic, but she wouldn’t care about curing the Gammas. No, June Mai wanted media attention, and she’d get it with the chalkdrive. She wanted the world to know about the dirty deals America had made with her vets, sending them to the Juniper rather than paying for their health care. That mattered. Not the Gammas. They’d been warring with her, and I imagined she’d prefer to let them rot.

I drank my fill from the metal tub under the windmill. I washed my feet and let them dry. The scabs and pus were gone, and new, tough, pink skin covered my toes, soles, and heels. My body healed. My body machine was easy to fix. Inside was a different story. I was diseased, and I knew it.

I realized, for her whole life, Wren prolly felt the sores inside, festering, full of pus, fully infecting every centimeter of her soul. No wonder she drank and ran wild. It was awful.

I missed the Skye6 like I missed my mama, but more so. Much more so.

Mama was dead. Skye6 was still around in the world, only I didn’t have any.

And I could feel the blisters starting again in those torture boots, which made me laugh and laugh.

I should cut off my own feet like I’d cut off Sharlotte’s leg.

No food.

Iffy on water.

I shuffled now ’cause I couldn’t really walk. My right foot hurt more than my left, and I grumbled as I walked. Ow. Left foot. Ow. Left foot. Ow.

Taking off my shoes, I walked barefoot for a while, trying to find the leftovers of the asphalt in the gravel or smooth dirt devoid of pebbles. Couldn’t find much softness anywhere on the dead strip of dirt of that ancient I-70 highway. My feet got chilly and tender, so I put the boots back on. More ow. More left foot okay and right foot ow.

Hours and hours and hours of shuffling down the road, prolly not going more than one or two kilometers an hour.

Days alone. Just me on the road, limping, starving.

The weather showed me kindness. Nights were cold, but the autumn sun warmed the plains and warmed me, never getting too hot, but in the end, I took little comfort in the mild temperatures.

Ran out of food. Kept walking.

Ran out of water. Kept walking.

Ruined my feet. Kept walking.

Three days later.

I collapsed into the weeds and sagebrush. I didn’t have the strength to get the X-Men comforter out of the hockey bag. I just lay in the dirt and watched stars milk up the sky.

Before dawn, the weather changed on a dime, and a cutting wind came sweeping out of the north to razor my skin. Even hunkered down under the sagebrush, the wind found me, to chill me and to poke despair into my ear with fingers of ice.

“I’ll just give up,” I said to the wind, but without any real faith I’d keep such a promise to quit. Too much of me was a Weller to stop now. My imperative was too incessant. Still, I liked saying the ridiculous words. “Yeah, I’ll just lie here, and if someone finds me, great, if not, well ... the world will have to go on without the cure to the Sterility Epidemic ... and without me. Who needs another Weller girl around, anyway? Who needs a Cavatica around anyway?”

Or a ’Teeca. That’s what Alice had called me. Before she went coco.

That’s what was happening to me. I was going coco, too.

Hours later I woke up to a sprinkle of hard bits of ice falling from a stone-colored sky. Wasn’t snow. Wasn’t rain. Wasn’t hail. Just pebble-sized bits of soft ice. I opened my mouth to try to catch some in my mouth, but all it did was sting my cheeks. My mouth still felt like I’d spent the night swallowing sand.

I’d sworn to lie there and die. A good plan. Too bad I didn’t follow it.

My feet and body hurt too much to walk, so I crawled.

Kill me to stop me.

Mama used to say, “Better to crawl forward than run back.” I’d told our team that during the cattle drive. I’d crawled before, back in Utah, trying to get to Sharlotte so we could amputate her leg. My ankle had been the problem then, not my feet. Dang, but we’d been busted up on our adventures.

And here I was, crawling again ... crawling down I-70 on hands and knees until I couldn’t go on. The stupid wannabe snow fell, but I knew it wouldn’t accumulate and would prolly stop in five minutes. The sky was flinging pebbles at me to make me miserable, so I dug out the X-Men comforter and draped it across my back and head.

Made it maybe a hundred meters and the comforter slid off me. I crawled on, so cold and damp from those stupid icy bits of snow, but not wet enough so I could wring moisture out of my clothes.

Still I kept crawling. I left the hockey bag behind; it was getting in my way.

I made it another hundred meters, then went down onto the weedy dirt road scattered with gravel.

Wind and cold tried to scrape me off the highway, but I was too heavy and too tired to move on. My fingers ached from the cold.

Let me freeze.

My tongue filled my mouth so I thought I’d choke on it. So thirsty. So done for.

Let me die.

I’d tried. I’d done my best. Neither God nor the world cared.

I’d be just another dead girl on the highway. Wouldn’t be the first. Wouldn’t be the last.

Opening my eyes, I saw the chalkdrive had come out of my shirt and lay on the asphalt directly in my line of sight. A piece of snow fell on it and melted.

I’d die.

The chalkdrive would live on.

I closed my eyes and felt the wind blow across my skin and then ... nothing; for a long time.

The sun broke through to shine