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

starving to death. Who cared about that, I was on my way to the ranch, on my way home, the land where Mama and Daddy and my baby sisters lay sleeping in the earth.

I was still feeling good and hopeful when I hit a wall of outlaws standing in a blockade, in steam trucks armed with mounted machineguns and rocket launchers. They even had a couple of the Cargadors, huge vehicles they used to pull zeppelins out of the sky.

But they’d failed to get the Moby, me, and Wren. We’d beaten them goddamn outlaws and sent them packing. I’d used a bazooka to destroy the Cargador myself.

“Hold up, Windshadow,” I said to that fine Arabian.

He did. We spoke the same language after all.

Once again, I was staring into the barrels of rifles.

I straightened and sat tall on Windshadow. “I’m Cavatica Weller. I’ve come home. Now, I’ve got something for June Mai. You kill me, she’ll be real upset ’cause I have something that can change the Juniper, change the world, change everything.”

No response.

I slid off of Windshadow. My feet hit the ground. My legs failed me, and I wound up on the ground. The X-Men comforter fell on top of me, which made me feel silly and ridiculous. All my talk of saving the world and I wound up on my butt.

Slowly, I climbed off the gravel road and back on my feet. My poor, poor feet.

A woman called out to me, “You will approach us with your hands in the air.”

Windshadow swung his huge face to look at me with gentle eyes. He knew I had no fight in me. He knew despite the guns, this wouldn’t be a battle, just the end of a long walk.

I ignored the woman. What could she do? Kill me? Let her.

Bringing my face to the horse’s, I pushed my forehead against his nose. “You done good, Windshadow. You can go now. Thanks for the ride. I can’t thank you enough.”

He nickered softly and slowly stepped back.

I put my hands in the air. “You let my horse go. You want me. Let him go.”

Women charged forward. At the sound of their footsteps, Windshadow took off across the plain, heading north, a black shadow against the fading light until distance and dust swallowed him up.

The women watched him go.

I shuffled through the soldiers. They stood back to let me pass, out of fear, out of pity ...

I wasn’t sure, but I walked through their ranks, standing tall, walking proud, wearing the X-Men blanket like a regal robe.

My family, our hands, our hires, we’d made it as a team from Burlington to Wendover, Nevada with three thousand head of cattle. And I’d made it back to Burlington, in a frictionless car, on a bicycle, walking in a steam-powered Stanley robot—thank you, Nikola Nichols. I’d then traveled on cross-country skis, I’d hiked mountain roads, I’d been carried by a Juniper mutant monster, more walking, and then an angelic Arabian stallion brought me the rest of the way like a princess.

All to get home, to where I stood, dirty, wearing clothes beyond filthy, with hair I could feel was matted where it wasn’t thinned out. With a body sucked dry, from too much trouble, not enough food, too much fear, not enough water, too much disease, not enough medicine.

I’d walked on wounded feet. Still, I’d walked.

And who knew? Maybe I could survive this. Maybe June Mai would find mercy in her warlord heart and give me enough money to pay off Howerter and get the ranch going again, ’cause Howerter would want his loan repaid, and with interest. Still, after all the trouble, I had hope that I could make a life in the Juniper again.

I limped up to an older woman with buzzed dark hair going gray at the temples. She stood with an MG21 assault rifle in her grip, across her chest. Sewn onto the pocket of her shirt was her name, M. Atlas. She had captain bars pinned on her collar.

“Captain Atlas?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Take me to your leader,” I whispered.

Chapter Fourteen

Home is where my heart is

Home is who I am

When the skies are dark

And the wind blows cold

Home is who I am

—Clover Rollison

(i)

JUNE MAI’S SOLDIERS didn’t handcuff me or zip tie my hands behind my back. They weren’t exactly friendly, but they did give me a little water and some strong-tasting jerky which I gnawed. Problem was, I’d gotten used to not eating. I eventually got tired of chewing and spit it out. Soldier girls surrounded me, guns out, watching me from the back of the steam-truck now a troop carrier.

One girl across from me caught my eye. “My sister was on the Cargador that attacked the Moby Dick. From what I hear, you were the one that killed her.”

I was feeling tired and mean. I held her gaze and said something Wren might’ve. “If you’d have been on that Cargador, I’d have killed you, too. Prolly shouldn’t attack people in the first place, huh?”

Then I turned and ignored her to watch the landscape—the line of highway and grasslands beyond, wintering up into yellow seas under a sky going twilight.

When I was little, sometimes I’d get a horse and ride west on I-70 thinking about the Outlaw Warlords of the Juniper, of the salvaged-out houses, of all that country of plain and sky and mountain.

It made me excited. It made me scared. And then I’d ride quick back home to Mama and the ranch.

But that ribbon of dirt and weeds, I knew it now like I knew my own skin.

Yeah, there was the ditch where we found the dead calf one winter. He’d wandered away and got lost and froze to death.

Yeah, there was the blackened semi-trailer that I’d used as a house to play in sometimes, where I’d hide sometimes when the fighting on the ranch got too much. One time, Aunt Bea found me there, but she didn’t rush me back. Instead, she played house with me for a while.