Inferno Girls

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Chapter Two

  There’s a lonely moon tonight, and the desert is cold

  In your grave you can’t see me growing old

  I whisper that soon I’ll join you in your sleep

  It’s not what you want, but it’s what I need

  — Pearl Cornell

  (i)

  THE PEGASUS HURTLED over the drainage ditches and dry ravines. Nice thing about a frictionless, it worked best on roads but could off-road it as well.

  The sun roasted us. The flat wasted landscape offered no comfort. Scrub scratched and thistles thwacked the undercarriage of the Ford Pegasus. I knelt in the passenger seat and turned around to take care of our wounded.

  Pilate tried to swallow his coughs but couldn’t. His lungs sounded like tin cans half full of ball-bearings. Sharlotte and Wren sprawling across him prolly didn’t help things any.

  The cramped back seat of a Pegasus made for a poor ambulance. I grabbed the belt from my jeans ’cause, first thing, Sharlotte needed a tourniquet. I wished Rosie Petal hadn’t been killed. She’d been a doctor. Now she was just dead. Like Crete. Like so many of us.

  “Micaiah!” I called over the roar of the engine and the whicker of brush under us. “Wren got shot again. Can she still heal? How long will the Gulo Delta work?”

  “The healing isn’t temporary,” he called back. “Her genetic structure has been re-coded. Wren will be okay.”

  I guess it was good news, but it did worry me a little. Wren’s genetics re-coded? What did that mean exactly?

  I pushed up Sharlotte’s gray dress to expose her wounded hip and bashed-in leg. I almost lost it. Her shin bones had been pummeled to splinters; it looked like hamburger strewn with toothpicks. I swallowed my gorge and looped the belt around her upper thigh and pulled.

  Her left arm had also been shot up by the Regio.

  The soldier girl I’d murdered.

  Please, don’t kill me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered back. It was true. Even though they’d killed our people and threatened to blind me, I shouldn’t have gunned her down like I did. Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love your enemies, not shoot them while they begged for mercy.

  “Not your fault,” Pilate wheezed. Did he know what I was thinking? If anyone would, he might.

  Couldn’t think about the dead Regio. Had to get Sharlotte stable. “Pilate, I need your belt for Sharlotte’s arm.”

  He twisted around and pulled off his belt. I tightened it around my sister’s arm. I held them both, but for how long? And how do you heal a smashed leg?

  Short answer? You don’t.

  You die. Or, the other alternative, well, you wish you were dead.

  Pilate managed to find the exit wounds on Sharlotte’s arm and hip. No bullets inside my sister meant one less thing we needed to worry about.

  I tore strips of cloth from Sharlotte’s dress and wrapped them around her left leg and left arm. The list of medical supplies we needed was endless: clean water to wash the wounds, buckets of antibiotic cream, a saw ...

  If she was bleeding internally, the list narrowed to one thing. A coffin.

  Again, shakes took me. I blinked at the blood sticking at my eyelids. I searched the glove compartment and found some wet wipes and a little toolbox. Quite a treasure trove.

  Trembling, I cleaned my sisters’ wounds with the wipes. My mind raced, cataloguing our many mistakes and going over our options, all the while wishing things had played out different.

  “What about going back for more Gulo Delta?” I asked Micaiah. “Or what about Wren’s blood? Can’t you use her blood to heal Sharlotte?”

  Micaiah shook his head. “That’s just in bad sci-fi video. Wren’s blood won’t cure anyone. And you saw the two Johnny Boys in Wendover. They know where we are now ... where I am. Out in the world, they’ll clear airbases in California and we’ll have battalions of ARK troops sniffing around, all over Nevada and Arizona. Nowhere is safe now.”

  A cold terror sank into my belly. “What about airbases in California? Surely, you don’t mean the U.S. military will help the ARK look for us.”

  Micaiah gave me a long look. It said everything. The U.S. armed forces, the FBI, the ARK, they were intertwined like a den of rattlesnakes.

  Micaiah kept his foot on the accelerator. We didn’t need to worry about re-charging. The Eterna battery could go thousands of kilometers on a single charge. But where could we go? We were alone. No people, no ranches, no farms in sight. Nothing upon nothing. It was one of the most desolate places I’d ever seen.

  I used the last wipe to remove the blood from my face, from the new gash Rachel Vixx had given me, and to clean the stitches I’d gotten fighting the Psycho Princesses. Then I sat back into the passenger seat.

  “So what do we do?” I asked no one in particular. “We can’t let Sharlotte die. We have to go back to Wendover or drive farther west. Maybe all the way to Reno ... maybe Vegas.”

  No one said anything. We rocketed across the dry desert under a faded sky where the nasty sun had burned away most of the blue. No food, no water, a few guns, and not many bullets.

  “If we turn around, we’ll get caught,” Pilate said. “And if we’re caught, we’ll be killed.”

  I tried to think, but all I could see was Sharlotte dragged down by the cattle and trampled underfoot.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and forced the horrid image out of my mind. Another replaced it: the Regio’s face, pleading. How could I be feeling guilty? Most likely she had put my sister into an early grave. Tears dribbled down onto my cheeks. Then I got mad. Good, I’m glad she’s dead. Good. I wished I could kill her all over again. I clung to the rage; I hung on to it ’cause it felt cleaner than my guilt and sorrow.

  Pilate choked back a cough and asked, “Does anyone know what’s south of here?”

  I checked the dashboard GPS and its fully-colored topographical maps. Five hundred kilometers south was the Great Basin National Park, near Baker, Nevada. Other than the park and Baker, the map showed no other settlements. To the east, the blank green of the Juniper ate up the screen.

  “Great, we have GPS,” Micaiah muttered. “They’ll figure out which car we stole and use our signal to track the car.”

  “Not from the GPS,” I said. “But the CPU will be registered. Thanks to the SISBI laws.”

  Signed into law by President Amanda Swain in 2054, the Security, Identity, and Special Borders Injunction had put a fence around the Juniper, supplied border troops, and required all US citizens to register their identities with the US government. Car companies followed along to try to put an end to car theft. Most new vehicles broadcasted a unique ID, and turning it off was impossible. If the car was running, the signal was transmitting. A sticker on the dashboard proudly proclaimed the Pegasus was theft-proof. Ironic, since we’d stolen her.

  “The SISBI laws are the problem,” Micaiah said. “We can’t travel in the U.S. anonymously because we’ll be tracked and scanned. That’s why I escaped with the cure into the Juniper in the first place. It’s the only place left in the U.S. where someone can be truly anonymous.”

  I remembered how Wren and I had had our eyes scanned in Cleveland. Since we weren’t U.S. citizens, we hadn’t been in the U.S. citizen database. Sharlotte wasn’t either. But Pilate, due to his military service, and Micaiah, for sure, would be.

  Then I thought of the wanted posters in my back pocket.

  “We’ll have to go back into the Juniper.” I felt sick for saying it, ’cause if that was where we were headed, we’d be driving away from medical aid for Sharlotte. I scrolled across the map until a stretch of blue caught my eye—Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, or that was what it had been called before the Yellowstone Knockout, when the world still made sense and Utah still had power. “There’s a wildlife refuge, and I bet that means water. We could find a cabin. Lay low for a while.”

  “Cavvy, we can’t!” Micaiah shouted in shock. He knew, like I did, that Sharlotte, poor Sharlotte,
might not survive the trip.

  I shouted back angrily. “I know we can’t, goddammit!” Cussing was such a bad habit, but at times, only cussing would do. “I know what I’m saying. We’ll have to cut off Sharlotte’s leg. And we’ll have to pray she doesn’t die of infection. We’ll just have to pray for it all.”

  That shut everyone up. Even Pilate stopped coughing.

  “We have about an hour until they catch our scent,” Pilate said. “First they’ll search Wendover. Then someone will report a stolen car, and they’ll track the car’s signal. They’ll send gunships for us, aircraft. They’ll kill us, take Micaiah, and destroy the chalkdrive. And no one will know Tibbs Hoyt has the cure to the Sterility Epidemic. The desert will swallow up the truth forever.”

  Micaiah struck the steering wheel with his palm. “I can’t let you risk yourselves anymore. Not for me. Not for this.”

  “What else should we do?” Pilate asked. “If we can change the world, we have a responsibility to try. Dare I say it? We have a moral obligation ... a sacred duty.” Pilate chuckled. “And I love to be a problem to people in power, especially when I’m doing the right thing. I still send the Pope Christmas cards.”

  I turned back around and petted Sharlotte’s hair. My beautiful, strong sister, so sturdy, so righteous. I’d watched her change into a poet, brave but gentle. “What about Sharlotte?” I asked.

  Pilate’s voice fell quiet. “Sharlotte got hit bad. If she lives, it will be miracle. I vote we bet on it. Miracles love it when we bet on them.”

  Baker, Nevada would be crawling with ARK spies and Cuius Regios looking for us. Every border town on the west side of the Juniper would be just as dangerous ’cause of the FBI manhunt, and we wouldn’t be able to avoid the ID scans for long.

  Our only hope lay at the Fish Springs National Wildlife refuge, inside the Juniper. We could drive until the Pegasus stopped working, then slog across the desert, find a saw, and do the terrible thing to my sister. And pray she didn’t die.

  That we all didn’t die.

  But could my ankle bear my weight across those kilometers? Or would it fail and leave me lame in the desert?

  Would I be just another damaged Weller sister courting death?

  (ii)

  We drove east, heading toward a line of bruised mountains punching an empty sky. The landscape had greened a little from spring. Rabbitbrush and Brigham tea fought with sagebrush for space in the gray dirt. Some kind of green bush I didn’t recognize dominated their own patchwork kingdoms across the plain.

  Raising his voice above the wind, Micaiah explained that after the ARK grabbed Wren, Pilate, and me, the rest of our crew escaped into the Moby Dick. As far as he knew, Aunt Bea, Nikki Breeze, Dolly Day Cornpone, Kasey Romero, and Allie Chambers were all safe with Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz. No mention of our dogs. And my horses, had they survived the stampede? What would happen to them? I thought about our other animals, like Charles Goodnight and Betty Butter. It’d be horrible to lose such smart cows, but it was far too late to save them.

  Wren and Sharlotte remained unconscious, and I prayed they’d stay that way. I was knocking on God’s door, and if He slumbered, I’d smash down the door, get Him out of bed, and make Him heal Sharlotte.

  It wasn’t long before we hit the fence separating the Juniper from the rest of the world. We stopped and looked at the long steel poles thrust into concrete circles in the dust. Attached to the poles, silver chain-link stretched as far as the eye could see, north to south.

  Every meter of the fence was monitored. Like Wren had said at the beginning of our adventures, the U.S. government didn’t really care who went into the Juniper, but they damn sure cared who wanted to stand on American soil.

  Which was why we should’ve known something was wrong in Wendover.

  Interestingly enough, right after the SISBI laws were passed, the U.S. managed to bring home the Ladies in Waiting stranded in China after the Sino. And where did most of our vets end up? The Juniper. That had happened to June Mai Angel, the Outlaw Warlord who had attacked us again and again and who currently occupied our hometown of Burlington.

  Long minutes passed as we considered the fence, what it represented, and what we were going to do about it.

  “Back up a bit,” I said to Micaiah.

  He threw the Pegasus in reverse and eased back. I stood and hefted Tina Machinegun to my hip. I triggered the grenade launcher and sent an MX2 shell into one of the fence posts. The explosion blasted the pole from the ground and sent a cloud of dust whirling across the desert.

  “Shouldn’t we have talked about that?” Pilate asked from the back seat.

  “Command decision,” I said.

  “Yeah, I see that.”

  “Now they’ll know where we entered the Juniper,” Micaiah said.

  “They know anyway, from the CPU broadcasting the signal,” I said. “There was no way we could’ve cut that fence without them knowing. It’s all monitored. But let’s get going.”

  We glided over the ruins of the fence and returned to zooming across the desert. Micaiah zigzagged around the bush kingdoms I’d seen.

  “What kind of plant is that?” I asked Micaiah.

  “Greasewood,” he said. “Farmers hate it.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  He smiled at me. “You’re not the only one who went to school.”

  I got flustered for a minute, then smiled back. We were hurt and fearful, but were together. I relaxed for a second, but then I just wondered how far we’d get before we hit the electromagnetic field and lost the Pegasus for good.

  (iii)

  I pulled out the FBI wanted posters and studied our grim faces, digitized pictures of Pilate and me, sketches of Wren and Sharlotte. I recognized my picture from the Sally Brown Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate, taken earlier that year. My junior year picture showed me in my New Morality dress, smiling, young, and blessedly naïve. Pilate’s photo had been taken when his hair was still short, prolly during one of his tours in China. A smirk twisted his face above his priest’s collar.

  Wanted. Armed and extremely dangerous. All of us.

  I read through our list of crimes: murder, aggravated assault, grand larceny, and kidnapping. Pilate and Wren were responsible for the first two. In our gun battles, they’d killed a bunch of people, and Wren had dragged me into a shootout at my school. I did the grand larceny, stealing the train. The kidnapping was complete fiction, since Micaiah was with us of his own accord.

  Then I realized I had also murdered. I was a murderer. I folded the wanted posters and shoved them back into my pocket.

  At dusk, without warning, we hit the edge of the electromagnetic field and the Pegasus lost power. We crashed to the ground, plowing through the white dirt and scraggly yellow grass, bashing up the front end something awful. Micaiah lost steering, and we struck a thicket of greasewood. It slowed us right down.

  We’d entered the Juniper, and the Eterna battery was now useless as a rock.

  The tool kit had wrenches, and I used them to remove the passenger seat. Laying it flat, I hacked off all the seatbelts with a box cutter and made three harnesses—for me, for Micaiah, and for Pilate. I latched them to the car seat.

  While I worked on the harnesses, Micaiah pounded at the rails of the car seat until they curled like a sleigh’s rails. Even with the improvements, dragging both Sharlotte and Wren was going to be a sweaty, grinding chore.

  And then Wren woke up. She glanced around, saw Sharlotte, and her face grew dark.

  We explained everything that had happened.

  I expected Wren to explode and insist we go back to Wendover so she could kill every one of those ARK skanks and get Sharlotte to a hospital. Instead, her voice got rough and her eyes got glassy. “Sorry I couldn’t fight with you. Sorry I slowed you down. Sorry for everything.”

  That unnerved me. Wren in a rage I understood. I’d grown up watching her throw punches at the world. Her sorrow felt eerie.

  �
�It’s not your fault,” I said. “You freed us. They were going to blind me, and you saved me. You can’t win every fight.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I ain’t good for nothing else. It’s my fault Sharlotte is gonna die.”

  I lurched forward and yelled into her face. “She’s not going to die! We have to have faith.”

  “I ain’t like you,” she whispered. “I don’t believe in nothin’ ’cept what I can do with my guns and my smile. Lost the one. Even when I had the other, I let you down.”

  Pilate coughed and spit into the dirt. “Let’s save such existential discussions for another time. Can you walk, Wren?”

  She shrugged. “Gonna have to. I’m mighty thirsty. You geniuses figured out what we’re gonna drink?”

  Micaiah went to the hood and opened it up.

  “There’s a windshield wiper tank,” he said. “If there’s water in it, we could drink that.”

  That made me smile. My boy, usually so smart, was mistaken. I limped to him. It hurt, and it was only going to get worse.

  The pain disappeared when I kissed Micaiah. His lips felt soft, warm, so nice. His smell mingled with the sagebrush. We hadn’t touched in what seemed like forever.

  I caressed his stubbly cheek. “Can’t drink the windshield wiper fluid. It’ll have an ammonia mixture to get the hydrophobic bug remains off the glass. And we don’t have the time or the plastic to set up a solar still.”

  Micaiah smiled. “Cavatica Weller, you never cease to amaze me. Hydrophobic? Solar still?”

  “Dang straight.” I winked and then echoed what he’d said before. “You’re not the only one who went to school. And you can use sheets of plastic to evaporate water out of the soil and the plant life. That’s a solar still.”

  “So smart,” he whispered and kissed me again and held me tight, so tight. His body was becoming familiar to me, the hard edges of his muscles under his soft, smooth skin. The kiss overwhelmed me, and I let my head rest on his shoulder.

  “No matter what,” he whispered to me. It was our promise to each other. It was the covenant we’d made after I got shot saving him from the Vixxes.