Inferno Girls

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Micaiah laughed. “What the hell, Aces? It’s a dead chalkdrive, not a lucky charm.”

  “I took it from you,” Aces said casually. “I can do whatever I want with it. If it’s dead, well, you shouldn’t care about it. But you do. I find that strange.”

  “Think what you want,” Micaiah said dismissively.

  Aces handed the chalkdrive to Nikola. She plugged it into the slate, touched the on button, and for a second, the electricity flowed, but it snapped off. “Let me try again,” she said. She grabbed another battery and hooked it up.

  The slate glowed, but every thinking person in the room knew it was all just theatrics. The only piece of electronics I’d ever seen work in the Juniper was from an ARK soldier. Micaiah said the ARK had limited shielding. But how limited? Could the ARK bring electricity back to the Juniper? Maybe, but they hadn’t, so of course, that meant they didn’t want to. But why? It would only mean more money in Tibbs Hoyt’s pocket.

  Nikola shrugged. “It’s like what he said. It’s blank, wiped out by the Juniper. The electrons are scrambled at a molecular level. It will never work again.”

  She laid it on a little thick, but it sounded good. Fooled Aces. Sure, he might be big, tough, and ruthless, but when it came to electronics and tech, he was stupid. How did that play into his backward theories on social Darwinism?

  Aces took the chalkdrive from Nikola, then swiveled on his heel. He held it up like he was going to give it to Micaiah.

  I couldn’t believe our luck. I had to stop myself from clapping.

  Micaiah batted it away. “You keep it, Aces. My father was a weak man who didn’t understand the world. You do. I want you to have it.”

  And there went our chances of a clean getaway. I was going to have an excruciatingly long conversation with that boy.

  Aces put the chalkdrive back around his neck. “Thanks, Michael. This piece of metal reminds me that the world put all of its faith in science and technology but forgot about soul and muscle. Like in the Sino, once the brass saw their drones and computers couldn’t win the war, they sent in men to do the killing. Men. Soul and muscle.” He gave Micaiah a long look. “You have soul. We’ll work on your muscle. At some point, you will have to fight for your women yourself.”

  Micaiah smiled. “I look forward to that day.”

  Nikola sighed at the stupidity. She returned the slate to the shelf. “Anything else for me?” she asked.

  Aces shook his head. “Nope, but get those Stanleys working. ASAP.” He said it as a word, like he was former military. I glanced down. On the back of each hand was a sword embedded in a red arrowhead. Chinese characters bordered the faded crimson ink. I knew enough of Mandarin writing to recognize them as numbers. His right hand went up to sixty-six, but all were crossed out. The characters on his left hand were also crossed out, except one, at the very tip of the arrow. A hundred and six. What did that mean?

  Holy God. He was Delta Force and had fought in the Sino. He’d managed to get home alive, only to be shoved out into the Juniper like June Mai Angel.

  He caught me looking and gave me a hard stare. “I have a feeling we’re going to have to defend our city sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t you agree, Cathy?” He said my fake name hard, like he thought it was a lie. Most likely, someone had finally realized there was only one woman who could fight like my sister. And her name wasn’t Renee.

  A man shouted from outside, “Aces, we have new people at the gate. A man and his wife. They want in.”

  Aces nodded at Micaiah. “I must go. I’ll have an escort take you back to your homes.”

  Sure he would. ’Cause he couldn’t trust Nikola or me. And though Micaiah was doing his best to string him along, I had the definite impression we had run out of time. Aces had put two and two together. We were the Wellers, the ARK was looking for us, and a chalkdrive lay at the heart of their search.

  Outside the Conoco, two groups of men met us. One led Nikola off. I gave her a nod, and she gave me one back. Tomorrow night, we’d meet at the hot pool and plan our escape.

  The other group led me and Micaiah back to our strip-mall room. Sharlotte slept on the king bed while Wren was crashed out on the wicker chair Sharlotte had finished re-caning. The cigar Wren had taken from Aces peeked out of the breast pocket of her shirt. I wondered if she’d ever get to smoke it in victory.

  I immediately latched onto Micaiah, pulling him close, “Why didn’t you take the chalkdrive from Aces?”

  My boy regarded me coolly. “If I had taken it right then, it would have made Aces even more suspicious. What I did was the only logical course of action.”

  I eased back away from him. “Fine. But I think Aces has figured out who we really are, which means we’re in trouble deep.”

  The boy nodded but kept quiet.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  “We do not know anything for sure. We cannot formulate a plan of action until we do.”

  I closed my eyes. I missed my boyfriend, missed him awful. “Okay, what about the man and the woman at the gate? Do you think it’s Pilate and Rachel?”

  “Could be, but we do not have enough information to extrapolate even the most rudimentary of theories.” Pretty words, but again, not much of an answer.

  “Okay, strike two. So let me throw you a curve ball. You said the ARK had perfected shielding, which is how I could use the slate at the Silver Island Casino. How come Tibbs Hoyt is keeping that a secret?”

  He looked at me with nothing, no heart, no soul, behind his eyes. He said in a low voice, way too carefully, “I do not know.”

  Only he did. I knew he did.

  Before I could move or say a thing, he drew close and slowly took the bracelet off my wrist.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Before, when you ended our relationship, you threw this at me. It was a symbolic gesture, but until I can be myself again, I want to keep the bracelet. The things I have done here, how I have treated you, I do not deserve the honor of you wearing such a symbol.” He didn’t look me in the eye while he talked.

  “Do you think we’ll ever find more of your serum?” I asked.

  “Unlikely,” he said mechanically. “I am blank again. But I know what I have to do to keep you and your family alive and safe.”

  “What’s that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  It was the last conversation we would have for a long, long time.

  (iii)

  We were asleep; Sharlotte and Wren were on the bed, me and Micaiah lay on the floor, as far apart as we could get from one another.

  Before dawn, men broke into our strip mall stall. Micaiah was shouting, Wren was throwing punches, but she was quickly overpowered.

  In the cold morning darkness, my sisters and I were taken out into the streets, handcuffed, blindfolded, and marched across town.

  A door clicked open then slammed shut behind us. Our footsteps fell on concrete.

  Through another door.

  Then dank stairs, going down, down, down. Just when I thought they were taking us down to the very pits of hell, we stopped.

  Big, rough fingers removed my handcuffs. The hands took my Moto-Moto watch as well.

  Not a second later, they threw us into a bare cement room. The door locked into place, and we were left in darkness.

  Micaiah wasn’t with us.

  “Those goddamn jackerdans. Those jacked-up assjacks.” Wren’s tirade went on and on. Sharlotte remained silent.

  I took off the blindfold, but it was pitch black—so dark my eyes hurt straining to see. Feeling along the wall, I finally found the door and felt for the lock, thinking maybe I could figure out how to pick it. My fingers went over the welds of a metal door, completely sealed shut. No lock to pick.

  Everything else, and I mean everything else, was concrete.

  We weren’t going anywhere.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Vegas sins and Vegas odds

  Been gambling my heart on Vegas gods


  Jack of clubs beat me, but the king came through

  Found a dark deuce in my pocket

  And it reminded me of you

  — Debra Alan Walker

  (i)

  OUR BODIES HAVE RHYTHMS, which are set by sunshine and darkness, when we sleep and when we eat. In that basement hole, time stopped, and the dancing in our bodies stopped and fell lifeless to the floor. No more rhythms.

  Wren spent a few days pacing, cursing, slamming around in that concrete prison. I say days, but you couldn’t call them days. Since they took my watch, there weren’t days for us. No nights either. Just the tick of the minutes crawling by. Micaiah didn’t visit, nor did Nikola. Heck, I’d have been glad to see Marisol, but no one came. We were fed once a day, maybe oatmeal, maybe a few pieces of meat or withered carrots and mealy apples. Leftovers. Like we were dogs.

  And we fell on the food like dogs. Along with the food we were given a plastic five-liter jug of water, which we had to share. Also a twenty-liter bucket. Which was sometimes emptied, sometimes not.

  I tried to get a plan together with Wren to bust out, to overwhelm the guards. At first she was game, during her lion-pacing phase, but then she sat down and never moved and never answered when I talked to her. I wanted to shake her, but I’d have to crawl through darkness to get to her. My eyes only showed a horrible, inky, velvety midnight.

  After a week, maybe, two—couldn’t tell, couldn’t tell anything—I took to a wall and stayed there, and I finally figured out what Wren was doing. She was hibernating. She was going away from herself, from the pit we were in, stinking, cold, and hard, where sleep and waking mixed together in a soup of time and misery.

  No one told us why we’d been imprisoned, but I knew: Aces had figured out who we were, and he was keeping us under lock and key. For what purpose? I didn’t even have a bad guess about that. My sisters seemed too broken up to discuss it, so that left me to try and figure it all out with no evidence to back up any of my theories. No way to extrapolate even the most rudimentary of theories, or that’s what Micaiah would’ve said. If he’d been there.

  Still I tried. Nikola asking about the chalkdrive in front of us. The way Aces had said my fake name, Cathy. Two people, a man and a woman, showing up at the gate.

  I’d not had a chance to ask Nikola about spies. Maybe the spies in Glenwood Springs had finally come forward. Which meant the ARK would be coming and coming strong.

  My thoughts went around and around until I longed for a switch to turn the dang things off. Somehow, I found one. It involved sleeping, being hungry, and hating the stink and the darkness.

  I went away. Missed my birthday, October 7. My seventeenth birthday. Happy birthday to me. But not really, ’cause it wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t around to celebrate. Wasn’t on the planet.

  I found the abyss and let it take me away. Nothing in the pit except for the pit.

  (ii)

  Sharlotte brought me back.

  She spoke and woke me up. Didn’t know about Wren. Maybe Wren had died. Being caged would murder her and prolly nothing else.

  “Remember Bill Wayne? Hey, Cavvy, remember Bill?”

  I had to flicker my eyes open and closed to try and get my mind going again. Not that I really wanted to. “What?”

  “Bill Wayne. The Wayne family were townies. Reverend Wayne? He was a preacher for Baptists or Methodists or one of them protestant religions. He had a wife and two kids, Bill and Jolie. Irish twins, born about a year apart. And both real pretty, blond hair and green eyes. They were in my grade, so I guess you might not have known them, since I’m so much older than you.”

  “Only eight years is all, Shar,” I whispered. “Now that you mention it, I think I do remember Reverend Wayne. He left town, though, right?”

  “Right. Took Bill and Jolie away. They were my best friends. Mama didn’t like it ’cause they weren’t Catholic, but she allowed it. We got on so well. I think she hoped me and Bill would somehow get together, but we were just kids. And Bill wasn’t viable. That didn’t matter to me, though.”

  I had no idea why Sharlotte was bringing up ancient history, but I wasn’t going to stop her from talking. Not a bit. You get a person talking, and you get them healing, and Sharlotte needed a lot of healing.

  “No, didn’t matter if he was viable,” I agreed. “You were middle school age, right?” It was hard for me to think of Sharlotte as a girl ’cause she seemed to have been born forty years old and as serious as a spinster. Or that had been her mask at least.

  I couldn’t see her, but I knew she’d taken off that mask. She’d said she needed time to find the other side of her troubles. Well, we’d had all the time we could ever want in that pit.

  “No, in high school.” Sharlotte said. “I’d ride into town and sleep over with Jolie. Crete’s sister Pearl Jane would come, too.”

  She half-tripped over Crete’s name. Her even saying that name brought me tremors. Crete. Eventually we were going to have to talk about Crete, the girl who’d been killed trying to rescue us from the Wendover Police Station.

  “Did you ever meet Pearl Jane?” Sharlotte asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But she got sent back to the World, didn’t she? Got married to some sterile guy in Topeka, I think. Like all the Macabys.”

  Not all. Not Crete.

  “Yeah, but before she left, she, Jolie, and me, we’d have sleepovers and we’d talk and dream about boys, and I would tell Jolie I liked her brother. That I dreamed about kissing him. She’d get all grossed out. It was funny. Just girls. Just silliness. Just silly talk about kissing.”

  I knew why Sharlotte was talking about Bill and Jolie Wayne. Micaiah’s kiss had sparked the memory. Back on the cattle drive to Wendover, Micaiah had gotten under her skin, even held her hand, and then suddenly he’s kissing her. Such a thing would’ve hurt her.

  And remembering Pearl Jane Macaby, Crete’s sister, that was bound to sting as well.

  I couldn’t ask her about Crete or Micaiah’s kiss directly, so I skirted the edges. “You ever kiss Bill Wayne?” I asked.

  “No, but I kissed Jolie.” I could hear the shy grin in her voice, even in the darkness. “And Pearl Jane as well.”

  As for me, I had to stop myself from gasping. My sister? Gillian? No, it was just youthful experimentation. That’s what the experts would’ve said, and I had some stories like that myself. With no boys around, and hormones running wild, well, it made sense. My belief in the New Morality kept me from doing most things, though. Prolly like Sharlotte.

  Sharlotte got frustrated. “Well, dammit, Cavvy, say something. It’s not that big of a deal. We were just teenagers being stupid. And who else was I going to kiss? Bill Wayne had every good-looking girl following after him like puppy dogs. If Wren had been older, she would’ve given him a go, you can bet your ass on it.”

  “I did give him a go,” Wren said in the darkness. “He said I was too young. So I punched him in the face.”

  We all had a little chuckle. But I wanted Wren to shut up and stay gone ’cause Sharlotte had to talk her way out of her darkness, and I didn’t think she’d do it in front of Wren. I wouldn’t have.

  But Sharlotte, my big sister Shar, she was tough and deep and stronger than me. Far stronger than I could ever hope to be.

  “Micaiah was the first boy to ever kiss me,” Sharlotte whispered. “And he kissed me like he meant it. Remember how he was all nice to me when we first took him in? Remember? I’d wanted to kiss him back then, even though it never felt right with him. But then he kisses me like that, oh, it hurts. To think, that might be my last kiss ever, and it was a lie.”

  She started weeping. I crawled on all fours across the smooth concrete and found her and held her. I felt like such a rat, that I got the boy in the end. But what did I get? I got an artificial boy with a broken brain, who needed medication to feel, who could lie and cheat and steal and not care ’cause you needed a soul to care, and I wasn’t sure he had one. Not when he was off his meds.
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  I didn’t say that. I just held her.

  It was Wren who spoke. “Hey Shar, kisses don’t mean much. I kissed plenty of people in my time. In Amarillo, rich women would pay to kiss me. And do more. I’d have to pretend to like it, but I didn’t. I hated it, and I hated them, and I’d rage and rage, like you know I can. It’s a sad world, and kisses should be sweet, but most aren’t.”

  We listened to her talk. Sharlotte grew still next to me.

  Wren laughed. “But I must say, Micaiah is a good kisser. One of the best, but not the best. I fell in love with a woman, and her kisses were like magic. Then I had a boy for a while, in the circus. Dutch Malhotra. He was beautiful and untrue and a snake in boots. Old Dutch would steal your money then stick around to help you look for it. He was no good, like me, but Jesus help me, that man could kiss. So look on the bright side: your first kiss with a boy, and maybe your last kiss ever, was a doozy. Would it be better if it had sucked?”

  Sharlotte surprised me by laughing. “Yeah, Irene, it would’ve. You know it would’ve.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve been kissed by Micaiah a lot, and he ain’t all that. And he’s not who he was. He’s gone blank.”

  “That’s our luck,” Wren said. “Us Wellers get broken things that only work half the time. It’s what happens when you grow up with a salvage monkey for a mama. It’s our lot to be stuck with leftovers.”

  “It’s a good lot,” Sharlotte said. And again, she left me dumbfounded.

  “A good one, Shar?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I might be ugly and one-legged, and no man in this camp would have me, but we got a good deal.”

  “You ain’t ugly,” I protested.

  “But you are one-legged,” Wren added, “and be glad none of those apes want you.”

  “Now, let me finish!” Sharlotte said loudly, but not meanly. Somehow, she had worked herself out of her damage. But then my family was always so very contrary. Give us money and roses, and we’d complain for days and bloody each other out of boredom, if nothing else.

  But give us a prison cell and no hope, and we’d come together and talk and laugh. Wellers, contrary, to the very end.