Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Rachel took my hand. “I’m comfortable being a non-human entity. I enjoy the emotions I have, and every day I am feeling more ... feeling more of the stillness at the center of my being. I find great serenity in the silence. But then the fear and doubt create this turmoil in me. Again, why did evolution give humans such feelings?”

  I took in a deep breath and answered, “Feelings, love especially, make humans stronger. Love for our families, love for our tribe, it makes us fight harder to survive. Hence, natural selection made sure we had emotions. Fear included. Fear keeps us honest, or it should.”

  “Cavvy!” Wren called to me from the Marilyn. She was right to be impatient. This was the wrong time for a long talk about the intricacies of human emotions and evolution.

  “We’ll make it through,” I said to Rachel, and squeezed her hand for emphasis.

  She finally coaxed a grin onto her face. “Thank you, Cavatica. I am using my imagination to picture Pilate holding me again and kissing me. My first kiss. It fills me with a dreamy kind of hope.”

  “And you say you aren’t human.” I laughed a little.

  Rachel laughed along. “And I’m curious about the powerful neurochemical reactions of sexual intercourse.”

  “Uh, yeah, awkward,” I muttered. Pilate was my daddy, and the idea of Rachel fantasizing about him made me completely uncomfortable.

  Before I could stop her, Rachel pulled me into a hug. She’d forgotten she’d been engineered to be stronger than us simple humans, and I swear my bones cracked. I couldn’t help but let out a strangled little cry.

  “Oops, sorry,” Rachel said.

  “Don’t engage Edger and her troops,” I said, reminding her. “That would be an oops you can’t take back.”

  “I understand.” Rachel’s eyes went distant. “I don’t think I can fight again. The first of your imperatives I embraced was to be kind. Being kind and violent do not go together. Be kind, become a Weller, protect the family if it comes to that. There is an internal paradox to the imperatives.”

  “Welcome to humanity,” I said. “We are walking, talking internal paradoxes.”

  I left her in the trees and returned to the Marilyn. Ironic, we had this cloned killing machine who couldn’t fight anymore. Talk about a paradox.

  And if Rachel’s DNA wasn’t human, what else might be inside her cells?

  (v)

  We tromped deeper into the forest. Pine branches skittered off the metal and glass above me as we followed the Audrey. Dutch was driving.

  Marisol had said her home wasn’t far, maybe a half-kilometer up the hillside on the south side of the valley. Deeper and deeper into the trees we went, and for a minute, I wondered if I could trust Marisol. I mean, I had only met her a few weeks ago, but then she was a young girl, scared, frightened, trying to get home.

  I could relate.

  The evergreens opened onto a road, and Marisol steered the Audrey Hepburn onto it. I saw by the tracks there was gravel under the snow, most likely the road home.

  We took another right. A slate-colored sky showed through the limbs. I glanced over at Wren, and she was asleep next to me. For a minute, I studied her face, and it seemed thicker somehow. She couldn’t have gained weight since being taken out of the jail cell where Aces had kept us, and then I realized it wasn’t so much her jowls were thicker, no, it was almost as if her skull had expanded.

  I recalled how her teeth had grown back after being bashed out. Micaiah had dosed her with the Gulo Delta, a serum the ARK had developed to augment normal people’s natural abilities. Augment is prolly not the right word, since it had brought Wren back from the grave after being shot in the belly, then stabbed multiple times. And normal people wouldn’t re-grow their teeth.

  Certain reptiles could. Again, I thought of what Rachel had said. Not human.

  Since Wren could heal at a preternatural rate, her muscles never started to atrophy. She’d grown stronger, faster, and more deadly. She’d put the beatdown on two grown men back in Aces’s gladiatorial games in Glenwood Springs. But now, maybe the Gulo Delta was mutating her on a more aggressive level. Her entire skeletal structure seemed to be thickening.

  Maybe it was the first part of her mutating. But mutating into what? A hog? No, that was prolly just gossip. The women in the Juniper loved rumors like they liked refried beans and queso dip.

  I touched Wren’s hand and prayed she’d be okay.

  Around the next turn we saw a condominium complex, but it wasn’t a complex any more. Fire-blackened trees clustered around skeletal ruins. Someone had burned the place to the ground. Long lumps of snow lay in a line in front of the wreckage.

  I knew what those lumps were.

  They were people, Marisol’s people, all dead.

  Chapter Four

  Weatherman says storms are on their way

  But they’re already in town I say

  Too cold to stay in

  Too cold to begin

  Too cold for you and me

  Too cold in this family

  —Janis Keeve

  (i)

  MARISOL’S FAMILY HAD lived in one unit of an old condominium, which in the old days would’ve cost a fortune. Close to Snowmass as well as Aspen, it was the perfect place to go for ski trips and excursions to expensive restaurants and other places for rich people.

  Now the condos were reduced to ashes and blackened boards and melted plastic. We got out of the Stanleys, and first thing I did was walk through the snow in my julie-rigged shoes and bend down to brush some of the snow off the lumps I’d seen.

  A charred skull stared up at me through the ice crystals. More than a dozen of the corpses lay on the ground, all burned to their bones. From the look of it, they’d been like that for weeks.

  Marisol counted the bodies, and it was like she was cataloging their names as she went: That one is my daddy. That one is my mama. That’s my sister. That’s my brother.

  The girl walked around stunned until she fell into the snow, unmoving. She didn’t cry. She just stared up at the dark clouds as the first snowflakes of the morning tumbled down.

  I bent down and held her hand. I didn’t have words for her. There are no words for such tragedy. I only had my presence to comfort her.

  “They’re dead,” she whispered. “All of them. My mom, my dad, Auntie, Uncle Gordo, all dead. Even our neighbors. Chrissy. Mikey. Dead. I’m alone.”

  I gripped her hand harder. No, she wasn’t alone. She would join us. We were collecting lost souls on our quest to save the world, which is how it ought to be. When we were done, we’d march every last Juniper citizen into Kansas to proclaim our victory.

  “Come join our family, Marisol,” I said softly and gently, like I was petting a newborn calf.

  She rolled into me and pressed her face against my dress. I felt how strong she was, how solid. She was a hardworking mountain girl, sure, so she had to have solid muscles on her frame.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry for this.” I petted her hair, this poor orphaned girl.

  Marisol didn’t answer, didn’t cry, just clung to me. Sometimes tears can’t touch the grief inside of us.

  Sharlotte came over, trying to walk more on her peg leg than her foot, to keep it out of the snow. “Do we know who did it, Cavvy?” she asked.

  All I could think of was Aces and his men, coming into camp, killing the men, stealing the women, but then Marisol wouldn’t have been alone in Glenwood.

  I spoke in a hushed voice. “Could be Outlaw Warlords out here, I guess. Only thing I know for sure is they killed everyone and burned it all down.”

  Sharlotte nodded, toeing at the wreckage. “Killed men and women, by the looks of it. And children. Lined ’em up and shot ’em and then lit the whole place on fire. Bad. Not Aces. Not any Outlaw Warlord I’ve ever seen. Maybe someone or something else.”

  Again, I thought of the hogs little Ajita had talked about outside of Grand Junction. Killer Juniper mutants.

  Dutch and Wren came over,
and when Wren saw the girl clutching me, my sister caught my eye. Instead of spinning on her boots and marching off, she waited, and then made a gesture at herself, and then pointed to the ruins to see if I needed her. She wanted to scout, to make sure whoever had killed everyone wasn’t still around.

  Such a change in Wren. A huge change. What she was doing, trying to be nice, trying to change, well, that took more courage than any kind of battle in any kind of war. In a gunfight, it all happens quick, and you ain’t got time to think, so you go on instinct, and before long it’s over and done, for good or for bad.

  Real life was slow, and each minute we had a million decisions to make, and while we might think it all doesn’t mean much, one gesture, one pause, a check-in, well, it defines not just who we are, but the world we live in.

  I nodded that I was okay, and Wren took off.

  Dutch stayed. He bent down on one knee. He touched Marisol’s hair. I resisted the urge to knock his hand away.

  He spoke in a quiet, gentle voice. “Marisol, I lost my family. Only I was there when Queenie and her outlaws attacked us on our farm outside of Lamar, where we were homesteading. My mom hid me in the root cellar while she and my dad and my sisters fought her, fought and lost. Killed. Queenie found me. I was eventually sold into an odd kind of slavery in St. Louis. But I lived. My whole family died so I could live. Like you’re alive right now with us.”

  The girl drew herself away from me. She gazed into Dutch’s eyes ... looking for what? For a lie? For an explanation of why life had to be so cruel? For hope and support? Prolly all those things.

  She found that and a whole lotta truth.

  Dutch could lie well, sure, you don’t go around preaching the gospel to get sex if you can’t lie. But right then I knew he was telling the truth.

  I was freezing, and the snow was falling harder, but I wasn’t going to move, not a muscle, ’cause right then Marisol needed me there, next to her, just like she needed Dutch’s eyes and the strength they offered.

  I’m not sure how long we sat there, but it was Wren who finally broke up the moment. She talked in a hushed voice, respectful of Marisol’s sorrow.

  “I did some scouting,” Wren said. “I found a room near the back that isn’t quite burned as bad as the others. We should salvage it out. Hopefully we’ll find the supplies we need, clothes, winter gear, stuff like that. But then we have to go and go quick. If there’s a road through these woods, Edger might use it to skirt us. Can’t let that happen. And we still don’t know what we’re going to find in Aspen.”

  If Aspen was a normal Juniper town and we marched in there with our Stanleys, we’d be a spectacle people would be talking about for months on end. With the ARK soldiers spreading out, trying to find us, we needed to travel in complete secrecy.

  And we still had to find Edger and rescue our boys.

  Sharlotte and Wren went around the back to pick through the burned wreckage for anything we could use: clothes, blankets, winter gear. For the Stanleys, we needed wood, or preferably Old Growth, which was synthesized coal taken from old-growth trees—which made it a hot-button political issue outside of the Juniper. In the Juniper, it was our fuel of choice.

  There was only one person we could ask about supplies. “Marisol,” I said gently, “where did you keep your wood? Or did you have a coal bin outside of the complex? We need to stock up the Stanleys. We need supplies, and we need to get going. You understand, don’t you?”

  Marisol nodded and pointed to the other side of her house where a little shack stood next to two trees. Prolly dry wood inside.

  “What about neighbors outside of your complex you trusted? Would anyone around here take you in?”

  She shook her head, then closed her eyes.

  Dutch took her from me and held her to his chest. “I’ll stay with her, Cavvy.”

  In his face, I saw the memories of his own hurt. He’d been orphaned. He knew.

  We both did. Both of my parents were dead, but at least I had Pilate. At least I hoped I did.

  Right then, I saw Dutch in a different light, and I realized why Wren liked him so much. He was handsome, but more than that, he had this secret piece of him that was vulnerable, and he was strong enough to show it.

  “Okay, Dutch,” I whispered. “Okay. Hold her close.”

  He nodded.

  I left to see what we could scratch together, all the while listening for a signal from Rachel. If we heard three gunshots, we’d have to drop everything and run quick.

  Again, I thought I’d rather be chased than do the chasing, which might not have made sense, but I’d just watched a girl count the bodies of her dead family. Nothing much made sense in a world like that.

  (ii)

  Dutch stayed with Marisol while I found Sharlotte and Wren behind the only wall left standing—near the back, under blackened pines—with the snow swirling around them.

  Most of the structure had burned flat, but one room had been spared like Wren had said, a teenager’s bedroom by the look of it. On the wall hung the tattered remnants of a boy band from long ago—the James-Young Gang, shiny-toothed grins and perfectly cropped haircuts—singed. JYG had a ton of hits, and my best friend, Anjushri Rawat, knew them all by heart. I had never much cared for pop.

  A bed, burned to the springs, lay next to a dresser blackened into charcoal, full of clothes that had somehow managed to survive. The girl’s candles had melted into the floor.

  Sharlotte held up two coats, both soot-stained and ashed to gray. One was a pink down coat, the other a long wool coat. She had on a Regio’s coat like me, and like me, it didn’t fit.

  “I call dibs on the wool one,” Sharlotte said. “Try on the down coat.”

  I hated pink, but I put it on. The left cuff had melted, and my wrist would likely get chilly. Still, it didn’t leave my middle freezing like the Regio coat did, and it would certainly keep me warmer than the wool blanket I’d had to suffer through.

  I found pants and jeans, but the girl had been slender, so neither I nor Sharlotte would be able to squeeze into them. Dang, seemed like no one in the Juniper had hips except for me and Sharlotte.

  In what had been the closet was another pile of clothes, mostly burned up, but I did find a black wool sweater, a matching black skirt, and a thick but tattered New Morality dress, hand-sewn. Sharlotte held up several pairs of black leggings, while Wren found gloves, hats, scarves, and even a pair of hiking boots.

  Like the jeans, the hiking boots didn’t fit me nor Sharlotte. We put them in a pile. Sharlotte got the New Morality dress, and I got the skirt and wool sweater. The leggings were made of a material that was stretchy enough we could pull it up over our thighs; it made things about a million times warmer. I was actually kind of warm in the leggings, skirt, and sweater. It wasn’t comfortable, though. Too itchy.

  I found the .45 caliber bullet I’d tucked into the seam of my silky dress. Wren had thrown that fateful bullet at Micaiah the night I’d first stood up to her. I kept it as a grisly souvenir of our adventures, but a part of me also knew having an extra bullet around was a good idea. Like the placard Mama had hung on the wall of our home, Waste Not, Want Not.

  In the New Morality dress, Sharlotte looked like she’d just come out of her bedroom.

  Wren held up a pink diary with a lock and handed it to me. On the front was a name, Eryn Lopez. “We should read it,” Wren said. “Might be something on who attacked the condo. Or maybe information on Aspen.”

  I held the diary, felt the weight of Eryn Lopez’s most secret thoughts. I put it on the desk. I couldn’t go through it like I’d gone through her clothes.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Poor girl has passed on, and I won’t disrespect her like that. We know enough. Marisol’s family and friends were all killed by raiders, and she wasn’t here, so she lived. The end.”

  Wren picked it up. “Sorry, Cavvy, but if she’s gone, she won’t mind. I’ll do it. Don’t you fight me on this. Not right now.”

  I let her have
the diary but still felt bad.

  Sharlotte cleared her throat. “We don’t have time to bury those bodies, but we should say some words, Cavvy. You want to?”

  I glanced around the ruined room and kept coming back to the James-Young Gang poster. Decades old, the ink had grown faded, but the boys were cute. Eryn had been in love with boys who were middle-aged men now. Even her love life was salvage. I knew that feeling. Other than my time in Cleveland, all my life, I’d been living off the leftovers of a better age. My very life now depended on her things, more salvaged clothes on my back, smelling like smoke. Dead people’s clothes. I’d grown up wearing dead people’s clothes. I felt the tears hit my eyes, for me, for Eryn, for Juniper girls livin’ hard from New Mexico to Montana. Even Wind River girls.

  “I can’t, Shar,” I muttered.

  Sharlotte nodded. “Well, me and the Lord have been fightin’, so He may not listen, but I’ll try. Come on.”

  With our bundle of salvage, we left Eryn Lopez’s room and returned to the yard where Dutch still held Marisol.

  “Shar is going to say some words,” I said. “Like a funeral, for Marisol’s people.”

  Dutch didn’t stay a word. He just helped Marisol stand, while Wren came over and held his hand.

  Sharlotte stood before the bodies for a minute, cleared her throat, then spoke in a prayer. “God, lots of people died here. And this girl, Eryn Lopez, she died, too, but we thank you for sparing Marisol. She’s helped us over and over, and we’re doing some desperate things ’cause we’re chasing after some bad people who took our boys. And as you know, we’re on a quest. A quest ... I guess that’s the right word, though it sounds a little too fancy for the likes of us. Anyway, you said be fruitful and multiply, but the whole human race is having trouble doing that. So, we’re going to deliver the cure and do your will. Yet we are but cottonwood fluff traveling on a troublesome river of woe.”