Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

She paused.

  Leave it to Sharlotte, our cowgirl poet, to come up with such words.

  Then she continued. “But that’s for us, the living. As for the dead, Lord Jesus, take their souls into your arms and hold them, hold them like Eryn’s mother held her, like Marisol’s mama did too, when both were born and the wind blew. Bless them and bless us, soften Marisol’s pain, and watch over Micaiah and Pilate, until we can be reunited once more. We ask this in your name, Lord Jesus, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  We then said the Our Father. Dutch said it, and I knew he meant it. Had I been wrong about him? It seemed so.

  “That was nice, Shar,” I said, having to wipe my eyes on the right sleeve of my new smoke-damaged coat. It was like wearing a campfire around, it smelled so strong.

  Wren nodded. “It was beautiful, Sharlotte. ‘We are but cottonwood fluff traveling on a troublesome river of woe.’ Never knew you had such pretty words in you.”

  Marisol suddenly threw herself into Sharlotte’s arms.

  We all were quiet. Snow fell in soft plinks on our clothes. A winter bird flitted onto a branch, knocked snow off which fell in a muffled thump, and then the bird flittered on away.

  “Do you hear that?” Sharlotte asked me over Marisol’s head.

  I nodded and grinned a little. It was Pilate’s sermon from Green River all over again. “I hear the silence. I hear you, Sharlotte. You spoke, and we all listened. We are the voices in the silence.”

  “That’s God enough, I reckon,” Sharlotte said. Then she turned to me and drew me in to hug along with Marisol. “We missed your birthday back in Glenwood Springs. Happy Birthday, Cavvy. I don’t have much to give you, but Eryn Lopez did. God bless her, and God bless you.”

  No cake. No birthday song, but all in all, the gifts I received from Eryn Lopez were by far the best I ever got.

  “Now,” Sharlotte said, “let’s get the wood loaded up in the Stanleys and get our boys back.”

  (iii)

  Still no sound of gunshots from Rachel. Felt like a good omen.

  We found wood in the little shack leaning against a toolshed. Inside there was a treasure trove, including old cross-country ski equipment, complete with a pair of boots. And they fit! I’d skied before, with Anju in Wisconsin. Her family had taken pity on me and paid for the whole trip. I thanked God when I slipped on the boots and walked around, trying to convince myself the shoes made my feet hurt less. Regardless, it was another birthday present for me.

  Being the daughter of Abigail Weller, we took the skis though I had no real plans on using them. I’d grown up under two framed needlepoint pictures: Waste Not, Want Not and One Woman’s Junk is Another Lady’s Treasure. We were children of the junk trash business, the offspring of salvage monkeys, so we’d leave nothing behind.

  Almost as good as the boots, I found rolls and rolls of duct tape. A lot of people might say the microprocessor computer chip was the pinnacle of 20th century technology, but if you ask a Juniper engineer, the obvious answer would be duct tape. And what the 20th century geniuses invented, the 21st improved on. In the toolshed, we found all-weather duct tape with special hyper-adhesives that were water resistant and locked down tight even when damp. Even before the Sino, the oil industry used it on their deep-water science instruments. Good down to six thousand meters and months in the water.

  Along with the tape were lots of different shovels, pickaxes, splitting axes, and digging tools. Even a few posthole diggers. I had an idea, a crazy idea, and I knew I’d be taking every last one of those shovels with me. Just in case.

  But first, footwear for Sharlotte. Cutting out the toes of one of the hiking boots and slitting up the sides, I julie-rigged a boot for Sharlotte. We had wool socks from Eryn Lopez, and now both of us had warm toes. We ate while we worked: cans of tuna, hash, green chili. We washed it down with water from our jugs. I kept some aside for Rachel, waiting on us and keeping watch.

  Wren had disappeared but came back transformed. She’d lost enough weight in Aces’s dungeon that she fit in Eryn’s clothes. She’d found another cowgirl shirt, a leather vest, and a fresh set of jeans. And apparently, Eryn’s make-up kit, which she used to make herself look gorgeous. Leave it to Wren to find a way to look better than she had before we started out. I knew how fast she was with makeup firsthand, so it only took a second for her to become gorgeous. It was clear she wanted to get back to our chase.

  Watching my sister come marching through the destruction, a Venus in cowgirl boots, Dutch’s mouth fell open.

  Sharlotte sighed. I did, too. My sister and her snake of a boyfriend, both so pretty, and so full of the Devil’s fire.

  We walked our Stanleys over to the wood shed, where we loaded up their coal bins with split wood. Ironic, the condo had burned but not the firewood.

  We didn’t have much room, but I took an ax with us, a toolbox which held screwdrivers with Home Depot-orange handles, a set of Craftsman socket wrenches, and various other tools. The tools made me feel better. Wren needed guns to feel secure, since she was a gunfighter, but for me? I was an engineer; I needed tools.

  After moving stuff around, I loaded up the trunk of the Marilyn. Sharlotte came over to appraise our food situation. We had six cans of fruit, six cans of green beans, and some hunks of beef jerky, along with a box of ancient saltine crackers.

  “It ain’t enough,” Sharlotte said. “If things go bad, we’ll run out of food. Are we really that desperate?”

  “All depends. We don’t know what Edger has or what’s in Aspen. Maybe we’ll find some nice mountain folk to help us out. Hopefully by then it won’t matter if normal folks know about us. If the ARK questions them, we’ll be long gone. Besides, we’ve done desperate before.”

  My sister put an arm around my shoulder. Sharlotte wasn’t a hugger, but we’d gone through a lot together, and I felt her love. “How long do you think our luck is going to hold out? How long can we rely on yours and Pilate’s magic to keep us out of the grave?”

  “Maybe it’s not luck,” I said. “Maybe it’s God’s majestic right hand holding us up and guiding us.”

  “Until His left hand smacks the crap out of us. Like what Pilate is always talking about.” A sad smile covered her features. “I like to cuss. I really do. But I suppose that doesn’t help our cause.”

  I glanced over to make sure no one could hear us, then I whispered, “What do you make of Dutch?”

  The sad grin grew mischievous. “Never thought I’d meet someone I hated more than Pilate. Still, what he said to Marisol, how he held her, he might not be as bad we think.”

  Leaving my sister, I finished packing by strapping our surplus equipment to the outside of the Marilyn: the cross-country skis, the digging poles, axes, digging bars, rakes, shovels, and Wren’s Panzerfaust—we still had about five grenades left for her.

  Since we didn’t have windshield wipers, I found brooms we could use to brush snow off the windows so we could see.

  Loaded up, we left the burned-out ravages of Marisol’s home, once again stepping through the snow and moving between the trees.

  We picked up a chilly Rachel, who was grateful to climb back into the Audrey. We’d lost a little over an hour in our chase, but we were better off than we had been, and the roads had stayed clear. Good news there.

  Edger was ahead of us on the highway. I could feel it.

  Snow fell in intervals, but our visibility was far better than the night before. Given that it was Colorado weather, it could either blizzard up a white-out or the sky could clear and we’d be given fifty degrees in fifteen minutes. We had no way of knowing. No Internet. No slates. Nothing like that.

  Though we didn’t have technology right then—and even though I was a fan of modern science and logical thought—I knew of an even better weapon than anything humans could make with their hands.

  Like I’d told Rachel, our best weapon was hope, and I was going to use hope, right down to the end of all things. Hope we’d find Edg
er and put her down. Hope we’d save Pilate and Micaiah and not be killed in the process. Hope we’d make it over Independence Pass, avoid the hogs, get to June Mai Angel, and convince her to help take the chalkdrive around my neck out of the Juniper and out into the World.

  I’d use hope as a weapon until I clicked all my barrels dry.

  We found Aspen as burned out as Marisol’s condo.

  But it wasn’t deserted. No, far from it.

  Chapter Five

  This city is a jail cell, and I’m living inside bars

  I have money for a room, but I can’t afford the stars

  —Clover Rollison

  (i)

  LESS THAN THREE HOURS after leaving the graveyard where Marisol had grown up, we approached Aspen. Dang, but I figured it would be smaller. Not quite sure what I had in mind, but certainly not a full-sized city spread out before us. It was in ruins, but not like what we’d seen along I-70 before Aces grabbed us. Those towns had been salvaged down to their foundations. Aspen had been bombed by the look of it.

  We’d read Slaughterhouse-Five in our American literature class, and while I didn’t understand much of it, Kurt Vonnegut had described the fire-bombing of Dresden perfectly. When I read his words, I felt the heat and smelled the flesh frying. Aspen looked like a scene from right out of that book.

  Snow covered the piles of shattered debris that had been houses, but the wind couldn’t eclipse the fireplace smell of the place. And that tang of melted plastic, an odor I was becoming far too familiar with. Even in our Stanleys, we could smell the destruction.

  Evening was coming, but the glare of the bright snow kept twilight at bay for minutes longer than we deserved. We tromped by a human arm with burnt skeletal black fingers, reaching for a gray sky in the fading light.

  Wren’s jaws clenched. “This is bad, Cavvy. This couldn’t get worse.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know it.”

  Sharlotte was silent above us.

  “More ARK troops are bound to be coming, looking for Edger and her people. So, we got that to worry about behind us. But the real problem is Edger herself. Either she managed to out-maneuver us and she is gone like a daddy jacker along with Micaiah and Pilate. Or she’s squirreled away in these ruins, waiting to ambush us but good. Either way, it’s bad.” Wren needed to say the words aloud, and she was always one to do her thinking right along with her talking.

  We passed condos, torched and melted. We passed houses, crunched into chunks of coal. Downtown lay ahead. Trees seemed to watch us like burn victims, their branches reaching out like the dead arm we’d seen.

  The ski runs were still visible to the southwest; a new growth of aspens marked them. Aspens grew quick, but the pines would take over eventually. In five hundred years, the ski runs would be gone, taken over by the evergreens.

  The lyrics of some old song about trees came to me, about maples and oaks, fighting. Pilate would sing it to me, and he knew every word. Pilate. We had to get to him before the ARK tortured and killed him, which they would undoubtedly do.

  “This wasn’t Aces,” Sharlotte said. “This was the ARK. The ARK came through here, and they left nothing behind.”

  “Looking for us,” I murmured. The chalkdrive on the chain lay under my clothes, close to my skin, and it had never felt heavier or colder. It held the cure to the Sterility Epidemic, and the ARK had bombed a whole city in search of it.

  Or maybe not. We had no way of knowing, but I felt what Sharlotte was feeling. We’d seen Aces at work, and we’d seen Outlaw Warlords, but this was something new.

  “Could it be those hogs we’ve been hearing about?” Sharlotte asked.

  “Maybe they breathe fire,” Wren muttered.

  I shook my head, my brow furrowed. “That is highly unlikely. Extreme heat and human tissue generally don’t mix. And what would ignite the flame? It is interesting to note that an electrical field would make more sense.”

  I was rambling. I stopped talking and halted the Marilyn. The Audrey came to rest behind us. Checking my gauges, I was relieved to find our pressure was good, but the fireboxes on both of our machines were glowing red hot again. If the metal melted, I didn’t have the welding skills to fix the problem. And then we’d be down at least one Stanley. Didn’t like that idea at all. I wanted both of our war machines for our suicide run over Independence Pass. If we survived Aspen.

  We waited. Snowflakes sizzled into nothing as they struck our engines. Walking straight through town on Highway 82 felt like the worst plan in the history of planning.

  “You and Dutch should get out,” I whispered to Wren. “Escort us through. I don’t think Edger snuck past us. I think she’s here with the last of those troops, waiting to ambush us. Or to make a deal.”

  Wren sighed. “If it comes down to it, Cavvy, we give ’em the chalkdrive. I won’t let ’em kill Pilate.”

  I noticed she said nothing about Micaiah. I didn’t blame her for that. Pilate was her everything; in some ways more of a father to her than he was to me, and we were biologically connected. Wren and Pilate were spiritual father and daughter, bonded through battle, closer than blood.

  “Does Dutch or Marisol know about the chalkdrive?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Wren said. “I haven’t said a word. While I love Dutch, I’m not sure I trust him.” That brought out a grin, part wistful, part lustful. “As for that little girl, the less she knows about our business, the better. You can’t torture the truth out of someone if they don’t know anything.

  Pilate had said we’d have to leave him, that our quest mattered more than our family and more than friendships. But Wren was right. If it came down to bargaining for Pilate’s and Micaiah’s lives, I’d give Edger the cure to the Sterility Epidemic.

  We just couldn’t let it get that out of control.

  Wren put on her hat and her gloves before sliding out of our Stanley, Tina Machinegun over one shoulder. She grabbed Mrs. Panzerfaust from the back as well as the extra rockets in a backpack. Our victory over the Kashmir IV had re-armed us; too bad we hadn’t been able to grab any extra food before the airship went up in flames.

  Wren marched over to the Audrey to get Dutch. He had an AZ3 with a backpack of his own full of ammunition.

  My sister and her scoundrel of a boyfriend disappeared into the swirling snow, but I knew they’d keep us in sight while watching out for Edger and her troops.

  Now the ARK had four targets to ambush, all lethal.

  Poor Edger. She only had a couple of dozen Regios. I kinda felt sorry for her.

  The snow blew in, blew out, blew in, blew out. It wasn’t a blizzard, only a snowstorm trying to quit, but like an alcoholic without AA, it kept on relapsing.

  The Stanleys moved down the street. The Audrey stayed back ’cause Rachel knew that was the wisest course of action. The Marilyn was walking point, and if we drew fire, the Audrey could respond in kind.

  We approached the downtown proper, or what was left of it. I’d seen video online about American soldiers fighting through the ruins of Shanghai during the Sino. The downtown looked like that, rat holes everywhere, perfect for snipers. On our left was a pile of rubble that at one point was a hotel, maybe named Jerome. We saw the “J” and a few scattered letters. On our right lay the ruins of a mall that at one time had been home to high class restaurants and shops meant only for the fabulously rich. Everyone knew that Aspen had been synonymous with wealth back in the day. Sometimes we spoke of it like it had been El Dorado.

  We heard the rumble of a diesel engine come to life. It had been hiding in the rubble of the hotel, covered with white tarps and snow.

  I expected the Humvee or the Athapasca troop carrier, but no, it was a piece of construction equipment, a backhoe loader with a huge bucket in the front.

  “Shar!” I yelled.

  “I see it,” Sharlotte yelled back.

  I took a step as she swiveled the arms around, but then the Marilyn lost her balance and tipped forward. They’d dug a pit fo
r us in the middle of the road. It was square, three meters wide, three meters deep, which wouldn’t have been a problem if we were upright. Problem was, we weren’t.

  We toppled down, landing on our guns, cracking the windshield further. The water gushed out of our tanks and our pistons died right there.

  The Audrey’s guns started up, gunfire thudding, but I knew what that backhoe loader had come to do. Not five seconds later, the Audrey was pushed on top of us, and there we lay, a tangle of metal arms, legs, cracked windshields, and no way to protect ourselves.

  The horn of the backhoe loader screamed through the gathering gloom, calling for an all-out attack on us.

  We were in trouble. In that pit, we were in trouble deep.

  (ii)

  I opened the driver’s side door, and thank God, I could get it open enough to squeeze out. I had an MG21 in my grip, the American standard issue assault rifle in the Sino-American War. Sharlotte opened her door, then closed it as bullets sparked and panged off the metal around her.

  A round whined in ricochet and clipped my ear.

  ARK Regios surrounded us. We were fish, the pit was the barrel, and those soldier girls couldn’t miss.

  I raised my rifle, took aim, and readied myself to go down fighting like Butch and Sundance in that old western video. Oh, well, Mama, here I come.

  Above us, in the muted silence of the snow, the whoosh of a rocket from Mrs. Panzerfaust took out half of the guns and girls aiming at us. They evaporated in an explosion that lit up the night and warmed my face. Debris clattered down on us, and dust mixed with the snowfall.

  Then Dutch’s AZ3 rattled off round after round.

  Those Regios had no choice but to seek cover. A 40mm grenade sent shockwaves across the landscape, and I recognized that sound. Tina Machinegun was talking dirty.

  I climbed up through fallen Stanleys and yanked open Sharlotte’s door. Blood masked her face, and for a minute, I thought she’d been headshot. But her eyes blinked open—so white compared to the red. “Just a cut from the fall,” she said. “I’m okay. Let’s get the hell out of here.”