There were a lot of mysteries for people to ponder, but right then I had my own little conundrum far closer to home. How could my sister be so gentle and kind to this little girl? Wren’s smile was so soft. “I like you, Princess. What’s your name?”
The girl glanced at her mother, who nodded. “Go ahead.” The woman relaxed a little, and I figured she was curious about the life of a Juniper gunslinger. From the looks of them, she and her daughter were prolly on their way to Sterling to visit relatives or some such business. A real adventure for them, though Sterling was the safest city in the Colorado territory.
“Laura Tucker,” the little girl said.
“Well, Laura Tucker, you’re right. We didn’t give up after the Knockout. But I don’t wanna talk about the Sino. I want to tell you the truth about the Juniper.”
“Are there mutants?” Laura squinched up her face like she wouldn’t be able to handle the truth.
“Nope. No mutants.”
The frumpy woman next to Wren spoke up. “But what about the radiation from the Knockout? How can you be so certain?”
Wren’s eyes narrowed and her voice got quiet. “Ain’t no mutants. Like I said, I’ve been all over the Juniper, traveling with a circus, sometimes as a sharpshooter, sometimes as a trapeze artist, and I would’ve seen a mutant in a sideshow somewhere along the way.”
The woman harrumphed loudly. I suppressed a desire to go over and explain to her the difference between fission and fusion.
The girl fell over herself to ask another question. “What about the savages?”
The mama shushed her. “Now, Laura, that ain’t politically correct to say. Right, Miss Carson?”
Wren shrugged. “I guess. In the Juniper, we call ’em the Wind River people. We took their land away from ’em once, but the Knockout gave it back, and they’re not gonna let history repeat itself. You go up into Wyoming or Montana, well, the Wind River people’ll cut your throat rather than look at you. To protect their land.”
Even though the Native Americans killed to keep their borders sealed, some folks supported them. Mavis Meetchum, for example, who was the biggest rancher in the Northern Colorado territory, let loose a thousand head of buffalo into Wyoming—partly as a peace offering, partly to give the Wind River people something to eat. Mavis was as clever as she was rich, which made Sterling such a safe place.
“Trains can’t go north,” Wren continued, “so to get to California the Union Pacific and Amtrak have to run their trains south through New Mexico. Can’t go through the Rocky Mountains, ’cause of the weather and the Outlaw Warlords.”
“Like June Mai Angel.”
Wren nodded. “Yep. June Mai Angel runs the central part of the Colorado territory. Up north is the Psycho Princess, who paints towns all pink. She kidnaps the girls and brainwashes them to be as crazy as she is. Believe or not, the Psycho Princess kills any boy she meets, viable or not. The Juniper has always had bad women runnin’ around. Prolly where folks got the stupid idea there were mutants.”
The frumpy woman shrugged and looked out the window.
Wren continued. “Why, when I was twelve or thirteen, our ranch got attacked by an Outlaw Warlord by the name of Queenie. She would raid ranches and farms for food, salvage, and boys. To sell. Big trade in boys nowadays, but you know that from school.”
“Only if they’re viable.” Laura tumbled over that last word.
“Uh-huh,” Wren agreed. “But my mama shot Queenie, right between her eyes. She and her girls were comin’ at us, and my sister back there, well, she wasn’t much older than you when she was reloading for Mama, and it was down to the last clip and them Outlaw Warlords were coming in for a last run, and Mama yelled out, and stood straight, and she was just so …”
Wren’s voice fell away.
I felt tears in my eyes as the memories bit me—the dirt stinging my face, the bullets in the air, electrifying my teeth, a crazy terror in my heart.
And Mama, clutching her over-under M16, which we named Tina Machinegun, yelling, “Dammit, Cavvy. You can’t drop no more bullets. You keep jacking up, we’re all gonna die!”
It was bad cursing, but that was what she’d said.
My hands were shaking so bad, and I was crying so much, most of the bullets didn’t make it into the clips. The brass glittered around me in the trench we had dug around our house.
Then this great big woman came up, Queenie, face painted with mud. I remember the flash of her teeth, and she had this big machine gun and it was chugging away at us. Mama was out of ammunition. She’d taken a round in the arm, and her blood dripped on me. One of our ranch hands, Nikki Breeze, screamed from somewhere that she’d been shot, and I was certain we were all going to die, until at the very last minute, Mama snatched a half-load from my hand, slammed that clip into Tina Machinegun and blew Queenie off her feet.
It was dewy-wet that morning. In my young mind, I thought I could smell Queenie’s brains in the mud. Now, whenever I smell that wet, muddy spring smell, I say to myself, “Smells like Queenie’s brains this morning.”
Laura Tucker was looking at Wren with wide-eyed hero worship as my sister told the story.
“But my mama’s dead now,” Wren whispered.
“Was she killed by June Mai Angel?” Laura asked.
“Nope. Heart attack. No one alive could kill my mama ’cept for God. He took her home to heaven, and left us here all alone.”
Laura put a hand on Wren’s hand.
“I’m sorry, miss. For your loss.” She said it with such seriousness that Wren laughed and laughed.
“If the Juniper is such a bad place, why did your mama go there in the first place?” the little girl asked.
The question caught Wren off guard. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she answered, “Family. She hated her family in Cleveland.”
“Hated?” Laura asked in wonder. “How can you hate your own family?”
“It’s good you don’t know.” Wren patted her hand. “But maybe it wasn’t just family that sent Mama west and kept her here. You know, the Juniper is a hard place to live but it’s also beautiful, and wild, and it’s the only place left in the world you can be free. The Juniper ain’t got no identity laws, no income taxes, nothing but open plains and starry skies, and a girl can make her way here. If you’re tough, smart, quick with a gun, you can live here, really live.
“I ain’t never gonna leave.” Wren grinned and changed gears. “Well, Laura Tucker, I hope you feel better. With all them questions you asked, I reckon you were a little scared. Well, until we hit McCook, you ain’t got nothin’ to be scared of. Yeah, they have guards on this train, but they ain’t seen what I’ve seen, or done what I done, so until I get off, you got me and my Colt Terminators to protect you, and I ain’t never lost a fight yet. Well, except when my little sister shot me in the back.” Wren paused. “You know, you kinda remind me of Cavvy when she was little and sweet, like my own little baby doll.” Her voice fell away.
For a long a time, it was quiet, Wren staring off. Then she cleared her throat, leaned in, and kissed the little girl’s cheek.
“Now look at my sister!” My sister stood, talking loud and waking everybody up. “Cavatica Jeanne Weller, all grown up. Mark my words, Laura Tucker, I won’t never be killed by anyone that’s not family.”
Wren strutted back to our seat, smiling at all the stares, murmurs, and hate. “Mutants!” My sister half-yelled the word. “Ain’t no mutants in the Juniper. Just a buncha scaredy-cat lies.”
“Quiet down, Wren,” I said, embarrassed.
I didn’t believe in mutants either, not really, but I’ll tell you what, growing up driving cattle to Hays, Kansas, there were some nights I heard things and saw things that made me think rough beasts slouched through the Juniper—creatures that God never meant to walk the earth.
Wren pulled her hat down and was asleep in seconds. I should’ve slept, but I hurt from the trauma of going to war at eight years old. And I missed my mama even
though I hadn’t seen her in a long time. Two years.
And now she was gone, and I didn’t want to go back to the violence of the Juniper. I missed my slate, my bed at the Academy, Anju, and her sighs over Billy Finn. The idea of going back to the Juniper made me want to curl up into a little ball and weep.
(iii)
Even after the memories of Queenie faded away, I couldn’t sleep, and a daydream crept into my head. I was at Anju and Billy’s wedding in Ohio. There was a boy there, one of Billy’s cousins. Though he was surrounded by girls, his eyes never left my face.
It was a look that said some things were meant to be.
He excused himself from all the girls ’cause he was real kind and gentle, but when he approached me, I could see he was at a loss for words. I took his hand and said, “Yeah, I felt it, too.” We talked all night long, danced to every song until finally we left and found a bench in a deserted park in Cleveland. I snuggled into his coat as we watched the dawn come up cold on the horizon. My own boy. I wouldn’t care if he was viable or not, swear to God, just as long as he was a boy of my very own.
It was such a nice fantasy, but then I remembered a conversation I had with Sharlotte when I came home for Christmas two years before. It was just us, sitting beside the fire in the parlor. Sharlotte worked on repairing a stirrup. I talked about Robert, a fine-looking viable boy at school who never seemed to belong, viable or not. I didn’t have a chance with him ’cause girls prettier and richer than me clung to him like wood ticks.
Pine burned in the fireplace, and the smoke smelled sweet. I sat on the hearth, enjoying the warmth, talking and talking, until I realized Sharlotte had fallen silent and distracted. She was in the old rocker, her face lost in the shadows. Her leather-working tools rested on her lap. After a while, she spoke. “You’re lucky, Cavvy, to be at that school, to be with boys. Ain’t no boys around here that ain’t taken or promised or already married. If you find a boy, you know to keep him close, right?”
“Ain’t gonna be no boy for me,” I’d said. “Some nights that’s hard to think on, and other nights I don’t care at all. There’s so much more to life than romance, despite what all those cheap eBooks say.”
“It gets harder the longer you go,” Sharlotte said quietly. “Maybe it’s not so much the boys involved, maybe it’s more the desire to be wanted. To have someone look at you and to see the joy on their face and to know you yourself are the source of such happiness.”
In some ways, the generation before us had it easier. At least they’d grown up with the hope of marriage and men. For Sharlotte and me, we’d grown up knowing how unlikely it was we’d marry, and we were too Catholic for any sort of polygamy and too New Morality to be gillian.
It’d been quite the confession from Sharlotte, who generally didn’t say much. She seemed to catch herself. “However, I should hope you aren’t reading romances, eBooks or otherwise. You are there to learn, not to go off into fantasylands. For whatever reason, God is testing us, and as women, we will be strong, we will be chaste, and when the sinful thoughts come, we will let our duty and honor be the compass to guide us to calmer waters.”
“Amen,” I’d whispered.
But Sharlotte going off like that, sounding like she’d memorized a Kip Parson sermon, I knew she’d visited fantasylands of her own.
The rocking of the train finally tricked me into sleeping, until Wren jostled me awake. “We’re getting off in McCook, Princess. We have people to meet and things to do. Or like we say in Amarillo, things to meet and people to do.”
“Don’t call me princess,” I growled. I didn’t want to leave my dreams. Out in the real world I was fearful, sick with sadness, and I had no idea who we had to meet or how we were going to get from McCook to Burlington in a day.
Worse than all that, I was going to leave the safety of the train for the hell and harshness of the Juniper.
My troubled homeland.
Chapter Six
I come from generations of Polish scientists, but I also grew up with Pollack jokes. The Polish mind just works differently—call it visual-spatial, call it big picture, call it whatever you want, but I have the ultimate Pollack joke. How many Pollacks does it take to invent a battery that changes the world? One. Me.
—Maggie Jankowski
Today Show Interview
May 24, 2057
(i)
Wren and I got off the train and you could almost hear the other passengers sigh with relief. Before my sister left, though, she blew Laura a kiss.
I followed Wren through the little depot, down steps to the street, and into the early-morning cold and dark. My belly rumbled, but we’d eaten through our cash, and nothing was open anyway. We stopped for a moment to put on our Mortex coats.
Not a soul stirred in McCook, Nebraska. The stockyards were silent, but soon the cowgirls would be up brewing coffee and working on their account sheets, waiting for a train to take their headcount to Buzzkill. McCook was a scrubby batch of nothing buildings, and the whole place stank of cattle, front-end chewing and back-end pooping, if you’ll excuse my language. That smell, mixed with the sage, carried on the winter wind, brought me back to the trauma of my childhood—I nearly ran back to the depot for an eastbound ticket.
Yet, I felt homesick as I walked through that town. The night had frozen the mud into a tangled crust, which kept tripping my boots, just like when I was six years old and walking to where the horse-drawn trailer picked me up for school. Part of me wanted to run back to Cleveland, but another part wanted to see my ranch again, pet my ponies, get long hugs from Aunt Bea.
Wren and I walked until McCook was behind us, and we headed west on what used to be US Route 34, but now was just a long stretch of dirt, narrowed by yellow grass and scrub—the asphalt long gone.
I knew I couldn’t ask Wren where we were going or who we were meeting ’cause she would just ignore my questions. So, I slipped on the Secondskin gloves as well as the Nferno hat and scarf, and soon was warm again. I was grateful Wren had stolen those things, but I still asked Jesus for forgiveness.
Morning light threw tall grass-shadows onto the dead highway. I was eyeing puddles for a drink, but they were frozen into white spider webs of ice. Wren kept moving, relentless, like a robot, too pretty and tough for the cold.
In the distance, something hovered on the horizon, not quite a tree, but neither hill nor building.
“Wren, what’s that in the sky?” I had an uneasy notion of what it could be.
She didn’t respond.
We got closer. Oh, Lord, then I understood everything.
A huge Jonesy-class zeppelin, cabled down to the foundation of a big red barn, dwarfed both the barn and the neighboring farmhouse. The frost on the galvanized Kevlar skin of the airship glistened in the sunlight as smoke from the steam engine swirled about in black wisps. The airship turned to show me her four back fins and three idle propellers. From the tip of her nose to the back fin, she was at least 150 meters with a diameter of 50 meters—a silver warehouse drifting in the breeze, straining at her cables, bobbing, tugging, bobbing some more.
Underneath the behemoth, cowgirls, horses, and cattle moved like miniature toys on a model train set.
I stood, spellbound. I’d seen zeppelins before at the airship port in Burlington, and that was when my fascination started—with the engineering of them, not the actual experience of flying in one.
My love for guns was similar. Mama used to say I talked like an ordinance salesperson in training. I loved the makes, the models, the mechanisms, but when it came to the actual shooting, I’d mess things up—unless it was deer hunting or target practice, then I wasn’t too bad.
Watching the zeppelin drift, my guts melted. Only one way to get to Burlington from McCook in a day. We were going to fly.
The lyrics of The Ballad of the Black Dog went through my head. Based on a true story, the song recounted the fate of a doomed zeppelin, pulled out of the sky by June Mai Angel. She left only one survivor to t
ell the tale. The rest. Butchered.
“Please, Wren, no.”
My sister shook her head at me.
We walked up to the farm, and Wren grabbed the first person she saw. “Where’s Sketchy?”
A woman in a New Morality dress pointed to a huge woman dressed in a wool skirt and a leather flight jacket. She had some kind of flying cap on her head, and what looked like cattling goggles around her neck. Leather and wool meant she was old school Juniper ’cause most folks wore the new synthetics, like Wren had stolen for me.
We got closer, and the huge woman put out a hand covered in fingerless gloves. Her fat-lipped mouth opened to reveal a scatter of teeth stuck into big, pink gums. Her dazed blue eyes were spread so far apart she looked toady. Soot covered every centimeter of her.
“I’m Sketchy, and I bet you dollars to donuts you be the Weller girls, and it’s a shame about your mama and all, but my mama’s dead too in the ABQ, and I miss her sorrowful. Your mama paid me all up front, quite a pretty penny, bless her, and I got Sharlotte Weller’s letter from the BUE, and she has that crazy plan, and I’ll do it ’cause I like her, and the money’s good, and it should help my reputation as an intrepid entrepreneur long as I don’t jack things up.”
How could Mama have paid Sketchy up front if we were having money problems? Hiring on a zeppelin wouldn’t help with that. I still had no idea what was going on. Wren sure as heck wasn’t going to tell me, and it didn’t feel right asking the strange woman in front of me.
“Please to meet you, Sketchy,” Wren put out a hand.
Sketchy pumped it like she was hoping water would come pouring out of Wren’s mouth. “Glad you found the Srikrishna ranch. As I thought, we got here late last night ’cause the wind shifted out of the west. I knew it would, but Tech doubted me, though I’m never wrong when it comes to wind, storms, and hogs.”
Wren nodded, her face once again inscrutable. I had no idea what my sister thought about our odd captain who held our lives in her greasy, black fists. Butterflies invaded my belly, and I hoped I wouldn’t puke them out. But then they were all I would throw up ’cause of how empty I felt.
Dandelion Iron Book One Page 6
