First things first. Pilate and I pulled our wounded across the pavement to the Pegasus. He made it and laid Wren into the back seat of the car. Sharlotte and I weren’t so lucky.
Cows flooded around the truck—all that meat rushing toward us. A bull struck me and Sharlotte.
She went down, trampled.
I was thrown back for a second, against the blistering heat of the car.
I flicked my rifle to full auto and opened fire. One, two, three cows toppled onto their sides, bellowing, until more running beef pounded over them in a wave of violence. The cattle changed course to avoid the pile and slammed into the concrete of the police station. Their white eyes rolled in their sockets even as their black, murky nostrils flared. Their piping screams and howls rose like a hellish chorus of the damned. And I continued to gun them down until I cleared a space.
I grabbed Sharlotte, but she was dead weight, completely gone from the world. I wept, my heart on fire and drowning me in the smoke. My sister, shot, then trampled. It wasn’t fair.
And me, killing a woman as she begged for her life.
Pilate rushed to help me, and we heaved Sharlotte’s broken body into the back of the Pegasus. Pilate crawled in and pulled Wren onto him. I dove into the front seat, holding Tina Machinegun—I didn’t remember picking it up.
“Above!” Pilate shouted.
Two Johnny Boy zeppelins chugged through the sky toward us. Blackened, ragged Kevlar flapped like dead skin from their previous battles with the Moby Dick. The two Johnnies were the last of the ARK blimps that had been sent to find us, full of troops, machine guns, and rocket launchers.
A cow bashed into our car, jarring us and making the metal scream. Micaiah slammed the Pegasus in gear and stomped on the accelerator. The jolt pressed me back into the seat. He wrenched the wheel to the left and then to the right, avoiding cattle. The zeppelins were flying in from the north, so we needed to head south, but the stampede blocked our way.
Micaiah slammed down the gear shift, going faster, faster, but why? His face glowed pale, gaunt, eyes hidden in bruises of exhaustion. What was he planning?
Then I saw a big rig’s flatbed trailer to the west. Its loading ramp was down.
“Do it!” I yelled.
He nodded and gunned the engine. We bounced off a few more cows as he careened the frictionless car up against the side of a strip mall’s glass storefront. Our thrusters shattered the window into a rain of fragments.
Then we were speeding toward the ramp. He was going to hit it at an angle, but I prayed it would be enough to send us soaring.
We whooshed up the ramp and into the air. But we weren’t going to make it over the stampede. A shriek froze in my mouth.
The Pegasus landed in the middle of the stampede about halfway across the main street. I winced, expecting us to sink under the raging cattle and be ripped apart by the stampede, except main street was so solidly jammed with beefsteaks that we careened over their backs instead. Horns screeched off the bottom of the car, and heads ducked before we took them off. The Pegasus bucked and jostled and surfed across the cows until we bounced over the last one and dropped to glide easily across cement.
We zoomed down an alley between casinos, onto a baseball field, and crashed through a chain-link fence. And then ...
Open desert.
The two zeppelins didn’t follow. One stayed above the police station, while the other chased the Moby Dick to the west. Once more, Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz had saved us. Well, Sketchy insisted she was family, and family take care of each other. Thank you, Sketch.
We’d made our escape, but what horrible price had we paid for our freedom?
Where could we go? Not only were the ARK soldiers looking for us, but now the police were as well. I shuddered to think of how many people had seen the FBI posters.
Worse yet, my sisters, both of them, lay bleeding in the back of the Pegasus, riding the razor’s edge between life and death.
Read on in Inferno Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 3).
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Dedication
For Scott. That’s my brother, dammit.
A Note from the Author
I HOPED YOU ENJOYED reading Machine-Gun Girls. The third book, Inferno Girls, will be available in the coming months.
A prequel novella based in the world of The Juniper Wars series is available now. Armageddon Dimes takes place five years before the events of Armageddon Girls and follows the adventures of a returning Sino-American War veteran, Mariposa Hernandez. Bored of civilian life, haunted by the war, Mariposa is invited by a long lost friend on a treasure hunt into the wastelands of Denver. Can Mariposa reclaim a fortune in abandoned dimes before the ghosts of her past consume her?
For more about me, my books, and The Juniper Wars, visit my website at www.aaronmritchey.com.
Copyright
Machine-Gun Girls is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Aaron Michael Ritchey and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
[email protected]
About the Author
Aaron Michael Ritchey is the author of The Never Prayer, Long Live the Suicide King, and Elizabeth’s Midnight. He was born on a cold and snowy September day in Denver, Colorado, and while he’s lived and traveled all over the world, he’s a child of the American West. Sagebrush makes him homesick. While he pines for Paris, he still lives in Colorado with his cactus flower of a wife and two stormy daughters.
About the Publisher
We love books and we are crazy-passionate about publishing the best adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Action-Adventure around.
Though our stories can be thought provoking at times, our primary goal is to entertain readers with wild stories and interesting characters you can’t walk away from. We want to whisk readers into a different world where the impossible is possible, where monsters lurk around every corner, but so do heroes, always ready to swoop in and fight back the dark.
We are also deeply dedicated to the authors we work with. For us, publishing is less about individual titles and more about supporting the authors we love. We want our writers to succeed, to thrive, to sell books, and to pursue their fiction passionately. We also want ALL writers to succeed and achieve their dreams of crafting excellent books and connecting with an audience who will love what they do. We firmly believe there has never been a better time to be an author. We also believe publishing is not a zero-sum game and that a rising tide lifts all boats. For that reason, we offer a variety of writing resources for folks looking to grow as wordsmiths or publish their books independently.
Find out about all our great books at www.ShadowAlleyPress.com
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