War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (best short novels .TXT) 📕

targets, a mixture of glass bottles, Barbie dolls, toy trucks, all balanced on cast-off highchairs. She adjusted one pink baby doll, dusty from the blowing wind, right where a real baby might sit.

Dallas Pat and Floyd fell into talking about work, since it was the only thing we had in common.

“Do you know what those waitress skanks did to me?” Dallas Pat asked in a plaintive little voice. “Mary Margaret poured a Coke onto a table herself. I watched her do it. Then she ordered me to clean it up.”

Mary Margaret Morricone was the latest bully the universe had sent to push me around. She was a rich girl who waited tables after school as a hobby, her and her Yankee prissy friends. They worked the front end of the Hurry Curry, hosting, waitressing, collecting tips, while we all worked the backend doing the grunt work.

“Someone is going to have to do something about them,” Floyd whined.

Of course, the someone would be me. They all knew it. It was just a matter of time.

Maria didn’t want to talk about work. No, she was still smarting from what I’d said to her. She got her courage up enough to say in an accented English, “You don’t have to be such a skank, Cavatica. It’s why God invented manners.”

“To keep things awkward and uncomfortable?” I worked the action on one of my pistols, holstered it, then snapped the slider on the other. “Jacker that. I might as well say what y’all are thinking.”

Starla raced back once the targets were set. She kissed my cheek. Dallas Pat and Floyd knocked the poop off the cushions and sat down; cushion fluff coated their thighs.

The dry cold filled my nose, once Starla stepped back. The cold mixed with the smell of her body spray, which brought on a world of lustful thoughts. Back in the day, I would’ve felt guilty and prayed. Now, I thought about what we’d be doing later on that night once I was drunk.

Sucking on my vape pen, I drew both .45s and blew the baby doll’s plastic skull to pieces. She tumbled off the highchair. Two Coors Light bottles shattered from my shooting. I took down two Ken dolls then a few Barbies. Every bullet knocked a doll off, and sometimes I was quick enough to shoot them again before they hit the ground.

I used my paycheck to buy ammunition. I burned through a thousand rounds a week blowing apart the leftovers of the Juniper’s grand salvage industry. Should’ve set aside twenty dollars. Pilate and I were always twenty dollars short. Dammit.

In the grand scheme of things, ten million dollars might not mean as much as you’d think. But a missing twenty dollars you could feel, daily.

Shooting all the time was fun at first, but then it was boring, my fingers calloused, and still I practiced. Still I practiced. For what? I couldn’t say. I had no war to fight from my cage. As time went by, I grew more and more certain the battles were behind me.

Starla snatched the whiskey bottle from Floyd, drained the last drops, and threw it into the air. I shot it to pieces, left-handed.

Starla grinned. “Ain’t nothing you can’t hit.”

“Ain’t nothing,” I murmured.

Floyd staggered up. “And you two just love each other. Cavatica and Starla, sitting in a tree. K-i-s-s-i-n-g.” He made kissy noises and laughed at himself.

Maria glared until her black eyes couldn’t get any blacker. Dallas Pat sighed.

What a merry band of assjacks were we.

“No.” Starla touched my face, softly, gently, a sad look on her eyes. “I love Cavatica, but she doesn’t love me. We’re all just a sublime waste of time for her.”

Wind blew down and it should’ve been cold. Wasn’t. Inside me, I was far colder. “Maria is right,” I muttered. “God invented manners, so we don’t talk truth. So hush up, now, Starla.”

“Tell me you love me.” Starla touched my lips. “Use these to prove me wrong.”

And I couldn’t. I turned away and sucked THC into my lungs and held it there, and part of me didn’t want to breathe again. I wanted to hold the smoke in me until my head floated off, and my heart stopped, and so I could leave Starla. All I ever did was hurt her.

So I wouldn’t have to scan my eyes again for Tibbs Hoyt.

So I could forget about Alice. Her blood. Her eyes.

So I could see Mama and Daddy again, on the ranch in Burlington, and return to our horses and cattle, my family, and my life.

Gone. Blown away.

(ii)

That night, I tripped in around 2 a.m., Starla’s scent on me. And the lingering perfume of my vape. And you couldn’t forget the sour-sweet stench of spilled whiskey ’cause it was coming out of my pores.

Pilate and I rented a basement apartment. It was cobbled together in an old neighborhood in Hays, a three-story mansion that now housed fifty people in squirrel holes. Most of us were illegal Juniper immigrants or Hindus without connections. There were also a few Hispanic families, on the fast-track to naturalization ’cause America needed workers.

Our apartment was a two-room affair: a main room and a bathroom. We slept on inflatable mattresses on the bare carpet coming apart to show the marbled gray underlayment. During the day, we stuck the mats behind the sofa, which wasn’t much better than the couch at the shooting range. The apartment did come with a VSD TV resting on a shelf made from pressboard and cinderblocks.

The toilet leaked, so it was always a little stinky and damp—also cold, since the house’s heating system sent the hot air up, not down. Our own electric heater would often blow the circuits, and we’d have to slog outside to throw the breakers.

I pushed through sliding glass doors and a shadow moved. I shrieked and went for the pistols in the cooler.

The familiar, awful smell of Alice crushed me, and I knew she’d gone coco for good, and she’d come to put me down ’cause