Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for students TXT) 📕

(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