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

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 Edger 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