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

But she had Emma beside her, a big freckled girl and a scrapper. Her New Morality dress would slow her though. I bent, scooped up a big chunk of asphalt and hurled it at Emma. The asphalt splattered her nose with blood to add to the freckles. She went down, weeping and bleeding. Not much of a fighter after all.

I maneuvered Elise, a pretty brunette, between Mary Margaret and Kitty, so they couldn’t come at me. Elise threw up her hands, but it was too late, I punched her in the nose, and she fell too.

Kitty didn’t go for me. She turned to run, but got her legs tangled up in her dress. I kicked her feet out from under her. Surprised, she fell, but didn’t catch herself right. Her face banged into the alley’s dirt. More blood.

Only Mary Margaret was left standing.

Elise had started wailing, which brought the backend staff out into the alley. They were screaming for me to stop, or something, but my rage had deafened me.

I charged Mary Margaret like a train going off the tracks. I smashed into the Yankee girl. The momentum took us both to the ground, her on her back, and me on top of her.

“Please, Cavatica, please, no!” Took me a minute to realize it was Mary Margaret, pleading for me to stop. She wasn’t going to fight me.

I gazed down into her fear twisted face, the horror, and I raised a fist.

“Please!” she begged.

I’d asked her to stop. I’d not wanted trouble. And she’d not stopped. I was going to show her the error of her ways.

I bashed my knuckles into her nose. Blood spouted in a geyser and she was screaming. She tried to struggle away, but I caught her hand, rammed it into the dirt, and hit her again, and again, and again.

Didn’t hear the sirens—the roaring in my ears eclipsed it all. Didn’t see the red and blue light flashing—the world had become a crimson stain. And then I was torn off the girl. She curled up around her ruined face and sobbed.

I escaped the hands holding me. Back on her, I drew a heart on the asphalt in her blood ’cause Wellers do what we say and say what we do. For most folks, that was a good thing. For us? It often turned sad.

“Get back here!” It was Trujillo, one of the West Hays cops who worked the Juniper immigrant beat.

I skittered away and ran through my former friends, hoping I could flee back to my basement apartment. I needed my saddle bags ’cause I knew where I was headed, and I needed the slate to trigger the scheduled task. Everything depended on it.

I didn’t get three meters when the electricity hit me. A Thor 2 stunner took me down and left me spasming on the floor. Getting hit a second time wasn’t nearly as bad as the first, which proved you can get used to anything. Still, couldn’t do anything but twitch and shudder.

So much for my escape.

I heard Parvati tsking me, shaking her head sorrowfully. “I’m sorry, Cavatica, but you brought this on yourself.”

“Go jack yourself!” I managed to growl through my clacking teeth.

Not five minutes later, I was in a squad car, in the back, fingers clutching the wire cage that separated me from the front seat. “Take me back! Take me back!”

I didn’t have the Hoyt slate. If I didn’t scan in, my friends in Cleveland would die. Like Alice. Dead.

Neither woman said a word.

We hurtled west toward a fence line growing taller the closer we got.

I wasn’t being taken to the police station because I wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

I was going to be thrown back into the Juniper, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

(ii)

I threw myself against the doors of the squad car, pounding on the exit buttons. I was beyond panicked, ’cause it had all gone to jackercrap and it was all ’cause of me.

Trujillo drove.

Suda took care of the situation—the situation being me. “Incapacitate. Level 2.” The zap came from the seat under me, and I was back to shaking and squealing as my nervous system received three million volts of Eterna goodness.

Once the storms of electricity left me, little aftershocks made me wince, and the memory, oh the memory of being electrocuted rocks you even after the energy fades away.

Couldn’t fight my way out. And after the fit I’d thrown, trying to talk to those officers would’ve been as futile as trying to apologize to Mary Margaret.

Mary Margaret Morricone. She’d been so scared as she begged me not to hurt her. And I did it anyway. What was I now? What had I become?

The squad car whooshed up at the end of I-70. “You can’t just leave me. I don’t have the right gear. This isn’t legal.”

Suda laughed. “You want to talk legal? You Junies don’t know the meaning of the word. Your filth is poisoning America. If we took you to the station, you’d be deported anyway. This way, we save taxpayer money we use on real people.”

“We are doing our country a service,” Trujillo joined in. “The minute we drove up and saw you beating that poor girl to death, we knew what we had to do.”

I went quiet. Not five years ago, we wouldn’t have been having this conversation. But the SISBI laws changed everything.

“But my family were Americans,” I whisper.

“Not anymore,” Suda said.

The gate is still open. Like with Sharlotte, the timer counted down from five minutes. The echo of it all was eerie.

Suda opened the door. Trujillo stood back, armed with a fully charged Zeus 2, and it was pretty clear that if I went for them, Trujillo would melt my skin off my bones.

“Hands over your head!”

I complied.

Hard to move across a seat without using your hands, but I managed. I got out of the car.

Trujillo waved the energy weapon west. “The United States of America has requested you walk through that gate. And don’t come