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

The sun had set, but a line of cold light glowed on the western horizon under a thick layer of bleak clouds. A chill wind blew out of the Juniper, welcoming me home. The wind, always the wind. I could smell the distance and time, the cold, the wet of the clouds, the dry of the sage shivering under the onslaught of the breeze.

My boots echoed across the asphalt, clack, clack, clack. A piece of gravel growled under my heel. The dumb Hurry Curry uniform dress would do exactly nothing in keeping warm, and yet, I didn’t feel the cold.

With my hands laced behind my head, I passed through the gates.

Silence. The darkness got serious about taking back the world and all shadows from the glowing VSDs.

Again, I read the signs.

WARNING: You are leaving the United States of America. You will not be allowed back without proper documentation and identification. This perimeter is secured. Failure to comply will be met with fines and jail time.

Like I wrote before... the Juniper was the jail time.

I remembered telling Starla I’d grown up in a prison and I was as bad as any ex-con. On hard nights, when I was drunk, I’d tell her I was a criminal. I felt like it. Her touch made me feel like I was betraying myself and whatever sick love I had for other people.

Or more precisely, and to my shame, the sick love I had for Micaiah.

“Bye, bye, Junie-bug,” Trujillo said.

The fence rattled shut. My chances to scan back in using Hoyt’s slate were over. And I had no doubt that he would follow through on his promise to kill my friends in Cleveland as well as everyone I’d ever loved.

Sick love or not.

(iii)

I dropped my hands. The police officers got into the frictionless. It spun around and zoomed away back down I-70.

I thought of the policewomen I’d met in Cleveland—they’d been nice and trusting. They wouldn’t have left me in my shirt sleeves on a cold night in the Juniper, cast off and flung away like garbage.

But those Cleveland cops hadn’t served in a border town while war ravaged not a hundred kilometers away.

I blinked and felt Mary Margaret’s blood crusting my fingertips.

The violence, the shock, the adrenaline was all gone. And there I was.

The only thing I had in the world were my clothes, Angela Chiddaram’s card, and the bullet in my pocket. It was the .45 caliber bullet Wren had tossed Micaiah the night I pointed a rifle at her. That fateful night, I’d sided with the boy and not my sister. At the time, it had felt like the correct decision. But right then?

Hard to say.

And that bullet had also betrayed us to Praetor Gianna Edger back at the Schuetz ranch, before the Vixxes killed Jenny Bell.

It was a bullet with a long history, none of it good.

Like my life.

I’d failed. I’d said kill me to stop me, and I was still alive, but I’d been stopped.

I’d gone numb. The wind blew chill, but I hardly felt its dreadful lick.

When the breeze dropped, the buzz of the fence could be heard in the quiet. Enough electricity to fry me and save me from the zero inside me.

No, not zero. Standing in front of that fence with the sun swallowed up by a cold night, I dropped to a negative number. Being zero inside, you don’t feel. Going negative, you felt only the bad stuff.

Suicide didn’t run in my family. Homicide, sure. Me and my sisters had killed and killed again. It was almost a genetic trait you could track.

But not suicide.

I could be the first.

I reached my fingers out. So empty, so hollow, the wind didn’t just blow on me, it blew through me, the negative-integer hole in my soul.

I reached farther. The fence was right there. An escape right there. And I wouldn’t be a hollow negative anymore.

I wouldn’t be anything. Right then. Death felt okay by me.

(iv)

“Cavatica.”

I dropped my arm. My name. Who could be speaking my name?

Pilate stood not three meters from me, on the Juniper side of the fence.

I hadn’t heard him. He wasn’t in his civvies, but in his Juniper fighting clothes, jeans, a black shirt with a white plastic priest’s collar, cowboy boots, and a coat so long, big, black, and thick you could stand it up in a doorway and swear it was a man. He was missing his Beijing Homewrecker, but everything else was Juniper Pilate. His long hair was gone, though, and his black hat hung from his neck by a leather string.

He’d seen me reach out for the fence, that stupid, buzzing electrified fence that blighted the landscape like a scab.

He coughed, but of course he did.

“Should get that cough looked at,” I said.

“My cough is fine. You want to talk about your soul?”

“I don’t have a soul.”

Wind blew between us, flapping the collar of his coat. The smell of it came to me. The coat, him, my Pilate. “You do, Cavatica.”

I don’t,” I said. “It’s how come I can stand here and not feel the cold. Soul’s gone.”

“You wish. It’s killing you. Or to be more exact, it’s making you want to kill it. If you talked to me, you’d feel better.”

“Maybe I like feeling bad.”

“That’s pretty jackering obvious.”

“Don’t cuss.”

“Don’t kill yourself.”

The words bit into me. He had seen the whole thing and that knowledge felt brutal. But I’d let everyone down and kept that awful secret of the slate. Now, I’d messed up, but good, and innocent people would die because of me.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked, and I wanted to cry. I wanted to feel something, but everything in me was so cold and dry. “I hurt people, everyone. Hit my girlfriend. Nearly beat to death four teenagers who were just being stupid. Drank in front of you. And kept secrets.”

“What secrets?”

“Alice is dead. Hoyt’s girls shot her in the head.” I swallowed hard. In my mind’s eye, the blood still dripped from her hair.

“I figured,” Pilate said quietly.

I