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

And she did. I could see it all click into place.

I was just glad she didn’t ask about the resurrection. Not sure what I could say about that.

Rachel changed subjects. “I have something to show you ... it could be the next big, bad wolf that we have to face in this fairytale.”

Those words made me shiver. “What do you mean?”

She motioned me over to an alleyway between two crumbling walls. She lit one of our lanterns and held it up. In the mud, crusted with ice and snow, was a footprint. Definitely a humanish footprint—five toes, a bridge, and a heel—but the imprint was abnormally thick and impossibly long, a half meter at least.

I bent and stared at the stupidly huge mark in the frozen ground.

The hogs had been in Aspen.

“Heroes need villains to fight,” Rachel said.

More shivers for me.

(v)

In the weak morning light of the snowstorm, the footprint appeared even more sinister. We all had theories, but Dutch didn’t think a hog had created the footprint.

His eyelids were low as he tried to convince us we were seeing things. “Come on, people, if the Juniper had mutant monsters, one of us would’ve seen them in all our travels. The snow just froze up wrong. Please.”

“Maybe the hogs are new. Micaiah only recently smuggled the Gulo Gamma and Gulo Delta in from the ARK.” Wren shrugged. “Well, Dutch, the same stuff is in me. Who knows. I might grow into a hog. Would you still love me?”

“Always.” Dutch rolled his eyes at his own lie.

And Wren just laughed.

How could Wren be so casual about it all?

I didn’t know. But we had to work to do.

We used the last of the diesel in the backhoe to dig a ramp with a gentle enough slope we could walk the Stanleys out of the pit. Getting them upright took more work, but we found strong cable, attached it to the backhoe, and drove forward until both Stanleys were back on their feet. It was still morning when we finally walked the Stanleys out of the pit. At least their fireboxes had cooled—one less thing to worry about.

Our next biggest problem was food. Getting trapped on Independence Pass and starving to death was more likely than freezing to death. The big, fat snowflakes weren’t helping me none either.

While I worked, Wren went on another salvage run. She came back shaking her head. “Place is either burned out, froze in, or completely jacked up. Like running salvage in a campfire. Sorry, Cavvy. We were lucky to find those MeadowHome dinners last night.”

I sighed. I’d hoped Wren might discover another cache of clothes, and I could find some proper walking shoes. Oh well. Though not very comfortable, Eryn Lopez’s cross-country ski boots were working fine, and I’d changed my bandages. There’d been a little discharge, but I wasn’t worried. I was healing.

The only thing that really mattered was the Stanleys. They had survived the fall with only minor damage; a few more cracks in the windshield and some pistons I had to hammer back into place. They’d work. Thank God. But did we have enough fuel to keep the engines going?

Back in the Stanleys, we tromped away from the battlefield Aspen had become.

Outside of town, the wind had blown the long yellow grasses clean of snow. More hogs had crushed footprints into the grass and mud. Their toes pointed to where we were going.

It seemed only a matter of time until we came across them.

Chapter Seven

The Devil lives in Dallas

So I went up to Nome

Got called down to Denver

For a dumb ol’ visit home

The Devil lives in fire

As everyone knows

But his kiss is cold

As cold as snow

—Pearl Cornell

(i)

THAT MORNING WE PUSHED past Aspen and started up the slope of Independence Pass. I longed for the storm to break, to see sunshine and a blue sky, but instead I got clouds and more snow.

And worse yet: wind.

Mix snow and wind together and you get a blizzard. And above three thousand meters, a blizzard can bury you in a minute.

We ate the rest of the canned fruit and the jerky. Which left us with green beans and stale saltines.

In the growing wind, we continued our march, going up toward hidden peaks lost in the storm. All traces of the hogs disappeared; now the snow was a pristine layer of white across the ground.

We were alone.

The wind worsened.

The snow deepened.

The Stanleys were six meters tall, with the first four meters being leg. The snow was a meter deep and would drift up to twice or three times that. In some places, bare asphalt showed through, but then I wondered why the salvage monkeys hadn’t burned it. Answer was easy enough: too high; too remote. Nothing up here was worth salvaging.

Not five minutes later, the asphalt would be gone, lost under a wall of drifted snow. I would have to tromp forward, fall back, go forward, fall back, and slowly move the Marilyn through the meters of snow. Took forever, and we were working against the clock. We’d feasted and rested the night before, and that gave the ARK precious hours in their search for us.

And more accumulated snow.

The Audrey followed me with less trouble, but always, on either my left or my right, the road fell away to nothing. I was having trouble seeing, and I had to be careful, so careful. One wrong step and we’d tumble off into an abyss or lose our way. The white of the snow blowing fiercely got mixed up with the snow on the ground until I couldn’t tell what was snow-blowing sky and what was ground.

The Marilyn’s pressure was good, but we were going through water fast. The engines were red hot, and we were all sweating. Wren rode next to me. She was going through Eryn Lopez’s diary, but she kept falling asleep while trying to read. I was kind of glad for that. Then Wren would wake and clear