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

fire. “We’ve been at war. No, this time you want to commit suicide and you want me to help you. No. Fuck you. I’m not going to do it.”

More bad cursing.

“You are,” I said. “’Cause this time, we aren’t running. We aren’t dodging the ARK and we aren’t saddled with three thousand cattle. This time, the war is mine, and I’m going to take these guns and I’m going to stick them down Hoyt’s throat until he chokes on them. Not only to cure the Sterility Epidemic but also to cure the Gammas.” A thickness rose in my throat. I sucked it down into my hate. “I made a promise. And we gotta fix Wren. I won’t rest until we do.”

Pilate gave me his best smirk. “All that is stupid tough talk. It’s crapperjack, Cavatica. Real killing isn’t about a jackering quip. Real killing kills you right back.”

“You can say all that without cussing,” I said.

“And you want to be a killer.” His jaw muscles jumped. And his eyes grew shiny in the firelight. “Don’t you see? I’ve done this before, and not once or twice, and not just with Petal, but with dozens of women. I can make you into a killer. But then I can’t unmake you. Don’t you get it? You must. You made me teach Rachel to be human. Look where that got us?”

I shrugged. “Don’t matter. You and I are going into the heart of a war. If I can’t fight next to you, I’ll die. Either way, you’ll have murdered me. That’s filicide.”

“Fancy word.”

“Learned it at the academy. Comes from the Latin, filia, or daughter. You gonna kill me, Pilate? Or are you going to help me? You and I both know I can’t go back to what I was before. I can’t be innocent no more, and I can’t live out in the World until I finish this war.”

Pilate closed his eyes, and he knotted his jaw muscles. I knew I won. I also knew I hurt him bad.

“I will do this foul thing on one condition, Cavatica Ann Weller.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

His words came out as ragged as old money. “No drinking. No drugs. You do this clean and sober, and you promise me you won’t ever touch another drop of liquor or take any mind-altering substances. I mean nothing, not even a sleeping pill, that will affect you from the neck up.”

“It’s a deal,” I said.

“You’re going to hate me before we’re done.”

“Who says I don’t hate you now?” I joked.

Pilate lifted his head. Tears tracked silver down his cheeks in the firelight. “You love me now. You’ll hate me. But I’m going to hate myself far more. For taking my daughter’s heart and destroying it.”

“It’s already ashes in me, Pilate. It’s already destroyed.”

Out on the plains, a coyote let out a howl at the moon rising in the distance. Others joined him, and it was a crazy, lonely sound, unearthly. Around us were the foundations of a town long stripped of anything good and useful. What was left? Graves and concrete.

I took out my Betty knife. “I need you to help me shave my head.”

He didn’t fight me. Between the two of us and both our knives, we scraped my blonde hair off to the scalp. I didn’t feel much of the pain. I felt the blood, and it reminded me of when Wren was little and cut off her own hair. I bet she hadn’t felt the pain either.

“I hate this world,” Pilate said after we were done.

“Me too,” I said. “But I’m still going to save it.”

Before we went to sleep that night, I cleaned Wren’s pistols, got ’em oiled up and working like divine machines of righteous vengeance. Pilate had brought his gun-cleaning kit, travel-size, just another part of his Juniper grip. He didn’t need to help me. I knew my way around firearms, though for most of my adventures I couldn’t shoot to kill. That had changed. Ask any of the Cuius Regios I’d shot. Oh, you can’t, ’cause they’re burning in hell. Or maybe not, ’cause those skanks didn’t have souls, and if there’s no God, there’s no heaven and surely no hell either.

Good thing I cleaned those death machines.

I needed them first thing the next morning.

Chapter Six

BONNEY: YOU SHOOT ’EM before you pull the trigger.

MARLA: How does that work?

BONNEY: You want them dead so bad, the gun don’t mean much. You’d rip their throats out with your teeth if it came to that. Sometimes it does. You’ll learn to love the taste of blood. Not your own, mind you. Never get used to the taste of your own blood.

—“Little Lost Souls.” Lonely Moon. Netflix. 7 April 2057. Television.

(i)

Dawn was a frozen dark blue on the eastern skyline. I slept peacefully under stars.

Then. The thunderous crash of gunfire woke me, and I curled into a ball; my heart matched each gunshot.

Dirt splashed my face from bullets. But who was firing on me?

Then I thought of the refugee camp. Could there have been outlaws there? Had they tracked us? Or were there Severin spies among the normal women?

Either way, the enemy had us dead to rights, out in the middle of the street surrounded by the concrete bones of the town.

“Wrong!” A voice bashed my ears, a man, yelling. Weren’t many men around, and it took me a minute to get that it was Pilate yelling, and not just yelling, but yelling at me.

A boot crunched into my back. Pilate’s boot.

“Lesson one, Weller, when someone shoots at you, you secure protection, isolate the enemy, and return fire. Protect, isolate, and respond. How is curling up into a ball protecting you?”

I scowled but couldn’t look him in the eye.

Hoarfrost had turned the landscape white with ice. I was wrapped up in my Avalon Comfort sleeping bag like a caterpillar still in her chrysalis. Fabricated from wool as well as synthetic fibers, filled with down feathers, the sleeping bag had radiated my heat back on me.