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

no, sir. No, sir will get you hit or killed. You will say yes, sir, and you will say it quick.”

“Yes, sir!”

He waved a hand. “Get out of my sight. It hurts me to look at you.”

Those words hurt me, but the pain was just more fuel for my rage.

I ran off. My legs started to ache, and my lungs burned in my chest like twin bonfires, but I knew that would all change, and fast too.

I was a machine. And I ran on food and water. Now I had schedule to follow. I wasn’t sure if our food and water would last, but even if I ate a sliver of jerky and only sipped water, I could answer honestly that I was giving the Cavatica Weller machine the fuel it needed.

All that day, Pilate sent me on useless errands to run. That night, he checked my feet, and didn’t find any blisters. He said armies needed feet and bellies and guns, but not minds. He’d do the thinking for both of us.

I was fine with that.

Before I went to sleep that night, in the sage, I looked for good cover the next morning.

When the gunfire came before dawn, I was ready. I darted behind a tall stand of sagebrush, found my enemy, drew a pistol, but I didn’t point it at him.

No, you only point guns at things you want to destroy.

Despite how he was treating me, I still loved Pilate.

“Nice work, Genius.” He threw an old ax handle at my feet. “Now, I want you to hit me as hard as you can with that.”

It seemed like a trick. I holstered my guns and picked up the length of gray wood. A crack split the center. One good smack would probably break it.

He stood there in his coat and hat, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He stifled a few coughs and waited on me.

I hefted the ax handle, but I doubted if I could really hit him.

He saw it.

Quick as a cobra, he ripped the ax handle from my hand and swung at me. I ducked but tripped. He laid that wood across my back.

Pain sparkled like the Fourth of July through my nerves.

“Crappy work, Genius. If you can’t follow a direct order, you’ll be useless in combat.”

He marched off, the ax handle swinging from his hand.

The wood hadn’t broke.

Neither would I.

(ii)

Pilate went through hand-to-hand combat with me. He didn’t ask me to shoot since he knew I’d gone through thousands of rounds at the outdoor-living-room shooting range with the Hurry Curry backend babes.

On the evening of the third day since leaving Hays, March 4, we hit I-70. Salvage monkeys had cooked up all the asphalt into road coal for steam engines, but various entrepreneurs, visionaries, and fools had tried to repave it with various materials including cement, plastics, and gravel, and one stretch had a mosaic made from car doors, hoods, and trunks. Another stretch was made from bits of bright blue plastic.

Pilate ordered me to make a fire, which I did, though I was about to drop from exhaustion. Every muscle in me ached, and I wept for sleep, but I built a small fire using some dead sage and a termite-eaten two-by-four I unearthed from the dirt.

Pilate used the crappy .45s to bring down a rabbit, which we shared, eating it charred from our little fire. Even though it was only a few degrees above freezing, he took off his priest shirt and switched it out with a black denim shirt. Scars hacked across his skin in maps of memory and pain. Most prominent was the pink tangle of scar tissue in his right chest, where he’d been shot by Renee Vixx. It was what had shredded his lung and gave him his hacking cough and unnerving wheeze. He covered his battle scars with the denim shirt.

He knew I was watching, and he didn’t explain himself. His silence and his absolute lack of humor had been bad enough. But this? It was the first time I ever saw him without a priest collar. Even in Hays, he’d worn his collar, though he often covered it with a sweater when he went to church.

I longed to talk with him, to return to the relationship we once had, but I knew if I did, he would chide me and of course, he wouldn’t call me Cavatica. He’d call me Genius.

So, I kept quiet and let my mind ponder the mileage we had to cover. It was three hundred kilometers from Hays to Burlington. If we huffed it thirty kilometers a day, that was still ten days. And it was another three hundred klicks to Denver. Another ten days.

We had thirty days, if we were lucky, and my hackery held. Less if it didn’t. But I couldn’t think about that. I couldn’t think about Anjushri and Billy Finn dying ’cause of me. I found myself praying for Cecilia Beckencourt ’cause she’d be the first to go.

The next morning, again, I was ready for gunshots. Instead, women shouting woke me. I hurled myself behind the rusted-out husk of a motor home, now just a heap of scrap and splintered cabinetry.

Wasn’t sure where Pilate was, but the yelling, the chug of several steam engines, and the tromp of footsteps kept me glued to my spot. I was secured. I needed to evaluate, and if necessary, respond with violence.

“You can’t do this!” a voice howled, a deep-throated woman’s voice. “We have a right to our land.”

I took the side rear-view of the motorhome and turned it at the angle to see what was going on.

A ragged batch of Juniper folk women, children, a few old men, were being pushed east down the highway by soldiers in U.S. army uniforms. Weren’t ARK Regios. Even saw a few soldier boys as American as apple pie, Christianity, and Dow Chemical.

Three huge Cargadors chugged behind them, loaded up with soldiers armed down to their socks. Cargadors were vehicles built by the Caterpillar Corporation for