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

ax striking his flesh and the clang of the whirling piece of broken wood hitting the side of the rusted relic of the Cargador.

For a minute, I stepped outside of myself and truly got a good look. He was right. And I realized I wasn’t all that scared to run recon into Burlington. Part of the reason was that I didn’t care if I lived or died. It was how Wren had lived her entire life, walking across poisoned razor blades, ’cause in the end she didn’t care. Or more precisely, she was driven by pain jumbling up her insides. I felt that jumble in me—needles through my heart, a terrible itch I’d die trying to scratch.

It was what drove her into countless battles when she was outgunned. It allowed her to dangle from a ladder under the Moby Dick to rescue Micaiah. It forced her onward, gut-shot, to come and save me. It was how she killed Aces in the end. And what had put a bullet between Dutch Malhotra’s eyes.

That odd combination of apathy, hate, and pain.

I should’ve been kinder to Wren. But she wouldn’t have allowed it. I knew why.

I slid the action on the .45 and snapped it back. Then opened the magazine and pressed in another bullet. “Level ten, that’s me. See you in a minute, Pilate.”

(iv)

I went in from the north, through the fairgrounds. Found a nice place to hide on the Kit Carson Carousel as I tried to figure out what was going on in my hometown.

Mainstreet had been reduced to rubble, but the damn merry-go-round had survived without a scratch. The jewel of the county fairgrounds, the carousel was better than a hundred and fifty years old and still turning. Originally built in 1905 for Elitch Gardens in Denver, it had been moved to Burlington at some point for the kids—those innocent children who would never see violence in their life.

I found the idea oddly comforting as I crouched between a colorful pony and a seahorse.

The fighting seemed heaviest in the south, near I-70—good news for me, but I figured I wasn’t alone on the northside.

I darted behind dumpsters and saw a white hand sticking out at the top of one. A shiver went through me until I realized that whoever owned the hand was dead. Wouldn’t have been so still so long. I climbed up on top. In the dumpster were bodies, a whole bunch, and in the hellish orange firelight, I was grateful for all the shadows.

Most would be frozen, so they weren’t stinking. Looked to be Juniper folk, in dusters, jeans, a few dresses, but those dresses had bandoliers on. No ammunition. The U.S. army would’ve stripped the bodies of ammo before tossing them in. No American soldiers were in there; they would get proper burials.

I leapt back down as a Cargador chugged by full to bursting with U.S. troops. Soldier girls gripping assault rifles clung to the outside. So it was Juniper people against the U.S. Maybe those women in the dumpster had refused to go marching off east and chose the rough way to go.

But why? Why would the U.S. come into the Juniper to bring order now? The Juniper had become a prison, the biggest in history, so why go in and murder the prisoners?

When I found President Jack in Denver, I’d ask him.

The Cargador headed south. I darted from burned-out house to burned-out house until I reached the grain elevators and our zeppelin port. Both zeppelins floated like buildings above me, blocking out the night sky.

The Moby Dick looked in fine shape, newly patched, which was good news. Could Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz still be on board?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to make the climb up the steel ladder all the way to the top to find out. However, the Moby Dick would be a quick way to Denver. Save us days upon days of travel ’cause with every second our thirty-day window was closing.

Had twenty days left. We needed the Moby. She was tied down to a grain elevator and lashed to the Bobby, a true flying war machine. I’d never seen anything like it. Eight machine-gun nests sprouted from her bottom. The front two and back two also had rocket launchers next to the barrels of their machine guns. I figured she’d have more turrets up top, ready to blast anything from the sky just as those eight nests obliterated anything on the ground.

An idea hit me, a piece of pure creative inspiration. Back in the day, I would’ve said it was from God. Now, it felt more like desperation. I just needed more information. And a pilot who could fly a zeppelin.

I crept up the ladder just high enough to get a view of the town. I’d thought Main Street had been reduced to gravel, but I was wrong.

One building still remained: the police station at the south end of town. That was prolly where that Cargador went.

I scurried down and ran across the street and hid behind a baby crib stacked in the front yard of a house still hissing from the flame. Parts of the siding glowed in the coals, stinking of melted plastic and ashes. A U.S. trooper walked up and stood in front of the ladder right where I’d been. Must’ve caught her off duty. Lucky me.

I backed away into the shadows and moved through the smoldering houses. A few were strange to me. Most weren’t. The Cavanaughs, the Burnhams, the Martinez clan, the Jacksons. Hopefully they got out with their lives ’cause their homes were gone.

Gone to Texas. Like some old book Pilate liked.

An Acevedo tank clattered by. I watched it go behind a dead cottonwood, the trunk black and the limbs blown to splinters. I waded through leaves and ran to the Steiner house across the street from the police station.

The building was guarded, heavily. It looked impregnable, which meant there were prisoners, which meant information. If I could talk to whoever they had captive, I