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

Could Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz be in there?

Yeah, I could almost feel them. Yet they might as well be on Mars. No way could I get to them through the armada of hard-faced women—Military Megs supplied by the United States of America to keep the peace in the Juniper.

Their kind of peace sure smelled like war to me.

(v)

Any other town, with any other police station in the entire world, and I would’ve been stuck, out of luck, without a buck.

But this was my town, and these invaders didn’t know it like I did.

Growing up, Olive Knapp used to brag she knew everyone’s business ’cause she eavesdropped almost every night on Sheriff Lily. When we told her to prove it, she showed us a cement culvert built under the police station. She said it didn’t go anywhere but that it was close enough to either the sewage or the ventilation system that she could listen in on Sheriff Lily’s conversations.

When we asked why she decided to go spelunking into cement tunnels underneath the police station, Olive merely shrugged and said her parents had lots of daughters and didn’t care so much about the middle ones. Reminded me of Wren.

Six years later, on that fiery night, as gunfire echoed through the air to the south, and the smell of cold night mixed with a city in flame, I remembered Olive and I swept around to the east, giving the police and the guards a wide berth.

Near a drainage ditch, I found the cement culvert, a hole in the earth about a meter in diameter.

It looked far smaller than I remembered. Then again, I wasn’t eleven years old.

Remembering Olive brought me back to remembering a lot of the good times I had kicking around after church or after school with my Burlington friends. However, riding hogtied to that memory was the time we discovered a stink on our property and found a heifer jammed into a drainage pipe by the highway. The poor cow had wedged herself into the passage something horrible. The swell of death made the situation worse. We had to pull her out via hacksaw. Wren did the sawing and somehow, the more awful the task, the more she liked it. Tell her to dust the house and she’d go tell you to go jack yourself. Tell her to saw apart a swollen greasy, black animal, infested with maggots, and Wren grinned and dove right in, despite the clouds of flies.

If I stalled, if I thought about the cow we’d sawed up, I wouldn’t go into the concrete tunnel.

Without another thought, I threw the green poncho off me, and then, in my parka, I crawled in headfirst, belly down, on my forearms and elbows and kicking with my feet. I wriggled into it as the weight of the earth pressed down—meters of dirt and the heaviness of the city above. I came across patches of water, some iced over, and some smearing my clothes with streaks of mud. The whole place stank of swamp and foulness. Olive had been a slender girl. What if the tunnel narrowed and I got stuck? I’d howl, I’d scream, but, in essence, I would’ve crawled into my grave.

Or what if the water wasn’t water? What if the mud wasn’t mud? Was my grave a stretch of sewer pipe? Was I crawling through human waste?

Couldn’t think about that. Had to focus on the task, on the war, and on getting the Moby Dick. Then I’d have far more time to save the Gammas, Wren, Sharlotte, the whole Juniper. No, I was going to save the whole world. And I’d beat Hoyt by doing it.

Crawling through that culvert was just one more horrible task. My heart crashed around my chest and my breath came in snatches. How far did I have to go? I didn’t know. I should’ve figured out the distance from the entrance, but I hadn’t.

I was only crawling a quarter meter every time I raised my arms and kicked my legs. My boots thudded on the cement. but I didn’t think anyone could hear me above the racket of the gunfire and crackle of flames.

A meter, then two, three, four, five, I inched my way deeper down the tunnel.

The cow who’d crawled into the culvert would’ve bawled her heart out, but no one found her. No one came.

She would’ve eventually accepted her fate, gone silent, waited for death, while the ground pressed in, while the oxygen grew thin, while the horrid fate crushed her spirit and crushed her chest.

Her breathing would’ve come in gasps and then the thirst would’ve hit, then hunger, relentless in the inky darkness.

Spiders would’ve crawled onto her face, maybe into her ears, into her nose.

Do the worst task first, Cavatica Weller, Mama always said.

But I didn’t know if this would be the worst of it, crawling underground, to try and get under the police station to eavesdrop. Olive hadn’t said how far she went, or how she knew, and none of us at the time had tried to do what she’d done. Some people didn’t mind enclosed spaces. Most didn’t like being buried alive.

Do the worst, first.

More thoughts of Wren. In Amarillo, she’d been a party girl, being paid to kiss Yankee women come to the Juniper to see how the wild lived outside of the New Morality. Paid to kiss them and do more.

What had she felt the first time?

And how could the world demand us to do such things? Wren had a choice, maybe, but did she? Running away from home, being who she was, had her life as a party girl been a choice?

Had I chosen the war I’d endured?

And yet it had shaped me into someone I didn’t recognize.

I threw out a hand and hit metal. Ripped a nail. The pain was good—it sharpened my senses. I moved my hand through the absolute stygian darkness, darker than night, darker than closed eyes. I groped around and