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

I pushed a button on the trigger, wondering what it might do.

Below, I felt some kind of weapon fire some kind of projectile in front of the police station. A second later, after the shell hit the ground, a greenish glow lit up the front.

“Well, now, that’s useful,” I murmured, swiveling the turret and pressing the button again and again until glowing green blobs of phosphorescent goo circled the police station.

Then I triggered the missile on my right, hitting the north side of the police station. If memory served, that’s where the cells were, but it had been a long time since my fourth-grade tour of the Burlington police station.

A crater opened up in the smoke and spare bits of grass caught fire, but the flames were eclipsed by the glowing blobs.

Back on the .50 caliber, I hit the wall, pounding the weakened cement with bullets. A flare arced over the zeppelin and then another, lighting up the sky in crimson light. Red in the sky, green on the ground, merry jackering Christmas.

Sweat leaked into my eyes, and I blinked against the sting. Had to use the other missile and pray to God my machine guns had pushed everyone away from the outside wall. Just like how the Moby rescued us from the Wendover jail.

My remaining missile left in a swoosh of fire and smoke as it streaked from my gun turret and hit the wall. As the smoke cleared, the remains of the concrete wall lay in piles around another crater near the first I created.

Then?

Sketchy and Tech ambled out. Pilate sped from the shadows.

Immediately, I leapt from my weapon’s bubble and ran into the hall and found stairs circling down. The stink of my flares still filled the place. I found the bottom of the zeppelin, a low-ceilinged basement of sorts. I spotted a bottom hatch and spools holding the rungs of a cabled ladder.

Opening the hatch, I pushed the ladder free.

The rungs unwound and hit the ground.

“They up?” Peeperz yelled through a communication tube.

Lights in the sky, five sets of them, appeared on the horizon. It was those Blackhawk helicopters with sapropel running lights

“They’re coming!” I yelled back. “Take off now. Go.”

Pilate was exchanging fire with women pouring out of the police station. Sketchy was on, and Tech was on.

Pilate was pinned down. I left them, circled the spiral staircase up. I picked another machine-gun nest and settled in. We were moving west, going slow, thank you, Peeperz.

But those helicopters would catch up. Prolly drop troopers onto us.

I triggered the machine guns, scattering bullets across the dirt. The peacekeepers retreated into the police station, but I couldn’t see Pilate. Wrong angle. Not sure if he’d gotten to the ladder.

What if Pilate hadn’t made it on board?

“Faith,” I whispered the old lesson, “faith not fear. Pilate will make it.”

I didn’t believe it much, but saying it felt right. Chalk it up to my Catholic upbringing.

I thought of the Rico Device, the small nuclear bomb that the U.S. had brought to Burlington. They hadn’t used it, so lucky us.

But we weren’t done dealing with atomic bombs. Not by a long shot.

Poor, tragic, us.

Chapter Eleven

THEY WANTED ME TO PROMOTE a lot of things. The money offered was life-altering. Despite the paycheck and despite the government’s insistence, I never came out in favor of the Military Meg recruitment campaign. The popular song insisted that Meg needed to do what’s right. Not to lapse into subjectivism, but I’m not sure anyone can do what’s right when it comes to war.

—Burke, Sally Brown, My Apologies, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2076

(i)

Burlington blackened into nothing as we left her in ruins and ash. Dawn was still hours away.

“Goddamn carousel is still okay,” I whispered sourly, wishing I’d found a way to blast that thing up as well. I wanted to leave Burlington a crater. My house had been wiped off the face of creation by June Mai Angel’s siege, and it felt like justice that my town should follow. Good. Good riddance to everything.

The helicopters chased us but Peeperz knew how to evade them.

I felt us rising higher and higher into the sky, into the clouds, higher and higher. Of course, we could gain such a high altitude. We couldn’t go too high, or we’d run out of oxygen. Already, my head felt a little light.

Theta-helium, or thelium, worked fine above three thousand meters and countries around the world had high-altitude platform stations otherwise known as HAPS. We could go high, and if Tech found oxygen tanks, we could go even higher to where the Blackhawks couldn’t follow—the air too thin for the rotors.

While I should’ve gone to greet Sketchy and Tech, I stayed in the gunner’s seat.

I didn’t want to know if we’d left Pilate behind. I didn’t want to face Sketchy and Tech and tell them I’d sacrificed the Moby Dick. And Peeperz, Peeperz hated me now, and maybe he had a reason to. A couple of reasons—if anyone was keeping score.

Then there was our prisoner, Jen Baptista. If we let her go, she’d tell her superiors all about me, and they’d show her pictures, and it wouldn’t be long before she realized it was Cavatica Weller that had punched her in the jaw and not Wren Weller.

After that happened, it would only take a matter of hours before Tibbs Hoyt went after Cecilia Beckencourt. That poor girl would die, followed by all my friends in Cleveland.

Only one thing to do. We’d have to put a bullet in Baptista’s head and toss her off the Heartbreaker.

Goddamn zeppelin was aptly named.

All those thoughts flitted around my skull, and once again, I had a realization about Wren. This was why she didn’t stay around, to visit, to chat, ’cause once you started down the road of violence, simple politeness and human kindness made you feel awkward inside. I’d gotten us out of Burlington, and I’d gotten us into a zeppelin so we could beat that thirty-day