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

him fixed. I glanced at my watch. It was 4:51 a.m. Sunrise wouldn’t be for another couple of hours. Pilate’s parachute stretched behind him in the darkness.

“So, you’ve not seen combat?” I asked Baptista.

“No, and I thought it wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, I’ve watched so much video, I figured it would be like that. But the blood, the muscle, the smell. It got to me...”

“Growing up on a ranch helps with that.” That was partially true. But not really. “You get used to the blood, the piss, the crap. It’s all just meat in the end. Like we are. We’re just meat.”

Pilate didn’t respond. He was out.

Damn, we were going to have to drag him. Baptista helped me get him out of his coat and the parachute harness. That took a bit of sweating and grunting.

“Hold his left arm.” I felt at the bones and all my anatomy came back from my biology classes. Radius and ulna. I felt at the edges of the bone. I went on instinct rather than knowledge, and when it felt right, I snapped the bones into place. I’d done it before on calves that had tripped into gullies. While a calf is worth several thousand dollars, what I was doing to Pilate was priceless.

He grunted and his eyes fluttered open. “Goddammit, Cavatica Weller, you are one brutal skank.”

“Aww, Daddy, you say the nicest things.” I checked his right arm and it seemed fine. He must have only sprained it in the fall.

“You two,” Baptista whispered. “Unbelievable.”

“For terrorists and outlaws? Oh, yes we are.” I grinned at her. “And we’re doing this without anyone shooting at us. Or being chased. It’s a lot easier when you have some time to—”

Spoke too soon.

I caught the scent of diesel in the air before I heard the chop of helicopters cutting through the night. Blackhawk helicopters. The U.S. military was coming to check on their perimeter breach. They might have missed the Heartbreaker, but they wouldn’t miss the green glow of our surgical theater lighting.

(ii)

I extinguished the glowstick by shoving it into a prairie dog hole. No time to hide the parachutes. Baptista would have to carry our raft and gear on her back. I’d deal with Pilate.

Stars and moonlight helped us a bit as I pulled Pilate up and got him dressed. He moaned and winced because I couldn’t be gentle.

Baptista hefted our gear and we tripped through the cottonwoods going toward the smell of the Platte River.

“Oh, this is awful,” Pilate complained between spitting, coughing, and wheezing. “Looks like my luck has gone bad. Sorry, Cavatica, but God has turned His face from me.”

“Her face,” I said. “I liked it better when you referred to God as Her.”

He didn’t say anything about leaving him. We both knew it might happen. I’d left him once, and I could do it again. I just didn’t want to.

Thank God for Baptista. I didn’t have to do this quest crap alone. Had to hope she wasn’t a Severin spy.

A root hidden in darkness snagged Pilate and we went down. I did my best to ease our fall, but we wound up on the ground. Falling on a broken arm must’ve been excruciating. Pilate didn’t make a sound.

Back up, we stumbled in a run toward the riverbank, swamped with cattails and reeds, dead and shadowy in the winter cold. We found a clear space giving us access to the river.

Baptista slammed the raft onto the ground and hit the compressed-air tube. Didn’t need electricity for that. In a whoosh of noise and stretching, the blend of polyurethane and neofiber inflated. Pilate toppled into the boat even as it filled.

“Don’t get wet,” I warned Baptista. Hypothermia and frostbite were real concerns. I’d seen enough Hollywood video of soldiers in winter rivers to know it was horsecrap. If it was freezing, and if you got wet, you either lost body parts, died, or did both. Read your Jack London.

“I know,” she said back. “You get in and I’ll push us away.”

I tumbled into Pilate. The compressed air was as cold as the night air around us, and sitting in the raft was like sitting in an icemaker. The swampy cold stink of the river bit my nose.

Baptista pushed us out and deftly leapt into the raft. The current grabbed us, but we didn’t dare go for the neofiber paddles. We couldn’t risk the noise.

Blackhawk blades shook the night sky. We were coming up to a bridge, C-470 I thought, and if we could get underneath, we could hide there. But the water moved fast in a narrow channel.

“Do we have rope?” I asked.

“Always,” Baptista said. She brought up a thick cord and tossed it to me. I knotted it quick and created a lariat.

Kneeling, I whirled it around a piece of rebar sticking out of the highway’s concrete. The cement glowed in the moonlight. All that roping of my youth paid off. The loop of cord caught the rebar and as the coiled rope slid over the raft’s side, I anchored it to the back handle in my best trucker’s hitch, measuring and guessing at how much rope we’d need.

The cord pulled tight. I’d guessed right. Waves lapped over the back of the raft, throwing droplets of pure cold, but the highway above kept us hidden. Lucky for us that even when the salvage monkeys burned the asphalt on the bridge there was cement underneath.

Bridges were gold in the Juniper. Try crossing rivers without them. In war, bridges were also critical.

They would be for us later on.

The helicopters had the same Juniper searchlight the ARK had put on their zeppelins. The sizzling circle of light hit the cottonwoods where they’d see our parachutes and Pilate’s blood.

Weren’t just helicopters. Troops had been dispatched. We heard voices carry in the still of the night freeze.

It might be too dark for them to track us to the river, but in the daylight, our tracks would be easy to see. And they’d know one of