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

wasn’t smirking or talking trash. She gazed on me, and her look said everything. She’d missed me. Her big mouth smiled.

“You okay?” I asked.

She knew exactly what I was asking.

She looked into my eyes. I looked into hers. I was the one to tear up first. My sister Wren was gone forever.

Before I knew it, she’d turned away and stormed back toward the Home Depot. Wren’s comrades were exchanging fire with the second Cargador.

A missile streaked across the air and hit the ARK vehicle. One of Nichola Nichols’ Stanleys stomped into view. Something about it seemed familiar, and then I knew why. It was the Marilyn Monroe, fixed up and working. The war machine stomped from her hiding place by an old King Soopers lost to weeds and trees.

A Stanley was a steam-powered battle robot fashioned from old car parts. It was eight meters tall with a central cockpit and a gunner’s roost. It had four doors, two for the driver’s seat, two above for the gunner’s seat. Both seats had the windshields and seats of the front part of old automobiles. The Marilyn had been built from two Porsches. Instead of hands, boxed belt-fed machine guns and rocket launchers tipped the pistoned arms. It walked on big grids of welded cross-hatched steel.

Between Wren and the Marilyn, the ARK Cargador didn’t stand a chance. The first battle I’d fought in Denver was over, and we’d won.

And yet the look in Wren’s eyes, her turning away, her silence, troubled me.

So quiet, so silent. Wren loved to talk trash when she fought. The old Wren did.

I didn’t know what to think of the new Wren.

(ii)

The driver’s door of the Marilyn’s cockpit creaked open. Sharlotte swung out. “Hey Cavatica, no time to talk. ARK zeppelins coming. They saw the smoke. We’re going to have to scatter. You follow Wren. And welcome to the fun.” She paused. “Not sure I like your hair.”

Self-consciously, I touched the stubble of my scalp. “My hair was never my best quality anyway.”

We both smiled. She might not have remembered the awful things I’d said, but I did. The guilt weighed on me. I wanted to apologize right then.

We didn’t have the minutes for it. It was time to run and run quick.

The smoke from the two wrecked Cargadors swirled up into the blue sky. Guerrilla fighting was a hit and run type of task—once you hit, you ran. Modern warfare created a stink and sight you couldn’t mistake.

“Hey, Shar,” I called back. “We’ll meet up. Good to see you, too.”

Juniper women ran from the Home Depot, but I didn’t recognize any of the faces, so I figured they were no conscripts. They clambered onto the Marilyn. Sharlotte drove her west with women hanging on the Stanley’s side ladders as she stomped away.

I thought we’d follow, but Wren had other ideas. She grunted and grabbed her slaughter machine, the automatic grenade launcher, and then muttered something.

“Where did you get that?” I asked. “Using it against people is a war crime. Too bad the Geneva Convention prolly doesn’t apply in the Juniper.”

Her eyes showed her anger and her huge lips trembled in frustration. Clearly, she wanted to say something to me but was stopping herself. Why?

“Pilate is wounded over by the Platte.” I pointed. “We need to go and pick him up and then rendezvous with Sharlotte.”

Wren nodded and sprinted east.

I took three running steps to follow but then realized I’d lost track of Baptista.

She stood over the burned, twisted bodies of Regios, her AZ3 limp in her hands, her face gone gray.

I approached her carefully. “You okay?”

She didn’t respond, just stood over the bodies, showing bone, internal organs, shredded flesh.

“They’re dead,” she whispered. “And I did some of that. Me. What gives me the right to kill people?”

“Not people,” I said. “And it’s part of soldiering. You signed up to do exactly what you did.”

Baptista huffed a sad laugh. “So you say. Two hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have been considered a person either. It’s so easy to look on the other and claim they aren’t human and their lives don’t matter.”

Oily smoke swept over us from the burning machinery. Then I caught a whiff of a steam engine burning coal.

Zeppelins. Three fast-moving Jimmies appeared in the southern sky. These were ARK birds, not American Blackhawks.

I snatched Baptista’s arm and forced her to run. Whatever awfulness she was feeling didn’t much matter. Standing around stunned would only get us killed.

Wren waved us over to the Taco Bell and then on to the ruins of the Walgreens. She must’ve seen us coming from the Home Depot.

We got to my sister, and I introduced Baptista.

The soldier girl’s mouth fell open. Her eyes went wide. Then she caught herself staring, but the funny thing was, she couldn’t stop herself. She stood there and had another oh-my-God-crap-herself moment, witnessing the massive monstrosity my sister had become.

But Wren seemed so mellow, so distant.

Wren nodded at the U.S. trooper, then opened her mouth. She took in a deep breath and it took some work, but she formed words slowly. “Pilate. Let’s. Find him.”

I remembered Alice’s lack of vocabulary and her grammatical disasters. I knew Wren couldn’t be pretty, but she didn’t want to talk and sound like an ape learning English. That explained her silence.

But why did she seem so emotionally far away? Generally, you would feel what Wren was feeling, and most of the time it was hostility and anger. That seemed gone.

“Yeah,” I said. “Follow us.”

Baptista and I led Wren through the grasses and growing patches of sage until we found the apartment complex where we’d slept that morning.

But inside? No Pilate. Our sleeping bags and gear were there, but he was gone. He couldn’t have limped off on his own. His leg was too torn up for that.

Fear poisoned my belly. What could have happened to him?

The Jimmies in the distance were clustered around the battle site, and Regios spun down on ropes to try and find our tracks. Which they would.