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

She kicked behind us. Her face twisted in discomfort at the frigid water.

The current caught us, both the raft and Wren were swept away toward Denver under a blue afternoon sky. But it wouldn’t be blue for long. Clouds hugged the western horizon.

Baptista and I locked eyes. “Not human,” she said.

“It’s what the ARK does. It’s what Hoyt does.”

“But why?”

The why of it...that was the mystery.

We were weeks away from an answer, but Tibbs Hoyt had a very definite reason for every awful thing he had ever done and for every monster he’d created.

I’ll say one thing for the man—he sure was focused.

(ii)

Clouds gathered across the Rockies. They were the kind of clouds that meant bad business—bruised—like they’d taken a beating crossing Nevada.

Kind of like us. Pilate lay, not moving, in the front of the raft where Baptista steered us down the Platte. I was in the back with Wren as she gripped the raft. Her color was going, she was shivering. Yet it seemed her super healing was fighting the hypothermia. Then again, she had so much mass, so much skin and tissue, it must’ve kept her warm.

I thought about the supplies we’d left behind in the apartment and prayed we wouldn’t need them. If all went right, Wren would take us to the outlaw’s army lair.

I went to doctor Wren’s slashes from the spiked tentacles, but her wounds were already sealing up. By the time I took a wet cloth to wipe away the blood, the pink skin had knitted closed.

A patch covered her collarbone, some kind of EMAT strip. I bent to read the lettering on the flesh-colored band, but Wren eased me back.

“It’s not Skye6, is it?” I asked. That would explain her subdued mood. But she didn’t have that glassy-eyed stare that Petal had gotten. Nor the dizzy smile I’d get when I dosed myself with the narcotic.

Wren shook her head, keeping her lips closed. She glanced away and stared at Pilate. Her concern was visible on her misshapen face. I took care of my own wounds on my legs from where I’d been lashed by the tentacles.

Baptista had done well in the fight, helping us get away, but her trauma wasn’t physical. “What in the name of God was that, Cavatica?”

“The first ARK super soldiers we fought were the Vixxes, but we took care of them.” My breath caught, and my stomach curled up into scorpions at the memory of Rachel. “Vixxes are all gone. The second batch were the Severins. Like the Vixxes, they could heal almost any wound, and they had enhanced strength and speed. The Severins had an additional advantage—they could look like anyone. The perfect spies. And now, number three? Not sure what the ARK calls them, but I’ve been thinking of it as an Octo. And if they have armies of Octos? We don’t stand a chance.”

“First.” Wren’s voice, deep, struggling. “First. I’ve seen.”

“So maybe that’s good news,” Baptista said. “Maybe they only have the one, and we were unlucky enough to run into it.”

“Dumb, Cavvy,” Wren grumbled. “Dumb. Running toward Pilate and. Getting us. Into.” Her brows knit together as she struggled to talk. “Trouble.”

My poor sister, huge now, nearly incapable of speech, and what about her going coco? If the testosterone and the madness in her brain took over, she’d lose all rational thought. Only an insane murderous violence remained.

“It’s okay to talk,” I said to ease Wren. “I won’t judge.” And I’d let my sister call me Cavvy. Fewer syllables were involved.

Wren’s lip lifted in snarl. A familiar look of disgust and defiance lit up her eyes. “Talk bad and sound so jackering stupid. Miss words and all. No. I talk slow. Don’t you judge. You skank.”

I exhaled my relief. This was Wren. Thank God, she wasn’t completely gone.

“Too. Cold,” Wren said. “Gotta. Get out of the river. Meet up with Shar. Exposed. Dammit.”

She grabbed the raft and pulled us to the bank. Another road crossed the river down the way, and my sister was right. We were exposed.

Her slaughter machine and the box of grenades hung from her shoulders by thick straps. She picked up the raft and carried Pilate inside it. In the distance, ARK Jimmies still chugged around the sky, so we were far from safe.

And there was the Octo to consider. I might’ve sent a dart into its brain. Then again, if I were engineering the eye sockets for such a battle monster, I would’ve put in a curve, so any projectile wouldn’t pierce the brain.

That level of genetic manipulation was unimaginable. It was like Hoyt had been to a DNA buffet with his latest creation: Take a little of every creature’s anatomy to engineer a Frankenstein monster of parts. Make something with spider eyes, octopus tentacles, the bony plates of a water buffalo’s skull, monkey feet. Rachel had warned me. She’d said I couldn’t consider her human and that Hoyt wasn’t creating humans. He was creating inhuman soldiers.

We passed through some kind of shopping center, huge buildings and weedy parking lots and more trash and scatter. The whole thing was a mall for ghosts and sad memories, relics from a lost age.

Denver used to be a city, then it became a cemetery, and now it was a battlefield in the middle of a prison. And we were stuck inside it. President Jack was crazy for coming in for a visit, which made me wonder about his real motivations.

Wren took to running, and she was right to. Caught in the daytime, out in the sunshine, an ARK patrol might find us, and we’d wind up dead. Unlike with our adventures, the ARK didn’t want us alive to question. No, they were in Denver to murder anyone who knew about the Gammas and the cure to the Sterility Epidemic.

We kept moving down a street named Kipling; we saw a street sign, rusted and nearly unreadable. Suburban houses, melted by weather, salvaged into scrap, lay around us.