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

we’d clean the house together, and Mama would say, “Many hands make light work.”

It got so we’d all say it every Saturday morning.

Mama whispered to me right then, Baby, you can’t do this alone. Many hands make light work.

A light winked on in the clouds and snow, a little flash of light. A pause. More light. My heart sped into a frenzy. The ARK, they were above us, but no, it didn’t feel right.

The light flashed in a pattern.

Morse code. I read it. The light flashed C-A-V-V-Y over and over.

Damn. Sketchy, Tech, and Peeperz were never going to call me by my real name. I darted down the steps and burst into the room. “I need a sapropel lantern. I need it quick. The Heartbreaker is above us.”

June Mai and Sharlotte grabbed a lantern and we ran up the stairs. Baptista followed.

We burst out, and I flashed my name C-A-V-A-T-I-C-A. Took me longer, but dammit, I didn’t care.

“What do we tell them?” I asked.

June Mai came up with the plan, and it was good. I flashed it back, three times in a row, and it took a bit, but we got it out.

We had ground troops. Now we had air support.

We were gonna do it right. The Heartbreaker found us, and dang, if Mama didn’t lead them to me.

Then I knew why. God wasn’t going to do squat. But Mama? She’d help us, and she’d twist God’s arm until that jackerdan helped us as well.

Chapter Eighteen

IN THE

Students

There are

Prisons

In the

Freedom

There are

Walls

—Tallulah Salomonsson, “In School,” Chapbook Publishers, 2077.

(i)

On the night of March 16th, Stanleys pulled trailers through the rising drifts of accumulating snow. We’d go north on Kipling Avenue and then slog east on Colfax Boulevard, retracing the route June Mai and I took to get home the night before.

I rode with Baptista on a Stanley called the Angelina Cash, named for the actress who played Henrietta Bonney from Lonely Moon. Nichola drove her and Baptista and I stayed in the gunner’s seat. The wind caught the smoke from the steam engine, sending it spiraling away, lost in the storm.

Pilate sat next to Nichola. He worried about me? Well, I worried about him. He’d thrown off the sling, but his arm was still broken. And his thigh had been cut bad. Jan’s splint helped him walk, yet he still wasn’t a hundred percent. June Mai and Sharlotte piloted the old Marilyn Monroe and it marched next to us.

We’d divided our forces into two divisions. Our main force, the one I was in, would take the Kipling route. The other division, our remaining Cargadors, would go down Hampden Avenue, otherwise known as Highway 285, to Santa Fe and then on up to I-25. If one or the other of our divisions was discovered, their orders were to flee. We’d figure things out as we went.

Snow covered the ruins along Colfax in great piles of cold white lumps in the night. One nice thing, though: The snow reflected every bit of light so at least we could see. Hopefully, we wouldn’t be seen. The new wet snowflakes helped hide us. Frost and growing layers of snow covered the Stanleys and Gammas in white, creating giant snow-creatures trudging along.

Dizzymona couldn’t walk anymore, but she rode like a queen in a trailer, eyes twinkling under stringy hair freezing into icy strings against her cheek. On her lap was the M134 Minigun, and around her was enough ammo to take out Taiwan. Other Gammas walked next to Dizzymona’s trailer with a half-meter of snow piling on their shoulders. Lucky both the Stanleys and the Gammas were so big, so we could hoof through the snow easily. Even the biggest drifts only came up to their shins.

Once again, the snow hid us. Mama must’ve been shaking the clouds that night. That storm. Such a gift.

If only Wren had been with us.

When we hit I-25, we stowed the Stanleys in a warehouse, bleeding the engines, but not letting the fireboxes cool. We needed them pressurized in case we were discovered. If our plan of sneaking around turned to crapperjack, we’d hit them with a full-frontal assault.

Baptista flashed me a grin before we got out and the snow hit us. It was cold, but in warm, dry clothes, it wasn’t so bad. Floating down a frozen river was far worse.

“This is like a war video,” she said. “Running black ops in bad weather under the noses of the enemy. I have to say, this is why I joined up.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to exchange fire with any Americans,” I said. “The irony of you joining up to shoot at your own people isn’t so funny.”

“No.” She frowned. “It’s not.”

I kicked myself for going so tragic on her. I shouldn’t have said anything. It seemed I shared Wren’s talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Ice-encrusted Gammas snatched up fencing and started unrolling it while outlaws started laying mines in front of it. As long as the temperature didn’t drop dramatically, the mines shouldn’t go off unless someone stepped on them.

We didn’t see any bombing raids, but we did see ARK zeppelins in the sky, drifting in the wind. They were far to the north. No helicopters were braving the elements, though I knew there were dozens on the ground near the Pepsi Center.

Could the Heartbreaker take them on? I hoped so. We’d managed to fill her with outlaws to work her guns, so she had a full complement.

Either way, fireworks were coming, and they weren’t going to be the good kind.

Our scouts said the last of the U.S. peacekeepers were in place, using the Larimer and Wewatta Street bridges to roll into what would become their prison.

We got to work.

Gammas slammed poles into the ground. We couldn’t hammer them in. We could only hope their strength would do. Fifty huge mutants working wasn’t quiet, and we had scouts and watch women looking for any trouble.

Slowly, minute by minute, in the rattle of