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

GOD NEVER LOVED MARY, not after what she done

Put down her baby and picked up a gun

Herod tried to stop her, but he wasn’t much a king

She took all of Joe’s money and pawned her wedding ring

Jesus was left lonely but that don’t mean a thing

’Cause worlds die when women hunt gods

All the children cry when women hunt gods

—LeAnna Wright. “End Times.” Cash and Jacks, Glitterhouse Records, 2057.

(i)

Remember me, O most gracious Virgin Mary, remember me.

Forty years later, December 1, 2098, I picked up the bottle of Pains whiskey. Forty years earlier, I promised Pilate that if he taught me how to be a soldier, I wouldn’t touch drugs and alcohol.

I kept that promise for a little while, and then it all went to hell ’cause when you make an addict promise not to use, Satan creates a special torture pit for everyone involved.

After our trip to Yellowstone, after what we did there, staying sober became a game for me. I’d swear off forever and promise everyone I was done for good. I’d go to AA meetings, and I’d work it until the moon went sideways, until a day ending in “y” triggered me, or the wind blew with a smell I couldn’t quite describe, but a smell that would tell me it was time.

Then I would tell everyone to go jack themselves and I’d crawl inside whatever potion I’d mixed together to fix the crazy.

Wren said it perfectly. She’d been crazy all her life, so when the Gulo Delta mutated her brain chemistry, it was business as usual.

I wasn’t like that. I’d grown up sane. Crazy found me later—the guns, the blood, the saw going through my sister’s leg, the culvert—screaming nightmares of Crete Macaby reaching for me with such darkness in her eyes.

I couldn’t shake that. Wasn’t a problem all the time. But all the time? It felt like a problem.

And now, close to the end of writing this, in my house in Burlington, bathed in the glow of electric lights, I know what’s coming.

I put the bottle down. I haven’t sipped from it yet.

My phone buzzes on my desk, rattling around, twittering and tweeting.

I ignore it, though it’s foolish to try, ’cause of what’s happening in my life, fifty-eight years old and cracked, cracking, dry as a bone left out in the sun.

Another buzz. Someone has left me a text.

I tap my smart ring around my middle finger, and a screen winks on above me, from the holo-projector.

A text message.

He’s dying.

Can’t be, not after all this time, but he’s dying. It happens to us all, and to men especially. Women outlive men, and I know why.

Men get lost in their selfish desires, in the call of their lust, or their desires to be kings.

Women get lost in their desire to be useful. To get their chores done, for their babies, for their mamas, for their friends.

He’s dying. I’ve experienced so much death, and yet, this one is going to kill me worse than all the others.

So many decades together. So many.

The bottle calls to me, but then I smell the snow melting, the frozen ground turning muddy. Spring’s magic smell. Queenie’s brains, or that’s how I thought of it when I was little.

Then I’m remembering March 18, 2059. On the Great Plains, spring is the season you have to watch out for. More snow falls in March than it does in January, and that snow can kill.

I know. I’d nearly been buried in a blizzard running from the Vixxes after Pilate was shot in the chest and Micaiah, my Micaiah, still held his secrets to his chest like good cards in a high-stakes poker game.

But that spring of 2059, we were spared blizzards. Thankfully, it would warm up and melt the snow we drank on our journey through Wyoming.

Baptista went off to Cleveland.

Sketchy and her crew stayed on the Great Plains. And with the help of June Mai’s outlaws, started repairs on the Heartbreaker.

And what to do about President Jack? I didn’t trust him enough to send him out with Baptista. He was spry for an eighty-year-old man and said he jogged five miles a day, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. Didn’t like the idea of bringing him along. I couldn’t just shoot him, though I’d thought about it. Couldn’t do much with him except make sure he understood he was expendable. He’d stay with Sketchy and Tech for the time being as our prisoner. Talking with him, looking into those intelligent eyes, I couldn’t help but think he wanted one last adventure. Well, he’d get one. He stayed with Sketchy at first, but that would change.

Us Weller sisters and my father, Pilate, we left the zeppelin. On foot, loaded with guns, food, and water, we headed north toward Yellowstone on the ghost of I-25.

And then the Octo found us.

She didn’t even try to hide herself. Was it a she? Hard to say, but that pronoun is as good as any.

She stood in the middle of the weeds and sage of old highway, standing like a statue. She wasn’t one of the ultra clones; she was like the Octo mistakes we fought at Coors Field. None of her tentacles were the same size, one was itty-bitty, hanging only a few dozen centimeters from her body. Another was only a foot long. Two, though, could reach around herself and work like arms.

She had the plated head, the black beady eyes scattered across her face, the slit for a mouth and the slits for ears. Her skin was brown flesh, not like the off-color plastic of the Ultra Octos we’d fought. Camouflaged fatigues full of pockets covered most of her, fitted to allow for her extra limbs.

Wren readied her cleaver. Pilate took out his sniper rifle, a Mauser like the one he’d used back at the confluence to shoot the Severin. His homewrecker swayed from the holster on his hip. His wounds from the parachuting accident were healing well enough, the arm slower of course. That cough,