War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (find a book to read TXT) 📗

Pilate had taken a large caliber bullet in the right part of his chest and had trouble breathing through the scar tissue. So, he’d cough, catch any little lung infection that came along, and would wheeze as often as not. He needed the problem lobe removed, but we didn’t have health insurance. I was Juniper-born, and the Roman Catholic Church had excommunicated Pilate.

He swallowed a last round of coughing and sat trying to catch his breath. He then smirked. “I look like hell. And I’ll have to make up a story, since I can’t be telling the nice women I meet that I was beaten up by my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

“Seventeen,” I corrected.

He paused. Nodded. Sighed. Him messing up my age seemed to have taken some of the spunk out of him.

And it was odd, his prostitution didn’t bring in very much income at all. Nor did the Male Product he sold on the internet. We’d not give that damn Hoyt a thing. In the end, Pilate and I survived on my Hurry Curry job. If his failure wasn’t so pitiful, I would’ve teased him about it, but I never did.

“Don’t worry about forgetting my age,” I said gently. “I turned seventeen when we were captured by Aces in Glenwood. Spent it in a prison cell peeing into a bucket. Happy birthday to me.”

Pilate closed his eyes. Didn’t stop the tears that slid down his cheeks and into the smears of blood. “I’m sorry for this world, Cavatica. I’m sorry that you couldn’t be a teenage girl.”

I smiled and punched his arm. “And I’m sorry you have to have sex with women for money. And I’m getting to be a teenager in Hays. Drinking, smoking pot, breaking hearts, and I currently have a girl who loves me, and she knows I don’t love her back.”

“Then why are you with her?” Pilate asked, rubbing at where I socked him.

“Because being alone makes me want to shoot someone, anyone. Sometimes even my own self.”

He wiped blood and snot from his nose. “How long are we going to be here, Cavatica? We have to get back to the Juniper before you lose yourself here.”

“Too late for that.” I said it tough. Said it like Wren would’ve.

But had she felt the little voice of panic in her heart? Had she felt like a cat walking on razorblades? Had she felt so sad when she’d talked so tough?

I had lost myself. I thought I’d hit zero on my lonely walk from Denver to Burlington, but no, I’d been a positive integer. Say what you will about rural education, but my math teacher in the Colorado Territory had been excellent. Mrs. Wasson talked about positive and negative numbers and the idea of zero. The idea of positive numbers stretching out to infinity as well as negative numbers doing the same stuck with me.

On that bad march toward my home, I’d been at least a plus one. In Hays, I was zero looking to go negative.

“Will you go to an AA meeting with me?” he asked. It had become a common question, too common for me to even answer.

“Will you go to church with me?” he asked again.

“Ain’t no God, Pilate. We might lift our voices in the silence, but it all doesn’t mean a thing. Only chatter in the void. Full of sound and fury...”

“Signifying nothing.” Pilate sighed, closed his eyes. Blood dribbled over his chin. “I’m still glad your mother saw to it you learned your Shakespeare.”

“She didn’t care about that, and you know it.”

He wasn’t done with his questions. AA was the first, church the second, and now the third.

“Cavatica, will you let me be a father to you?” he asked.

And what did that mean? It meant he could get tough with me and it would mean something. That he could lay down laws and I’d follow them. That he could love me, reach into the pit where I was dying, and pull me out even if it meant losing parts of him as well.

A father meant all of those things.

“No,” I said. “You’re my Pilate. My daddy is dead.”

The pain on his face reached into my drunkenness and slapped me hard. It was a wake-up call.

To flee those sad eyes, I reached over to turn on the heater, to bring some warmth into the growing cold in the basement.

The light above us winked out.

The circuit had blown. No juice. Just darkness.

The Juniper was calling me home. But I couldn’t go.

Not yet.

Chapter Three

THE NEW MORALITY DRESSES were Reverend Parson’s idea. I didn’t fight Kip as much as I should’ve. However, I won’t sigh and say it was because as woman I wasn’t taught to be assertive. It was simply easier. People wanted what he was selling, no matter how poisonous the product.

—Burke, Sally Brown, My Apologies, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2076

(i)

I didn’t sleep that night.

Pilate flipped the breakers, we got power, but our little heater wouldn’t heat. Instead of trying to get me to fix it, he curled up on his sleeping mat and fell asleep wrapped in an old quilt.

I stayed up and got out the slate Hoyt had given me. The light from the VSD TV gave our rat’s nest a warm blue and I worked under it, still half drunk, still buzzing from my PTSD episode.

Seeing Pilate like that, crying, broken, woke something in me. I was at zero. I had to seek some kind of positive integer, or I’d crack and go negative. And once you went negative, suicide was only a few malicious numbers away.

Only one way for me to get positive and that was to break free from Hoyt’s cage.

My fingers were numb from the cold, so I blew warmth into them while I worked on the slate. I hacked into the data stream I was uploading to Hoyt’s server. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought, which made me feel ashamed. I kicked myself for not trying to mess with it sooner.

Hoyt’s