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

hold onto it. They can use it all they want, but they need to keep it connected to the internet.”

A girl my age bustled forward. “I can, Ms. Weller. Me and my ma and sisters are gonna cross in the next week or so. My daddy left us to live with a bunch of other women in Topeka. He might be a jackerdan, but he’s coming to claim us. We have our birth certificate and Ma didn’t tear up the marriage license. Thank the Lord Jesus.”

“Jesus goes by the name of Starla now,” Pilate murmured in a low voice.

No one replied to his blasphemy.

The girl’s face, dirty, thin from hunger, showed sparkling eyes not unlike the Widow Burton’s. I knew I’d lost it, and I knew my eyes had gone dead, like Wren’s, when she was waiting for another fight.

This girl and I had the same number of years behind us, but the battles had marked me. I had aged. She still had a soul, bright and shiny and looking forward to life.

“I reckon we have a deal then,” I whispered. Her name was Cecelia Beckencourt, and I’d think of her a great deal in the next thirty days. She was holding the lives of my friends in her hands. That wasn’t a very safe situation at all.

Pilate and I exchanged glances.

“You have to tell her,” he said. “You have to warn her.”

Cecelia screwed up her face. “What?”

“People might come for the slate,” I said. “You tell ’em I sold it to you. You tell ’em you don’t know nothing about me, and it might save yourself.”

But it wouldn’t. The ARK army had shot Jenny Scheutz in the chest without a word of warning. Hoyt would interrogate this girl and her family and then slaughter them without thinking twice.

Cecelia was girlish enough to laugh it off. She held up the slate. “This old thing? Found it and I don’t know nothing more. Never met any Wellers. Folks say they ain’t real no how. Who could cross the Juniper with three thousand cattle? No one could. Certainly not Howerter and his Rough Riders. Hereford Gold is a lie.”

That both made me smile and made me love Cecelia. Too bad I might’ve just sentenced her to death.

Pilate looked away and shook his head.

Me and the priest crashed in the camp that night, slept in Cecelia Beckencourt’s tent with her mother and sisters. It never got quiet. Too many women, too desperate for sleep. Pilate had brought all our money, and we traded it for high-end Avalon Comfort sleeping bags, plastic jugs of water, pounds of Quincy Jim’s Chile-Lime Jerky, and some Kirkland Signature Trail Mix. God might not love us, but Costco surely did.

The next morning, we left the camp and headed west. But only until the camp was out of sight, and then I headed north.

“You have a destination in mind?” Pilate asked.

“Yeah, and I still have a couple secrets I didn’t tell you.”

“What are they?” he asked.

“Tonight, I’ll tell you both. You ain’t gonna like them any.”

Pilate raised his face to the blue sky, full of a cold sunshine that couldn’t compete with the chilly breeze freezing our cheeks. “Oh Lord in Heaven, next time, could you bless me with less adventure and less mystery and more quality video entertainment. And I don’t mean porn.”

“Shame on you for saying such a thing,” I said.

“Shame on you for keeping secrets.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Shame on me.”

I was going to ask Pilate to do something that very well might kill whatever goodness he had left in his oddly religious heart.

(ii)

March 1, 2059, we walked toward a place that had given us much sorrow.

Took us a bit out of our way, but I had a definite destination in mind. I carried my saddle bags over my shoulder despite the weight.

Pilate didn’t bug me too much about going north ’cause he swore I wouldn’t have to do a quest alone again. Say what you will about Pilate, priest or scoundrel, killer or counselor, he was a man who chained himself to his word.

I kept on north until we found the Plainville Salvage Yards, an old airport that had become a junkyard after the Yellowstone Knockout. We’d fought the ARK there and retrieved the chalkdrive from a Severin that had infiltrated June Mai’s army.

The Plainville Salvage Yards was where salvage monkeys tossed stuff they couldn’t sell. Beds, furniture, paper, plastic of every kind of description, and old tech like CRT monitors and VCRs. The electronics lay stacked in piles taller than Pilate.

We didn’t stop there but kept walking north.

Pilate grew more solemn with every step ’cause he figured out where I was heading.

He stopped talking, and I found him with a rosary in his hand, praying while we walked. I would’ve teased him for being stupidly Catholic, but I wasn’t that foolish. I needed him. Might as well not poison the air between us just yet.

Evening found us in the town of Plainville. The Juniper had wiped away the horror that happened there—Rachel falling on a grenade to save us, and Wren gunning down the love of her life. Snow and wind had washed away the bloodstains.

Pilate stood at Rachel’s cairn, alone, with a sad look on his face. I went to the foundation where we’d thrown Dutch Malhotra’s corpse. The magpies and turkey vultures had picked his skeleton clean, and a coyote had strewn his ragged clothes and yellow bones in a wide circle of death.

I spit on his remains, and if I could’ve, I’d have killed him myself all over again. He’d been an ARK spy the whole time, living off two rules. Never let your heart get in the way of a paycheck. And always, always, always, shoot ’em right between the eyes.

Wren had ignored the first rule but followed through on the second. The hole in his skull was clear enough.

But I hadn’t walked a day, given up one of our precious twenty-four hours, to spit on his corpse, though it did