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

You kill with your entire body. But did you need a mind to kill?

You didn’t need a mind to kill.

You just needed orders.

And slowly, slowly, Pilate crafted me into a soldier in a shameful world where thinking and feeling didn’t matter, only the orders. Only securing, evaluating, and responding.

And learning to hate.

Chapter Seven

MARLA: WHAT IF I DON’T want to be a killer?

BONNEY: Too late for that. You killed that girl in the ditch. Don’t worry none. A little murder never hurt nobody.

—“Little Lost Souls.” Lonely Moon. Netflix. 7 April 2057. Television.

(i)

We were a day away from Burlington when I started recognizing the landscape. With every step we took, the Rocky Mountains inched up little by little in the far western horizon. Could barely see them, but I knew they were there.

We stopped for the evening at a Cargador and a trailer lying dead on a dirt back road that would lead us to my hometown. The Cargador was rusted, shot up, the tires disintegrating into the dirt. Some salvage monkey had run into outlaws, most likely, twenty years before. The bullet holes were bloody rusted holes in the metal. But the Cargador’s trailer would get us out of the wind. The doors squeaked back and forth in the chill breeze of twilight.

I’d grown accustomed to the ruins of America and the salvage the people left behind. However, that Cargador was the salvage of salvage. It was a Juniper ruin, a monument to a chaotic time when the electricity clicked off and things changed forever.

I set my saddle bags down on the fine dust that covered the floor of the trailer.

Behind me, I heard the ax handle strike the dirt.

“Pick it up and hit me with it,” Pilate said.

I closed my eyes and grimaced. I was tired. I was done with this stupid training, and I hated Pilate.

If he wanted me to hit him, I would, with everything I got. If only to shut him up.

I whirled and plucked the ax handle out of the dirt as fast as I could. My only advantage was a surprise attack. I hoped he thought I was still reticent about hitting him.

He was an old man. I was a young girl with hate in my heart. He never had a chance. Instead of hitting him right away, which he would expect, I barreled into him, lowering my shoulder and driving my legs into the dirt.

For the first time, I caught him off balance. He tripped backward, went down, but skittered around onto his hands and knees, trying to get to his feet.

I stood over him.

Swiveling around the core of my body, I used my legs, my arms, my whole body to bring that ax handle down across his back as hard as I could.

The stick snapped. Gray wood went spinning off and struck the Cargador with a clang.

Pilate moaned. He coughed into the dirt. His fingers clawed at the soil.

I remembered Alice’s huge hands making a similar motion back in Hays while the snow fell on us and I tried to get the shakti to kill her.

Now, I had that shakti.

I stuck the sharp point of the broken ax handle to the back of his neck. “Get up, you jackerdan, so I can hit you again.”

Instead of him saying a word, he stuck his face into the dirt and wept.

Seeing him like that made me sick.

I stalked off.

But I knew my training was over.

(ii)

That night, we didn’t talk about what happened, me hitting him, or him crying in the dirt while he coughed.

We hardly said a word as we ate the last of the Kirkland trail mix and drank our icy water and waited inside the trailer until it was time for sleep. I thought about the last ten days and I didn’t feel much. Then I considered the next twenty days before my hackery ran out. And I smiled.

Coyotes yipped and yowled in the distance. Both their unearthly cries and the perfume of the sage drifted on the wind. I knew those animals. I could feel their yearning and despair and desire—the pain that living brings.

Life hurt. Even in peacetime. Even when things were fine.

Life hurt.

Twenty-four hours later, we found my war.

(iii)

An orange glow burned on the horizon and the wind carried the smell of smoke. It wasn’t just the bitter stink of weeds burning, but an odor I’d come to recognize as the stench of battle, the burning ruins of a city. Glenwood Springs had had a similar smell as if the city itself had been laid on a funeral pyre.

Only this dead city was my hometown, Burlington in the Colorado Territory. I didn’t say a thing, but Pilate didn’t send me running ahead, and he wasn’t trying to trip me anymore, or shoving, or giving me a random kick. I was ready for any of it. He’d ceased to be Pilate, or my father, or anyone I’d ever known. He wasn’t even my adversary, not really. He was practice, and every time I was around him, I was ready for a fight.

We crept toward the burning town as night fell. We were still some ways away when we saw the zeppelin port built on one of the grain elevators, the tallest buildings around. Two zeppelins floated there, tethered to the top. One was a big Bobby, filling up the sky and catching the reflection of the fires on its Kevlar-armored underbelly. Dwarfed by the Bobby... my eyes went wide. My mouth dropped open.

Pilate laughed—the first time he’d really laughed in months, or so it seemed.

Tied to the zeppelin port was the Moby Dick, the beloved airship that had taken us into and rescued us from any number of scrapes. Something looked wrong about her. She seemed to be held captive above the zeppelin port, tied to the big Bobby next to her.

Helicopters chopped through the air above us. Sapropel must’ve fueled the twinkling lights reflecting off machine