Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for teens .txt) 📗

dreams, or I would’ve used them to tear down the universe and make Him pay for what he had done to this world and to my sisters.

That little flicker of hate felt good, and I nurtured it like I had nurtured my little fire of dead sticks. It wasn’t a big bonfire, no, ’cause that would melt the ice of my sorrows and expose my twiggy little heart. But the heat of my hate was big enough, hot enough, to hurt, which is what I wanted.

Like the fire in my Marilyn, now broken, frozen, and gone, I could use the fire of my hate to keep the machine moving.

I thought about what I’d said to Rachel, that hope was a weapon.

Well, so was fury. It kept me moving, and it kept me true to my imperative. And if God’s cruelty knew no bounds, I was going to spit on Him by living. Hate became my weapon.

And it focused me into a single bullet, aiming for Burlington.

Time to go to war. Again. By walking out of the Rocky Mountains and surviving when everything and everyone around me wanted me dead.

Including the dried-up stick my wounded heart had become.

Chapter Nine

God don’t love us, never did, not a one

Eve dropped the apple and picked up a gun

When Adam warned Eve, he warned her like this:

If you go hunting God, better settle your sins first

Better sell your mama’s ring next

’Cause worlds die when women hunt gods

All the children cry when women hunt gods.

—LeAnna Wright

(i)

MY ALREADY HURT FEET blistered. The cross-country ski boots were not meant for the marathon distances I was covering. My heels grew wet from the blood and torn skin, but it wasn’t like I could do a thing about that. Walking was torture, but what I was feeling inside hurt more.

I didn’t have any food, but I had plenty of water around. It was all melting in the warm high-altitude sunshine, and I eventually wrapped my coat around the skis and poles. I thought about casting them aside, but I figured God wasn’t done torturing me with snow just yet. I might need them to get to I-70 and through the Eisenhower Tunnel and down the other side.

Besides, Waste Not, Want Not, right Mama?

Highway 82 hit Highway 24. I looked at the signs for a long time. Both were dirt roads, the asphalt long gone, cooked up into road coal.

It was evening. My hunger had mellowed to a mean, sullen laugh inside of me. My belly had stopped gurgling and started telling me jokes that weren’t funny.

“Time to sleep, Cavvy,” I said to myself.

And myself answered. “Cavvy’s dead. Call me Cavatica.”

“Spider died in Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur lived, though. And Charlotte A. Cavatica had babies to keep him company.”

“I’m alive? This is life?”

“Yeah, you are alive, but for how long?”

“Long enough to follow my one imperative.”

“’Cause Mama never left nothin’ unfinished.”

“Wrong, Cavatica Ann. Mama did leave unfinished business. She died in debt to Howerter, with our ranch in arrears and a crazy plan to run cattle west, which we did. Got ’em all the way through to Wendover, me, Wren, and Sharlotte.”

Saying the names of my sisters was too dangerous. It made the ice inside shift and crack. It threatened to snap my dried-gray heart. So, I shut myself up and sank down against the Highway 24 sign, then collapsed on the ground and slept with my hands in Eryn Lopez’s gloves.

I woke up cold and slept again to run from the cold and woke up shivering in the early morning light, just oranges and pinks in a weakly colored sky.

I got up. Started north on Highway 24 toward I-70. I limped along. The blisters were ruining my feet, but then they were already ruined. Had to keep going. Too cold to take off the boots. Even with the boots, I’d prolly lose toes and some fingers from frostbite. Prolly drop flesh onto the pavement like a leper out of the Bible.

“Hey Jesus,” I yelled at the sky, “you were a lousy, second-rate messiah. Why don’t you heal me, you worthless jackerdan!”

Jesus didn’t answer me. I prolly sounded too much like Pilate right then, and I figured God would have to ignore someone as chatty as Pilate.

I thought about Rachel puzzling out the Jesus story. What story was I telling myself?

Since God wouldn’t talk to me, I talked to myself. “You’re losing it, Cavatica.”

“Already lost it, skank. Lost it a long time ago.”

I shambled along the highway as it got warmer, and once again I had to bundle up my coat, gloves, scarf, and hat around the skis.

I tripped, walked, stumbled, until I came to the refugees running from Leadville, which burned in the distance, sending up a column of smoke.

Oh, goody, another war.

(ii)

Faces of scared people, some bloody, some ashen, some covered in burns, some shot, some stabbed—the faces all blurred until all I saw were the children weeping against their mothers. Babies held to bosoms.

Some men, not many. Babies, children, and old women—mostly old women. What had happened to the other women, eighteen to sixty? I didn’t know, but I’d learn.

Some of the people rode bikes, some horses, some rode in steam trucks, others swayed in carts and wagons being pulled by oxen. But all were fleeing Leadville, burning in the distance.

Most were on foot with their hastily-taken possessions clasped to their chests like the babies to their mothers.

“Hey, what’s going on in Leadville?” I asked the collection of scared faces. “Is it the ARK? Are there soldiers and tanks and whatnot?”

That question got me nothing but pale confusion.

Ha, I had to laugh. A new army to fight. Oh, goody, again.

The flashing faces answered me in snatches, hastily.

“Ain’t human.”

“Big and hairy.”

“Hogs. You heard of ’em? Mutants.”

“Tore my husband apart. Two and half meters tall, hairy, and they got guns, and they know how to use ’em.”

“Juniper mutants. Hell on Earth. Satan’s demons spit up from hell.”

Had to laugh at that. “Hell. I know about hell.”

My feet were hell.