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

I’d bit the inside of my mouth and spit out the blood. “Come on, girls, that was a mighty one, but the New York Yankees need one more run to win the Series. Get on it and hit me home.”

One of the hogs grunted. She was a terrible thing to behold. The muscles of her shoulders and across her neck looked like bunched-up blankets twisted into knots and wrapped around her neck. In comparison, her arms and head were tiny.

Why such big shoulders, Grandma?

All the better to hit you with, my dear.

LaTanya looked on, horrified. I addressed her directly. “Get an eyeful, baby. This is the Juniper. Ain’t like in Lonely Moon, now is it? Damn tourist.”

She glanced away, ashamed.

Shoulders McQueen was going to clock me again when I heard a howl. Then both the hogs went down. It happened so fast that I didn’t really register what had happened until Alice, sporting a split lip and bleeding down her chest, howled and picked me up.

She seized the rusty length of chain connecting me to LaTanya, bellowed some more, and ripped those links apart. She then held me to her chest, stifling me in her foul smell—stinky, but so familiar and oddly comforting.

“I have you, ’Teeca. I have you. And I won’t never let you go. You sister. You sister to Alice.”

A bullet skipped by us in a shower of dust and noise.

I didn’t turn. I knew what was coming.

Jolie stormed in with her M60 in her grip like a toy rifle. “Alice! What you do! What you think!”

“She a meg!” Alice thundered. “But she still hurt and can’t go fast. She die. These other Gammas beat her. Not fair. I carry ’til she get the gas and get the heal. I carry. Me. Kill me to stop me.”

Kill me to stop me.

Wren might’ve said it. Hell, it could’ve been the Weller family motto. I latched on to it and repeated it to myself over and over.

Kill me to stop me.

I’m going to get the chalkdrive to Burlington. Kill me to stop me.

The tension in the air crackled like pork rinds in grease. I didn’t say a word. When property is being bartered over, the property shuts the hell up.

I heard Jolie snort and sigh. “You carry her, Alice. But I myself give her to Dizzymona. Fight me and I kill you.”

“Okey-doke.” Alice threw me over her shoulder. “I carry.”

The megs got to their feet, the two hogs pushed them on with the cottonwood limbs, with LaTanya in the back, glancing over at me.

I raised a hand to wave. They were still handcuffed together.

LaTanya waved back.

I felt bad for a minute, for what I’d said to her, until Alice laid me on the ground. I knew what was coming, and I was nearly weeping in anticipation. Then Alice gently pressed a strip of the EMAT on my neck. I sighed, closed my eyes, and rode away on the ice of the drug.

I was jarred awake when Alice plunked me down in a grocery store cart. The sky was blue, the air was warm, and around me was a trail of leftover junk, trash, sofas, clothes, all scattered on the wide street which at one time had been a major thoroughfare back before the Yellowstone Knockout and even after for the salvage monkeys.

Under me lay the Vail Recreation District bag, but Alice had created a nest using the X-Men comforter, so I didn’t feel the sharp edges of the metal cart all that much. The blue on the handle told me it used to belong to Walmart back in the day. Alice eased my boots off to let my feet breathe and heal.

“Thanks, Sissy,” I murmured dreamily.

The wheels shook noisily across the asphalt. It was a rough ride, but if Alice was happy, I was happy. Hell, I’d have been happy right then even if Shoulders McQueen had been beating on me with an entire cottonwood tree.

The megs and the rest of the Gammas were ahead, and I was glad. Things were back to normal; Alice took care of my body while the Skye6 took me away from my thoughts.

We passed under a big chunk of freeway, and I knew Pilate would’ve known the name of it, and I thought it might’ve been I-25, but then it didn’t matter, and all the signs were gone, salvaged out. No cars were on the road either. They’d all been salvaged out, too.

We did come across an industrial stove. It prolly had been plucked out of the Denver Café, an old diner on my right, all the windows smashed, and inside, all the booths gone. Why take the booths and not the stove? Not sure, but sometimes during those rough salvage days, plans changed once the bandits started shooting at you, and you only took what you could run with. Mama had told me lots of stories about competing salvage teams going in and exchanging gunfire as they fought over the carrion of Western civilization left to rot in the Juniper. Scavengers. Salvage monkeys.

Skyscrapers rose on my left, the tops ragged ’cause one especially ambitious monkey had wanted to salvage the skyscrapers to the ground. Only did the top ’cause it was too expensive and ill-conceived. Poor Crash Jones. He’d lost a bundle on that project.

The mint passed on my right, a nice big park, the Capital building, but with the roof gone on account of the gold. The U.S. Military had come in after the Knockout to get the money in the mint and to get the gold on the dome ’cause Lady Liberty was funding a war with China and every bit of cash helped.

However, everyone had a story about lost mint coins, buried here and there, and every once in a while someone would come up with a map and a Cargador, ’cause you needed the heavy equipment to move tons of pennies around.

Half a million dollars in pennies is a whole lot