Inferno Girls

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  My breath snagged in my lungs. I jerked up.

  She’d shifted to lay down on the carpet. I listened until her breathing became regular, and then I said a prayer for her. And for me. If I was going to get any rest, I needed to put my faith in God.

  Faith or fear—we can’t feel both emotions at the same time. It was one or the other.

  It took a long time before I could find sleep. Before I did, a plan formed in my head. Really, it was the only plan that made any sense. The ARK would expect us to escape into the western United States—Nevada, Arizona, California, maybe even Oregon or Washington. They would never think we’d try to cross the Juniper again.

  But I knew, even if we got back to Kansas, we’d have trouble crossing the border, and then there were the SISBI laws to consider. Once the U.S. Border Patrol got wind of our return, they’d call up Tibbs Hoyt, and he’d unleash hell on us.

  No, we needed an army to fight our way out into the U.S. If we had troops backing us, we could tell the world that the ARK had the cure for the Sterility Epidemic.

  And I knew someone who had an army: June Mai Angel, the most organized and well-armed Outlaw Warlord the Juniper had ever seen. She was one of the Sino veterans who had been carted off and sent to the Juniper with empty promises of a better life. She wanted the world to know about the injustices she and her women had suffered. What better way to gain the world’s stage than coming forth with the cure for the Sterility Epidemic? No one could ignore her then.

  June Mai would tell the world about the cure, and Micaiah would give us the reward money he’d promised, and we’d pay off Howerter and save our ranch. It was a long shot, but the Weller family had always thrived on such gambles—like betting it all on an inside straight.

  Once again, I’d have to put my trust in an enemy.

  Once again, we’d make a dead run across the Juniper, into the mouths of a war we had wanted to avoid.

  We had to get back to Burlington in the Colorado territory.

  We had to get home.

  I woke to find Micaiah asleep on the floor next to me. He’d flung his arm across my body to keep me warm, though I hadn’t known it. I’d slept like the dead. The front windows showed the wan light of a new day. Outside, the red-winged blackbirds were already trilling over breakfast.

  Rachel wasn’t tied up anymore. She sat against the wall, looking at me, her face drawn. She’d healed. Overnight, the wounds on her forehead were gone.

  It felt like I’d awakened face to face with a hungry grizzly eyeing me.

  (iii)

  Rachel and I locked eyes. Wasn’t the first time I’d stared into the square face of a Vixx, but everything about her was different. In her eyes, I saw doubt, fear, and then, surprisingly, affection for me.

  “Good morning, Rachel,” I whispered. “I see you found a way out of the ropes.”

  “I spent most of the night stretching the nylon cord. It is very old and ineffective.” She stopped talking. She didn’t look away. Her next words came low, quiet. “You have felt fear for a long time. How do you manage it?”

  Any talk of prayer or God at that point wouldn’t have done much except maybe make her mad. So far, she hadn’t discovered anger, and I wanted to keep it that way. Instead, I asked her, “How long have you been free?”

  “Since dawn,” she murmured. “I have been listening to the birds outside. Their calls are beautiful and full of life. I can’t describe it, but their song beckons to me. Before, I would not have noticed. Now, I am different.”

  We sat, listening to more bird calls. I didn’t know if she’d go for me or not, so I stayed frozen.

  “I am free,” Rachel whispered, “but I am in an error state. My imperatives are to retrieve Micah Hoyt and the chalkdrive and eliminate anyone who has knowledge of him. But I cannot do that, and so I am conflicted. I have tried to incorporate your new imperatives into my thinking, but I am having trouble doing so. There I am also conflicted.”

  “Sounds like it,” I said. “I’m sorry.” After having slept so well, I felt a renewed strength in me. And I trusted more in Rachel’s new orders than I did in her old ones.

  Rachel closed her eyes. “I will have to wait until my neurochemicals readjust, and then I will not have these feelings. Then I will follow my imperatives, though the idea makes me ...”

  She couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know the words yet.

  I did. “It makes you sad. But maybe by the time you lose your emotions, you’ll be following my new imperatives,” I said gently.

  Our talking had woken Micaiah. He smiled at me.

  Instead of smiling back, I drilled him with my eyes. “I didn’t ask Rachel about you. I need you to tell me the truth about who and what you are.”

  He pulled his legs up to his chest, hugged his knees, and looked away. “You know everything already. You know I need a special serum to feel. You know I can heal almost any wound. You know my father is Tiberius Hoyt. What else is there?”

  And that was Micaiah, who just loved to answer a question with a question.

  I didn’t try to hide my hurt one bit. “Were you born or created? You’ve been secretly dosing yourself with the neurochemical serum since we met you, so is there anything else you have that might be useful? Do you have something that could help Sharlotte?”

  “I don’t.” A pause. His next words hit harshly. “I’m not going to tell you what I am. It’s my business, not yours.”

  I felt stabbed, once again betrayed. My heart had shriveled into a raisin. Micaiah wasn’t going to tell me anything else about his past. He’d made himself perfectly clear.

  He stood up and stepped back. “We should head west in one of the diesel trucks. To San Francisco.”

  Rachel brightened. “If you go west, that will allow me to follow my imperatives. The ARK mission control and local authorities are looking for you in the western states. Your pictures, profiles, and descriptions have been posted to every law enforcement agency in the remaining forty-five states, including Alaska and Hawaii. You will be caught, and my mission will be over.”

  “Would going east be any better?” Micaiah asked Rachel. “Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma are going to be just as bad, right?”

  I let them talk, gritting my teeth, getting madder and madder.

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “After the SISBI laws, electronic surveillance technologies secured the United States border with the Juniper. Anyone exiting either by land or air will be noted and investigated. However, inside the Juniper there are millions of kilometers of empty acreage. And without electronic surveillance and detection equipment, the search becomes difficult but not impossible.”

  Well, Micaiah was right. No filter. Whatever Rachel was thinking came pouring out of her mouth.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I stormed off the mattress, shoved my way past Micaiah, and left the house in a limp.

  Outside, Pilate snoozed in a frayed lounge chair under some cottonwoods, Tina Machinegun across his lap. A breeze must have been keeping the gnats at bay, otherwise, Pilate would’ve been in one of the houses to get away from them.

  Wren leaned against the truck where she and Pilate had been keeping watch. She was eating Quincy Jim’s Mighty Meaty Pasta Qs out of a can with her battered spoon. Every Juniper girl had a spoon. Didn’t need a fork if you had a Betty knife.

  My hurtful anger tore through me. How could Micaiah still keep secrets from me? After all we’d been through, it didn’t seem fair. I clung to the anger ’cause the grief would put me down on my butt.

  “How much diesel do we have?” I asked Pilate and Wren. “Did you check? I saw someone inflated the tires on the F-150.” I nodded at the truck.

  Like usual, no one answered my questions.

  Wren licked her spoon and smiled. “Hey, Cavvy, can I shoot that Vixx now? Did you get all your girly ’strogen mothering out of your system?”

  “No,” I said. “Rachel is with us now. She managed to get out of the ropes, and I’m still here. So t
here’s at least one person in this world you can’t kill, Wren.”

  My sister shrugged. “I’ll wait. She’ll turn, and I’ll put her down. I’m feelin’ much better.”

  That was apparent. The scratches on her face were gone, and her color was good. Like Rachel. Like Micaiah.

  Everyone was all healed up while Sharlotte lay unconscious in the house, and I limped around wounded, inside and out.

  Pilate made it worse. “You do realize we can’t take her with us, right, Cavvy? Yes, she has emotions for now, but the way I see it, your Micaiah is going to have to share his serum. He’s one of them, right? Not human, but something brewed up in some ARK lab.”

  Wren tapped the spoon against her hip. “He’s a good-lookin’ kid. Maybe you can ask for another clone just like him for Sharlotte. Then you can all have babies, and won’t it all just be grand?”

  “Enough!” I yelled. “How much diesel do we have? Can we make it to the Kansas border?”

  “East?” Pilate asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. If we go west, well, that’s what the ARK is expecting. The ARK and the police.” The wanted posters were still in my back pocket.

  Micaiah and Rachel came out of the house. Immediately, Wren drew her pistols, and Pilate was on his feet, aiming Tina Machinegun.

  Rachel cowered, throwing her arms around her head. She crouched there in the weeds, shivering on the front porch. Poor thing.

  “Stop!” I charged in front of their guns. “See? She’s afraid now, and we have to be nice. We have to show her mercy.”

  Pilate wiped a hand down his face. “Mercy? How much mercy did they ever show us? We are not adopting her. She’s not some lost kitten.”

  “With Sharlotte down, I’m back in charge,” I said. “We’re going to load up the truck with supplies and go east.” I didn’t tell them the rest of my crazy plan to enlist June Mai Angel ’cause I knew I was already pushing my luck.

  Pilate shook his head. “This isn’t a cattle drive anymore, Cavvy. We’re running for our lives. You’re what, sixteen? How much outlawing have you done?”

  I didn’t mention my adventures with Wren in Cleveland, but in the end, he was right.

  Still, that didn’t stop me. “Don’t kid yourself, Pilate, I am in charge. I don’t care how young I am. I got us to Wendover, and I can get us out of this mess. If you have a better plan, I’m open to it. But think about it. The longer we’re in the Juniper, the safer we are. The ARK will look for us, but the Juniper is a big place. Big enough to make it hard to find people, and once things quiet down, we’ll head out into the world. We have all summer. We can cross the Rockies on I-70, and as long as we make it through before autumn, we’ll be fine.” I smiled at Pilate. “Besides, you like women tellin’ you what to do.”

  He gave me a dark look but couldn’t manage a quip.

  Wren smirked at me. She didn’t care who was leading—she’d fight with whoever was in charge. She did have a good question for Micaiah. “So, Johnson, how much happy juice do you got for you and your auntie Vixx?”

  “Enough,” he said back.

  “Uh huh.” Wren tossed the can out into the greasewood.

  “Wren, don’t litter,” I admonished. Stupid, I know, but living in the US around strict women wasn’t something that left you right away.

  “Okay, fearless leader,” Pilate said to me. “What about Sharlotte? Yeah, we have her stable, but we’re counting on medication that’s thirty years old. She needs a hospital.”

  I ground my teeth. Again, he was right. Again, I didn’t retreat. I returned his stare. “We have Doc Slocum’s Reactivation Elixir. The medicine will work.”

  “You do know the term ‘snake oil,’ right?” he asked.

  Wren interrupted. “Don’t you bad mouth Doc Slocum. It’s the real deal. Cavvy would’ve died of pneumonia as a baby without it.”

  I didn’t mention the research paper I’d done on the reactivation elixir for both economics and biology back at the Sally Browne Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate.

  Micaiah joined Pilate in the fight against my plan. “I trust the medicine more than I trust the diesel. Yeah, BP came up with a preservative, but the fuel is thirty years old. I’ve read studies that argued long-term preservation of diesel could wreak havoc on engines. We could easily get stranded in the desert.”

  I couldn’t believe Micaiah had turned Judas on me. I didn’t look at him when I spoke. “I’m sure we’ll find an old AIS rig we can get working, or there’s bicycles. We can make it.”

  Pilate and Wren laughed at that.

  “We just crossed the Juniper, and it nearly killed us,” Wren said. “You want us to go back, Princess?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, at least we won’t have three thousand cows to worry about,” Pilate said, thinking my plan through. It was our only option. With the ARK on our trail, we had to disappear. The Juniper was the perfect place to do just that.

  “I’ll agree to your plan on one condition,” he said. “We deal with the Vixx. My way. Right now.”

  Then he struck.

  Fast.

  I’d forgotten how fast Pilate could be. He shoved me to the dirt, pushed Micaiah out of the way, and once again, was aiming Tina Machinegun at Rachel’s head.

  She didn’t say a word, just stared at him with frightened eyes.

  On the ground, I was too far away to stop Pilate. If I couldn’t talk him out of it, Rachel would die. “Pilate, what about thou shall not kill? What about loving your enemies?”

  No answer.

  A second ticked by. Then another. I had no idea how many people Pilate had killed, but he was a legend for his fighting, during the Sino and after. He wasn’t afraid to spill blood and quote scripture while doing it.

  “Answer me, Pilate!” I yelled. “You wear that collar. Prove it means something.”

  No one moved, and no one spoke. A bird called from the trees. Wings slapped on water.

  “You want us to love our enemies?” Pilate growled. “Pretty words. A nice idea. But not for me, not for a long time. We kill the enemy before they kill us. If Petal hadn’t laid down her gun she might be alive right now.”

  “I do not want to be your enemy,” Rachel said quietly. Her eyes were red from crying, her nose as snotty as a toddler’s. “I am in an error state. My imperatives are conflicted and useless to me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

  She’d said emotions were a liability, but twenty-four hours after feeling for the first time, we were all witnessing their power. She had changed. And she had chosen, in part, to change.

  Rachel’s eyes stayed on Pilate. “Cavatica gave me new imperatives, to be kind, to be a part of your family, and to protect you. But I will need help to manage this.” She touched her chest. “I will need help to manage this fear and sadness. Can you help me, Father Pilate? You are a priest. You offer counsel to those in need. Will you offer me counsel?”

  I expected a smirk from Pilate or for him to say something sarcastic, but instead he was silenced. His mouth trembled. “How can you ask that of me?”

  Was he talking to Rachel? Or was he asking God?

  “Please,” Rachel whispered. “Please. I need help.”

  Tears glossed Pilate’s eyes. “You know, I’ve spent a good portion of my life teaching nice people how to kill. Can I teach a killer how to be human?” He swallowed hard at the question.

  I remembered Father Pilate’s ten-second boot camp. I remembered Rosie Petal saying she’d been a doctor, until Pilate had taught her how to be a sniper.

  Pilate finally answered himself in a hushed voice. “Yes, Rachel, it would be my honor to counsel you.”

  Despite Wren’s grumblings, that put things to rest. Rachel would join us.

  But Micaiah had never really answered the question about how much serum he had to keep him and Rachel human. What did “enough” mean? If he ran out, would Rachel return to her original imperatives?

  I stepped up. “So we go east. We’ll keep careful watch
over Sharlotte. And we pray.”

  Wren spun her guns on her fingers, real fancy, and slapped them back into her holsters. “You pray. I’ll fight. God only listens to my guns.”

  Chapter Six

  Hold me closer

  Hold me tighter

  You’re the last of the gas

  And I’m the lighter

  — Shelley Woz

  (i)

  WE PACKED AS FAST AS we could. The ARK was coming for us. It was only a matter of time.

  I hid the bottle of Jack Daniels behind the seat of the truck ’cause even though Wren had fought temptation before, I wasn’t going to risk her sobriety. I’d like to say I brought the alcohol to clean wounds and dull pain, but really I took it ’cause I’m the daughter of a salvage monkey, and those scavenging habits are hard to break.

  We sorted through cans of food and picked the ones that weren’t bloated or exploded. We filled up every bottle we could find with water, which we boiled on the propane stove. We got really lucky when we unearthed a twenty-liter blue plastic jug.

  We found cast-off clothes and coats—coats ’cause though the days were warm, the temperatures at night dipped. I swapped out my jeans for a clean pair and found a big, dark brown shirt that really didn’t fit me but would prove good camouflage if the unimaginable army on our tail finally caught us.

  We’d neutralized the Vixxes, but Micaiah had warned us about the Severins, who he claimed were worse.

  I thought about throwing away the wanted posters, but I kept them, like I kept Wren’s bullet. Souvenirs. The grisly kind.

  Holding that bullet in my hand, I noticed a bit of blood on it. Didn’t know if it was mine, Wren’s, Sharlotte’s, or the blood of an enemy. Maybe it was all of our blood together. That had been my life since leaving Cleveland, a world of violence and bullets.

  Then I thought of Rachel. In her hour of need, I’d been there to love her, and that love was transforming her. I’d given her new imperatives. She’d said God didn’t exist, but what I’d done was God in action.

  I stuck the bullet back into my pocket and got back to salvaging like Mama had taught us.