No, I had to rescue him and Pilate—part Roman Catholic priest, part gunslinger, all Pilate. We’d gotten separated after the fall of Glenwood Springs, after Wren killed Aces. The ARK ground troops, the Cuius Regios, had come slamming through the city with tanks, zeppelins, bombs, and a firestorm of bullets.
We’d escaped with the chalkdrive containing the entire research database of the ARK, including the cure to the Sterility Epidemic and the future of the world. I was wearing it like a pendant, close to my heart. Dutch and Marisol had no idea.
Back then, my heart beat strong and true, and I knew we’d find our men. We’d make it to Burlington, where I would give the chalkdrive to June Mai Angel, who would use it to tell the world that the ARK had been lying to us for years. We could even out the male birth rates so the ratio would be fifty/fifty, not ten percent. And with ninety percent of those males sterile, well, we could fix that, too.
I figured June Mai Angel would love the chance to stride into the limelight. She could say we had the cure, and she could tell all of America that President Amanda Swain had sent June Mai and the other vets into the Juniper so the U.S. wouldn’t have to treat the various disorders brought on by the Sino-American War, the worst war the world had ever seen.
The Sino used up the world’s resources, killed several generations of men, and brought about the Yellowstone Knockout that wiped out the electricity in five states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana—and several chunks of other states besides. Why China had nuked Yellowstone was anyone’s guess, but the explosion had caused a flood basalt, which had created the Juniper, 1.5 million square kilometers of wasteland and Outlaw Warlords. A penal colony, fenced in with protected borders and laws to keep the bad people in and Americans out, unless they were tourists, crazies, or criminals, of course.
And I’d grown up there, unaware. But then, that’s how the people in power liked it.
Everything rested on our ability to make it back to Burlington and find June Mai Angel, though at the time I hadn’t told anyone about that particular plan.
It was a desperate gambit, but then desperation and fear walk lockstep a lot of the time.
I’d known my fair share of both, or thought I had.
I thought I was real tough and battle-weary as we charged down the highway, away from Glenwood Springs and toward Aspen. In the midnight snowstorm, we chased after the ARK troops in our Stanleys; big battle machines made from the scraps of cars, fueled by a steam engine and loaded down with enough armaments to storm back into the Garden of Eden.
Looking back now, I see I was seventeen, but by the end of my travels, I’d age, not in years, not even in mileage, but in sorrow, doubt, and a hatred for God’s silence.
I’d end my adventures as an old, old woman.
’Cause time doesn’t age us, not really.
Evil ages us. Sometimes, it ages us too quick and leaves our faces glowing with youth, while inside we become crones with a foot in our grave and a boot heel on the throat of God, asking him why we shouldn’t kill Him and put an end to His broken, stained universe.
Chapter One
My high noon is midnight black
You took my love, and I want it back.
—LeAnna Wright
(i)
Hell is cold.
I’d studied Dante’s Divine Comedy at the Sally Browne Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate in Cleveland, Ohio, and according to the Italian poet, the last circle of hell was reserved for traitors, with Judas being the worst of them. The betrayers stood locked in ice, like straw in glass, unmoving, freezing, dead but never dying; their lot was to suffer through eternity.
On Highway 82, twenty kilometers south of the burning ruins of Glenwood Springs, the cold and snow battered our big robotic vehicles as we charged down the icy road, chasing after the ARK army who had captured Pilate and Micaiah.
Us Weller sisters were leading in the Marilyn Monroe while the Audrey Hepburn tromped behind us. The Marilyn and the Audrey were our Stanleys, six meters tall with a central cockpit and a gunner’s roost above. Each section had the windshield and seats from the front part of old automobiles, including the doors. The Marilyn had been built from two Porsche Boxsters, while the Audrey was fashioned out of BMWs, the hoods and trunks marked by the manufacturer insignias. Inside their bodies, the Stanleys had big steam engines to power them. Storage compartments—converted trunks—lay under the engine. Instead of hands, belt-fed machine guns and rocket launchers tipped the pistoned arms; their feet were big grids of welded cross-hatched steel. Glancing in a rear-view mirror, I could see snow piling up on the Audrey’s shoulders and head even as her stack smoked into the blizzard.
The Stanley Steamers were named after the defunct steam cars of the previous century. The creator of the Stanleys, the brilliant Nikola Nichols, had promised to bring more of her automatons to help us on our long walk east, but I knew it wasn’t going to be any time soon. She had scared women to gather and the ARK interviews to endure.
We topped a ridge, and I pulled the sticks back to stop us.
A Jimmy-class zeppelin was staked down near the ground in the river valley below. Guards holding sapropel lanterns lit up the bottom of the airship’s canopy. Without their lanterns, we wouldn’t have seen them since visibility was nil; the sky poured down snow in a subzero wind straight from the Devil’s own nostrils.
“Let me take a closer look.” Wren grabbed our spotting scope as she threw open the door and climbed down the ladder to trudge through the snow.
Sharlotte was above me in the gunner’s seat and spoke into the copper communication tube linking the two compartments. “We should prolly go out there with her.”
“We prolly should.” I couldn’t help but wince. I wasn’t dressed for snow, and I was still damp from my previous excursions outside.
I scooped up a wool blanket and pushed out of the Marilyn to climb down the ladder in the little silk-nothing dress I wore. Wet slippers froze on my feet. I couldn’t help but shiver until my teeth clacked. The wool blanket didn’t do much except itch me.
Sharlotte followed, equally underdressed in a gown and slippers, though she kept her teeth clenched so they wouldn’t chatter.
Wren motioned for us to get low. We did, creeping up to her, crouching.
Wren was wearing her jeans, her cowgirl shirt, her leather vest, but no jacket, and if she was cold, I figured the liquor hanging from her breath numbed her enough to talk without a tremble in her voice.
She pointed to the airship below us. “So the main convoy is still ahead, and I’m not sure we can catch ’em in the Stanleys. I figure the only way to get ahead of them ARK soldiers is to fly in on ’em.”
Hated Wren, but she was right. We’d hidden under a bridge back at the Colorado River just south of Glenwood Springs, while at least three A3 Athapasca Armored Personnel Carriers, or APCs, rumbled over us. Following behind them came the UHV Humvees, armored and weaponed up, running on growling diesel engines, with an M1 Acevedo tank taking up the rear.
That convoy had our boys. And we knew who was in charge of that particular unit of ARK soldiers: Praetor Gianna Edger had returned to plague us. She’d slapped me in the house of our friends, the Scheutzes, and she would’ve done worse if Wren hadn’t shown up to save us. Edger was a brute of a woman: not human but not a Vixx. I figured she was just a Cuius Regio who had managed to be meaner than her sisters and so the ARK had promoted her to Praetor.
The maelstrom spun snow around us in the dark of night, and the only thing we could really see was the zeppelin and the guards below.
I motioned to Wren to give me the Swarsky spotting scope. She handed it over, and I got a good look at the ARK soldiers waiting down by their dirigible. There were only about a half dozen; it’d be easy to swat them like flies—Wren being our main flyswatter, even still a little drunk after her battle with Aces.
All the killing felt grim. Aces needed to die, and I was glad he’d been put down. Did the Regios down there need
to be exterminated? They weren’t exactly human, and right then I’d have wiped them all out just to get Micaiah and Pilate back. However, the one Regio I’d killed still haunted me. Over and over, I heard her last plea for mercy. Over and over, I felt my finger pull the trigger.
I was a good Catholic girl; murder was a mortal sin, and yet I’d murdered. And most likely, I’d have to do it again. How could I live with such conflict?
I didn’t know. But I needed to get my head straight. I recalled Pilate’s ten-second boot camp. He’d given me the basic principles of combat, but of course, Pilate being Pilate, he had ended it in his own inimitable way:
Those are not people down there ... they do not eat, they do not sleep, they do not love their babies. They are killers, and when you’re sleeping, they’re awake, making plans on the best way to BBQ our horses and deep-fry us. God did not create the women down there. Satan did. And it’s our job to rid the world of them.
The wire and grass bracelet from Micaiah tickled my wrist.
Morality questions aside, we had a mission.
Could be the ARK convoy holding our boys was supposed to rendezvous with the Jimmy below us but missed it ’cause of the storm. We didn’t have enough intel to really know, but as I lay in the snow with my sisters, Wren’s idea was making sense. If we could commandeer the zeppelin, we could use it to overtake the convoy.
Who would drive the Jimmy blimp?
Uh, that would be me.
Wren guessed what I was thinking. “You still a-scared of heights? I’m assuming since you could drive a goddamn train, you could drive a goddamn zeppelin.”
I sighed. “A train is on the ground and goes right down the tracks. You want me to pilot an airship in bad wind, and if I mess up, we’ll all die. Yeah, I’m scared, but it seems I ain’t got a choice, now do I?”
“Not much of one,” Sharlotte murmured.
“It’s only a little blimp,” Wren added, “but it should have enough lift for Marilyn and Audrey. I’m thinking we rope the Stanleys and lift them up, and then we can fly right in front of the ARK convoy. Catch ’em in an ambush. We know about them, but they ain’t got no clue about us.”
I pondered the situation. Jimmy-class zeppelins were the smallest and most swift of the zeppelins built by Boeing for use in the Juniper, but still, the airship below us was nearly a hundred meters long and around forty meters in diameter. It prolly had ten air-cells full of theta-helium, what we called thelium, and a skin of reinforced Kevlar around a frame of Neofiber, a lightweight plastic as strong as steel.
I’d studied zeppelins, I’d watched Sketchy fly the Moby Dick for hours and hours, and I had a good understanding of the technology, the physics, and the general use of one. All that book knowledge was fine, but a far cry from piloting one myself.
Butterflies the size of bats choked up my belly. No choice. We’d have to seize the Jimmy, rope up the Stanleys, and take off into the wind to get our boys back.
Though it was past midnight, I was wide awake, my system sucking up a new serving of adrenaline.
We withdrew back to where the Marilyn Monroe and the Audrey Hepburn stood, their dark shapes outlined by the snow covering them. I opened the boiler to toss in more wood. In the light, I saw Wren grinning.
“You’re liking this, aren’t you?” I asked a little nastily.
She heard the question and not the nasty. “No, Princess, I’m loving this.”
“Don’t call me ‘princess,’” I growled back.
Wren grinned. “Me and Dutch will get to the other side and wait. Once you attack in the Stanleys, Dutch and I will use the distraction to either kill them guards or sneak aboard the blimpy or do both. Then you’ve got to get into the airship fast and learn how to fly it. Show us some of that genius you got.”
It was a good plan, but I was scared.
And the snow wasn’t helping my nerves.
We had to get up and over Independence Pass, and if the snow continued, we might find ourselves stranded, then starved, then dead. The pass had been my brilliant idea to outmaneuver the army chasing us. We figured they’d be searching the old I-70 corridor.
So, I was scared of the snow, and I was equally as frightened by Edger; she’d come crawling out of her grave to chase us. On top of that, I had to get ready to fly a zeppelin in the next half an hour or so.
If only Micaiah had been there to help me. If only I’d insisted that Sketchy give me flying lessons. If only we’d never been captured by Aces in the first place.
“If onlys” are cheap. Especially in the Juniper.
(ii)
Ten minutes later, I sat in the Marilyn’s cockpit, waiting for Wren and Dutch to get into place. Sharlotte was above me in the gunner’s seat. We didn’t have much to say. Inside our Stanley, we were warm but wet. Nice thing about steam engines: they run hot.
A jagged crack marred the windshield from where Aces had hit us with a grenade during battle with him in the Glenwood pool. The right arm had also been damaged, but we’d survived the encounter. Aces hadn’t. That jackerdan was roasting in hell along with most of his Neanderthal followers.
The Audrey Hepburn stood next to us, waiting. Wren had grabbed Dutch so they could stab the zeppelin crew in the back once we hit them from the front.
Rachel had chosen to drive, which wasn’t so surprising. I had the idea her fighting days were behind her now that she could feel. Tibbs Hoyt had bio-engineered her, and the other Vixxes, without emotions, since he thought they were a liability. Maybe he was right, but more and more I saw feelings as powerful things that, if channeled correctly, could prove to be the ultimate weapon. Well, if one could control them. Rachel was still learning how to do that. So was I, for that matter.
Marisol was above her in the gunner’s seat. The shy, quiet girl had worked Audrey Hepburn’s guns before, during our big escape from Glenwood, so I was hoping she could do it again.
I glanced at the glow-in-the-dark hands of my Moto-Moto watch. The date function didn’t work anymore, but the clock did. We’d synchronized our watches. It was 12:51 am. At 1:00 am, we’d take the Stanleys down the hill, guns blazing.
It was a plan we’d done before, playing the killdeer, distracting our enemies so Wren could go in and do her damnedest to kill or be killed. Since she was nearly invulnerable after being dosed with the Gulo Delta, it’d prolly be the former and not the latter.
Dutch, on the other hand, was untested and a scoundrel to boot. I didn’t like him, but Wren loved him. Well, loved him, was scared of him, and hated him all at once. She’d said she didn’t know which she liked better, kissing him or smacking him.
Weird, but leave it to Wren to have such a love life.
Her real name was Irene, but Mama had made a mistake in naming her. Wren was a wren, born to fly ’cause sitting still hurt too much.
Poor Mama. Months dead now. Her heart had given out and we’d buried her. It nearly broke me. Did break Sharlotte. And Wren? Wren had told me Mama was dead with a smile on her face.
Bad history between Wren and Mama. Some kind of secret was there.
The minutes crept by. I closed my eyes to pray, but more and more I wasn’t sure if anything would listen to me. Being Catholic, though, was more about habit than belief at times, and so I prayed to God He’d watch over us, He’d deliver us from evil, and He’d forgive our many trespasses against His other creations.
Sure, the Cuius Regios had come out of a vat, but if they walked the earth, God had allowed it, and it made them a part of His divine plan.
If only He’d let us in on His schemes.
Another cheap “if only” not worth a green street penny.
Sharlotte’s voice punched through the tube. “It’s time, Cavvy. Let’s go get ’em.”
I swallowed and threw the sticks forward.
The Marilyn took off in a whoosh of pistons and the thunder of her big, cross-hatched metal feet pounding on the slushy mud of the road.
Another roll of the dice. Another battle in our w
ar. Another chase to save the day or die trying.
(iii)
Sharlotte controlled the arms from up in the gunner’s seat. While the Marilyn’s right arm weapons didn’t work, we still had our left guns.
I controlled the legs and feet. The gauges for the steam engine glowed in front of me, the needles coated with phosphorescent paint. Behind me was an auxiliary hatch so I could feed fuel down into the firebox. A valve next to it allowed me to dump water into the engine, ’cause steam needs equal parts water and heat to keep the pistons pumping.
It was hard to see in the dark. The windshield kept getting clogged with snow; we had no windshield wipers and my breath kept icing up the inside. I tried rolling down both windows, and still I had trouble seeing anything. But I kept on heading toward the lights.
The Audrey Hepburn was right behind me.
Sharlotte triggered a rocket, and it went streaking through the darkness with a tail of sparks and light. It hit in front of the troops, which was okay; our job was to be the distraction while Wren and Dutch did the killing.
The Regios started firing at us. Their bullets pinged off the metal, sparking, and one cracked the lower left part of my windshield. Lucky for me the glass was bulletproof. Even luckier, the bullets shook off enough snow for me to see again. My engineer’s mind did ponder how much the grenade had compromised the glass’s integrity. I had to hope for the best.
Sharlotte returned fire, working the fifty-caliber machine gun on the left arm. Marisol did the same. The thud of the belt-fed guns eclipsed all other noise for a minute, and then I heard a familiar sound, the explosion of a 40mm grenade from Tina Machinegun. That would be the middle Weller sister, making her mark.
Regios lay scattered in the snow. Wren and Dutch crept into view, exchanged more fire with someone shooting at them from inside the Jimmy ten meters above them. Tethers held the airship to the ground, and a rope ladder dangled down. Either Wren or Dutch hit their target, and a body tumbled out of the airship to lie motionless in the snow.
Wren started up the rope ladder while Dutch held it. Sapropel lanterns lying in the snow lit the scene.
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