Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  Shadow Alley Press Mailing List

  Magnificat

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Memorare

  Glossary of Historical Figures, Slang, and Technology

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

  litRPG on Facebook

  GameLit on Facebook

  Dedication

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Summary

  Sometimes the monsters are real.

  BY 2058, BOTH THE SINO-American War and the Sterility Epidemic have decimated the male population. Electricity does not function in five western states. Collectively, they are known as the Juniper. It is the most dangerous place on Earth.

  For months, Cavatica and her gunslinging sisters have heard rumors of psychotic monstrosities killing everything in their path. But first the Wellers have more important concerns: Pilate and Micaiah have been captured by the ARK, and it’s up to the sisters to save them.

  Once again, the odds are not in their favor. If they manage to survive the treacherous weather of the Rocky Mountains, Tiberius “Tibbs” Hoyt has created new army of super soldiers known as the Severins to stop them. You need an army to fight an army, and the Weller sisters think the Outlaw Warlord known as June Mai Angel might help them. But she’s tried to kill the sisters twice. Can they convince her to help?

  And while the Wellers think their enemies are outside of their tight family, the ultimate betrayal lies ahead as they battle their way toward the Kansas border.

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  Magnificat

  O beautiful for outlaw girls,

  For whiskey morning pains,

  For purple mountains bruising bad

  Above the salvaged plain.

  Oh Juniper! My Juniper! God turned His back on thee!

  For ’Murica loves her ’lectric lights

  Not you, the dark between the seas.

  —Country Mac Sterling

  (i)

  HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF God, you can’t help me with this next part of my story ’cause I don’t believe in you, in Saint Joseph, in Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a mule. When I was in the autumn of my sixteenth year, the silence of God drifted down upon me, and I faltered.

  Micaiah and Pilate, the two men I loved to hate and hated to love, had been stolen from us, or so we thought when we found the coffee mug and the bracelet outside of Glenwood Springs. The city was burning even as zeppelins shined spotlights down, trying to find us. By us, I mean me, my sisters, Sharlotte and Wren, and Rachel Vixx, our one-time enemy but now sister. We also had two new additions to our crew.

  Dutch Malhotra was Wren’s bad ex-boyfriend and even worse current one. He’d supposedly stumbled upon Pilate and Rachel, and yeah, he’d helped us escape Glenwood Springs, but I still didn’t trust him. He was a slippery, handsome man with dark skin and a flashing smile, viable and stupidly arrogant about it. With a last name like Malhotra, he was definitely Hindu and prolly something else besides.

  Little Marisol, a twelve-year-old orphan girl we’d saved from Aces, also joined us. We’d sworn to get her back to her family, but that was before we’d discovered Micaiah and Pilate might have been captured by an ARK convoy going south out of Glenwood Springs.

  The American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative, called the ARK, was the biggest, richest corporation on Earth. It had the cure to the Sterility Epidemic but didn’t want anyone to know. Tiberius “Tibbs” Hoyt was making too much money selling Male Product to women around the world so they could have babies.

  And when he wasn’t doing that, he was brewing up armies in vats to protect his empire. We’d killed three out of the four Vixxes but managed to save Rachel from herself. Micaiah gave her a dose of the serum he used to give himself emotions. It turned out the boy was as bio-engineered as Rachel, maybe even more so. The serum made Rachel human. Without his meds, Micaiah turned into someone I couldn’t love.

  I’d had to break up with him, but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t go and save him.

  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.

  Butt
erflies 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.