Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Wren had seen her when she was dying on the floor of the Silver Island Casino. And Sharlotte had seen her after we cut off her leg.

  Right then, in my own death, I didn’t see Mama, but I heard her.

  “What’s in your heart, Cavvy, baby?”

  I didn’t hear that. I couldn’t. I was crying too hard, a mess in the dirt, broken, broken-hearted, broken-souled. Never to be repaired.

  “What’s in your heart, baby, baby, Cavvy?”

  I fell quiet. I went still on top of my mother’s grave next to our burnt-out house.

  I heard it a third time. “What’s in your heart, Cavvy?”

  A memory came to me. I was in Mama’s arms. It was an autumn night, chilly, but still warm in its bones. We were on the porch, on the swing, she was facing forward, and I was little, so little, and I sat on her, facing the house—facing her. I traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and she looked at me with soft, happy eyes. For most of my years on the ranch, I never got to be close to Mama like that too often. She was too busy, moving too fast, too serious about her work to sit still long enough for me to touch her.

  On those rare times she did pause, we’d play our game.

  “What’s in your heart, Cavvy?” she’d ask me. And then tickle me on my chest.

  “Faith, Mama.”

  “That’s right. Pilate says faith is an old grandpa telling us it’s all going to be okay. What’s in your heart, Cavvy?” Another tickle, and I’d giggle and smile.

  “Love, Mama.”

  “That’s right. Pilate says love is an orphan who needs a mama. And who’s love’s daddy?”

  “Faith, Mama.”

  “And who’s love’s mama?”

  “Hope, Mama.”

  “That’s right. Hope is like bindweed: it takes hold in our hearts, and it grows flowers that are pretty, and it fills us, and if we let the roots go deep, hope will always be with us. Hope, like bindweed, can be hard to kill. Hope brings us love just like faith brings us love.”

  Then Mama would hug me and laugh, and she’d sing an old R&B song from when the world made sense and electricity ran strong through all fifty states.

  How much do I love you?

  Oh, where do I start?

  Through the valleys of my soul,

  ’Cross the mountains of my heart.

  What was in my heart now?

  Pain. Rage. Sorrow.

  Those things wouldn’t help me get to the other side of my despair. No, but then I remembered LaTanya, singing in the darkest of nights as woman after woman was taken away.

  Maybe hope was a weapon, but for us Wellers, it was also a weed. And I felt the roots of it down deep.

  I’d get up. I’d get over the pain, and I’d find my other side. I’d heal my stick heart green again.

  I’d give June Mai Angel the chalkdrive.

  Kill me to stop me.

  (ii)

  On top of my mother’s grave, the night coming in cold, that was when I heard a violin playing, echoing across the plains. I sat up.

  Couldn’t be.

  It was playing an old cowboy song, “Oh Bury Me Not”, and I listened to it sing, so simple, so full of pain it made my eyes water again.

  I got to my feet. Then I saw her: about thirty meters from me, a woman played a violin on her shoulder, sawing out the song.

  She turned to me and stopped. She moved the bow from the strings and merely watched me.

  She was a short woman, with short black hair, but not buzzed. She had a good haircut, actually pretty fashionable, and it framed her face well. Only, her hair wasn’t important once you saw her eyes.

  Even at a distance, I could feel the power in her eyes, the raw energy emanating from them. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, inside her soul I saw a generator with enough shakti to electrify the entire Juniper.

  And I knew, only one person in a million can make you feel them from a distance—someone who held life and death in their hands. Someone who was used to controlling their own destiny, the destiny of those around them, the destiny of the world.

  June Mai Angel. I’d come to meet the enemy, and there she was, alone, just her and me.

  I got up and limped toward her. And I smiled a smile I borrowed from my sister Wren.

  Hope was a weedy thing in my heart, the ice was gone, and I was me again. My sisters were gone, the ranch beyond saving, but I still had life in me. I was going to live and finish my imperative despite the death and the destruction.

  Sure, I’d give her the chalkdrive, but first I was going to punch June Mai Angel in the nose.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Come and dance with me,

  The truck’s gone, the car is too

  We owe too much on the house

  To ever make it through

  The kids are hungry

  The dogs run away

  But come and dance with me

  like it’s our wedding day

  —Isobel Custer

  (i)

  I MARCHED UP TO JUNE Mai Angel. Her in her uniform with a gun belt and a Betty knife, and I knew I looked a mess. My face was smeared with dirt and tears, my clothes hung in tatters, and I couldn’t help but limp on my ripped-up feet

  “Hello, Cavatica,” she said.

  Jacker that skank. I didn’t care that she knew my name.

  I punched her square in the nose. Like how I hit Becca Olson, my enemy at the Sally Browne Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate.

  Becca had gone down bleeding, cursing, and shocked.

  June Mai Angel kicked my feet out from under me and then knelt next to me with her Betty knife to my throat. Her violin lay in the dirt next to us.

  Every cell in me screamed in happy adrenaline joy. Yeah, violence can do the trick, just like a drink, Skye6, or anything else.

  Blood dripped from her nose onto my pink coat. And still, those eyes, those blazing eyes, reached into me.

  I felt the need to explain myself. “You burned my house down. You tried to kill me and my people at least twice, so you had that coming.”

  She pressed the knife to my throat.

  I kind of found it silly. Was she trying to scare me? Hell, she’d have to do better than that.

  I kept talking, though each word made the knife bite into my neck farther. She was bleeding on me, but my own blood trickled into the hair on the back of my neck. “I got the cure to the Sterility Epidemic around my neck. If you help me get the truth out into the world, people are gonna know your cause. They’re going to know about how President Amanda Swain sent all the Sino vets to the Juniper with a lot of empty promises, then put up a fence to keep you all here.”

  I swallowed to get some spit in my mouth after my long speech.

  “Go ahead and cut my throat,” I said, “but I’d ask that you get the chalkdrive out into the world regardless. And I promised some of the hogs you’ve been fighting that we’d cure them if we could, though I think that’s prolly unlikely. But if there is a cure, it might be on that drive, too. I’ve crossed hell and earth to get it to you ’cause even though I think you might be one evil skank, I also think you love your people enough to want them to have justice. The World might have been able to ignore you out here in the ass end of America, but I guarantee no one will be able to ignore the necklace around my neck.”

  The ice was gone, my rage was gone, I’d been able to sucker punch the Outlaw Warlord who burned my house down.

  What was in my heart, Mama? Right then, what was in my heart? Not faith or love or hope, but peace. A whole lot of it.

  I’d done it. I had followed through on my imperative. I’d done my bit.

  June Mai Angel rose and sheathed her knife.

  I closed my eyes. Now I could search for the flowers the bindweed grows, ’cause bindweed might be a weed, but it’s also known as the morning glory—a flower of hope. Hope for what? I didn’t know, but I knew I’d come through the worst of it. I’d gone crazy and come back. And I got my licks in along the way.

/>   What else is there in the world?

  June Mai still didn’t say a thing. She was prolly taking care of her nose, which if I was lucky, I’d broke. Evil skank.

  I rolled onto my stomach, to sleep, to rest, finally. I’d earned it.

  Then I smelled it. The stench of a cigar eclipsed the perfume of the cold sage, the dry dirt, and that winter smell of grass sleeping.

  A pair of boots walked into my line of sight. Black boots. And jeans. And a long, black duster, and then ...

  Pilate. Smiling. My Pilate, alive and right there.

  I sat back on my legs. I regarded him for a long time, and he looked down at me. He was thin like me, his long hair gone, and the scars on his skull visible from the bullets he’d taken walking around with the luck of the Devil, rolling dice for purple cloaks and all the cities of Judea.

  No, he couldn’t be there.

  I was hallucinating. “Hey, Pilate. You’re not really there, are you?”

  He smiled.

  No, he wasn’t there. So, I said exactly what was on my mind. “You’re not there and neither is God. I bet you’d like me as an atheist. Well, I figure I’m one now. God can’t exist, not with what we’ve been through.”

  I expected him to fade away, but he didn’t. He sucked in on his cigar and let out the smoke. Coughed a little, but not much.

  “No, Cavvy,” he said, “I don’t reckon there’s a God at all in this fucked-up world.”

  I heard him. He was there. Or I was experiencing an auditory hallucination as well—one that cursed and cursed bad.

  He went on, “As far as what we’ve been through, well, of course there’s a God. How else can you explain us here and now, chatting?”

  I didn’t point out that my house was gone and my ranch in ruins. Instead, I talked about horses. “Windshadow gave me a ride into town. He found me on the plains outside of Limon. He told me to say hi.”

  Pilate laughed. “See? If anything, God is that horse. Let’s start the cult of Windshadow, but dammit, where was he when I needed him? Well, at least I didn’t have to walk much. It’s really useful to have lots of friends in Juniper.”

  We let a quiet come down between us. No wind. Nothing but us breathing and the rustle of June Mai Angel putting her violin in a case.

  “You hear that?” I asked Pilate.

  “Yeah, I hear it.”

  My eyes closed on their own. My atheism was short-lived, dang it. I was too tired to argue against a lifetime of Mass and Bible. “It’s God, isn’t it? That silence. And you and me talking in the silence. And Micaiah, he’s with you, huh? All of us God. And all of us just little pieces of God at the same time.”

  Pilate nodded. “Little pieces of God, blowing on the wind.”

  “Sharlotte said it. Cottonwood fluff on a river of woe.”

  Pilate chuckled. “Your sister is quite the cowgirl poet. I’d imagine NPR is in her future.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing is in her future. She’s dead.”

  He didn’t respond to that but said something else. “Micaiah is back in Burlington. And I see you’ve met June Mai Angel.”

  “Yeah. I punched her. Called her an evil skank.” I stood up.

  Pilate took my hand in his. He was alive. He was real. And if he was upright, Pilate was talking. “I’m here as well. And God? He doesn’t exist, only He must exist, only He can’t exist, and if He’s everything, He can be nothing, nothing at all. Atheists, saints, sinners, we’re all right when it comes to the Almighty Nothing above us, in us, and some impossible thing that is not there at all but is as close to us as the breath on our lips and blood in our veins. Forever and ever, Amen.”

  I buried my head into Pilate’s shirt, smelling clean, smelling like a man, like my father, like Pilate, forever and ever, Amen.

  If God ever needed a lesson on how to hold me, He could learn it from Pilate.

  “Sharlotte, Wren, Rachel, they’re dead,” I whispered into Pilate’s shirt, as he held me.

  “Are you sure?”

  I moved back slowly and said carefully, “You’re not saying they’re here, too?”

  He shook his head. “No, I have no idea where they are, but I can’t believe Wren would die without saying goodbye to me. And I promised Rachel I’d kiss her.” He grinned, and I saw a far-away look come into eyes. “Rachel, silly Rachel. She became almost magical in her innocence and kindness.”

  He caught my glance and turned sheepish. “Not that anything happened between the two of us. You’d have been proud of me. I was celibate, like with real vows and everything. Jesus, it’s like I’m a Roman Catholic priest or something.”

  “You didn’t get the letter from the pope?” I asked him, glad we weren’t talking about his romantic life.

  Despite his blush, he managed a joke. “Oh, I don’t read Roman mail. Look what it did to Peter. Reading Catholic mail can get you crucified upside down.”

  “But Pilate, I watched Sharlotte blow herself up. Then an avalanche swept down and covered them. They’re dead. They have to be.”

  Pilate shrugged. “Did you see the bodies? Did you feel their wounds like Tommy the doubting doubter did to Jesus H. Christ? The H is for ‘hell, yeah’ by the way.”

  I pushed Pilate back, and I felt the anger flood me. I shrieked at him, and it felt good to feel, to scream. “They’re dead! I couldn’t get to the bodies, but they couldn’t have survived. They’re dead! I did what you wanted me to. I denied you! I denied them! I denied Alice! Three times, like Peter. Three times I did it!”

  Pilate grabbed my arm, and not too gently either. “Where’s your goddamn faith, Cavatica? You asked me that, and now I’m asking you. Where’s your goddamn faith, Cavatica?”

  “I thought I needed hope?” I yelled again. “I thought it was all just hope.”

  Pilate smirked. Yes, he knew how to hold me, but he was just as good at pissing me off. “Faith, hope, and love. And what is the greatest of these?” he asked.

  “Love! I know my Bible, goddammit!”

  “I love you, Cavvy. But have faith. What are the odds that not one but two genetically modified super soldiers died at the same time under the same circumstances? And one was Wren? I won’t believe they’re dead until I take her Colt Terminators off her body, and even then, I’d imagine she’d come back from the dead to fight me for them.”

  I went back to that moment, when Sharlotte spun the Marilyn Monroe and sent that chain of missiles into the Audrey Hepburn. Then the thunderous apocalypse of noise as half the mountain covered them in ice and snow. No way.

  But what if?

  What if in the ice and tumble, either Wren or Rachel had woken up? They would’ve dug our people out, found Marisol, put her down ... and then what? Started east.

  What if?

  It was a good story I was telling, but I couldn’t believe it. I’d been there. I’d seen the destruction.

  I didn’t have much faith, hope, or love in me right then. I did have a whole world of tired and hurt. I took the chain off my neck and tossed it to Pilate.

  “I’m done with my imperative, and I’m done with your sacred duty nonsense. You like the world so much, you save it.” I was dizzy, my head was swimming, and I had the idea I’d crawl back onto Mama’s grave and sleep there. The cold might kill me, but then I wouldn’t have to go far to see her again—hold her hand, feel her hugs, listen to her sing.

  And Micaiah? I wanted to see him again, but the emotionless thing wasn’t much of a boy any more. Maybe it would be better if I never saw him again.

  Pilate held the chalkdrive up to look at it. “You know, the world needs saving all the time. Pretty much daily.” He addressed the darkening sky. “We’ll do it this time, God, but no more. Your stupid, little world better learn how to save itself.”

  “Amen, Father.” I laughed a little. Not sure if Pilate was priest or not, but the name fit. He was my daddy after all.

  I took a step.

  June Mai Angel had stayed away to let Pilate and I talk, but n
ow she marched toward us. She didn’t look happy, not happy at all. But right then, she didn’t seem at all important. She and Pilate could deal with the chalkdrive.

  I decided I did want to see Micaiah again before I died. I wanted to learn how he and Pilate managed to escape Glenwood Springs, and why Pilate’s cup and the bracelet had been left there.

  Another step. My feet hurt. I was thirsty again and hungry, but I’d been ignoring my body for so long, I could laugh at it.

  Stupid body. You think what you want is so, so important.

  “She’s going to faint, June.” Pilate called her by her first name, like they were friends.

  “No, I ain’t,” I muttered.

  June Mai Angel sure didn’t talk much. I figured she’d be real chatty. Nope.

  Then I fainted dead away, right into the arms of an Outlaw Warlord.

  She turned out to be so different than I had ever imagined.

  (ii)

  I couldn’t have been out more than a minute. When I woke June Mai was holding me. For such a short, slight woman, her strength was impressive, but then I didn’t weigh much anymore.

  “Thanks, June,” I said, and I laughed weakly at calling June Mai Angel by her first name.

  She spoke over my head, one word, “Pilate?”

  Pilate came over, and they dragged me past the crater where my house had been; my pretty blue room with lace curtains and all my things, all my memories, my whole life now reduced to smoke and ashes. Eryn Lopez died, but her room was saved. I lived, but my room was gone. Who got the better deal?

  They carried me to a Ford Explorer with the back chopped out to allow for the ASI attachment. Machine guns and cannons were mounted all over the body—a real war machine.

  They put me in the back part of the cab, next to Pilate, who put an arm around me and held me close. The woman with salt and pepper hair, Captain M. Atlas, drove. I noticed people called her Captain Atlas, but more often than not, they called her by her full name, Marie Atlas, every single time. It was how I began to think of her.

  Next to Marie Atlas, June Mai rode shotgun.

  We took off to the sound of the AIS steam engine chugging. I smelled the dried cow patties burning in the firebox, and it brought me back to our cattle drive, and before that, to my life working the ranch.