Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4), Aaron Ritchey [best beach reads txt] 📗

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