Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Another grunt. A huge shape rose from the corner and pounded over to me in huge room-shaking stomps. It was some kind of monstrosity, but I couldn’t see it.

  I could smell it, though. Smelled like a woman who’d never showered ... ever.

  A match-flare blinded me for a minute, then a candle, and then squinting; I saw my first hog.

  It was a woman. Could tell by the pendulous breasts and thick hips. Long fuzzed-up blonde dreadlocks hung down around a chubby face marred with scars and patches of scraggly beard. A hairy arm several times the size of my leg reached out with a hand as big as a bicycle tire. The monster was three meters tall. At least. The clothes had been stitched together, a patchwork of leather, cotton, what looked like a bedspread, the metallic material of an emergency blanket, and several Kevlar vests.

  In her belt was a hammer that looked ridiculously small. Next to it was an array of large handguns and two Remington shotguns. All her weapons had the trigger guards sawed off to accommodate her grotesquely fat fingers.

  Small eyes glittered in the candle light. Fat, wet lips spread in a smile to show a mouth of block-like teeth and bright pink gums.

  “Pet,” the thing wheezed, and then it clapped its huge palms together. Its forearms were as shaggy as a dog’s belly.

  My stomach fell quiet. No more fussing about the sausage. My mind had shut down with the impossible thing that faced me. The dried-stick of my heart trembled and took charge. I had to get away from such a thing. I tried to run.

  It was a matter of fight or flight, and I wasn’t about to engage this monstrosity unless I could be in a fully-loaded Stanley with an automatic grenade launcher and hundreds of 40mm shells to fling at this this mutant, this ogre, this hog.

  She caught me and flung me back into the bed. My head hit the sheetrock, and I was knocked senseless for a minute.

  “My pet. No go. Pretty, pretty pet.” The thing caressed me. Like I was a stray Jack Russell terrier it had caught.

  Flight hadn’t worked.

  I didn’t have the shakti to fight.

  Which left me one alternative. Conversation. “I’m Cavatica. What’s your name?”

  Its eyes lit up in the candlelight. At least it was a scented candle, some kind of potpourri that helped cover up a little of the hog’s stink. In reality, pigs smelled better.

  “You ’Teeca. Me Alice.”

  I wasn’t about to correct Alice on how to pronounce my name. And I shouldn’t have given her my real name in the first place. But I did ask, “Where am I?”

  “Camp. Jolie’s camp. Jolie took pets and megs, but Alice got none. Came too late. Found you, though. Found me a pet.”

  Megs? What did that mean?

  Fear clamped my throat closed. I had to ask, “What do you do with your pets?”

  Alice blinked long-lashed eyes. Funny I’d notice how full and lush her lashes were. “Alice feeds them and takes care of them, but last one died. Sad Alice.”

  “You’ll take care of me, Alice?”

  Alice nodded, all jiggly and excited. “Yeah, Alice loves ’Teeca.”

  “I’m really hungry,” I said softly. “Can you get me one of those sausages?”

  My belly gave my genius a standing ovation. My mind, though, knew, once Alice left, I was going to bolt.

  I never had the chance. From her utility belt, she took out handcuffs and carefully took my wrist, clicked the cuff in place and then clicked it to the bedframe.

  “Alice be back, ’Teeca. Good sausages.”

  “Hey, Alice, if I’m your pet, you won’t hurt me, will you?”

  Alice’s prominent eyebrows covered her nice lashes as her forehead wrinkled. “’Teeca behave, Alice be nice. ’Teeca be bad, Alice punish. ’Teeca be good, yes?”

  I nodded. “Oh yes, ’Teeca be good. What happened to your last pet?”

  “Alice punish bad pet. Pet die. Bad pet. Sad Alice.”

  With that, Alice thudded out of the side of the house. Then it struck me, she wouldn’t have fit through the door.

  Alice didn’t come back, but another hog did. Her face was mashed in, burned, scarred, and her nose took up most of the left side of her face. This one came skulking in, grunting, “Me saw, me saw, me saw Alice’s pretty, pretty pet.”

  That was me, the pretty pet, and apparently Alice didn’t own me quite as much as she thought.

  (iv)

  I went to scream, but this other hog stuck a filthy, meaty hand over my face. “You tell, Edith kill.”

  The light was bad, but between her fingers, I saw Edith had huge razors of sharp hair sprouting out of her right shoulder which made her walk hunched over.

  The new monster removed her hand from my mouth.

  “Where’s Alice?” I asked.

  The hog didn’t answer. She gripped the bed frame, ripped off the bar, and then threw me over her shoulder. The handcuffs dangled from my right wrist. My left hand slipped over the spines of hair bristling from her misshapen back. They were sharp enough to cut my hand—another wound for my collection.

  Outside, a bonfire burned in the middle of Leadville’s downtown, right on Highway 24, and dozens of the hogs clustered around the fire.

  Edith tried to skirt around them, which gave me a better look. All the mutants looked a little different, but all were huge, thick, muscled, tall, some closing in on four meters. Some had buzzed hair, some had long dreads like Alice, some had dark skin, some had white skin. Most had huge noses, pig-like, some nearly elephantine. All were dressed in a mismatch of clothes and military gear. All were armed down to their smelly butts.

  They were drinking from bottles, eating the spitting sausages in greasy fists, and yelling, shouting, snorting, gnashing their teeth on the hot meat. The smell of the food made my mouth water, even in my predicament.

  “Edith!” a voice growled.

  My captor went to run off with me. She wasn’t quick enough. A huge body came crashing over, grabbed her, and flung us both back five meters onto a concrete sidewalk. I hit the cement and rolled to a stop. I pushed my hurt right hand against Eryn Lopez’s pink coat to staunch the bleeding.

  Edith rose up, emitting a thunderous howl, and then I saw it was Alice who had saved me. Both those hogs didn’t argue with words but brayed like cannibal mules or psychotic bears starving to death.

  The biggest of the hogs marched over. Across her back was a belt-fed M60 machine gun. She wielded it like it was a Daisy pellet gun.

  “Alice. Edith. Why fight? Why you fight when it feast time?”

  I figured the big hog was Jolie, since it was her camp, or that was what Alice had said. Jolie’s face was disfigured with a scar, filthy lumps of hair sprouted from a scalp which was mostly gnarled flesh covered in bright pink acne. A few of the pimples were a bright yellow with pus.

  The hog leader came over, grabbed me, and held me by my leg to inspect me. My hip joint howled.

  Alice and Edith were breathing hard, and I could smell their stank breath even from a distance

  Jolie grinned, showing those huge teeth, like glacier rocks in her mouth. “You pet or meg?”

  “Pet!” I shouted. “I’m Alice’s pet. She loves me now. Edith can’t claim me. I’m Alice’s.”

  I prayed it was the right thing to say.

  Jolie spun, and I spun with her. My hip joint seemed about to give, my head pounded full of blood, and I came close to blacking out.

  “Alice. Why pet? Why not meg?”

  “Bad feet, Jolie, and she weak. I found her dead. She’s my pet. See?” From a zippered pocket of her Frankenstein clothes, Alice dug out a small slate, which of course, couldn’t possibly work. Something was taped to the screen.

  “See?” Alice insisted. “My pet! See?”

  Jolie growled. “My orders say to report all pets and megs. You not tell. You disobey. You still want promotions? You still want command of this unit?”

  Alice turned her head, sullen. “Dizzymona put you in command. I follow orders good. Alice does want promotions some
day.”

  Dizzymona, another monster, the queen of the monsters maybe, but I could see Alice didn’t like the idea of taking orders, not a bit. She wanted to be in command but wasn’t. I thought about how I could use that to my advantage, but I was plumb out of ideas. Being upside down made it hard to plan.

  Jolie grunted, “You didn’t follow orders good. Maybe I give pet to Edith.”

  Alice shouted, “No! I take a whipping. She my pet. Okey-doke? I take punishment.”

  Jolie paused. She brought my feet to her face and sniffed at them like a pig snuffling for mushrooms. She poked and prodded me, then she howled, “This no pet, and this no meg. She a dead girl. But you will take punishment!” Jolie dropped me to the ground. I used my arms to break the fall before flopping onto my back.

  Jolie yelled, “Edith! Ellen! Grab Alice!”

  Edith and a hog with a goiter hanging off her neck like a tetherball grabbed Alice. They dragged her to the fire. Two other hogs began pounding steel spikes into the ground with thirty-pound sledge hammers they handled like they were tack hammers.

  They chained Alice to the loops in the steel spikes and locked her up with padlocks with the Ace Hardware logo on them.

  Jolie then unraveled a cat-o’-nine-tails she had over her shoulder.

  Edith came and snatched me up. She hugged me to her, and her touch set me on edge, nauseated me. Especially when she bent down to whisper in my ear. “You my pet. You Edith’s pet, and I kill Alice to keep you.” Suddenly, Alice didn’t seem so bad.

  Edith and I watched as Jolie lashed Alice, over and over. Alice howled, and Jolie grunted, and all the other hogs grunted, howled, laughed, and guzzled hooch from grimy bottles.

  I hid my eyes. Still I could see it, over and over, in my mind’s eye, Alice getting whipped in front of me.

  This world. This stupid, jacked-up world and what it can do to people, to everyone, even to monsters. This world was even cruel to the monsters.

  Find the ice, Cavatica, I told myself. Find the ice and go numb. Don’t feel, ever again. Hide in the ice.

  Somehow, I found the cold nothing I so longed for. It was like I had an off switch, and my mind snapped off. I was already beyond exhausted, feverish, hurt, starved, and like Jolie had said, I was a dead girl now.

  Might as well die right then.

  Which I did.

  Who knew suicide would be so easy?

  Chapter Ten

  Uncle Sam needs his girls!

  Girls like Megan to save the world

  Lady Liberty needs every gun

  To go and do what must be done

  It’s not just the Johnnies that need to fight

  It’s the Megs as well to do what’s right

  —U.S. Army Recruiting Song, All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2035

  (i)

  I DIDN’T DIE.

  Instead, I woke and vomited some kind of soup onto a carpet of pine needles. Alice was above me holding a stupidly small spoon in her big, thick fingers. In her other hand, she gingerly pinched a can of Quincy Jim’s Chicken Noodle Soup. New and improved with Flavor Qs! Trademarked, of course. A cartoon girl smiled at me.

  Dumb kid. Pissed me off.

  Who knew suicide would be so hard?

  We were outside, under pine trees, on a hillside. A happy sun hung in a blue sky just above the western mountains. The evening air was warm, so it was comfortable, and that was the Colorado territory. Blizzard one day and room temperature the next.

  Like me. My fever had me feeling every degree in the air. I went from freezing to roasting in a heartbeat. Then back to freezing as my sweat ran in rivers down my face. My feet blazed, throbbing with pain. Both the wounds and the blisters had festered, and like Jolie had said, I was a dead girl now. Every bone in me ached like they wanted me to remove them from my flesh and scrub them down with painkiller.

  Shouts came from below us. Jolie and the rest of her hogs clustered around fires, getting ready to bed down for the night. Not just hogs were down there, but normal women and some older girls, all chained. Megs.

  But why were they called megs?

  There was only one reason why I wasn’t with them. I was Alice’s pet. Was that a good thing? I wasn’t sure. I figured it was a whole lot better than being Edith’s property. What had happened to my razor-backed admirer?

  I couldn’t spot her in the hog encampment below us. I did finally notice the patchy dirt and weedy path of what had been six lanes of highway winding next to a river. We were on the edge of the forest on I-70. Going east.

  I had dim, jostled memories of riding on Alice’s back. Her hair wasn’t bristles like Edith’s, but soft. I’d rest my head on her shoulder. Or when she cradled me, I’d find comfort next to her. Like I was back to being a baby, and Alice my mama, like the monster in Beowulf, which they made us read at the Academy back in Cleveland.

  How many days had I been carried by Alice? I had no idea. I didn’t even know which side of the Eisenhower tunnel we were on. It was all mountains and trees, rocks and river. And I-70, the path that would take me to June Mai Angel on her throne. My one imperative.

  “Alice,” I said. “Help me sit up.”

  She did. I was covered in a vile smelling X-Men comforter from some kid’s bedroom. I moved it and looked at my feet. Yellow pus, red skin, and slimy white scabs tried to cover the blisters but failed. Too much pus. The undersides of my feet had swollen into big red balloons. If the flesh went necrotic, I’d lose my feet.

  I remembered amputating Sharlotte’s leg at the knee, the white and yellow of her bone. The red of all her blood.

  I turned my head and tried to throw up more, but my stomach was empty. Alice must not have been able to force much of the Quincy Jim’s soup down my gullet despite the Flavor Qs, however new and improved.

  I turned back. Talking was hard, but I had to. “Alice, what happened?”

  Alice patted the pocket where her slate was, with whatever picture was taped there. “You Alice’s pet. But Alice say if you get better, you become meg and become a Gamma for Dizzymona.”

  “What’s a meg?” I asked.

  Alice croaked out a tune and it took me a minute to realize it was an old army recruiting song. When they were incorporating the draft for both men and women, a photographer had snapped a picture of Megan Malone, standing with her unit; she was the only girl. They’d all been scorched and dirty and exhausted after a battle. The men around her seemed huge in comparison. Ms. Malone had been a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall; I was taller. But she’d captured the imagination of a generation, and the army wrote a song about her. Soon everyone talked about enlisting like Military Meg.

  “A meg we take for Dizzymona’s army. Need new megs. Gammas go coco. Alice kill Edith ’cause Edith go coco.” She growled as she remembered the fight.

  Everything she said sprouted questions in my head. I chose one, to take it slow. “What’s a Gamma?”

  “Civilians are Alphas, but Betas are soldier girls. Soldiers better than civilians. Gammas are best. Gammas are us. Dizzymona has the rituals to make megs into Gammas. Megs are both alphas and betas.”

  So, they called themselves Gammas and not hogs. I was glad I’d never used that word around her.

  “Who’s Dizzymona?” I asked.

  “She’s Gamma Omega Mother. She the first and last Gamma. She turns megs into Gammas. Her headquarters in Denver. We go to her. You become Gamma.”

  Dizzymona must’ve found the canisters of Gulo Gamma first and used them to mutate other normal women into hogs. And of course, they had named themselves after the ARK’s serum and came up with the story of genetic superiority after the fact.

  I was destined to become a Gamma if I didn’t escape Alice, and if I didn’t die of my infections. My feet weren’t necrotic yet, but it was coming.

  I chose another question for Alice. “You said Edith went coco. What is that?”

  Alice let her lower lip fall and her brow dipped. “Sad. Gammas go coco near the end. They mu
st be put down when they go coco.”

  “Like loco? Like crazy in Spanish?”

  Alice nodded. “Psycho. Loco. Coco. We say coco. I scared Alice go coco. Then words go, thoughts go, and just kill left.”

  I nodded and touched her thick, hairy arm. “It must be a side-effect of the drugs. Eventual complete psychotic breakdown. Almost like you have a ticking time bomb inside of you. I’m sorry.”

  Alice put one of her massive paws on my hand. It covered my hand completely. “Alice scared ’Teeca become Gamma and go coco. Maybe we go coco together and kill each other. ’Teeca, ’Teeca, it scares me awful.”

  “I’m scared, too.” I touched the stubble on her face, like a man’s cheek. Then it hit me—it must be some kind of testosterone mixture in the Gulo Gamma, some kind of leftovers from Tibbs Hoyt’s research into curing the Sterility Epidemic.

  I remembered how hairy Wren’s arms had gotten. How Dutch had teased her. Well, I didn’t have to worry about Wren becoming a Gamma or going coco. She was dead. And she had already been coco.

  Thinking of Wren, of Dutch, put a crack through the ice inside me. Couldn’t think of them. If the ice melted, if my dried heart was exposed, the sadness and horror of what I’d seen would break me. No, I had to stay cold to say alive.

  “What ’Teeca scared of?” Alice asked.

  I ground my teeth together to stop the shivering from my fever, the ache in my bones, to cling to the ice inside. “I’m dying, Alice. I need a special kind of medicine called antibiotics.”

  Alice nodded. “No, no medicine. Dizzymona make you become Gamma. Then you get the heal. See.” She lifted a Kevlar vest stitched into her patchwork clothes. I saw a gray strip of elastic which must have been her brassiere strap. Couldn’t imagine what they made their underwear out of. Her skin, however hairy, was whole and only a few pink scabs were left from the lashing Jolie had given her.

  “All healed. You get the heal, too, when you become Gamma.”

  “I don’t want to become a Gamma,” I said, dizzy, getting tired again. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s for the best. I become a Gamma, I heal, and I get to June Mai Angel.”