Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Alice backhanded me. I was sent sprawling in the yellow grass under the pines.

  Fury brought Alice to her feet. “She enemy! You friend enemy? You friend Devil Angel?”

  I lifted a hand. I tasted blood in my mouth. “Not friend. I’m her enemy, but I need her help ’cause I have a bigger enemy. Oh, Alice, you hurt me. I was good, and you hurt me.”

  Alice burst into tears and held me against her. Stifled, sweating, nauseated, I knew I was dying for sure.

  Again.

  Alice fell into a weepy rant. “Alice sorry. Bad Alice. If ’Teeca die, Alice won’t know what to do. You more than pet, you sister. You sister to Alice, and Alice so alone. Alice want command, but Gammas think she is soft. Alice can be soft, but she good soldier girl, too. Don’t matter to them. I kill Edith ’cause maybe Alice going coco, too. Alice hurt ’Teeca. Maybe Alice going coco, too.”

  I had to cut through her madness and make her understand, ’cause Gamma or not, coco or not, I had my imperative. Get the chalkdrive to June Mai Angel. “Alice, I need antibiotics, or I won’t live to see Dizzymona or become a Gamma.” I let my head fall backwards, and I was out. Out again.

  Pain like needles being buried in my arm woke me. But my head was fuzzed for some reason that I didn’t really care. I found I had the urge to giggle.

  Alice was back. I could smell her. Shocking, more and more I found her stench comforting, which was stupid, since she might be going coco, which meant she might accidentally kill me in a rage.

  No words. No thoughts. Just kill.

  That was why Dizzymona and her bunch of hogs needed fresh conscripts. The old ones went psycho and had to be put down.

  “Alice, what did you do to me?” I asked. My right forearm burned. I looked down and half the hair on my arms was gone. I snorted out a laugh.

  “Medicine,” Alice grunted. She was fiddling with something in huge blocky fingers. Then I recognized what she held. She had a roll of EMAT on a spindle. EMAT stood for Emergency Medical Absorption Tape, and I’d been dosed with it before. Petal, our doctor turned sniper turned drug addict turned dead, had introduced us to the next generation of medical supplies.

  I hoped this tape had antibiotics ’cause it definitely included some kind of narcotics.

  “Give me the spool,” I said. “You big ol’ Alice with your big ol’ fingers.”

  Alice handed me the spool. I checked the label on the side: Diacetylmorphinesextus—which was Skye6—and upsilonteixobactin—which was an antibiotic. Both a painkiller and an antibiotic on the same tape. Made me weepy until I got laughy.

  I easily pulled out a dose and ripped it at the perforation. Then I peeled off the backing and stuck it on my left arm where she’d pulled off the previous strip.

  My eyes half-closed as I felt the bliss of the drug. Prolly had too much in my system, but I was loving it like I loved Aunt Bea’s tortillas.

  The ice around my heart had spread to become an ice rink. I could feel again. I wasn’t numb, and I got to feel all the goodness in the world, and yeah, the ice was there, the death, the sorrow, all that evil hate I had for God, but my stick heart skated across it until it was like I was dancing inside. Soon enough, the dancing turned into flying.

  “Alice, where did you get the medicine?” I asked.

  “Alice smart. Do trade. ’Cause Alice so smart, should be put in command. Maybe someday. Maybe.”

  I was feeling so good flying through the world, I leaned into Alice. “Thanks, Mama,” I whispered.

  Alice petted my hair. “Not mama. Sister.”

  “All my sisters are dead,” I said, and yes, they were dead, but happiness, paradise on earth, was only a little bit of medical tape away.

  I understood why Petal had chased this. I understood every drug addict ever. They weren’t morally wrong, or sick, or stupid. They were brilliant. Goddamn geniuses. God is dead, but we have drugs, so let’s bury the jackerdan.

  In a more sober moment, I might have remembered what drugs eventually turned Petal into, or how Wren hadn’t been able to stay away from the bottle, but those thoughts felt so far away, best not to think them. They would ruin my skating and flying and all my happy.

  Alice wasn’t high. She cried. “Alice’s sissy dead, too. Now we have each other. We’re sisters. Not pet and not meg, but sisters.”

  “Yes, we are, Alice,” I said. And I hugged her, and she hugged me.

  Out of all the sisters I’d had, well, Alice turned out to be a good one—not perfect ’cause perfect sisters don’t exist.

  (ii)

  We moved east on I-70 toward Denver, toward Dizzymona and the mutation that awaited me. Sometimes Alice carried me on her shoulders, sometimes across her back, and sometimes she would swaddle me in a sling like I was a baby. I rested, slept, and just bounced along, hating it, liking it, annoyed, and then diving back into the comfort of the Skye6.

  I think I might have slept through a dark trip through Eisenhower Tunnel, but really, I was too doped to know or care. Alice traded more of her guns for as much EMAT as she could find. We ended up with a Ziploc bag full of it. Some were spools of the Skye6/antibiotic combo and some were just the synthesized morphine.

  I stayed high, but my fever didn’t. As my body fought the infection, I found I had an appetite again. I stopped puking and started eating as my feet slowly healed themselves. I had a passion for the Gamma’s sausages. I didn’t know what was in the sausages the hogs fried every night, but I ate them to bursting. And drank icy water from Clear Creek, running next to I-70.

  Jolie would come along every once in a while and look at my feet, sniff them, and then confirm I was healing.

  A week later, longer maybe—or shorter—I found I could limp along. Alice pulled my old socks and boots out of a big bag she had around her. Across the side was the flecked out, faded image of a hockey player and the words: Vail Recreation District.

  I had a love/hate relationship with Eryn Lopez’s cross-country ski boots, but after washing the socks, I slipped them on so I could walk next to Alice down the highway. We took up the very rear and crept slowly behind the shackled conscripts. Poor megs, they were all chained together, and the Gammas beat them if they slowed.

  I could go as slow as I liked. With Alice around, no one would touch me. Problem was, Alice didn’t mind smacking me, though she tried to be gentle about it since she didn’t want to kill me.

  Noon on that first day walking down the highway, I asked, “Why aren’t I with the megs now that I can walk?”

  Alice was getting more and more sullen, would snap at me, and I had to be careful. She was going coco, and the worst part? She knew it. Her words burst out, clipped by her crazy. “’Cause me got stripes, you. Killed Edith, you. Traded guns, you. Did it all, you. Jackerin’ sister. Real sissy go hog. Real sissy go coco. Jackerin’ hog go coco sissy.”

  In her fury, she dropped words, slavered down her face and into her beard, and struck her chest to make her meaty breasts bounce.

  I stopped walking, getting ready to run if I had to, away from Alice’s violence.

  She flung her hair around, slavered, and then came at me with her meat-hook fingers to rip me apart.

  I stepped back. “Alice. I’m your sister. Don’t go coco on me. Not yet.”

  Alice closed her eyes. “No. Alice loves ’Teeca. Alice won’t go coco. Alice won’t. For ’Teeca.”

  “Easy, Alice. Easy.”

  I went to her and held her hand in mine. My hand was baby-sized in comparison.

  I walked some more, was carried some more, and we passed by Silver Plume, Georgetown, Idaho Springs, which hadn’t been hit too hard by salvagers. We camped by the river, downtown next to a playground.

  The next day we went up Floyd Hill and into Genesee. In the distance lay Denver, a wide metropolitan area, mostly salvaged, and at one time owned by June Mai Angel. But now?

  Smoke drifted up from the downtown area, the skyscrapers partially salvaged. Even from a distance, the teeth of the buildings were cr
acked and jagged, like they’d tried to take a bite out of the moon and came away shattered.

  We were headed toward Denver. Most likely I’d become a Gamma there and then go coco. Hopefully, I could get the chalkdrive to June Mai Angel before I lost my wits completely.

  Afterwards? Didn’t matter a jackerin’ bit.

  If I wanted to stay human, and that was a pretty big if, Alice was my only way out, but Alice, poor Alice was losing it. Part of me felt sorry for her, and I found myself wanting to help her somehow. Another part of me didn’t care. I was so high. Another blissful strip of the Skye6 and I’d be back floating above the ice inside me.

  We camped there in Genesee, looking down at Denver that night, and the air was chill. From the hockey bag, she pulled out my X-Men comforter. One of the characters, Wolverine, stared up at me. My best friend Anju got me to a watch a few of those comic book movies, but I didn’t care much for him. I did know, however, that Wolverine could heal any wound, but he also went coco every now and again.

  Alice was grumbling and cursing and couldn’t look at me.

  She came back with the sizzling sausages I had grown to love like mother’s milk. I hoped they didn’t contain human flesh, but I wasn’t about to confirm my suspicions. I’d seen Gammas butcher deer and elk, so I knew they were mostly animal meat. The filler? I didn’t want to know.

  Alice also had some other goodies for me: flat bread cooked to a char, but doughy inside, and a plastic two-liter Coke bottle full of river water.

  We sat and ate, watching the eastern horizon go dark. I wasn’t going to talk first. If I said the wrong thing, Alice would slap me, and then she’d get even more morose, which would make her smack me again, and so the endless cycle of abuse went.

  After a while, such abuse becomes normal, which was a scary thing, ’cause being abused should never become a habit. Sad to say, though, it happens all the time.

  After slurping down her sausage, Alice gnawed on a bone she kept in her pocket, from either a cow or buffalo. She went at it like a dog, with her big maws full of block-like teeth. She eventually bit through the bone, then licked and sucked the marrow.

  We ate in silence—well, if you could call her smacking and lapping silence—until she spoke softly. “Dizzymona is in the church in Denver downtown. Dizzymona have the gas there. They took Sissy there. They took Sissy and made her smell it in the ritual. She get powerful, and she get the heal. Then she get bigger. Then she say, ‘Alice, you go now. You come and be Gamma.’ I said, ‘No, Sissy.’ But they made me. And it was dark, and Dizzymona gone coco, only no one talks about it. Then I become powerful and got the heal. And we go fight Devil Angel to get Burlington back and become Warlords of Denver. But Devil Angel evil and smart and armed, so well-armed, from her years gathering up the heavy guns. Hate Devil Angel. Hate her.”

  I reached out and touched Alice’s bulky shoulder. Alice relaxed into my touch. I thought about what she had said and realized that the Gulo Gamma was a gas, not a liquid, not like the Gulo Delta Micaiah had given Wren. If one was a gas and the other a liquid, would Wren have turned into a Gamma? That didn’t matter anymore. Death had turned her into nothing.

  Alice let out a sorrowful sigh. “Sissy went coco. Begged me to put her down. Which I did. Gotta get more megs to fight Devil Angel. Hate her. Called us hogs and sent us away. We Gamma, and we try to be proud, but Alice not proud. Alice don’t have a command. And Alice wanna be a Beta again. Betas don’t go coco. I miss Sissy. Alice love ’Teeca, but Alice miss real sissy.”

  She pressed a thumb into her right eye, jammed it in hard. I grabbed her arm. “No, it’s okay. Don’t.”

  “I going coco, ’Teeca. Will you put Alice down when time come? Will you send Alice to heaven when she go coco and don’t come back?”

  I leaned against her big, smelly body and put my arm around her, the poor wretched thing. She’d taken a whipping ’cause of me, and she’d fought to keep me as a pet so I wouldn’t have to walk with the megs. But then I was more than her pet; I was her surrogate sister. This monster who would hit me ’cause she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.

  Alice put down her bone, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the slate. She showed me the picture taped to the screen. It was a girl, smiling, blonde-haired, laughing in the sunshine. She looked like me, without a doubt. What if I’d had darker hair, or what if I hadn’t resembled her sister? Most likely, Alice wouldn’t have given me a second glance. Once again, like with Eryn Lopez, another dead girl had saved my life.

  Alice caressed the picture. “Sissy sign up for the Sino. I go, too. Always following after Sissy. We there for Battle of Hutongs. Everyone die but for us. We stay in China so long our family die in ’Braska. All die. We come to Juniper, and we know nothing ’bout farm or ranch. We go join June Mai. Sissy with Dizzymona, me with Mariposa Maria Hernandez, my CO.”

  I was impressed she could say that name so clearly, but then it sounded like her commanding officer meant a lot to her.

  Alice grimaced and blinked. “Then me with Dizzymona. I say that. I say Sissy gone coco.”

  She paused. I knew what was coming, I did, and it exhausted me.

  “Alice do it to Sissy to save her. Will ’Teeca do it for Alice?”

  I wanted to weep for her, for her killing her sister, but I was cold inside, and the drugs kept me floating above the ice.

  I knew what Alice expected me to say. So, I said it, mechanically, how Micaiah might have said it—like how Rachel Vixx might have said it before she got on her meds. ’Cause I wasn’t human anymore. I was like a Vixx, dead inside.

  “Yes, Alice, I will put you down when you go coco.”

  She nodded, swallowing noisily.

  I thought about putting one of her big revolvers up to the back of her head and pulling the trigger, and it made me feel something other than the numbness or the drug. It made me feel sick to my stomach.

  Maybe I wasn’t as dead inside as I thought. The dried stick in my chest still had a little green on it under all the ice. I surprised myself by wanting to live, to be free again, to avoid Dizzymona and her Gulo Gamma gas.

  “Alice,” I said in a whisper. “I don’t want to be a Gamma. I wanna go free and be an Alpha and not go coco. Will you help me?”

  Alice tensed, whirled, and backhanded me across my chest. I went rolling away. I knew she hadn’t used her full strength or she’d have killed me, but it was enough to knock the breath out of me.

  “No, ’Teeca. You live and be Gamma. You kill me like I killed my real sissy. You find someone else to kill you. So it goes in a circle.”

  She marched off. I pawed at the grass until I could breathe again.

  Then I reached for the Skye6 wings I used to fly above all the pain. I found those wings easily enough.

  Too easily.

  (iii)

  The next day, Red Rocks Amphitheater passed on our right as we walked on by. Dozens of hogs and at least fifty megs shuffled along in chains. My feet were better, still tender, but not so bad.

  And I didn’t care about them anymore. I didn’t much care about anything—not about the hogs, their megs, or what happened after, not about them, not about me. At one time in my life, I would’ve wanted to free the women, but now they didn’t matter at all. I certainly didn’t want to be a hero. I only needed a little Skye6 and everything would be all right ’cause I only had my one imperative: get the chalkdrive to Burlington and give it to June Mai Angel. By any means necessary.

  We walked up to a bow tie of freeway, where I-70 hit C-470, and there was Denver in the distance. I’d gone through it before, when it was empty, but now I could see bodies and vehicles moving up and down the roads, campfires, and their smoke. It was a city, but it was a city of monsters.

  Too many of the megs were dropping from exhaustion, so Jolie ordered us all to stop. I looked forward to the dinner of Gamma sausage, though I couldn’t tell that to Alice. She was in a mood, either gone coco or nearly there. I kept my mouth shut.

 
I thought about my violent new sister and what little of her past she’d shared with me. A strong Nebraska girl, she’d followed her sister to the Sino-American War, hit it just in time for the Battle of the Hutongs, the worst fighting with the most casualties the world had ever seen. Even if Alice’d been eighteen when she signed up, that put her in her mid-thirties, though she didn’t look human enough to really figure on an age.

  And then ten long years waiting to get home, only to be dumped into the Juniper. From there, I could piece it together. Dizzymona finds a way to create Gammas, so she doses a bunch of her buddies, and they think to unseat June Mai. June Mai Angel becomes the Devil Angel. Sure.

  It was all just Juniper drama and wouldn’t mean much in a few years. If I got the cure to the Sterility Epidemic out, that was important. That would change the world.

  Let all these monsters and outlaws fight it out for the sagebrush and ruins. I had my work to do.

  Alone, I sat on the side of the Green Mountain, now yellow with late autumn, looked up at the fluffy clouds in the sky. I made shapes out of them: bunnies, puppies, cars, and MG21 assault rifles. No, that one looked like an AZ3. That one was a Stanley. Another looked like Wren with her hands on her hips, sassing some skank in hell.

  “Go get ’em, sister,” I said to the sky-Wren. “Go shoot all those devils right between the eyes. Always. Always. Always. Get ’em right between the eyes.”

  The other hogs and conscripts were on the slope below me. Though I was alone, I knew they were watching me. If I ran, I wouldn’t be Alice’s pet anymore, I’d be fair game; either a pet or a meg. Like in Glenwood, I was owned. But as long as I was owned, I was safe.

  At sunset, Alice brought me a sausage and some burned tortillas in a filthy T-shirt. Full of hog germs, no doubt, but it was napkin enough. I took the food. Eating was fun and good and nice. It made me forget that the next day I’d meet Dizzymona, and I’d get the gas.

  Alice gobbled up her sausage, grabbed half of mine, and shoved it into her face, and then chewed and grunted and belched. She slurped water out of a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle. Then another big belch.