Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4)

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  I stood there alone for a minute, taking in the barbaric spectacle around me.

  I was in the ruins of a city, surrounded by screaming monsters, no hope for escape, and I just had to grin. Good. Give me the bad odds and then take a step back. ’Cause things were about to get interesting.

  “Hey, all you hogs!” I shouted it loud. The Wren part of me had taken over.

  All them hogs shushed. They were prolly shocked that one of their prisoners wanted to address the crowd.

  “I’m Cavatica Weller, and I wanna talk to Dizzymona. I figure y’all are ugly, but I’m betting your queen is the ugliest skank from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs.”

  Wasn’t the right thing to say, but I wasn’t thinking. My care button had busted broke. Besides, I had both Alice and Jolie next to me, and I figured they could stop the worst of them from coming for me.

  At least I had everyone’s attention now.

  There was a tremendous caterwaul that shook the avenue of buildings, that shook the cathedral of stone above me, that seemed to smoke the very air in outrage.

  Dozens of hogs rushed forward. Alice and Jolie grabbed the first few and threw them down, cracking bones. The megs around me let out cries of fear and several started to weep.

  But I stood up straight and yelled as loud as I could, “I can stop you all from going coco!”

  Jolie had been smashed in the face and was bleeding from an eye, but I watched the flesh heal right there, heal enough for me to see her glare at me. “No, me say. I brought you. My news!”

  “Sorry, Jolie, but Alice brought me. You just keep getting in the way.” I then turned, climbed on top of Alice’s shoulders and yelled out again. “That’s right. I’m on my way to the scientists who invented the gas in the first place. Some of you might want to be human again. I can make that happen. Some of you might wanna stay a Gamma, but if you do, you know you’ll go coco, but I can help with that as well. And in case you missed my name, I am Cavatica Ann Weller, and if you didn’t know it before, you know it now, you goddamn hogs!”

  From my perch, I had a good view of the crowd’s reaction. Some shrieked for my blood and gnashed their teeth. Others murmured, faces turned thoughtful—well, as thoughtful as a hog could be—and some looked actually hopeful about the news I brought.

  The Cathedral doors were thrown open, and a tall, lean Gamma came out, but I knew she wasn’t Dizzymona. No, she didn’t have the right bearing. Her voice carried well, though, and her face wasn’t so hairy, and she looked fairly normal. For being three meters tall that is.

  “Jolie, Alice, bring bad girl inside. Dizzymona want to hear more.”

  I flashed a smile down to LaTanya. “Guess I get an audience with the queen. Lucky jackerin’ me.”

  (iii)

  Dizzymona wasn’t her real name.

  In the entryway of the church was an altar with candles burning next to the picture of a thick-bodied Latina girl named Desdemona Rodriguez, Sergeant Major, decorated in the Sino. Her picture, her passport, her dog tags, hung there.

  We’d read Shakespeare’s Othello in school, and I knew about Desdemona. Othello killed her ’cause he thought she was cheating on him. He thought she was a real monster. He was a tragic kind of guy, but then, aren’t we all?

  I walked in on bare feet, limping a little, but my feet were doing better. I actually had skin and not pus-filled blisters, which was a nice change.

  It was really dark inside the church, so it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. The pews were gone. The stained glass had either been rescued or sold as salvage. Figures filled the empty space below the arches and crowded the pillars. At first it appeared that people, not hogs, filled the church, but that wasn’t the case.

  Every mannequin for a hundred kilometers around had been brought in and placed inside the church. All those plastic eyes gazed at me, speechless, wordless—hundreds of mannequins, all naked.

  The central aisle was clear, and it led up to the altar, which wasn’t an altar anymore, but the throne of Dizzymona.

  Alice and Jolie were behind me as I limped along toward where Dizzymona sat, another thistle throne.

  Around her were more mannequins, these ones dressed in robes from priests, from altar servers, in cardinal hats, and bishop gowns; all the plastic eyes gazed at the monstrously fat woman seated on a La-Z-Boy armchair while candles burned all around her. Dizzymona was fat, but for a Gamma, she was runty. She was barely taller than me. It was clear that she’d been squat as a human, but now she was just toady. Food orbited her like convenience store asteroids: donuts, Wonder Bread out of the package, open cans of Quincy Jim’s Beefy Qs, Baby Ruth candy bars. Her dark hair was long and caked with old milkshake, maybe, or some kind of milk product. I could smell the curdle coming off her.

  All hail the queen of the hogs.

  When she talked, her fat lips flapped, and her piggy little eyes glimmered deep inside the lard of her face. “Beatrice says cure. You have cure.”

  The tall one, Beatrice, nodded.

  Everyone, the creepy mannequins and the four hogs, waited for me to talk.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m Cavatica Weller. My sisters and I took cattle to Wendover, but along the way we found a boy who told us about the Gulo Gamma. That’s the gas you’ve been using to turn your megs into Gammas. He said the ARK could cure you.” I inhaled deep and really started to lie. “This boy gave the cure to me. I memorized the formula. I need to get it to the ARK clinic in Hays, Kansas, but once I get the serum I can bring it back to you all.”

  “Tell me cure,” Dizzymona said gruffly.

  I knew exactly what to say. “One-part hydrogen, one-part sodium chloride, and two-parts oxygen.” Which of course was saltwater. To them, I figured it would sound all science-y and legit.

  No one said anything, so I added, for good measure, “Only the ARK has the ability to brew that up in the right way.” Or I could’ve, with a salt shaker and a puddle.

  Dizzymona frowned at me, glanced away, glanced back, and did more frowning followed by a series of grunts.

  I kept my eyes welded to her. I could feel the pain in my feet coming, the pain of all my loss, and I knew I was due for another dose of Skye6, and the idea of it made me dizzy. But still—still—I didn’t look away.

  “I don’t believe you,” the queen of hogs said with a grunt.

  Chapter Twelve

  No more bottles of beer on the wall,

  No more bottles of beer.

  Go to the store and buy some more

  Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.

  —Anonymous Folk Song from the mid-twentieth century

  (i)

  ON MY FIRST TRIP THROUGH Denver on the I-70, back when I had a family and three thousand head of cattle to move, I’d played Fast Food Restaurant Bingo to pass the time. I’d had a scorecard in my mind, and I ticked off boxes as I found different flavors of restaurant now gone derelict.

  Across the street from the cathedral was another restaurant I could’ve checked off my list. It was a Dairy Queen, and that’s where they stuffed us, all fifty, shoved inside.

  We took turns sitting down, it was so packed. I found a place near the back door, now bare concrete, but I could see the outlines of where the sink had been. The water pipes had all been removed, and now the concrete was dotted with pitch-black holes that looked like unseeing eyes.

  I crouched until I could wriggle around to get enough room on the floor for my butt. Had to push back feet and legs, but I managed to clear a space. Barefoot, my feet were hurting me again, so I wanted to sit and let them rest.

  A girl glared at me ’cause of the smell. Another woman gave me a nasty look ’cause she thought I should be standing with everyone else.

  A few of the other women tried to talk to me, but I shined them on with one-word answers. It’s easy to push people away when you answer every question with a yes, a no, or a shrug.

  That was what I did while I tried to come up with a plan. I didn’t care about any of t
hem. I still had Skye6 in my veins and the chalkdrive around my neck. Nothing else mattered.

  But I knew I wasn’t going to escape from the DQ. The doors were chained shut, and we had monster guards standing outside, snuffling, hollering, getting in fights, and generally being mean.

  My only real hope was Alice, but then she’d turned sullen again after Dizzymona ignored me. She slammed EMAT on my skin and then took off with the Vail Recreation District bag to parts unknown. I couldn’t imagine what kind of nightmare barracks they had or if they slept out in the cold. Jolie had made it clear that Alice was still assigned to her unit and that my sister better behave.

  Alice had grunted and snapped a thick-handed salute. It had looked sardonic to me.

  Every so often the front doors would open, a woman would be led out, and then the doors would slam shut. When it got dark, the hogs gave us homemade candles to burn. The tallow hissed and sputtered, giving off a smoky, foul light.

  We were hungry. We were thirsty. The women around me were scared and talked about what it might be like getting the gas, but I sat, my legs to my chest, as the women slowly thinned out until I could stick my hurting feet out in front of me.

  One by one by one the hogs took women, and those women never came back.

  I’d been smart to get a place in the back ’cause the hogs would grab whoever was closest and lead them away to whatever fate had in store for them. Alice had mentioned it was dark when she was gassed, and I figured they prolly took the women to the basement of the church where the canisters of Gulo Gamma lay. I wasn’t thinking Dizzymona was doing the gassing, not with her sitting on her throne surrounded by junk food and wrappers and stinking up the place. No, I figured it was prolly Beatrice and other hogs hand-chosen for the initiation.

  When Wren had been hit with the Gulo Delta, she’d started healing right away. She had started to change, get bigger, but not until months later. However, the Gulo Delta had been a syringe and the Gulo Gamma a gas. Different formula, and hopefully, God willing, the Gulo Delta was more stable.

  After a couple of hours, all the women were sitting on the floor. It was getting colder—less women in the Dairy Queen meant less body heat. As more and more women were taken, my toes started to ache from the cold, but my grimy wool socks and Eryn Lopez’s boots were with Alice.

  LaTanya sat next to me, and, thank God, she didn’t try to talk to me. Until she did. “Do you really have a cure for them?” LaTanya asked. “Do you think there’s a cure?”

  Others had asked, and I’d shrugged.

  With LaTanya, I suddenly felt charitable. This poor woman was about to be led off into the night and gassed. I might as well chat with her; after all, it was the Christian thing to do. My Catholicism, though, was threadbare and ripped and torn, so I didn’t have much left of the mantle of Christ to guide me.

  “I don’t know anything for sure,” I said honestly. “I do have knowledge of ARK research, and that’s where the gas first came from, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had something to help. I don’t have it personally. But from what I understand, once you become a Gamma, it’s irreversible.”

  LaTanya reached out for my hand. She did it unconsciously. So full of fear, she acted on instinct.

  I took her hand.

  She gazed into my eyes. “You’ll come back to heal me, won’t you? Once they turn me, you’ll help me, right?”

  I had to look away. I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t lie, right to her face. “LaTanya, I’ll be a hog along with you. I don’t have an escape plan. And I don’t even know if there is a cure.”

  “But you’re a Weller,” she whispered. “I’ve talked to these women about you. You, your sisters, your mother ... you’re legends. Legends don’t just die.”

  She sounded so young, so full of hope, that it would’ve been a form of murder to disagree. I closed my eyes and wished she would just shut the hell up. She’d told herself a story, like Rachel had done, and I was the hero who could fix the world.

  Her hope hurt me.

  And yet she wouldn’t stop telling me her tale of hope. “You’ll get away, Cavatica. You’ll get away, and you’ll find a cure, and you’ll tell the U.S. about what’s happening in the Juniper, and they’ll come to get us, to heal us. You’ll save us. I know it.”

  The door opened, and a woman near us was dragged off, weeping, pleading, out into the cold, into the darkness. The door slammed shut and we heard the chains rattle as the door was locked once more.

  Saving these women wasn’t a part of my imperatives. I needed to get the chalkdrive to June Mai Angel in Burlington so she could tell the world about the cure to the Sterility Epidemic. That was my one imperative. I couldn’t help this poor woman or any of the women being turned into monsters.

  But what if ...?

  What if the ARK could help them, through gene therapy or whatever?

  But the ARK wouldn’t care about them, and the U.S. wouldn’t either. The Juniper was their penal colony, where they sent their broken soldiers, their defective people, their criminals, and anyone else who didn’t fit into the New Morality’s polite society back in the World.

  The door opened. Another woman taken.

  They were taking them faster, more and more. I looked at my Moto Moto watch. It was creeping into early morning, 2:15 am, and I wanted to be sleeping, but I couldn’t. Not with the crying women, not with the shouts of the hogs, not with the threat of imminent mutation in my life.

  Not with LaTanya pleading with me.

  “Tell my parents what happened, Cavatica,” she whispered. “Tell them I made it as far as the Eisenhower Tunnel before the Gammas grabbed me. I told as many people in the Juniper as I could about the good news.”

  She wasn’t a tourist, coming into the Juniper on some big adventure. She was a missionary telling the world about the good news of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and she’d gotten unlucky. An hour here, an hour there, if she hadn’t been where she’d been when the Gammas came through she might’ve gone through the Juniper just fine. But that hadn’t happened.

  “You come alone?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, my church group was with me. We brought supplies for the poor in the mountains, but the Gammas killed most of them. Some of my friends escaped west, but then the snow hit.”

  I’d heard of cycling groups coming into the Juniper, and in Cleveland, I’d even seen a book called Cycle the Juniper! I hadn’t given it a second glance, but I could only imagine what was inside: See the Old West come alive, lose some weight, and enjoy the ride!

  Stupid. Tragic. Sad. But Christians coming to save the poor and spread the Gospel? Stupider, more tragic, and sadder somehow.

  “Please, Cavatica.”

  Her grip on my hand turned sweaty.

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak my promise ’cause it might’ve been a lie if I had to use actual words. But I nodded. It was promise enough.

  “Really?” another voice asked, someone who had been eavesdropping. “Really, Ms. Weller. You’ll save us?”

  I had to nod at her as well, but yeah, I would. Didn’t know how, didn’t know if there was any hope at all, but why not pretend there was? Why not tell them a nice story before they were taken away?

  LaTanya bent her head over me and wept.

  Her tears trickled down my skin, and you know what? It was a baptism. Some of my own cynicism and coldness was washed away.

  What was left was hard and determined.

  What was left was my imperative.

  And another woman was taken away.

  Dang me, if that wasn’t when LaTanya started singing.

  (ii)

  Tears on her face, a smile on her lips, LaTanya didn’t sing anything that made any sense, not to me at least. I figured she’d sing a hymn if she sang a word, but instead she belted out, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

  The women in the room, fifteen of us, all turned on her, the young, the old, the thick, the thin, the scared, the whipped, the heartbroken,
we all turned.

  She sang about us, one being taken down, passed around, and then there were ninety-eight bottles of beer left on the wall. For a long second, I thought she had lost it, crying one minute, singing an unlikely song the next.

  Take one down, pass it around, ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.

  Then I got it, and I chuckled. The chuckle felt good, so I sniggered. That felt good, so I laughed out loud, laughed and started singing along with her.

  Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall.

  ’Cause that’s what was happening. There wasn’t ninety-six women in the derelict DQ, but fifty. And one by one, they were being taken down, taken through the door, and we were one less woman.

  More women joined in, and it was eighty-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Then seventy-three bottles of beer. Fifty-one. The door opened, and one of the remaining woman stepped forward to be taken away, smiling, hopeful. Was it ’cause I promised to get a cure and bring it back? Maybe. Did the song help? Definitely.

  The brave woman left, and we all belted out, fourteen bottles of beer on the wall, fourteen bottles of beer. Fourteen women left in the room.

  We’d forgotten where we left off, but it didn’t matter. LaTanya then asked a girl sitting next to her, “What’s your favorite song? I don’t think the hogs sing, so this might be our last chance.”

  “Don’t Stop Believin’,” she said.

  It was an old timey tune, but we all knew it. City boys and small-town girls, ha, back when there were cities full of boys.

  We sang it loud, and we sang it long, and we sang it twice for good measure.

  Then we moved on, sang some old tune about Rocky Raccoon, about a gunfighter and Gideon’s bible. And we sang Johnny Cash, and we sang LeAnna Wright. We sang Country Mac Sterling’s rendition of “America, the Beautiful,” with his brilliant lyrics, of course.