Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for teens .txt) 📗

“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