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

of zinc since in modern times, the penny is only about two percent copper. Still, it’d be a good haul.

Past the Capital was a bookstore, and then? Hog central.

The buildings on both sides were open, and nightmare faces looked down. Hogs filled the rooftops, shooting off guns. Hogs on the streets, howling. Hogs with more teeth than their mouths could hold. Hogs with huge, knotted veiny arms and legs and howling with beards and breasts wagging. Hogs with every kind of hair style, every kind of tattoo and piercing, all howling and screaming and beating their mallet-hands together and tromping their elephantine feet.

I saw LaTanya, eyes wide with fear, and the other megs throwing me glances, and part of me knew what they were thinking. If anyone could get them out of this mess, it would be a Weller.

But I couldn’t think about them. They didn’t have anything to do with my imperative. Get the chalkdrive to Burlington. Kill me to stop me.

The drugs were just enough in my system to make it all fuzzy and not at all scary, but my mind was clear enough to take it all in. I was feeling pretty good.

Want to gas me? Sure! It would only make me stronger and heal me up. Do it. I’d worry about going coco later.

“Alice! Now!” Jolie’s voice knifed through the chaos and cacophony.

Alice lifted me out of the Walmart shopping cart and set me down in the street in front of the Cathedral. A space cleared in the crowd of hundreds of hogs as the other conscripts were brought forward and were forced to the pavement. In their chains they had no choice, they were pulled down all down the line. Only I stood above them—me, Alice, and Jolie.

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