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This book is available at www.roguephoenixpress.com
Peacebreakers
Mindy MacKay
Excerpt Heat Level: Violence
Book Heat Level: 2
Buy at:
www.roguephoenixpress.com
The cat’s tail dangled from
a nail on the wall in the middle of the school cafeteria, looking like a great
hairy worm, while two teenage girls painted a message next to it in the
animal’s blood: Remember 1860. It was
five in the morning, hours before school started. The cat had belonged to the
principal. And when the first bell sounded to ring in the day, the girls would
be up to their scrawny necks in trouble.
"Remind me again, why
are we doing this, Chamika?" asked the taller of the two miscreants, a blonde
who finger-painted the letters of graffiti with her left hand; her right one
wrapped in bandages. "Not that I’m not having the time of my life playing
with dead animals, but do we really
need to get ourselves kicked out of another school?"
The other girl, the one
wearing too much color with her hair dyed too many shades of black, let out an
irritated sigh at her friend’s sarcasm. "It doesn’t matter how many
schools boot us out, Kiera. That’s insignificant when you consider the grand
scope of things."
"And what, dare I ask,
is this grand scope?"
Chamika tapped on the wall
with a manicured fingertip. "The Purge of 1860. It’s what got the ball
rolling and started the ongoing war between mutants and humans. It’s the reason
we’ve got to teach mutant-haters like our principal a lesson every now and
again."
Kiera wiped her bloody hand
on her jeans, cringing as she did so. She didn’t object to most forms of
cruelty, but the amputation of a creature’s tail unnerved her, perhaps because
she had one herself when she turned into a wolf every month. "Why the cat,
though?" she asked. "Why its tail?"
Any fraction of a smile on
Chamika’s face disappeared. "Did you know," she began, her tone
suddenly stoic, "that almost all mutants used to have tails?"
~ * ~
The mutant tail was a long,
whiplike organ whose tip barely grazed the floor when relaxed. Its covering of
flesh was much like the skin on the rest of the body, though it grew
translucent at the tip so the tiny muscles and the last of the vertebrae were
visible. It was a sensitive organ, containing a number of large and vital blood
vessels, and there was once a time when almost ninety-nine percent of mutants
had one sticking out of their skirt or trousers.
In the eyes of humans, the
tail was seen as a sign of the Devil. And in 1860, a small faction of humans
took it upon themselves to purify their land by weeding out the demons living
among them.
The Purge first reared its
ugly head on a market day in Messina, Italy. Just as the stands were packing up
and closing down, a bellowing holler of "Hear ye, hear ye!" drew
everyone’s gaze to the center of the square. There, a group of men had five
small, naked, whip-tailed boys tied at the wrists and ankles. The leader of the
men announced to the populace the boys were about to be stripped of their evil.
At the end of his speech,
the man drew his sword and the little boys struggled in their bonds. They made
feeble attempts to free themselves with telekinesis but it was no use. A
full-grown man with a weapon was more than a match for a few mutant children
who couldn’t control their powers. With five slicing blows, the tails of the
five boys were severed, and the appendages flopped and writhed for a moment,
separate from their owners, before going limp.
The boys bled. A sea of red
spilled into the market, and the air boiled with the screaming of the poor,
agonized souls until all the blood was gone from their little bodies and they
lay quite still.
A twig-thin figure shoved
through the crowd, frantically shrugging past bystanders and protectively
clutching a trembling tail with both hands. The girl ran and ran until she came
to a little cottage whose door she threw open and slammed behind her. Once she
was safely inside, she collapsed on all fours and sobbed.
"Amelia! What happened?"
her mother gasped, enveloping her in a tight embrace.
"They killed
Gino," the girl cried out between heaves of grief. "They killed my
brother; they chopped off his tail and murdered him! They said we’re the
Devil’s children!" Her outburst sent objects flying across the room and
falling off shelves.
Her mother was in too much
shock to speak.
"What could p-possess
anyone to d-do such a h-h-horrible thing like that?" sobbed Amelia.
Soap Box in My Mind says:
"I really enjoyed this book. It was a surprisingly good storyline written
by a 17 year old."
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