The Orphan Army

To the memory of two great writers who, long ago, took the time to offer advice and encouragement to a thirteen-year-old aspiring writer:

Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson.

They were the mechanics of dreams, the architects of the impossible.

Happy journeys through the limitless forever.

And, as always, to Sara Jo.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

I had another dream about the witch last night.

The Witch of the World.

I still don't know what that means.

In the dream the Bugs were looking for something, and they were knocking down trees and breaking open mountains to find it.

We were all running from them.

The shocktroopers were dropping from the landing ships and firing their pulse rifles at us. They're taller than most people—seven feet or more. Like praying mantises. Worse than that. Huge and ugly, with long legs and two sets of arms. They jumped down to the ground, ready to kill. Some stood on two legs and fired four pulse guns; others ran on four legs, as fast as dogs, and dragged people down.

I saw Shark get hit. And Lizabeth and a few of the other kids.

My mom and dad were there too. Running from the Bugs.

I couldn't see Dad's face, though. I never see his face anymore in the dreams.

I wish I could.

The Witch of the World kept whispering to me, and I could hear her even though it was really loud with the explosions.

She does that. Whispers.

I never see her.

I only hear her voice in my head.

She said something really weird, too. After the Bugs attacked the camp and we were all running from the fires, she said that I needed to fight back.

I told her that was stupid. I'm a kid. I can't even win at grunt-and-grapple games in gym class.

She said that wasn't what she meant. She said that I needed to find a weapon.

I told her that I had a weapon. My slingshot.

She laughed at me. She said that's not what she meant.

She said, “A hero does not need those kinds of weapons. A hero
is
a weapon.”

I told her that I didn't want to be a hero. I couldn't be a hero. I'm just a kid.

She said, “Only a fool asks to be a hero. A real hero rises when all others fall. Whether he wants to or not.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, there was a big explosion and I woke up. For a while I couldn't tell if the explosion was in the dream or not.

I didn't get back to sleep.

Six Years from Next Monday . . .

“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”

—HELEN KELLER

M
ilo Silk wasn't afraid of the monsters under his bed.

He didn't have a bed for monsters to hide under.

Milo had a sleeping bag, and that was usually spread out on rocky ground up on Mount Driskill or on moist, buggy dirt in the swamplands along the Louisiana bayou. Sometimes he slept in a net hammock that dangled between a fuel truck and a tank with a crooked cannon.

Besides, all of the monsters were way above him in their spaceships.

I
t was a Tuesday when everything went bad.

Not that things weren't bad to begin with. At least that's what all of the adults always said. Big old bad world.

But every single one of them wanted things to be the way they were before bad became worse.

Milo and his friends learned about it in school. And school was a patch of ground or a fallen log or a muddy beach under a camouflaged canopy. In the bad
old
days, there were schools with desks and chairs. Now school was wherever the teacher said school was.

All because of the aliens.

All because of the Swarm that had come down like locusts from the stars.

They came in a fleet of hive ships, each one many miles long and made from a thousand kinds of scrap metal. The plates did not look bolted together but instead looked fused, or melted. Or grown. As if they had been chewed into metallic pulp and then spat out to be woven into a spaceship, the way a wasp builds a nest from chewed plant matter. Each vast machine even looked like an insect nest. They filled the skies and blotted out the sun. Impossibly old, still cold from their journey between the stars. Thoroughly ugly, completely alien and utterly dangerous.

The Dissosterin destroyed most of Earth's major cities in their first assault, and with every passing day, they were ruining more of the planet and wiping out more people. So, sure, things were already way over in the “bad” category. Horrible bad. Scary bad. But in a weird way Milo didn't really understand how bad it was. He knew that he didn't know. It was something that was happening to other people somewhere else. He never saw a burning city. He never saw a dead person.

He just heard about that sort of stuff. He once saw a massive hive ship in the far distance, hovering like a storm cloud over New Orleans. A few times he saw Bug drop-ships pass overhead, or the smaller hunter-killer machines buzzing at treetop level. Small robotic insects that came in a hundred frightening shapes. All of them deadly. But none of them were ever close enough for him to get a good look. Or for the Bugs to see him.

The ships he did see were all wrecks. Drop-ships and transports, a couple of the big mining ships that had been brought down by portable rocket launchers.

He saw them much closer in his dreams, though. Each night he dreamed of the hunter-killers coming in swarms.

He dreamed of the small, fast drop-ships deploying the Dissosterin shocktroopers. Many times he would come awake gasping and terrified from a dream to freeze there, clutching his thin blanket, listening for the sounds of war. Or he'd awake in the morning after a long, bad night and be afraid to open his eyes for fear of seeing the camp in smoking ruins and all his friends lying dead.

But those were only dreams. They weren't real.

In many ways, the whole war was so far away from him that it wasn't totally real.

Until that Tuesday.

T
his is the story of what happened on a very bad Tuesday.

A
nd what happened after.

T
he tree Milo hid behind was called devil's walkingstick. All thorns and spikes, but it offered good cover. There was a whole row of them growing wild along the muddy slope leading up from the bayou. Most of them were hidden in the mists that moved like armies of ghosts across the flat, still swamp waters.

Milo had his slingshot out, a sharp stone fitted into the leather pad. Eyes open, ears alert, breath almost still in his chest.