The Orphan Army (10 page)

The real truth was that he was still freaked out by what had happened in the forest. He'd planned to tell his mom everything, but when he came in and found her packing, he hadn't. She would have enough to worry about. So would he.

That was half of it.

The other half was that he'd had a bad dream last night. A nightmare of fire and screams. In the dream, everyone in the camp—all of the soldiers, all the refugees, all the others kids—vanished behind huge walls of flame as the Dissosterin shocktroopers swept down from the sky. Grinders and bangers flew through the air, blowing apart the trucks and the Humvees and the last helicopter. And through the fire and smoke, something huge and terrifying came stalking. Even in the dream, Milo couldn't tell what it was. It had to be one of the Dissosterin, but it was too big, too strange-looking, and it was surrounded by other even more freakish shapes.

The dream went on and on until Milo snapped awake, shivering, soaked, his heart hammering like gunfire in his chest. He snatched up a pillow and jammed his face into it to keep from screaming.

You don't scream in the night. Not unless you wanted to get everyone killed. Sound carries at night.

There had been screams in the nightmare, though. Milo's. The other people in the camp.

And Mom.

He remembered that.

Milo remembered the sound of his mother screaming as that big, strange, awful dark shape dragged her away from him.

Now, sitting in her tent, watching her get ready to lead a mission, Milo felt haunted by the dream, but he didn't know what to do about it.

“I just don't think it's fair that you have to go all the time,” he said.

“Milo,” she said with strained patience, “how many times do we have to talk about this? This is my team. All of these people look to me. Not just to make decisions, but to lead them. Do you think it's fair for me to send Captain Allen and Sergeant Lu out and I stay here?”

“Not
all
the time, but you go out more than anyone.”

She nodded. “I know. And do you understand why?”

“Because it's your team,” he said. “I know, but—”

She looked at him. Her eyes had changed, too. In a way they were the hardest part about her. Dark, like polished black stones. And there seemed to be shadows there. Or, maybe ghosts. Ever since Dad went missing, her eyes seemed to be filled with those ghosts. It was worse when someone from another camp said they heard a rumor that someone had maybe spotted Dad. Mom got all excited and went looking, but she never found anything. Each time she came back, she was a little sadder and she looked a little older. Like the hunt for Dad was draining away something vital in her. Spirit or life force. Or something.

“Everyone has something they do really well, Milo,” she said. “Captain Allen is a very talented tracker, and he's good at figuring out the alien tech. Sergeant Lu is a dependable squad leader. Her people trust her. But they all look to me for something else.”

He could think of a lot of reasons the soldiers and everyone else in camp would follow Mom. She was smart, strong, and scary good in a fight. So what else was there?

“What else?” he asked.

“My track record.”

“Huh?”

“When I lead a team,” she said, “people usually come back.” For a moment her dark eyes were hard as stone, and then they glistened with wetness. Mom turned quickly away and began shoving loaded magazines roughly into her canvas rucksack. She cleared her throat, then echoed one word. “Usually.”

Milo felt that word like a punch.

He knew it meant Dad.

Dad.

Gone for three years now.

Milo dreamed about him every night, though it was getting harder and harder to remember exactly what he looked like. It crushed him to think that one day he might not remember his father at all. That would be truly awful.

A single lantern stood on the ammunition box they used as a nightstand, and it was turned down to a pale glow that was barely there. Outside the crickets pulsed like the heartbeat of the night. Milo sat on a cable spool that was turned on its side. They didn't have any real chairs or tables. Everything was boxes and bundles and old crates. Nothing was real. Nothing in the camp was being used the way it was meant to be used.

Except the weapons.

Like the gun Mom snugged into the shoulder holster and the rifle that stood by the tent door.

“Besides,” she said, almost as an afterthought, “this isn't a combat mission.”

“Then what is it?”

She pursed her lips, clearly debating whether to tell him. Milo put on his most innocent and attentive expression, the one that assured anyone who saw it that he was trustworthy beyond reproach. He even gave it a bit of the big puppy eyes that usually worked well on his mother.

It worked this time, too.

“There's been some unusual activity along the bayou,” she said at length. “Reports of shocktroopers down around the Atchafalaya River.”

“What? But you said that there wouldn't be any fighting—”

“
Dead
shocktroopers,” interrupted his mom. “Scouts found two dead 'troopers and a lot of wrecked equipment.”

Milo gasped. “Dead?”

The shocktroopers wore a kind of body armor that was impervious to most kinds of bullets. It was tougher than Kevlar. And the 'troopers carried enough guns so they could walk on two legs and fire four guns at once. In a one-on-one fight, a shocktrooper had no equal on planet Earth. Only combined firepower or high explosives could take them down.

“Who killed them?”

“That's one of the things we want to find out. The scouts said they were pretty badly mangled and crushed. Clawed apart.”

“‘Clawed'?” echoed Milo.

She shook her head. “We don't know what that means, unless it's a bad description of injuries sustained in a crash, but there's no report of a downed ship. And it's too far away to have been the one your pod scavenged today.”

“Do you think, um, a
wolf
could have done that to the 'troopers?”

“A wolf?” she grunted, surprised. “Even if there were wolves in Louisiana, I doubt even a pack of them could take down a pair of shocktroopers. It's more likely a rogue resistance group. We're finding people all the time. If so, we'll see if we can bring them into the Alliance.”

Milo understood that. There were lots of rogue groups, mostly made up of families, packs of hunters, and others who had managed to survive on their own since the invasion. The Earth Alliance did a good job of working with them, swapping information for supplies and tactical support. Half the people in this camp were originally rogues. Like Barnaby and his brothers.

“What are they like?” Milo asked on impulse. “The Bugs, I mean?”

Mom was feeding cartridges into a spare magazine for her pistol and she paused. “You know what they're like, Milo.”

“Not really. I mean, okay, I've seen a lot of pictures. I know some of them look like grasshoppers or locusts; some look like praying mantises. I know. I get that. But what are they
like
. You've been up close. How insecty are they? They can't be exactly like bugs or they couldn't build spaceships. Do they talk? Do they have families?”

Her face was wooden as she finished thumbing the last rounds into the magazine.

“They're monsters,” she said. “That's all they are, and that's all you need to know.”

“But—”

“The Bugs have no soul, no heart, no pity. They're
exactly
like locusts. They swarm and consume and destroy and they take everything.” Her voice was filled with more hurt and bitterness than Milo had ever heard. Mom wore a small silver locket around her neck that held a picture of Dad. As she spoke, her fingers absently touched the locket. “That's who and what they are. Takers. They give nothing back except pain and suffering and leave nothing behind except waste and destruction.”

Her words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, unintentionally harsh, filled with pain and old memories.

“Did you go onto the hive ship to try to find Dad?” he asked.

He didn't think she'd answer. She closed her eyes for a moment as she slipped the loaded magazine into its slot on her belt.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Milo didn't ask the follow-up question because the answer was obvious. Dad had never come back.

“No more questions.” Abruptly, his mother bent and kissed him. Once on each cheek and once on the forehead. The way she always did when she was about to leave. “Mind the teachers, you hear me? And don't forget to do your chores while I'm away. I'll check when I get back.”

“When
will
you be back?”

“I'm . . . not sure. Two days? Three at the outside.”

It was a long time. He tried hard not to let the alarm show on his face.

Mom straightened and reached for the tent flap.

“Mom . . . ?”

She paused, the canvas flap clutched in one small, tanned fist. “Yes?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him.

He wanted to say,
Come back to me.

He wanted to say,
Don't get hurt. Don't get killed.

What he said was, “I love you, Mom.”

Her shoulders—always rigid and strong—slumped for just a moment.

Or maybe she was just taking a breath.

Milo couldn't tell.

She looked at him for a long, silent moment.

“I will always love you, Milo,” she said and then gave him a small, rare little smile. “You know that, right?”

“I know.”

She brushed a few strands of his fine brown hair from his eyes. “Be good. Be smart. Be safe.”

It's what she always said.

Then she went out.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

I wonder where Dad is.

Is he alive?

Some of the soldiers say that the Bugs have been “collecting” people for years.

Collecting.

For what? What's that even mean?

In some of my dreams, I see Dad in a collection, like the bug collections you see in museums. Sometimes he's in a big glass jar and there's not enough air to breathe.

Sometimes it's worse. Sometimes he's on a big board. Pinned there.

Those are bad dreams.

I hate those dreams.

N
ight fell quickly and completely.

Milo stood looking out through the tent flap at the blossoming darkness. Hating it. Wishing the days would last longer.

Milo could still remember things like streetlights and how they pushed back the darkness with glowing walls of soft yellow and orange. He could remember living in a house that had running water, a flush toilet, electricity, a fridge filled with cold food, a yard littered with toys, a street lined with cars in pretty colors. He could remember watching cartoons and funny cat videos on YouTube with his older cousins—Joelle and Rob. He could remember kindergarten and even day care before that. He could still remember all of it. New books, warm beds with fluffy pillows, going to the movies, playdates, and birthday parties.

Those kinds of memories had stopped when he was six, but he remembered all of it because that was how life should have continued to be. His best memories were part of that time.

Joelle and Rob were gone, of course. Their neighborhood was a hole in the ground gouged by the massive pulse cannons on the hive ships. The edge of that smoking hole was only three blocks from where Milo used to live. Every time he thought about how random it was that they were gone just like that and he survived, he got sick to his stomach.

One minute they were there; the next the world had changed.

The Dissosterin Swarm had begun its conquest of planet Earth.

The five years since seemed like they belonged to someone else.

No, that was wrong. Maybe the truth, as much as he didn't want it to be the case, was that the first six years were the things that belonged to a different person. The five years since the invasion were the real world. They were this world.
His
world.

No streetlights anymore. The poles were still there, but the power grid was off. That was one of the first things the Dissosterins destroyed. Before the big hive ships descended from the starry night, swarms of smaller craft came down and attacked the power plants. Dissosterin shocktroopers took possession of every single nuclear power plant. The whole world went dark. Bang, just like that. His mom said that it was the most sophisticated strategic strike in history. From first shot to last, it took the aliens less than two hours to turn off all the lights.

From then on, everything changed. Without power, there was no Internet. Then the hive ships destroyed all of the communication satellites and major cell phone relay stations.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Only places that had their own generators, or that worked off solar or wind power, stayed operational. For a while.