The Orphan Army (17 page)

There were no paw prints, but there was a line of the same round indentations.

After a few seconds, Lizabeth said, “Do you believe in monsters, Milo?”

He didn't look at her. He couldn't. He cleared his throat. “You're not asking about the Bugs or Stingers, are you?”

“No. I mean
real
monsters. Like in stories.”

“I—” Milo began, but he honestly did not know where to go with the conversation.

Lizabeth smiled and nodded again. Then she took his hand and led him back toward camp.

T
uesday morning turned into Tuesday afternoon and began creeping its way toward Tuesday evening. So far Milo hadn't liked any of it.

His body hurt everywhere. He was sure his molecules were bruised. And as for his brain, Milo was convinced that either he was totally nuts or the world was.

Maybe both.

He sat with Shark on the tailgate of an old army truck. Shark looked like Milo felt. They both wore clean clothes, but they were still grubby and shell-shocked. The aftereffects of adrenaline made Milo jumpy, and the epinephrine kept Shark on the edge of snoozing.

The only comfort was that someone had sent a runner to notify his mom's patrol. With any luck, she'd be back by morning. Milo would have rather had his fingernails pulled out than admit it aloud, but he really needed a hug. Not just any hug. A Mom hug. Shark would probably get one too. From Mom and his aunt Jenny.

They each had plates of food on their laps, though neither of them had much of an appetite. Every time Milo tried to take a bite, the tines of the fork rattled against his teeth. His hands were shaking that bad.

Despite his reluctance to talk about it, Barnaby convinced Milo to give a full account of what happened. He did, but at first didn't mention the stone figure, but then Lizzie jumped in and ranted—quite loudly—about a boy made of rock. Milo flinched, expecting everyone to laugh at him, but they didn't. In fact, one of the officers, Lieutenant Jeter, floated a suggestion that everyone seemed to accept.

“Must have been some new tech,” he said. “Some kind of exoskeleton with hydraulics to give the wearer extra strength.”

“Do we even
have
that?” asked Shark.

“They were working on combat exoskels before the war. Maybe somebody built one.”

“What about the rocks and all?” asked Milo.

Jeter shrugged. “Camouflage. I mean, what else could it be, right?”

That had been the end of the conversation. Jeter sent scouts out to find whoever had the new tech. Milo, for all that this was a reasonable explanation, was pretty sure they weren't going to find any rogue soldiers in high-tech battle armor.

Lizabeth, who'd been there during that conversation, laughed at the idea and went back to her tent.

Now it was just Milo, Shark, and Killer on the tailgate. Above the camo netting, the sun was tumbling toward the western tree line, and twilight was beginning to paint interesting colors on the sky. Pale purples and vermillion with streaks of yellow. It was pretty, and Milo usually liked the lurid sunsets even though he knew that intensity of colors came from dust and ash hurled into the atmosphere by the Dissosterin mining rigs. The ones that tore great gaping holes in the earth to get at the rich veins of minerals.

The people of the sun . . . your people
, the Witch of the World had said in his dream,
hammered in the first cracks. Now the Swarm has come from behind the stars to kill what is already dying.

Remembering those words made him shudder. They felt a lot less like something from a dream and too much like a statement of fact.

“Well,” said Shark, whose face was a ghastly shade of gray-green, “that really sucked.”

He was so weak, he gave it only one “really.”

“Yeah,” said Milo softly. “Yeah, it did.”

Shark looked like a sick old man instead of an eleven-­year-old boy. He sipped the snot-tasting tea from his canteen, wincing as it went down.

“Really tastes that bad?” asked Milo.

“It's not that,” said Shark is a husky voice. “My throat's still closed. Hard to swallow, you know. And I feel like a balloon, which is just what I need—to look fatter.”

“You don't look fatter,” said Milo. “You look kind of . . . inflated.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Shark sourly.

“Could be worse.”

“How?”

Milo tried to make a joke, frowned at the middle distance, then shook his head. “I got nothing.”

They sat there, both of them totally wrung out from what happened.

“A Stinger, dude,” said Shark after a while.

“A Stinger,” agreed Milo. “Geez.”

They both shivered.

After a while, Milo said, “Look . . . about the other stuff. The wolf and all . . .”

“Yeah.”

Shark shook his head. “Am I crazy, or did she try to save us from the Stinger?”

“Seemed like it to me. Kept going after the Stinger.”

“I didn't get a great look at it, Milo, but I don't think it was a real wolf.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it's probably someone's dog. Maybe it looks like a wolf or it's part wolf. I don't know,” said Shark. “But, c'mon, dude. Wild animals don't just up and rescue kids from alien mutants.”

Milo said nothing.

A few minutes passed. The colors of the sunset became more intense, more bloody.

Shark said, “The exoskel tech?”

“What about it?”

“Do you believe that's what it was? That rock guy, I mean?”

Milo chewed his lip.

Shark nudged him. “Say something.”

“Okay,” said Milo. “I got to tell you some stuff, but you got to promise not to say I'm crazy.”

Shark ticked some items off on his fingers. “Wolf. Pyramid. Cold zone. Stomp marks all over a crash site. Stinger. Wolf again. And maybe new tech or maybe a man made out of rocks. Crazy? I don't know, man. How much crazier can today get?”

Milo almost laughed at that.

Then he told Shark everything.

This time he held nothing back. He told Shark every word of the strange conversations with Evangelyne Winter. Her obscure references to the orphans and the spirits of darkness. His dreams about the Witch of the World. Everything Lizabeth said about the round footprints where they'd had the fight with the Stinger. And what he really saw when the Stinger was killed.

It was the very first time Milo had ever totally opened up to anyone. The first time he'd ever mentioned the things he wrote in his dream diary. The whole story took a while. The sunset burned brighter and stranger. Shadows began to grow under the parked vehicles and beneath the reaching branches of the trees. The air around them seemed unnaturally still.

When Milo was done, the two boys sat there and didn't look at each other for a very long time.

Eventually, Shark said, “Wow.”

“I know.”

“Those round footprints were from the rock boy?”

“I . . . think so.”

Shark grunted. “Makes me wonder if that's what the scouts found.”

“What do you mean?”

“The patrol your mom and Aunt Jenny went out on. They found two shocktroopers who'd been clawed up and smashed flat, right? Who does that sound like? A wolf and a kid made out of rocks. If that's even possible.”

“You think I'm nuts, right?”

Shark shook his head slowly, though Milo didn't know if that meant his friend didn't think he was crazy, didn't believe him, or didn't know how to answer.

Milo never found out.

Killer suddenly jumped to his feet and stared at the sky. His fur stood up, stiff as a bristle brush along his spine. The unused forks on their plates began to rattle again. Then the plates themselves started to shake.

To tremble.

“What the heck is . . . ?” asked Shark, but his words trailed off.

They both heard it then.

A low, heavy rumble.

Milo felt his mouth instantly go dry.

He looked up through the gaps in the camouflage netting stretched from tree to tree over the camp. He could see the wispy clouds far above.

But as they watched, those clouds thickened and darkened. The white edges seemed to boil. The sun grew abruptly dimmer and then vanished behind a pall of darkness.

They were not storm clouds.

This was not thunder.

“Oh no . . . ,” he breathed.

He had never seen this in real life. Neither had Shark.

But in dreams . . .

In last night's dream.

They stared in slack-jawed horror as the clouds suddenly boiled away to reveal a dark patchwork of fused metal. It filled the whole sky. So huge. So ugly.

So close.

“God . . . ,” he heard Shark say in a tiny, faraway voice.

This was no dream.

It was a hive ship.

S
omeone yelled,
“They found us!”

That's when the screaming started.

And the gunfire.

Milo was trapped inside the moment, unable to determine if this was really happening or if he was dreaming. Was he still back where he'd found the Stinger? Was this another nightmare?

It had to be.

This was exactly what happened in his dreams. He'd written this down a hundred times. Even though the camp had been moved so often and was so well hidden under the camouflage canopy, the Dissosterins had found them.

That was always the fear. The Bugs never stopped looking. Never. They were as relentless as they were merciless. They hunted for EA camps to steal supplies, to end resistance, to take captives. To destroy.

Milo's heart sank.

The hive ship burst through the clouds. The swarms of hunter-killer machines. Soon the shocktroopers themselves would come flying over the trees, squads of them clinging to the sides of their drop-ships like wasps on a nest.

This was only a dream.

Except that it wasn't.

The sounds were different. Everything was more confused. Muddier, overlapping, deafening. There was the stink of smoke in the air, and he never remembered smells from his dreams. Goose bumps rose on his skin. His heart began racing.

Real.

This was real.

Oh my God. This is real!

Suddenly, Milo was in motion.

He flung his plate away and jumped off the tailgate. The ground seemed to ripple under him as the shock waves shook the camp. A hunter-killer drinker—a flying foot-long tick that could suck all the life out of a person—flew directly at him, and Milo swatted it out of the air. The impact numbed his hand. The drinker struck the fender of the truck and dropped to the dirt, the wings beating furiously to regain altitude. Milo stomped down on it. Once, twice, again and again until the metal shell split apart and the green lifelight burst into a cloud of glittering crystal dust. Fire and sparks shot upward from the machine.

The sky seemed to be filled with glowing green lights. There were more of the hunter-killers in the air. So many kinds. More of the drinkers as well as iron-toothed biters that were as big as bobcats and clouds of mechanized gnats whose tiny mouths carried drops of a neurotoxin that could paralyze a grown man. Poppers exploded in the air, blowing apart the camouflage netting, exposing the camp to the Swarm.

“Shark!” yelled Milo as he grabbed his friend's arm. “We got to go!”

He pulled Shark off the tailgate, but Shark was still so sick and weak that he stumbled two steps and dropped to his knees.

“Go!” gasped Shark. “Milo, run. Don't worry about me.”

“Oh,
shut up!
” Milo grunted as he jerked Shark to his feet again, wrapped his arm over his shoulders, and began to half carry him.

A grinder—nine feet long and driven by a frenzied high-speed engine—ripped across the camp, the chain-saw blades scything through poles that supported clotheslines and tents. It whipsawed in the air like a snake, and when it caught their movement, it changed direction and flew straight for them.