The Orphan Army (21 page)

T
hat's what he told himself. He even said it aloud.

“I'm not a freaking hero. I'll get killed.”

It's what he'd tried to tell the Witch of the World.

It's what he believed.

What he didn't understand was why he was no longer hiding. Why he was running as fast as he could along the path behind the alien Huntsman and his pack.

Why on earth was he doing that?

H
e raced along, low and fast, making maximum use of cover. The pack was focused on the girl, and she was simply running for her life.

The girl could run. Milo was impressed. Even injured, she could run like the wind.

Evangelyne ran barefoot through the woods, pulling her dress up to her knees when she leaped a creek or jumped onto and over a falling log. She ran like she had been born to run.

The Stingers, though, ran faster.

They spread out and ranged far ahead and to either side, angling around in a classic trap pattern to cut her off. Milo and his friends did that in their games of swamp tag. He heard the girl cry out when she spotted the closing arms of the trap. She paused for a breathless moment, casting wildly around for a way out and finding every exit blocked by a monstrous form, while behind her the Huntsman closed in for the kill.

The kill.

Milo knew that this was what he was seeing.

This is the Huntsman, who will hang us all like trophies on his wall.

A hundred plans formed in his head, and he dismissed each one as being silly or suicidal. A pack of Stingers and the Huntsman against a girl with no weapons and a boy with only a pouch of throwing stones, a combat knife, and a . . .

The bag of grenades was heavy in his hand.

He licked his lips, afraid of the thought that had stuck in his head.

The only possible plan.

He jerked open the drawstring and removed one of the green globes. It was about the size of an apple and weighed only a little more. The skin was a drab olive and
S&F
was stenciled on the shell. There was a plastic cap on the top. Milo knew that all he had to do was twist the cap and throw.

It sounded simple enough, but it wasn't. Did he have to count to four like the soldiers did while practicing with regular fragmentation grenades? Was it better to twist and throw right away, like they did with the nonlethal flash-bangs? And what about the blast radius? Milo remembered a safety lecture about grenades. The standard M67-X fragmentation grenade could hurl crippling or lethal fragments up to fifty feet, though some soldiers said that they'd known shrapnel to fly as much as six hundred feet, depending on elevation and terrain.

Milo's longest pitch was about one hundred and fifty feet, and that was playing outfield. He was better at close, fast pitches. He could never hurl a grenade six hundred feet.

These calculations buzzed through his head in a microsecond.

The Stingers howled.

The girl screamed.

The Huntsman threw back his head and roared in triumph.

“Hey . . .
girl
!” Milo bellowed, trying to get her attention so she could see what he was about to do.

She didn't even glance in his direction.

“Girl!”

Nothing.

So he thought,
What the heck.

At the top of his voice, he yelled,
“EVANGELYNE!”

Her head whipped around, and she stared at him with wide-eyed shock.

“Duck!”

With that, Milo twisted the arming cap, cocked his arm, and threw. The grenade rose in a high, high arc toward the gap between two of the Stingers, farthest from the terrified girl. One of the Stingers saw it and whipped around. It even hissed at the small green metal apple.

The Huntsman saw it too. He bellowed out a command to his pack.

The girl did not hesitate. She ducked.

Just in time.

The grenade hit the side of the red ship, bounced high, and exploded.

Sound and fury.

Very well named.

The sound was like all of the thunder that would ever trouble the sky compressed into one gigantic
BOOOOOOOOM
.

The fury was the shock wave.

Even from a hundred and fifty feet away, the force picked Milo up and flung him into a stream of muddy water. The shock wave flattened bushes and tore apart small trees. It bent two of the red craft's landing struts, and with a squeal of protesting metal, the ship canted sideways and bowed to the ground.

As Milo splopped down into the mud, he saw pieces of one of the Stingers go flying in all directions. Another of the creatures reeled back, mortally wounded and screaming out in pain.

The other Stingers screamed too, their bodies trembling with agony, their senses totally overloaded by the effects of the grenade. Even the Huntsman was staggered, and he leaned sideways against a tree, hands pressed to his ears, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a prolonged scream.

Milo looked to see what had happened to the girl. He'd tried to throw the grenade as far from her as possible.

He looked.

And looked.

But the girl was gone.

In the midst of the sound and fury, she had escaped.

Milo grinned despite the ringing pain in his own head and the muddy water in his mouth and ears.

He'd done it.

He'd saved her.

The growl behind him, though, told him that being a hero was going to come at a cost.

More than he ever wanted to pay.

A shape blotted out the twilit sky. Milo's head swam with dizziness and shock as the Huntsman glared raw hatred. He tottered on the edge of unconsciousness and lingered only long enough to see inhuman hands reaching down toward him and a green light, like the burning eye of a dragon, flashing at him.

The Huntsman turned for a moment to look at the dead Stingers and then at his damaged ship. His chest seemed to swell with fury. He turned back to Milo as he cocked his fist back. Milo had one microsecond to try to avoid what he knew for sure would be a deathblow.

The fist filled his whole world.

There was a white shock.

There was incredible pain, worse than anything he had ever imagined. White hot. Going all the way through him.

And then darkness closed around Milo like jaws and swallowed him whole.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

I always wonder if I'm crazy.

I dream of things that sometimes happen.

I talk to a witch in my dreams.

I don't know if I'm normal or not. There's not enough kids left to decide what normal looks like.

Six Years from Next Tuesday . . .

“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”

—ANDRÉ GIDE

M
ilo dreamed that he was dead.

Or maybe he was dead.

He couldn't tell. He lay on the burned ground, his limbs cold and stiff, his breath stilled, his heart silent.

Only his mind remained.

But it was not connected to his body anymore. He seemed to float in the air above his corpse. He could see all of him and the ground around where he lay.

I dreamed this
, he thought. He remembered writing this in his dream diary.

From up there, he could see the burning swamp.

And he could see the manlike thing—the Huntsman, as Milo now thought of him—and his pack of Stingers.

Several of the Stingers were bleeding and injured. Not far away, a pair of them lay dead.

I did that
, thought Milo.
I killed two Stingers all by myself.

Shark would think that was so cool. Maybe really, really
, really
cool.

If Shark was alive.

He thought,
Mom would be so proud of me.

If Mom was alive.

If, in fact,
he
was alive.

From where he floated, Milo was pretty sure that, yes, he was dead.

So much for being a hero,
he thought.

He hoped the girl was still alive. That, at least, would make his death mean something.

Then he thought,
What am I?

A ghost?

No!

Milo didn't want to be a ghost. Small and invisible and powerless, wandering the ruined Earth forever. Unable to find his mother. Unable to hug her. To feel her kisses on his head and cheeks. Never again to share her warmth.

That made him so sad he wished he had eyes so he could cry.

It also made him furious, because he wanted to fight back against these monsters who had killed everyone he knew.

Rage was the only heat he could feel, and it burned like a small sun in whatever ghostly body he possessed.

Below, the Huntsman bent low over Milo's body and poked at it with a clawed finger. The body rocked limply, the way a corpse will. The flesh was pale, the lips bloodless.

There was a strange sound. Deep, creaky, and nasty, and it took Milo a few moments to realize that the sound was coming from the alien Huntsman. He saw the creature's shoulders tremble.

He was laughing.

Laughing?

Laughing at a dead body on the ground.

At
his
dead body.

At him.

The heat in Milo flared hotter and hotter still. It pulsed and throbbed, and for a moment he imagined that his ghostly fists were solid enough to punch this monster. To batter him. To knock the laughter out of its hideous mouth.

With thought came action, and suddenly Milo felt himself moving. His spirit dropped from the empty air toward the Huntsman, driven by rage and grief and frustration. Milo could not see his own hands, but he imagined that he was clenching his fists and then he struck.

Or
thought
he struck.

There was no point of impact. There was no thud of knuckles on insect armor. No shock running up his arm from the force of the blow. No actual sensation of touch.

And yet . . .

And yet.

Something
happened.

Milo seemed to pass through the Huntsman.

No. Not through him.

Into
him.

It happened all at once, and it was instantly and completely bizarre.

A thousand strange and inexplicable images flashed through Milo's mind. They felt like memories, but they weren't his. He remembered touching things that he had never touched. The handle of a whip. The controls of a flying machine. The edge of a blade. The . . .

Milo's internal vocabulary failed him as the images became more exotic, and they overlapped with things his eyes had never seen but that his mind now “remembered.” It was as if he was suddenly thinking the Huntsman's thoughts. Or remembering his memories. It was like peeking into someone's diary. All of those secrets opened to his eyes.

The images came in waves, and Milo was sure that the first wave was not those of the Huntsman. Not really. They were borrowed by him in some way. These images were of the broken and barren wastelands of alien worlds. Devastated mountains of silver and gold. Burning volcanoes rising through the melting streets of crystal cities. Rivers running black with pollution and flowing down to oceans devoid of all life, even to the smallest bacteria. Moons strip-mined and blown apart, hanging like debris above dying worlds. Valleys filled with bones that could never be assembled into shapes Milo would recognize.

There were views from windows. A final assault on a green planet that loomed close as great ships hurtled toward it. The aching feel of a hunger that could never be satisfied as that world was devoured. Races of apelike creatures and others that looked like evolved otters were hunted down, enslaved, and then consumed. Milo saw vast deserts of skeletons. He saw the last desperate survivors as viewed through the crosshairs of targeting mechanisms and then the harsh glow of blue pulses of destructive force. And just when Milo thought no more harm could be done to this world, the Dissosterin aimed their biggest guns yet into the deepest valleys and into holes they'd dug. The pulse cannons hammered at the bedrock, cracked the crust, shattered the mantle, and split the planet open to expose the white-hot core of molten metal. As the world exploded, the incalculable energies released were sucked into the hyperdrive engines of the hive ships. Absorbed, stored, ready to power their fleet for the centuries-long flights across the stars. Toward new stars and new worlds.