The Orphan Army (7 page)

“This is
really, really
freaky,” he said in a frightened whisper.

Shark repeated what Milo had done, stepping back and then forward. He stood chewing his lip for a moment, then started edging around the pyramid. Milo did the same, going in the opposite direction. They met on the far side.

“It's a circle,” gasped Shark.

“I know.”

“A perfect circle.”

Milo nodded.

“That's even freakier,” murmured Shark.

Milo nodded again, too creeped out to actually speak.

They stared at each other for a moment and then began backing away from the pyramid and didn't stop until they were in the warmth again. Milo shivered, and Shark rubbed at the skin on his forearms as if trying to wipe away spiderwebs. They stood together outside of the zone of cold and clammy air.

They heard a small sound and turned to see Killer standing ten feet behind them, his ears down, tail curled under his body, hair standing straight up, a low growl of fear and anger issuing from his throat.

“What's wrong, boy?” asked Shark.

The dog looked from him to the pyramid and back again and whined. Then he began backing away until he was out of the burned area. No amount of coaxing would get him to come any closer.

Shark and Milo exchanged a long look.

Then they immediately retreated all the way to the green path outside of the crash site and waited for the rest of the pod to arrive. They did not say a word the whole time.

However, as Milo stood there, he thought about what they were seeing—and feeling. The place felt wrong. Very wrong. The girl had said as much. That he didn't belong here. That it wasn't safe. And Milo had seemed to know that as she said it.

It made him wonder if there were places that could be
wrong
. Places that didn't want people there. Or didn't want certain people there. Places that didn't like people. Places that wanted to be left alone.

That's what it felt like here.

This place wanted to be left alone.

Milo knew it. The
place
knew it. And he was pretty sure that even Shark and Killer knew it.

The pyramid squatted there inside its coldness and dared him to come closer again.

Milo knew that he would not and could not.

He knew that he dared not.

B
arnaby found them a few minutes later, and as soon as he saw the crash site, he clapped Milo on the shoulder. Very hard.

Barnaby Guidry was a fifteen-year-old Cajun teenager assigned to train a pod of twelve younger kids in several useful skills. Woodcraft and orienteering were big, of course, because no one could risk living in cities anymore. But Barnaby, whose family were rogues before Mom brought them into the Earth Alliance camp, was a first-rate scavenger. Much better than almost all the adults in camp. A field trip with him might involve infiltrating and raiding a small town or a remote store that was abandoned and overgrown, searching for anything of value while avoiding Dissosterin traps and land mines. Another trip might be like the one they were on today: following up on a report of a downed ship.

Investigate, locate, identify, scavenge. That was the plan.

“Well, lookit that, boy. You done gone an' found it, you,” said Barnaby in his Cajun drawl. He was thin, tall, with green eyes and skin the color of coffee with a big splash of milk in it. His wiry black hair was wild and stood out in all directions as if Barnaby had touched a live electrical wire. He shook his head and grinned. “And Mr. Sharkey here was saying that
him
was going to win the prize today. Poor boy gonna cry, cry, cry.”

“Bite me,” muttered Shark.

The prize for finding a salvage site was first pick out of the salvage barrel. The barrel, which was under lock and key, contained items recovered by salvage teams but which had no value in terms of survival or combat. Books, old comics, toys—some of which still had most of their parts—board games, sports equipment. Like that.

Milo once got a novel that had no burned pages and wasn't water-stained. The book was
The Hobbit
, and it was mostly complete. Only the last four chapters were gone, which was okay. It was rare to find whole books anymore. Weather, mold, and war destroyed paper. Milo liked making up stories to fill in missing pages. However, rumor had it that there was a baseball glove in the barrel. A real one. He wanted that glove very much. Thinking about it had made him excited for this scavenging hunt, and it had spurred him into allowing gut instinct to lead him to the crash site while everyone else followed logic.

Now, though, he couldn't care less about the glove or anything else.

The pyramid, the wolf, the girl, and what had happened to him were all he could think about.

The things she'd said were so strange. He hadn't told Shark everything. Like the stuff about
his
kind wanting to kill
her
kind. He thought his friend would laugh at him. Milo knew for certain Barnaby would.

But it burned in his mind.

Barnaby cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a series of birdcalls that always sounded to Milo like someone strangling a turkey. Within a few moments, the other kids from the pod began emerging from different parts of the swampy forest. Some of them groaned when they saw that Milo had won the prize.

Lizabeth, who, at nine, was the youngest of their pod, came over, scooped up Killer, and stroked the nervous dog's fur.

“What's wrong with you, puppy boy?” she asked. She was tiny for her age, with lots of wavy strawberry-blond hair and those pale blue eyes. Not the same as either the strange girl or the wolf, though. Lizabeth wore baggy jeans and two layers of sweaters despite the heat. She was always cold, even on the hottest day.

Barnaby noticed Killer too. “What
is
wrong wit' him? Dog get himself spooked by a coon?”

The local raccoons were big, smart, and fierce. Even some of the bigger dogs in camp avoided them.

Milo didn't want to explain, but Shark pointed. “He got spooked by that.”

“Wha-a-at? Tee-dog been to a dozen crash sites and—”

“No,” corrected Shark as he clicked on his flashlight.
“That.”

Barnaby entered the burned area and stopped in front of the pyramid. He straightened, frowned, took a few steps back, then moved forward again. Then he rubbed at the beads of sweat on his forearm and frowned.

“Feel that?” asked Milo. “The temperature?”

The team leader glanced at him but didn't respond. He looked confused and concerned, and his hand rested on the curved handle of a lug wrench he carried when out in the woods. Barnaby called it a “slug ranch.”

Lizabeth began to enter the cold zone, but Killer started barking and squirming in her arms. Only when she stopped moving toward the pyramid did the dog ­settle down. Even then he whined and growled softly.

“What is it?” asked Lizabeth.

Barnaby said nothing for almost a minute. It was a long time, and Milo felt more and more uncomfortable as the seconds passed. Then Barnaby began backing away.

“Turn off da light, you,” he said, and Shark complied.

“What
is
that thing?” Lizabeth asked again. “It feels . . . It feels . . .”

They waited for her to finish.

“Feels what, Lizzie?” asked Milo.

Her eyes met his and fell away. “You'll just laugh.”

“No,” he replied, “pretty sure I won't be doing that.”

Lizabeth hugged Killer. “It feels sad. And . . . really
mad
.”

Nobody laughed.

Barnaby turned and studied the burned clearing and the surrounding woods. His green eyes were narrowed, and his face was without expression. He stopped when he was facing the pyramid again.

“You think the Dissosterin built that?” asked Shark.

“No. Dem cockroach din' make dis,” murmured Barnaby, his voice gone suddenly quiet. As Shark's and Milo's had before.

“It looks old,” said Milo.

Barnaby nodded. He licked his lips as he continued to study the woods. He didn't say what he was looking for. As he looked, though, Barnaby dug into his pocket and clutched something. Milo knew what it was. Like a few other Cajuns in the camp, Barnaby had a small deerskin pouch in his pocket filled with special herbs, stones, chicken bones, and other items that his grandmother had gathered for him as protections against the
gris-gris.
Against evil.

Milo didn't mock. He had his lucky black stone. As everyone always said, the world was pretty short on luck. You held on to any of it you could find.

“C'mon, man,” insisted Shark. “What is it? Is something else going on in these woods?”

“Dey's always something goin' on in dem woods, you,” Barnaby said without looking at him. “Always been dat way, goin' alla way back.”

“What kind of stuff?” asked Lizabeth, her blue eyes huge. The other kids had gathered around now, and they took turns looking at the crash site and then at the pyramid. One by one they clustered around Barnaby.

“When you is out here, you got to be real careful,” warned Barnaby. “Most of you ain't never been this far out.”

“Why?” asked one of the other kids. “Alligators?”

Barnaby snorted. “Dey's more than gators in dem woods, you.”

“Like what?” asked Lizabeth in a frightened whisper. “Stingers?”

“Dey's probably Stingers out dere too,” said Barnaby. “But dat ain't what I'm talkin' 'bout. Dey's stuff out here ain't never come down from the sky, no. Tings dat was already here. Stuff dat's been here a long time. Stuff dat live bag dare in the swamp.”

Lizabeth looked off toward the east, toward the part of the swamp forest beyond their scavenging patrols. Milo followed her gaze, and his imagination began playing tricks with him. Those vine-draped, mosquito-­infested swamplands were no different from where they stood, but at the moment they
looked
different. They felt different. They felt wrong.

Barnaby sucked his teeth as if deciding whether to say more; then he glanced at the pyramid again and nodded to himself. “Dis here's
rougarou
country. Don' you know dat?”

Lizabeth's blue eyes snapped back to stare at him, and now they were wider than ever. “What's a—a
rougarou
?”

“A
rougarou
?” said Barnaby quietly. “Why, dat's a big bad wolf,
cher
. Got long, pointy teet. He bite you whole.”

“Wolf?” gasped Shark. Before Milo could stop him, his friend blurted, “Milo just saw a wolf.”

Barnaby's head whipped around toward Milo. “What dat you say?”

“It's true,” insisted Shark. “Right here.”

The older teen grabbed a handful of Milo's shirt and pulled him close. “You tell me exactly what happen, you. Don't be lyin', no.”

Milo didn't want to. This was starting to really scare the daylights out of him as bad as what had happened earlier, but there was no way out of it. So he told them all what he'd told Shark.

When he was done, Barnaby looked deep into his eyes as if searching for a lie. Then he let go of Milo's shirt and stepped back. The Cajun teen's brown face had gone slack, and he gave his lips a nervous lick.

“Okay, okay . . . Whatever's goin' on, dis ain't our bid-ness, no,” he said slowly. Then he deliberately turned his back on the pyramid and faced the debris field. “We'll tag da spot and den we're out of here. And I don' want to hear no complainin', me.”

The others groaned in protest, but they all knew this was Barnaby's call. The pod-leader was responsible for more than the scavenge trip; it was his job to bring them all home safe.

The grumbling continued, though, because even though Milo had won the big prize for this hunt, there were other things they could win by finding good bits of salvage–extra food, fewer chores, bonus points in their sit-down school. But Barnaby wouldn't budge. He ordered four kids to tie orange markers to trees on the outside of the burn zone.

He didn't let anyone go into the crash site, and he did not step even an inch closer to the damaged pyramid.

While the team was buddy-checking their gear for the hike back, Milo, Shark, and Lizabeth cornered Barnaby. In a hushed tone, Milo said, “What's with you? What's going on? Why are we bugging out like this?”

“What you tink?” said Barnaby sourly.

“Is it because of the wolf?” asked Lizabeth.

“Maybe dat's right,
cher
.”

“Why?” asked Shark. “Is it rabid or something?”

“Or sometin',” was Barnaby's reply.

“C'mon, Barn,” Shark pressed. “What's wrong? You looked like you swallowed a hairy caterpillar as soon as Milo said he saw a wolf. How come? It's just a wolf. What's the big?”

Barnaby shook his head. “Dat's where you wrong, Mr. Sharkey, you. If Milo saw a wolf here.” He pointed to the pyramid. “
Here
. Den maybe it a
rougarou.
And a
rougarou
ain't no everyday kind of wolf, no.” When he was scared, the Cajun's accent got even thicker. “The
rougarou
—him's a big, bad wolf.”