The Orphan Army (8 page)

“Bad?” asked Lizabeth. “What do you mean?”

“I 'member my grandmama tole me when I was little, before dem Bugs come down here. She said I don' do all my chores and don' say my prayers before bed, den da
rougarou
gon' come an' eat me all up. I believe her, too, 'cause everybody down here heard da
rougarou
howlin' on a dark night.”

“You're talking about the boogeyman,” said Shark.

“Da boogeyman? Him's a puppy compare to da
rougarou
. Da
rougarou
—him knows who you are. Da
rougarou
is all da time watchin'.” Barnaby laid a straight finger alongside his nose. “He smell if you been good or bad. You good, he maybe leave you alone, you. Maybe. You never can tell. You bad—well, he knows. You
very
bad, da
rougarou
come and bite you.”

“Bite?” echoed Lizabeth.

“He bite you,
cher
, and make you a
rougarou
just like him.”

“How . . . ?” she began, but Barnaby leaned close.

Barnaby's green eyes burned as bright as an alien lifelight. They shone with a sinister emerald fire. “'Cause the
rougarou
—him's a
werewolf.
”

Lizabeth's eyes were so big now that they seemed to bug out of her head. “A were—were—were—”

It was as far as she could get.

Milo was about to say something, to tell Barnaby to knock it off, when the team leader suddenly let out a big bray of laughter. “Look at you faces. You
believe
me, you. Don't tell me you don'.”

For a few seconds he was the only one laughing. Then the others joined in. Slowly, reluctantly. Lizabeth too, though hers sounded entirely false and forced. Milo and Shark exchanged a look. They were the only ones who didn't laugh.

“You're a total dipwad,” Milo said to Barnaby.

That only made the pod-leader laugh harder. He sauntered away from them, slapping his thighs as he laughed.

Shark leaned close to Milo but nodded toward Lizabeth and in a quiet voice said, “Guess who's going to be wetting the bed for, like, the next month.”

Still chucking, the Cajun walked back, waving to the pod to fall in behind him.

Shark and Milo lingered at the edge of the clearing, fuming and angry.

Under his breath Shark muttered, “Maybe when we take a bathroom break, he'll wipe his butt with poison ivy.”

Milo said nothing.

He hadn't liked Barnaby's story.

He'd been angry about the joke.

But he did not believe for one second that Barnaby's laughter was real. It sounded fake and forced to him. It sounded like a lie.

He saw little Lizabeth mouth the word “
rougarou
.” There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

Milo held out his hand until she took it. “Come on, Lizzie. Don't you believe any of that stuff. You know Barnaby. He's just messing with you.”

She gave him a smile, but from the look in her eye, Milo knew that she didn't believe it was a joke any more than he did.

B
arnaby did not make them leave after all.

After warning everyone to stay well clear of the shrine, he gave orders for the pod to do what they came to do. Examine the debris and search for anything useful.

“Wonder why he changed his mind,” Shark said quietly.

Milo shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Maybe he's just being annoying.”

While the pod unpacked their gear in preparation for examining the debris field, Barnaby stood to one side, his right hand resting on the butt of his stun gun, the other on the leather-wrapped handle of his knife. He was sweating, but he kept a smile on his face. It was the most false smile Milo had ever seen. He said as much to Shark.

“He's spooked,” agreed Shark. “Lot of that going around.”

Milo nodded. “Yeah.”

They began unpacking their gear. Milo dug his pack of microtools of out his jeans pocket, selected a little meter, and attached the leads to a piece of junk. The readout told him that the machine was Dissosterin. Milo used a couple of small tools to remove the cover and isolate undamaged circuits. Then he removed them one by one and put them in his pocket. Shark was doing a similar job, removing booster cells from a communicator. They worked quickly and with great efficiency, using techniques they worked every day to refine. Even at their age, this was something they—and nearly everyone in their pod—could do well. With the tools in their kits, they could dismantle everything from a drop-ship antigrav engine to a complex mechanical door lock.

While they worked, Milo noticed that no one even glanced in the direction of the broken pyramid.

They all feel it
, he thought.

He found a clear patch of ground and ran through the standard equipment check they were all required to do. He had his tape measure, portable Geiger counter, digital land surveyor, metallurgic analysis scanner, and a dozen other gizmos. Most of them were secondhand—damaged and refurbished, handed down from soldier-scouts to pod members.

A shadow fell across him, and he looked up to see Barnaby. The pod-leader was no longer smiling. He glanced around to make sure everyone was busy with their own gear checks, and then he squatted down next to Milo.

Before he could speak, Milo said, “That was a rotten thing to do to Lizabeth.”

Barnaby glanced at Lizabeth, shrugged. “Didn't mean no harm, me. You know dat.”

“Still.”

“
Mo chagren
,” said Barnaby. Then the pod-leader sighed and repeated it in English. “Sorry. I'll make it up to Tee-Lizzie, me. We're having ice cream wit' dinner. She can have my share, her. Tink dat'll do?”

“Better if you didn't do something like that again, man. Lizzie's got issues. Ever since . . . you know . . .”

Barnaby nodded and sighed again. A little more than a year ago, Lizabeth's parents went missing when one of their previous camps was attacked. Later, when they'd found a new, safer spot, a patrol had gone back to look for survivors. All that was ever found of Lizzie's parents was her mom's left shoe. It was torn and stained with blood. Lizabeth didn't get hysterical or anything. Instead she went into her own head and seemed to get a little lost there. It was shortly after that when she started seeing monsters. Most kids would have been treated harshly for telling lies—after all, the whole Earth Alliance survived on the strength of reliable intelligence. Bad or false intel got people killed. Nobody came down too harshly on Lizabeth except once or twice. Mostly people just smiled and nodded and pretended they believed her. Milo was pretty sure that Lizabeth wasn't lying. He thought she believed that she was seeing these things.

Shark thought so too. It scared him.

It made Milo sad and a little frightened. Not of her, but of the world. He had vivid dreams—nightmares, really—and sometimes things he dreamed about came true. He'd dreamed of his father disappearing the night before he went missing when his patrol tried to raid a hive ship. So, if Lizabeth said she was seeing monsters, maybe she was. Real ones or ones that were coming their way.

It was tough living like they did.

Fingers snapped in front of him, and he jerked his head back—and dragged his thoughts back to the moment.

“Talkin' to you's like talking to a fencepost sometimes, you know dat?” said Barnaby.

“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Milo.

“Look,” said the pod-leader, “about what you saw. You tellin' the trut', or is you messin'? I mean, maybe you playin' a joke on us?”

“No. You're the comedian around here,” said Milo.

“I'm being serious, me. You really see dat wolf?”

“I really did.”

“And dat girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Who had eyes just like da wolf?”

“Well . . . same color, but yeah.”

Barnaby chewed a crumb of skin off the corner of his thumb. “You told me everyting she said, you?”

“All I could remember,” lied Milo. In truth, he'd told Barnaby only parts of it. Much less than he'd told Shark.

“What she said,” persisted Barnaby, “about conjurin'? She said dat?”

“Yeah. You know what it means?”

Barnaby took a bright red cloth from his pocket and mopped the sweat on his face. “Dat's old stuff. Hoodoo and black magic.”

“Huh?”

“People used to believe dat names—people's true names—have power. If you knew someone's true name, you could stir it up like ingredients in a gumbo pot. Dat's how dey make a spell. Dat's how dem bad people control you. Dat's how wizards used to control demons.”

Milo narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Are you making this up?”

“Hand to God,” said Barnaby, no trace of a smile on his face. “All dat hoodoo magic was like dat. Dat's why I wear my dime.”

He pulled up his pant leg. There was a sturdy piece of string tied around Barnaby's ankle. It passed through a hole cut into an old dime. Milo had seen it a thousand times but always took it for a simple good luck charm. His scavenger eye noted that this was an old mercury dime, not one of the dimes made after 1965, which meant it was mostly silver. That precious metal was highly prized by the tech teams because it had a lot of uses in their weapons labs. Dimes made after 1965 were composites that had no silver at all. He didn't comment on it even though no one was allowed to have silver or gold. Maybe there was an extra rule for good luck charms.

“This protect me from da
gris-gris
,” said Barnaby. “Him keep the
rougarou
away.”

Milo could never quite get straight if
gris-gris
referred to the actual evil or the things used to protect against it. Barnaby seemed to use it both ways, but this didn't seem like the time to ask for clarification.

“I thought you were only joking about that,” said Milo.

Barnaby shrugged. “I'm not talkin' about dat right now, me. I'm talkin' about da wolf and da girl who ran with da wolf.”

“I don't know that she was even connected with the wolf. I just saw her around the same time. They weren't together.”

“But you saw dem at the same time, din' you?”

“No. I saw the wolf first, kind of. Just the eyes, I mean. Then I saw the girl. Then I saw the wolf.”

“Not together?”

Milo thought about it, shook his head. “No.”

Barnaby started to say something, but then looked away. Milo watched the muscles at the corners of his jaw clench and unclench over and over again.

“Barnaby?” Milo said tentatively.

“What?”

“What's going on? Do you know something about that girl?”

But the young Cajun shook his head and refused to say anything more. He got up and walked back to the pod, leaving Milo to wonder exactly what the heck was going on.

T
hey set about their work. The crash site was divided into quadrants, and the debris field was far enough from the banks of the bayou for the ground to be firm. No risk of deep mud. However, the squadrons of mosquitoes and biting flies had come up from the flat water and had descended on the pod. Shark, as always, seemed to be the centerpiece of the menu. Every time he swatted a mosquito, he smiled fiercely and said: “Take
that
back to the Swarm.”

The Earth insects were not connected in any way to the Dissosterin, but if it made Shark feel better, Milo didn't see any reason to constantly correct him. Over the last few months, some of the other people in camp had started saying the same thing. Shark was always a trendsetter when it came to stuff like that.

So, despite the aerial assault, they focused on the task at hand.

Scavenging sites like this was what the pod was trained for and what they were good at. Locating debris, identifying it, examining it, and salvaging anything that could help his mother's resistance team. The most important items were things like working servos, undamaged computer parts, and any kind of weapons system. Milo looked at the wreckage and thought that it would be a real stroke of luck if they found anything of even minor use.