The Orphan Army (20 page)

No thanks.

He went up the bank and slipped back into the forest, hoping the Stingers would run into ol' Mr. Gator.

Then, after he'd run at least a mile and maybe two, Milo stopped to listen. He needed to know how much trouble he was still in.

Listening was something Barnaby taught. The bayou is always noisy, so you have to filter out the sounds that are always there and listen for those sounds that aren't. They practiced it on every hike. It was a major survival skill.

Milo stood very still, looked at nothing in particular, and listened.

He heard the birds who were all chattering in alarm at what was happening. He heard the normal Earth insects, who didn't know or care about what their alien counterparts were doing. He heard the rustle of a nutria on the stream banks.

Milo let all of those sounds fade out of his consciousness.

Beyond them, behind them, he heard the other sounds.

The low rumble of the alien craft. It was still up there, but he couldn't see it through the dense canopy of trees.

The engine sounds of the smaller hunter-killer crafts were so faint now that he wasn't sure he could actually hear them.

There was no gunfire now. No new explosions.

He did not strain to hear. Barnaby warned against that. If you tried too hard, you sometimes heard things the wrong way.

He wished his mom were there. Not just to hug him and take him somewhere safe. No, he wanted her there because she was the best fighter. She said it herself.

When I lead a team, people usually come back.

Could she have turned this around? Could she have fought off these monsters—the Stingers, the shocktroopers, the grinders and poppers and all of the other alien tech?

Where was she? Where were Mom and her team?

They said she'd be back by morning.

What would she find? Would it be a burned-out shell of a camp and blackened bones? Would she find survivors? Or would the Bugs be waiting for her?

For a wild moment, Milo very nearly turned to run back to the camp, wanting to intercept his mother, to warn her. To save her.

The world needs a hero.

“I'm not a hero,” he growled.

At the same time, he wished with all his might and will that he
was
the hero this world needed. A hero could save his mom.

A hero could stand up to that creature that came out of the fire.

A hero would have fought off the shocktroopers and . . .

And . . .

You are a dreamer, child of the sun, but it is time to wake up and make your stand.

Tears burned in Milo's eyes and rolled crooked through the dirty landscape of his cheeks.

He felt very small in a world that was far too big.

The woods were strangely quiet for almost a minute.

“Okay, Miss Witch,” he said softly, “if you've got something to say, now's the time.

The only voice in his head was his own.

“Great,” he said sourly. “Very helpful.”

He pawed away the tears and forced himself to keep going. There was a bolt-hole pretty close. Maybe a mile along the bayou. The question was whether he could he risk heading that way yet. The woods had been on fire over there.

There was something on the trail ahead. Milo paused, afraid that it was a body. But as he crept close to it, he saw that it was a soldier's gear bag, lying partly hidden by bushes that were withering and steaming from the heat. The canvas was scorched in places, and some of the contents had spilled across the path. There was a rifle with a bent barrel. A shotgun with a splintered stock. A handgun but no bullets. A military combat knife in a durable plastic sheath. A net bag of round metal globes that Milo recognized as S&F grenades. The letters stood for “sound and fury.” They were designed especially for combat with the shocktroopers. Milo had heard about them but had never seen them used. All he knew was that they were very dangerous, and Mom had given him a long lecture about never—
ever
—touching one.

The rest of the stuff in the bag was either melted or broken. He took the combat knife and began to move off, paused, thought better of it, and snatched up the bag of grenades.

He figured his mom would understand.

Milo headed into the gloom, keeping low, running lightly along the secret paths, using the skills he'd been taught. With every step, though, he felt pain deep in his chest. Not physical pain, but heartache. Shark and Barnaby and Lizabeth and little Killer. The others in the camp. His friends. His extended family made up of a couple hundred survivors. Tough, good-hearted, incredibly brave people. Soldiers and teachers, cooks and scouts, scientists and medics. Everyone doing their part to help the whole community survive. Everyone doing their part to help humanity survive.

Were they all gone now? Were they dead or captured?

If they were, what chance did he have? What
point
was there to fighting for survival if he was all alone now?

A humming sound made him turn, and he saw the red craft lift above the trees, its polished crimson paint glistening like fresh blood. It was the ship belonging to the alien Huntsman. All around its rim, the snouts of pulse cannons peered out, looking to do more harm.

He glared hatred up at the ship as it passed overhead and then dropped down to land beyond a line of cypress trees. Tears burned hot lines on his cheeks. Right then, if he had possessed the power, he'd have leaped up and torn that ship from the sky.

Right then he would have given his life to destroy it.

“Shark,” he said, putting his friend's name on the wind. It hurt to say it.

Then he heard two sounds that changed both the shape of his thoughts and the pattern of Milo Silk's destiny.

He heard the roar of a Stinger. Close. So horribly close.

And then he heard the high, shrill, terrified shriek of a young girl.

M
ilo tensed and raised his head to listen.

The scream had been close. Somewhere here in the forest. Was it Lizabeth?

No.

He thought it sounded a little older than that.

The Stingers howled. Then something else roared. It was weird, more like a man trying to roar like a Stinger. So strange.

The woods were too lush for him to see much, so he began creeping along the side of a shallow drop-off toward a spot where the plants were sparser. The scream seemed to have come from that way. Beyond the woods, he could see the red hulk of the Huntsman's ship standing on eight hydraulic steel legs like a big metal spider.

There was no movement for a few seconds. No sound.

Then . . .

The scream was so loud and close that he jumped and almost tumbled down the drop-off. He crouched down to catch his balance, and as he did so, he saw, between the stalks of wild sugarcane, a pair of feet running past.

Bare feet.

Girl feet.

Running fast.

A slim form whipped past, stirring the leaves, racing at full speed along the curving rim of the drop-off. The path angled around and down to the muddy banks of the bayou.

Milo parted the cane stalks and leaned out to see who it was.

And gasped.

He'd expected it to be one of the girls from camp.

It wasn't.

The slim figure that raced through the woods wore a dress of old linen, and her hair was the color of smoke. Her eyes were wild and filled with fear, but they were as pale and cold as moonlight on snow.

Evangelyne!
And even as he thought that and remembered that he knew the name only from a dream, he was absolutely certain it
was
her name.

Evangelyne Winter.

With a pack of Stingers chasing her.

She ran very fast, wasting no time, moving like she meant it. But even with that, Milo thought there was a hint of a limp in her running gait. Like someone who was hurt but was fighting through it, running like the pain didn't matter.

As she raced along, Milo saw with growing alarm that she was hurt. Her dress was streaked with red, and there were long half-healed cuts on her arms and face. Something bad had happened to her.

Milo ducked out of sight as fresh sounds came from the other end of the path.

The grunt and wheeze of big dogs.

Dogs who weren't dogs at all. Not anymore. Dogs that also clicked and clacked as their armor plates rattled with each loping step.

Milo clutched the bag of grenades to his chest and let himself slide down the bank, allowing the rich, fecund, muddy dirt to partially cover him. Camouflage for eye and nose and mud to mask thermal scans if there were any shocktroopers here.

On the ridge, a Stinger raced past.

Then another.

And another.

Four in all. Each of them as massive and hideous as the one that had chased him only hours ago. Just seeing them sent shivers through Milo's body.

Then something
else
moved past.

Huge, tall, manlike.

Milo instantly knew that this was the dark and sinister shape he'd seen through the wall of fire, though now he could see it clearly. In all its terrible majesty.

This is the monster that monsters fear.

That's what the Witch of the World said, and there had been panic in her voice.

Now he could see it clearly, and if he'd been scared before, he was suddenly nearly frozen with stark terror.

It walked on two legs, like a man. It had a man's torso and human arms, but that's where its connection to humanity ended. The body was wrapped in layer upon layer of chitinous plates, just like the Stingers. And, like those beasts, it had a set of pincer arms sprouting from its sides, just below the more human arms. The pincers snapped at the air as if practicing how to crush the limbs of the fleeing girl. There were plates and ridges along the human arms, too, and sticking out from each separate plate was a spike. Not metal—these were made of the same material as its insect armor. Dark and horrible. A green jewel burned like emerald fire on its chest.

Its face was the most horrible thing of all, though.

There was human flesh there, and maybe this whole thing had started out as a human, but then things were
done
to it. Plates of shell grew around it and over it, cutting into the skin, hiding most of it, replacing humanity with inhumanity, transforming man into monster. Antennae rose from the sides of its head, and the eyes were the multifaceted eyes of a blowfly.

But its mouth . . .

Milo swallowed to keep from throwing up.

The lips were stretched back to accommodate a huge pair of mandibles that snapped at the air as if tasting fresh meat.

Here was a monster a thousand times more terrifying even than the Stingers.

The creature's chest and hips were crisscrossed with equipment belts from which hung guns and other devices whose nature Milo could not even guess. In one armored fist, though, it held a whip made of leather studded with chunks of jagged metal. The thing raised its arm and flicked the whip at the slowest of the Stingers, leaving a two-inch gouge in its flank. The Stinger screamed and ran faster.

This creature—this alien-human hybrid of a Huntsman—­passed along the ridge without noticing Milo. He strode behind a howling pack of scorpion dogs, snarling at them in a language that could never have been spoken with a human tongue. The Huntsman and his pack raced on, and far down the slope the running girl was losing ground. She kept having to cut right or left to avoid the Stingers.

Milo realized that the Huntsman and his pack were herding the girl the way dogs do with cattle and sheep. With every forced turn, it brought the girl closer to the clearing where the red ship squatted on its eight legs.

Why?

Were they trying to kill her or . . . ?

Or capture her?

Yes
, whispered the Witch of the World.
The Huntsman very much wants to capture one like her.

Milo tried to project a question to her without speaking.
What do you mean, “one like her”?

There was no answer.

The girl cut left away from a leaping Stinger, and Milo could almost feel her frustration and fear as she realized what they were doing. She was so fast, though, that the pack had to work hard to keep her contained.

“All she needs is chance,” he murmured to himself. One distraction and she could break through their line and get away.

If only there was a way to distract the Stingers.

“God . . . ,” murmured Milo in a hoarse whisper.

Milo Silk had no intention of being a hero.

A hero was someone big and tough. Someone older. Someone who knew how to use guns or do karate.

A hero was Mom. The soldiers in the camp were heroes.

He wasn't; he was sure of it.

A hero would have gotten up and done something to help that girl, even though she was a total stranger.

That's what a hero would have done.

And Milo Silk was no hero.