The Orphan Army

by Jonathan Maberry

  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.

  They 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.

  Milo usually loved the work of scavenging, but as he worked, he kept going over everything that happened. As time went on, he began to doubt some of his memories. Like . . . the hands that grabbed him. How many people could there really have been standing behind him? How had so many grabbed him at once? And how had they all vanished so quickly and completely?

  And . . .

  What was with the girl? Had she really been able to see into his thoughts? Was that even possible?

  And . . .

  What was all that about the Heart of Darkness, and the rest?

  His dad had once told him, “If it happened, it’s possible. In that case, it must have meaning. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it can’t eventually be understood.” Milo hadn’t really gotten that when he was little, but he thought he grasped it now. Whatever was going on, it must mean something.

  As he moved through the routine of examining debris, he also laid out the facts as he remembered them from his encounter.

  The pyramid was built by someone to be a shrine. In the camp’s sit-down school, Milo had read something about shrines, and he poked around among all of the information he had in his brain until he came up with a definition. A shrine was a holy place. Usually built to honor a saint or a specific religious figure. There was a Catholic shrine to a saint over in Grand Coteau that Milo had seen once on a long trip with his mother.

  Okay . . . so was this a shrine? If so, to who? Or what?

  It didn’t look like the saint’s shrine. This was rougher. Less . . . He fished for a word. Civilized?

  And the shrine apparently contained something called the Heart of Darkness. Whatever that was apparently mattered to the girl and her friends. Milo didn’t know what it could be, though he once saw a book called Heart of Darkness. He hadn’t read the book and didn’t think that it could be connected.

  The girl originally thought Milo had opened the shrine and taken the Heart. Then she changed her mind. But she was still mad at him. How had she put it?

  You’re probably happy the Heart is missing. Now your kind can finish what you started. Without the Heart, you can finish killing us all.

  Milo didn’t know what she could even mean by that, but somehow it hurt his heart to know it’s what she thought. It was how it must feel to have someone think you did something really bad—like betrayed a friend—but it not be true.

  He wished he could speak to her again. To understand what she meant and to set her straight.

  Lizabeth wandered past him. She seemed to be spending her time looking at the ground around the junk. Milo shrugged. In his view, girls as a species were strange. Lizabeth a little more so.

  “Hey, Milo,” called Shark, “look at this.”

  Milo, moody and conflicted, went over.

  “This is wrong,” said Shark, pointing to several pieces of debris. “Look at the breaks.”

  Milo did. Their teachers had taught them about impact, ratios of mass and momentum, variations in resistance depending on surface density, angle of impact, and the rest of the s
cience. He understood the physics of it, the math. They all did. Every good scavenger had to.

  Which was why he saw at once what Shark thought was wrong. Lizabeth joined them.

  Shark knelt by one large piece. “I think this is a Bug drop-ship,” he said. He brushed at the soot to reveal the signature patchwork metalwork. Then he pointed to the fractures in the metal from where it had crumpled. Most of the fractures were dark with soot, but there were plenty that gleamed as bright as polished silver in the sunlight.

  “It’s not burned,” said Lizabeth.

  “No,” agreed Shark. “And that doesn’t make sense. This whole place was on fire. Look at the grass and trees. The grass was wet. You can see it. A lot of these saplings would have smoked really bad. So how come only some of the breaks are covered in soot?”

  No one had an answer.

  “It almost looks,” said Shark slowly, “like this stuff was busted up after the crash. After the fires went out.”

  “After?” asked Lizabeth.

  “Has to be. Unless someone came and polished these breaks.”

  “No way,” said Milo.

  “I know what happened,” said Lizabeth.

  They looked at her.

  “What?” asked Milo.

  “I think someone came and stomped all over it. After the fire, I mean.”

  Shark chortled. “They’d have to have some pretty darn big feet.”

  “I know. Round feet, too.”

  Shark blinked. “Um . . . what?”

  “Look,” she said, and touched the ground. There were indeed several large, roundish dents in the dirt. Several similar marks were punched into the twisted metal. “They’re all over the field. Something came in and stomped everything.”

  “That could be anything,” said Shark. “It doesn’t even look like a footprint.”

  “Looks like an elephant footprint,” mused Lizabeth.

  “Lizzie, there aren’t any elephants in Louisiana,” said Shark with great patience.

  “Aren’t any wolves, either,” said Milo dryly.

  “You know what I mean. We’d have heard an elephant.”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” said Lizabeth. “No one was out here when it crashed.”

  Shark didn’t know how to respond to that. He looked at Milo for help, but Milo held his hands up in a “you’re on your own” gesture. He was enjoying this.

  Lizabeth bent and spread her fingers over one of the dents. It was as big as a dinner plate and easily dwarfed her little hand. “Something had to do it, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Maybe an elephant escaped from a circus or a zoo during the invasion.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “It could be living out here.”

  Milo and Shark exchanged a look and then shrugged.

  “Must have been one angry elephant,” remarked Shark. “He stomped the heck out of this stuff. It’s all junk now. Maybe we should ask Barnaby about it.”

  “Barnaby’s a poophead,” said Lizabeth softly.

  “He is, in fact, a poophead,” agreed Milo.

  “Poophead or not—and, believe me, I’m with you on that,” said Shark, “we should show this stuff to him.”

  They reluctantly agreed, but when he came trotting over, before he even looked at what they wanted to show him, he said, “It’s dat wreckage, right? Da tracks?”

  “Yes, how’d you—” But Milo cut himself off. Everyone was gathering now, jabbering about the same thing. They’d seen it in their quadrants, too.

  “What is it?” asked Shark. “Lizzie thinks it’s an elephant.”

  Not one person laughed.

  Barnaby’s face was pinched. “Okay, dat’s it. We’re done here. Pack your tings and fall in. We out of here in five minutes. And dat’s not five minutes and one second. You all hear me? Move!”

  They ran to gather up their equipment.

  Everyone was lined up in three minutes.

  Barnaby gave them a curt nod of approval. “We’re out of here now. Ghost pace, to konprann?”

  Do you understand?

  They did. Ghost pace was scavenger lingo for moving as quickly as silence would allow. They were all good at it, even Shark, who was bigger than any two of the others. Big didn’t always mean clumsy.

  Within seconds the clearing was empty.

  From the woods, Milo took one last look back as the leaves closed across the trail. He thought that he saw a single, brief flash of gray.

  Wolf?

  Girl?

  Or his own frantic imagination?

  When he paused to take a better look, there was nothing.

  He shivered despite the heat.

  Then he turned and hurried to catch up with his friends.

  FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY

  I had one dream where I was sitting in a cave talking to shadows.

  The cave was strange, because it looked like someone lived there. It was rock and dirt, but there were shelves on the walls and a table, chairs, and a cot. It felt like a lonely place, though. Not sure I know why. Could what a person feels kind of stick to the walls? Or hang in the air? It was like that. Like maybe whoever lived there spent too much time alone and not enough time playing with other kids.

  Funny, but until I wrote that last sentence, I didn’t really know that the cave was where a kid lived. But looking at what I wrote makes me believe that.

  It was where some kid lived all alone.

  No other kids.

  But not no one to talk to.

  She had people to talk to.

  She?

  Why did I write that?

  How come I sometimes know more about my dreams when I write them down than when I have them?

  Does writing them down help me remember stuff I forget when I wake up?

  Not sure.

  Anyway, I remember sitting in that cave in my dream and talking to someone. It wasn’t the Witch of the World. Not that time.

  I couldn’t actually hear the voice, either. It was like thinking back and forth.

  This is all I remember of the conversation:

  Me: Where is this place?

  Her: It’s not anywhere you can find. It has to let you find it.

  Me: What does that mean? How can a place do that?

  Her: Earth is alive. It has feelings. It has thoughts.

  Me: It’s just a planet.

  Her: No, it isn’t. It never was. How come you don’t know that?

  Me: Do the Bugs know that?

  Her: They didn’t when they came here. They do now. That’s why everything is going bad.

  And that was all I remember.

  There was more, and I wish I could remember it, because I think it was really important.

  The day didn’t get better.

  It wasn’t a Tuesday, but it was quickly becoming one of Milo’s least favorite Mondays.

  When they got back to camp, he saw a lot of activity. At first Milo thought the camp was being moved. Again. Since the invasion, no humans set up any permanent settlements. This camp, though home to Milo, had been moved dozens of times, and soon it would be time to move it again. The Bugs were always looking. Milo was surprised at the activity, though, because this camp was so far out of the normal Bug patrol areas.

  But then he realized that it wasn’t the whole camp that was in motion. It was only the soldiers, and they weren’t preparing for a fast evacuation. They were getting their gear together for a mission.

  Which meant Mom was going out, too.

  Which meant Mom was going hunting for monsters.

  Why do you have to go?”

  It was maybe the eighth time Milo asked his mom that question. He had no doubt the answer was going to be the same. It was the only answer she ever gave at times like this.

  “Because I have to,” said Mom as she adjusted the Velcro straps of her shoulder holster. “We talked about this. This is my job.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Mom turned to him. She was short
and so thin. Milo could still remember when she was plump. Not fat exactly, but round and soft and full of smiles. That was before they came. That was six years ago, back when Mom was a school librarian. Milo had seen pictures of her from before that, when Mom—who wasn’t even married yet—had been a soldier in a war somewhere far away. She’d been thinner then, too, but it was different. In those photos, Mom was always in good shape, always smiling, but to Milo she was a different person entirely. Now Mom was thin and hard, with sharp cheekbones and sharp edges everywhere. And she never smiled anymore.

  “But what?” she asked.

  “But can’t someone else do it? Just for once? Why can’t you stay here and let someone else go? There’s Captain Allen and Sergeant Lu. They’re tough and—”

  “It’s not just about being tough, Milo.”

  “I know, but why can’t they go instead of you?”

  “Why them and not me?”

  He almost said, Because I don’t want to lose you, but he bit it back. Stuff like that hadn’t worked when he was six or eight or ten, and it wasn’t likely to work at eleven.

  The real truth was that he was still freaked out by what had happened in the forest. He’d planned to tell his mom everything, but when he came in and found her packing, he hadn’t. She would have enough to worry about. So would he.

  That was half of it.

  The other half was that he’d had a bad dream last night. A nightmare of fire and screams. In the dream, everyone in the camp—all of the soldiers, all the refugees, all the others kids—vanished behind huge walls of flame as the Dissosterin shocktroopers swept down from the sky. Grinders and bangers flew through the air, blowing apart the trucks and the Humvees and the last helicopter. And through the fire and smoke, something huge and terrifying came stalking. Even in the dream, Milo couldn’t tell what it was. It had to be one of the Dissosterin, but it was too big, too strange-looking, and it was surrounded by other even more freakish shapes.

  The dream went on and on until Milo snapped awake, shivering, soaked, his heart hammering like gunfire in his chest. He snatched up a pillow and jammed his face into it to keep from screaming.

  You don’t scream in the night. Not unless you wanted to get everyone killed. Sound carries at night.