Great fear.
Fear so towering that it caused them all to throw back their heads and scream.
The crystal egg was gone.
Gone.
The heart of their ship.
The hope of their hive.
Gone.
They screamed and screamed and screamed.
Then the ’troopers closest to the birthing chamber saw something impossible happen. The drone who lay amid the debris groaned and sat up, shedding shell fragments and glass. It was a drone for only a moment longer, and then it wasn’t.
It was the Huntsman.
The ’troopers turned toward the door where this same Huntsman had fled minutes ago. Then they turned back to this one. Bruised and bleeding, but irrefutably the Huntsman.
It was in that moment that for every Dissosterin, their fear transformed into another emotion. Another one that was new to them. An emotion planted like a seed in their shared consciousness by the evil mind of the Huntsman.
Hate.
As the Huntsman’s ship lifted off from the landing bay, the door remained open long enough for three small round green globes to come rolling out. They bounced onto the deck and wobbled to a stop in front of a knot of shocktroopers.
The shocktroopers had time to click a single warning to one another.
It was a second too late.
Sound and fury.
The crimson ship dropped out of the clouds and kept descending until it was below the tree line, moving fast only a few feet above the rippling surface of Bayou Teche. Alligators watched it with their ancient eyes and seemed to grin with evil mouths.
The ship wobbled as it flew. It clipped a few trees. Twice it dipped too low and bounce-splashed atop the surface of the water. Then it corrected awkwardly, gradually straightened out, and finally came to rest beneath the shadows cast by a great canopy of oak trees. It stood on its eight metal legs, looking alien and ominous.
The engines whined for a moment and then died away into a ghostly silence.
After several long minutes, the hatch opened and the loading ramp stretched down to the marshy ground.
A figure emerged.
Skinny, short, disheveled, with clothes that were stained with blood and green goo. With him was a girl who had hair the color of ash and eyes the color of the moon. She had one hand clutched into a fist, and she kept it pressed against her heart.
Behind them came a fat brown boy who had his arm wrapped around the waist of a tall boy with wild hair that stuck up in all directions and a little blond girl with pale blue eyes. Others came down. Boys and girls. Older teens. And a few old people who leaned on one another.
“Milo!” called Shark, and the skinny boy and the fat boy gave each other a fierce hug. Like best friends do. Like brothers do. Lizabeth squirmed in between them, and then the Cajun joined them, not so much adding to the group hug as leaning on it.
“Dang, Milo . . . You is more dan motier foux, you,” he mumbled. More than half crazy. There was a smile on his face and tears in his green eyes.
The last to emerge were two boys who stood at the top of the ramp. One made of wood, the other of stone. The huddled refugees stared up at them with glazed eyes, as if unsure if this was a dream.
A hummingbird stood on the oak boy’s shoulder.
The rock boy held one hand out, palm upward, and in it was a tiny form who lay absolutely still. Milo Silk tore himself free from Shark and the others and ran back up the ramp, his heart leaping into his throat. He skidded to a stop and stood looking down at the sprite in the rock boy’s hand.
“Oh no!” he cried.
“Mook,” said the rock boy softly.
“Is she . . . ?” Milo’s voice trailed off. He didn’t want to finish that question.
Evangelyne bent and blew a kiss at the tiny form. “She used all of her magic,” she said.
“All of it?” asked Milo, and there was a hitch in his voice.
Evangelyne looked up at him with eyes that were bright with tears. “Almost all. She’s asleep.”
“But . . . she’s going to get better, right?”
The wolf girl placed the Heart of Darkness in Mook’s palm and nudged it against the sprite. Halflight groaned softly and curled herself around it, hugging it as if it were the only thing that tethered her to life.
“There is still magic in the world,” said Evangelyne. “Thanks to you, there is still magic in the world.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
Milo wiped away his own tears. There was a rumble of thunder in the east. They looked up. There, partially hidden by the storm clouds, was the great bulk of the hive ship. It might be damaged. They might have stolen its crystal heart. They might have left it in confusion. But they had no illusions that it was no longer a threat. Maybe it would be a great threat. Time would tell.
Milo could feel the weight of the crystal egg in his pocket. Warm, alien, repellent.
He wondered if they should have killed the Huntsman while they had the chance. It would probably have been the smartest thing to do.
But Milo had not done it. He hadn’t crossed that line.
The egg seemed to throb. Like an unspoken threat. Like a promise.
He looked away, and Shark and Lizabeth and Barnaby stared up at him like he was someone they didn’t even know.
Maybe he wasn’t.
Not anymore.
He touched Evangelyne’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “I want you meet my other friends.”
She hesitated. “They’ve seen what I am. What we are. They won’t want to—”
Milo turned to her. “They’re orphans now too,” he said. “We all are. This isn’t about the Nightsiders and the children of the sun. C’mon, that’s the old world.” He removed the crystal egg from his pocket. “We just won the first major battle against the Bugs. We, Evangelyne. Not the Earth Alliance. Not the Nightsiders. We. Maybe it’s time we stopped being scared of one another. This is our planet. Ours. All of ours. If we want it to survive, if we want us to survive, then we have to fight this war together.”
Her eyes searched his for a long time. Then she took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go meet your friends.”
FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY
Last night I dreamed I was sitting on the top of a mountain, which is funny because there aren’t too many mountains in Louisiana. But it was a dream, and anything can happen in a dream.
In the dream I was watching a hive ship burn in the sky.
It was strange. I know I should have been happy to see it burn, but I wasn’t.
It made me sad.
In the dream the Witch of the World came and sat down next to me. She was older than dirt. And I think that might actually be true.
She said that she was proud of me for what we did.
She said that it would help everyone to have the courage to fight back. The EA, the rogues, the Nightsiders. Everyone.
But she said that it came with a price. That’s how she put it.
A price.
She said the crystal egg was more important than we thought. She said that the Bugs will do anything to get it back.
Anything.
The only thing we have going for us is that they can’t just bomb us because they have to get it back undamaged.
That still leaves a lot they can do to us.
She said that the Huntsman would come after us. Not just for the crystal egg. He hungers for the Heart of Darkness.
Her word.
“Hungers.”
She said, “He will burn the fields of the earth and topple mountains to find you and get back what you stole.”
Harsh.
Scary, too, ’cause I know she’s right.
Tomorrow we’ll go back to looking for Mom and Aunt Jenny. And Killer. I hope they’re all safe somewhere. I asked the witch about them, but she didn’t answer.
Instead, the witch told me something else. Something that I hope was j
ust dream stuff because it really scared me.
She said, “There are horrors more dreadful than the Huntsman, Milo Silk.”
I asked her what she meant, but right about then I started to wake up.
I think I heard her say one last thing before I woke, and I don’t know if it was an answer to my question or something else.
She said, “Your father lives.”
That was it. I woke up.
AUTHOR’S NOTE ON JOURNALS AND DREAM DIARIES
I began my first diary when I was in the second grade and kept writing one well into my thirties. I wrote in it nearly every day, and after a while the old diaries filled many feet of space on my bookshelves.
Writing in a diary is a great way of getting to know yourself, exploring different ideas, experimenting with different ways of thinking, and allowing your imagination to run wild. Imaginations—trust me—should always be encouraged to run wild.
Sometimes my diary entries were simple lists of things I did that day, or things to do, or things I wanted to put on a list. Favorite things. Least favorite things. Like that.
Other times my diary was me having a conversation with myself about the things that happened in my life. The death of my best friend when I was a kid. The first time I saw the ocean. The hurt I felt when I lost a friend after a bad argument. The happiness I experienced when I won my first martial arts trophy.
I also wrote a lot of ideas for stories in my diary. I always wanted to be a writer, and sometimes the ideas I had as a kid have been given new life as a story now that I’m an adult. The Orphan Army, for example, came from a story idea I had when I was ten, called “The Shadow Boys.” No idea is ever wasted. Every idea should be written down. Don’t trust to memory. Keep a record. Even if you don’t yet see the value in the idea, its day may come. Trust me.
But of all the things I wrote about, the most common entry was my attempt to recapture the previous night’s dreams. I would record every detail of every dream I had. After a while I became better at recalling those details because the process of writing them down helped me remember more and more.
I learned a lot about myself from those dreams. I still do. Many of my dreams become the stuff of new short stories, comics, and novels.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was the same thing that Milo discovered with his dream journal: When you have a nightmare and write it down, it loses its power to frighten you. When you frame it in words and lock it on the page, you’ve just succeeded in capturing and caging the things that scare you. Once caged, you can look at them, understand them, and over time discover that the more you understand something, the less frightening it is. And the more powerful you are.
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times bestselling and multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author, magazine feature writer, playwright, Marvel comics author, and writing teacher-lecturer. His books include the Rot & Ruin series, Patient Zero, Extinction Machine, Marvel Universe vs. the Avengers, and Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead. He lives in Del Mar, California. Visit him at jonathanmaberry.com.
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Rot & Ruin
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maberry, Jonathan.
The orphan army / Jonathan Maberry.
pages cm. — (The Nightsiders ; [1])
Summary: In the future, bug-like aliens are taking over Earth and young Milo Silk learns through dreams and strange encounters that there are other, ancient monsters on the planet that are also threatened by the aliens, and that he may be the hero destined to lead his friends in saving the universe.
ISBN 978-1-4814-1575-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4814-1577-4 (eBook)
[1. Science fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Monsters—Fiction.
4. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 5. Heroes—Fiction. 6. Magic—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.M11164Orp 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014014576
The Orphan Army Page 24
