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.
Milo 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, e
ven though she was a total stranger.
That’s what a hero would have done.
And Milo Silk was no hero.
That’s what he told himself. He even said it aloud.
“I’m not a freaking hero. I’ll get killed.”
It’s what he’d tried to tell the Witch of the World.
It’s what he believed.
What he didn’t understand was why he was no longer hiding. Why he was running as fast as he could along the path behind the alien Huntsman and his pack.
Why on earth was he doing that?
He raced along, low and fast, making maximum use of cover. The pack was focused on the girl, and she was simply running for her life.
The girl could run. Milo was impressed. Even injured, she could run like the wind.
Evangelyne ran barefoot through the woods, pulling her dress up to her knees when she leaped a creek or jumped onto and over a falling log. She ran like she had been born to run.
The Stingers, though, ran faster.
They spread out and ranged far ahead and to either side, angling around in a classic trap pattern to cut her off. Milo and his friends did that in their games of swamp tag. He heard the girl cry out when she spotted the closing arms of the trap. She paused for a breathless moment, casting wildly around for a way out and finding every exit blocked by a monstrous form, while behind her the Huntsman closed in for the kill.
The kill.
Milo knew that this was what he was seeing.
This is the Huntsman, who will hang us all like trophies on his wall.
A hundred plans formed in his head, and he dismissed each one as being silly or suicidal. A pack of Stingers and the Huntsman against a girl with no weapons and a boy with only a pouch of throwing stones, a combat knife, and a . . .
The bag of grenades was heavy in his hand.
He licked his lips, afraid of the thought that had stuck in his head.
The only possible plan.
He jerked open the drawstring and removed one of the green globes. It was about the size of an apple and weighed only a little more. The skin was a drab olive and S&F was stenciled on the shell. There was a plastic cap on the top. Milo knew that all he had to do was twist the cap and throw.
It sounded simple enough, but it wasn’t. Did he have to count to four like the soldiers did while practicing with regular fragmentation grenades? Was it better to twist and throw right away, like they did with the nonlethal flash-bangs? And what about the blast radius? Milo remembered a safety lecture about grenades. The standard M67-X fragmentation grenade could hurl crippling or lethal fragments up to fifty feet, though some soldiers said that they’d known shrapnel to fly as much as six hundred feet, depending on elevation and terrain.
Milo’s longest pitch was about one hundred and fifty feet, and that was playing outfield. He was better at close, fast pitches. He could never hurl a grenade six hundred feet.
These calculations buzzed through his head in a microsecond.
The Stingers howled.
The girl screamed.
The Huntsman threw back his head and roared in triumph.
“Hey . . . girl!” Milo bellowed, trying to get her attention so she could see what he was about to do.
She didn’t even glance in his direction.
“Girl!”
Nothing.
So he thought, What the heck.
At the top of his voice, he yelled, “EVANGELYNE!”
Her head whipped around, and she stared at him with wide-eyed shock.
“Duck!”
With that, Milo twisted the arming cap, cocked his arm, and threw. The grenade rose in a high, high arc toward the gap between two of the Stingers, farthest from the terrified girl. One of the Stingers saw it and whipped around. It even hissed at the small green metal apple.
The Huntsman saw it too. He bellowed out a command to his pack.
The girl did not hesitate. She ducked.
Just in time.
The grenade hit the side of the red ship, bounced high, and exploded.
Sound and fury.
Very well named.
The sound was like all of the thunder that would ever trouble the sky compressed into one gigantic BOOOOOOOOM.
The fury was the shock wave.
Even from a hundred and fifty feet away, the force picked Milo up and flung him into a stream of muddy water. The shock wave flattened bushes and tore apart small trees. It bent two of the red craft’s landing struts, and with a squeal of protesting metal, the ship canted sideways and bowed to the ground.
As Milo splopped down into the mud, he saw pieces of one of the Stingers go flying in all directions. Another of the creatures reeled back, mortally wounded and screaming out in pain.
The other Stingers screamed too, their bodies trembling with agony, their senses totally overloaded by the effects of the grenade. Even the Huntsman was staggered, and he leaned sideways against a tree, hands pressed to his ears, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a prolonged scream.
Milo looked to see what had happened to the girl. He’d tried to throw the grenade as far from her as possible.
He looked.
And looked.
But the girl was gone.
In the midst of the sound and fury, she had escaped.
Milo grinned despite the ringing pain in his own head and the muddy water in his mouth and ears.
He’d done it.
He’d saved her.
The growl behind him, though, told him that being a hero was going to come at a cost.
More than he ever wanted to pay.
A shape blotted out the twilit sky. Milo’s head swam with dizziness and shock as the Huntsman glared raw hatred. He tottered on the edge of unconsciousness and lingered only long enough to see inhuman hands reaching down toward him and a green light, like the burning eye of a dragon, flashing at him.
The Huntsman turned for a moment to look at the dead Stingers and then at his damaged ship. His chest seemed to swell with fury. He turned back to Milo as he cocked his fist back. Milo had one microsecond to try to avoid what he knew for sure would be a deathblow.
The fist filled his whole world.
There was a white shock.
There was incredible pain, worse than anything he had ever imagined. White hot. Going all the way through him.
And then darkness closed around Milo like jaws and swallowed him whole.
FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY
I always wonder if I’m crazy.
I dream of things that sometimes happen.
I talk to a witch in my dreams.
I don’t know if I’m normal or not. There’s not enough kids left to decide what normal looks like.
PART TWO
MILO AND THE MONSTERS
Six Years from Next Tuesday . . .
“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.”
—ANDRÉ GIDE
Milo dreamed that he was dead.
Or maybe he was dead.
He couldn’t tell. He lay on the burned ground, his limbs cold and stiff, his breath stilled, his heart silent.
Only his mind remained.
But it was not connected to his body anymore. He seemed to float in the air above his corpse. He could see all of him and the ground around where he lay.
I dreamed this, he thought. He remembered writing this in his dream diary.
From up there, he could see the burning swamp.
And he could see the manlike thing—the Huntsman, as Milo now thought of him—and his pack of Stingers.
Several of the Stingers were bleeding and injured. Not far away, a pair of them lay dead.
I did that, thought Milo. I killed two Stingers all by myself.
Shark would think that was so cool. Maybe really, really, really cool.
If Shark was alive.
He thought, Mom would be so proud of me.
If Mom was alive.
If, in fact, he was alive.
From where he floated, Milo was pretty sure that, yes, he was dead.
So much for being a hero, he thought.
He hoped the girl was still alive. That, at least, would make his death mean something.
Then he thought, What am I?
A ghost?
No!
Milo didn’t want to be a ghost. Small and invisible and powerless, wandering the ruined Earth forever. Unable to find his mother. Unable to hug her. To feel her kisses on his head and cheeks. Never again to share her warmth.
That made him so sad he wished he had eyes so he could cry.
It also made him furious, because he wanted to fight back against these monsters who had killed everyone he knew.
Rage was the only heat he could feel, and it burned like a small sun in whatever ghostly body he possessed.
Below, the Huntsman bent low over Milo’s body and poked at it with a clawed finger. The body rocked limply, the way a corpse will. The flesh was pale, the lips bloodless.
There was a strange sound. Deep, creaky, and nasty, and it took Milo a few moments to realize that the sound was coming from the alien Huntsman. He saw the creature’s shoulders tremble.
He was laughing.
Laughing?
Laughing at a dead body on the ground.
At his dead body.
At him.
The heat in Milo flared hotter and hotter still. It pulsed and throbbed, and for a moment he imagined that his ghostly fists were solid enough to punch this monster. To batter him. To knock the laughter out of its hideous mouth.
With thought came action, and suddenly Milo felt himself moving. His spirit dropped from the empty air toward the Huntsman, driven by rage and grief and frustration. Milo could not see his own hands, but he imagined that he was clenching his fists and then he struck.
Or thought he struck.
There was no point of impact. There was no thud of knuckles on insect armor. No shock running up his arm from the force of the blow. No actual sensation of touch.