Now this strange and impossible figure was saying some of those words in exactly the same way. As if he was playing an audio loop straight from Milo’s memories.
It was crazy.
And it was wrong.
“No,” said Milo hoarsely, his voice almost lost beneath the roar of the rain.
“Right now, young man.”
“I . . . can’t . . .”
“I don’t want to hear ‘can’t’ from you, Milo.” Dad turned one beckoning hand palm up and reached forward with it. “I need you to come here and give me what you took.”
“What? I . . . didn’t take anything. That was when I was little.”
The figure snapped its fingers with impatience. “Don’t make me come over there. Don’t make me take it back.”
Those were almost the same words. Almost, but not quite.
And it occurred to Milo that the figure had not moved at all. It stood in the shadows between the trees, beneath the canopy of leaves. It was no more than fifteen feet away and could have reached him in a few quick steps.
But it did not.
Which is when Milo realized that he was thinking of the figure as an “it,” not a “him.” Not as Dad. Not anymore.
The figure seemed to sense this, and the frown changed into a sneer that was so cold it chilled the air and nearly froze Milo’s heart.
“Come here,” said the figure.
“No!”
“Come here now!”
This time the words came out as a roar. The voice changed, the things that had made it his dad’s voice crumbled and flew away into the storm winds. Now the voice was huge, strident.
Alien.
And familiar in a very, very bad way.
So bad.
“Come here, boy!” bellowed the voice.
And suddenly it was no longer his father’s voice. Now it was something else entirely. Something wrong. Something horrible. Something familiar.
“I want what you stole!”
Milo screamed.
Chapter 27
“I want what you stole, boy. Give me the egg or I will lay waste to everything you love.”
The figure of his father stood there roaring with the voice of the greatest monster who had ever walked this or any world.
The Huntsman.
“No,” cried Milo, falling backward into the mud. “You can’t have it.”
“Give it to me or I’ll take it.”
Milo retreated through the mud. The stone had fallen from his slingshot, but he dug another one out and fitted it into place, raising the weapon, aiming.
The face in the shadows creased into an ugly smile that Milo knew never had a counterpart of his real dad’s mouth. This smile was a leer of malicious hate.
“Give it to me now.”
Milo pulled back on the strong elastic bands of the slingshot. “If you want it—come and take it.”
Milo forced himself to say those words. Forced his voice to sound far, far braver than he felt. He readied his stone to strike as the Huntsman charged.
The thing stood there in the shadows, glaring and seething.
But stood.
It did not move.
It did not come after him.
It did not step out of the shadows and into the rain.
“This is your last chance, boy,” growled the Huntsman.
“Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” snarled Milo, and then he let the stone fly.
It was a streak that punched through the rain and struck his father’s body right between the eyes.
And all at once his father vanished in a shower of red sparks.
One second it was there, looking like his dad, guitar and all, and then it was gone, changed, torn away to reveal something else entirely. Another figure stood in the shadows.
No, not “stood.”
Hung.
It was another man. A human, dressed in the camouflage green and gray of the Earth Alliance. His clothes were torn and streaked with blood. His skin was unnaturally pale. His eyes were completely empty and his mouth hung slack. The front of his shirt had been torn open, and into the pale skin over his heart a Dissosterin lifelight had been driven. Implanted. Wires ran from it up the throat and vanished beneath the flesh under his chin. Other wires disappeared beneath the shirt and sleeves, only to reemerge from the cuffs. They wrapped around each hand and each finger, forming a pattern like the crooked lines of blood poisoning, but Milo could see that they were indeed wires. On the man’s face was a cracked device from which smoke now rose.
Those hands still reached for him, but the creature seemed unable to move.
Only when the lightning flashed again could Milo see why. One of the man’s legs had been shattered, apparently by heavy-caliber bullets. The other thigh was also punctured. The only reason the man could stand at all was because he was leaning back against the trunk of a tree. The pain from those wounds had to be unbearable, and yet there wasn’t even a flicker of it on the man’s face.
Milo whipped another stone out of his bag and readied it to fire.
“Who are you?”
The man’s mouth worked, but the voice that came out was neither his father’s nor the Huntsman’s. It was a meaningless, wordless mumble of empty noise.
A cold wind whipped up and down Milo’s spine at the sound of it.
Milo backed away from the man . . . or thing . . . or whatever it was.
With the device shattered by his stone, the illusion vanished. And so, it seemed, did the connection with the Huntsman. What was this? he wondered. Had the Huntsman somehow rigged this poor guy with some kind of speaker? Or maybe some other device? A hologram of some kind?
That seemed to be the only possible answer. But it left Milo with so many questions. Like, how could this even be here? It couldn’t have been set as a trap, because even Milo hadn’t known he was coming this way. And why was it here?
Milo rose to his feet, the stone still aimed at the wounded man.
“Who are you?” he asked again, anger and fear seething within him. “Why did you look like my dad? Why?”
The man kept making the meaningless mumbling noises. There was no expression on his face, no spark in his eyes, and no sense to the sounds he made. They weren’t even jumbled words. Just sounds.
Milo took a hesitant step forward to see if the man would react.
He didn’t.
Nothing changed at all. Not one thing.
Milo looked at the wounds. They were awful and the pain had to be unbearable. So why wasn’t the man screaming? How could he keep his face so slack?
So . . . dead.
It made no sense at all, and terror rose up like a mushroom cloud inside Milo’s heart.
“No!” he said as he backed away, at first slowly with clumsy steps, then more rapidly as the strangeness of this began to overwhelm him. Finally, with a small cry of wordless utter horror, he whirled and bolted.
He got exactly two steps before he ran into a very big man with a very big gun.
Chapter 28
Milo rebounded as if he’d struck a wall. The man was massive, and he didn’t even grunt as Milo slammed into him. Instead he raised his very big gun and pointed it at Milo’s face.
“Say something,” he said. His index finger was stretched along the outside curve of the trigger guard. It would take only a fraction of a second to slip it inside and pull that trigger.
Milo, sprawled on his back in the weeds, stared up at him.
The man was dressed as a soldier, in the camouflage pattern of the Earth Alliance. But he was a stranger and his face was half melted as if he’d been in a terrible fire. There were bloodstains on his clothes, and his shirt hung in shreds. Through the holes Milo could see torn Kevlar and also torn skin. The wounds still bled, the red mingling with rain. The bloody water sluiced down his body.
“I said,” the man repeated, “say something. Make it good and make it fast.”
Milo’s mind pretty much froze and he
tried to speak, but couldn’t.
The soldier slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. “Last chance, little man. Say something.”
“I . . . ,” began Milo. “I mean . . . wh-what do you want me to say?”
The soldier squinted down the barrel at him, one eye cold and brown, the other a milky white and blind, a leftover from whatever had burned him.
“What’s your name and unit?” demanded the soldier.
“I—I . . .” Milo stopped, swallowed, and then said it the way he’d been taught. “Milo Silk, scavenger, Third Louisiana Volunteers.”
The brown eye widened for a moment, then narrowed again to a suspicious slit. “The Third Louisiana, huh? That’s under the command of Major John Burke, right?”
“What? No. My mom’s the commanding officer, Colonel Amanda Silk.”
The soldier studied him a moment longer, then slowly lowered his gun. “You’re Mandy Silk’s kid?”
“Yes . . . ?” Milo said uncertainly.
The soldier suddenly grinned and offered his hand. “Then you’re darn glad you met me, kid.”
“Um? I . . . ? What?”
Milo accepted the hand, and the big soldier plucked him off the ground and set him on his feet. Milo staggered, but the man steadied him.
“Who are you?” asked Milo. “And what was all that about John Burke? Major Burke’s dead. He was killed last October and—”
“Yeah, well, can’t be too careful, can we? Bugs have gotten smart. They understand English now, and probably other languages too. And they’re using the holo-men to—”
“They’re using the who?”
The soldier pointed through the steady downpour to the thing that still stood in the shadows between the trees. “Holo-men,” he said. “Or maybe ‘zombie’ is a better word.”
“What—?” Milo gasped. “Who are you and what on earth are you talking about?”
The soldier grunted. “I’m Staff Sergeant Jose Ramirez, Fourteenth Regulars out of Biloxi. We came over here to support the Hundred and Third out of Baton Rouge, but we . . . well, we were too late.” He walked over to the trees, raised his gun, and flicked on the top-mounted flashlight. The wounded man hung here, pinned to the bark by long metal spikes Milo hadn’t seen before. The man’s eyes were empty, mouth slack. “You see that? It looks like one of our people and it sounds like one of ours, but it’s not. Not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
Sergeant Ramirez reached in, grabbed a handful of wires, and with a savage grunt tore them away. There was a shower of sparks, and suddenly the wounded man slumped down and hung like a limp scarecrow. Ramirez hooked a finger under the chin to raise the man’s head. There was no expression at all on the face.
“They killed him,” said the sergeant. “The Bugs. As far as we can tell, they wiped out the entire One-Oh-Three. Every last man and woman. Maybe all their camp followers too, though we haven’t confirmed that yet. And instead of just letting the dead stay dead, those bloody Bugs wired them up with some new kind of tech. Our geek squad thinks it reactivates the central nervous system enough for the dead to walk around.”
“Oh my God . . . you mean that man was . . . I mean is . . . ?”
Ramirez nodded. “Dead. Two, maybe three days, by the smell. Poor bugger.”
Milo turned away, disgusted and close to throwing up. “That’s so . . .” He stopped and simply shook his head, unable to come up with a word that described what he felt.
The soldier glanced at him. “Oh, it gets worse. You saw something, didn’t you? You saw a friend maybe, or—”
“I saw my dad,” said Milo. “He looked like my dad.”
“Even sounded like him too, I bet.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
Ramirez looked angry and he pounded the side of his fist on the tree. “It’s this new tech, and I got to admit that we’re struggling to understand it. From what we know, it doesn’t just animate the dead—it does something to anyone within range of about forty, fifty feet. It gets inside your head somehow and pulls out a memory, and then uses holograms to make it look like someone you care about. A friend, a fellow soldier, or . . . your dad, I guess.”
“That’s sick.”
“Yeah, it is, and don’t ask me how it works because I have no idea. No one does. Almost seems like magic.”
Milo said nothing to that.
“We call them holo-men,” continued Ramirez. “The Bugs have started using them all throughout the South over the last couple weeks or so. Most of the time you can’t even tell they’re fake. Not if the light’s bad, ’cause that makes the holograms look totally real. Rainy nights like tonight? Heck, they could walk right up to you and you wouldn’t know you were in trouble until you were dead.”
“He couldn’t walk at all.”
“Yeah, well, that’s where you got lucky. Looks like this one lost a fight to someone. Maybe one of my squads, or more likely a refugee, ’cause my guys would have put it down for good. The Bugs must have propped him up to ambush anyone coming this way. His gun is gone. No knife, either. Not sure what happened there. Maybe a slippery darn scavenger managed to steal them, or maybe the Bug who propped him up didn’t have a spare.”
“So . . . he wasn’t dangerous?” asked Milo.
“Don’t think that for a second. If you had gotten close enough, he’d have choked the life out of you. Maybe even bit you. These things are programmed by the Bugs. They’ll kill you any way they can.” He glanced up at the gloomy sky. “The Bugs have upped their attacks on camps over the last couple of days. They’ve gotten even more vicious. Nastier, if that’s even possible. Not sure why.”
Milo was pretty sure he did know why, but he didn’t tell Ramirez about the crystal egg or the Heart of Darkness. He wanted to, but something made him hold his tongue. He wondered if the Witch of the World was somehow whispering in his ear so quietly that all he could do was react but not actually hear her. What was the phrase he’d read that described that? Subliminal influence? Or maybe subconscious influence. Something like that.
There was a flash of lightning, but now the thunder lagged behind it by almost ten seconds, which told Milo that the storm was moving away. The rain was slowing too.
Ramirez said, “A couple of the holo-men were even fitted out with explosive vests like suicide bombers used to wear back when humans were fighting humans. Insane stuff. We lost a lot of people before we figured it all out, and there are still a lot of others out there who don’t know. Unfortunately, even though we’ve been able to trash a bunch of these holo-men, we haven’t recovered much of their tech. The wiring and holographic stuff are pretty basic, but we haven’t begun to crack how they read minds and pull out such convincing images. The Bugs have really gotten smarter lately, and now they’re using our own memories against us.” He shook his head. “And you thought you were seeing your dad? I’m sorry, kid, but that must have been pretty rough. I lost my folks during the invasion and I was already twenty-two. I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling.”
Milo said nothing. What he really wanted to do was find a nice quiet spot to sit down and cry. The soldier came over and knelt in front of him.
“Where are your people, Milo?” asked the sergeant. “Where’s Colonel Silk? We heard that there was an attack, and we saw the hive ship over the bayou.”
Milo wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “They attacked us.”
He told Ramirez what had happened. Not all of it, but enough. He did not mention the Nightsiders. But he did tell him about the Huntsman. The big sergeant looked frightened at the mention of the alien-human hybrid.
“The Huntsman, huh? Is that what he calls himself? Geez, that’s creepy,” Ramirez said hollowly. “We’ve been hearing reports about some weird new Bug critter that’s supposed to be half-human, but to tell you the truth I didn’t believe them. Or maybe I didn’t want to. Geez. Most times when rumors start flying around about that thing being in the area, we lose all contact with our peo
ple almost immediately, and if we find survivors, they’re half out of their minds. Guess now I have to believe it’s all true. You’re Colonel Silk’s son and you don’t seem like you’re all that crazy.”
“Um . . . thanks?”
“One of the survivors we met—this poor guy who lost his whole camp—said that there was this big monster-looking guy running around with a pack of Stingers like a hunter with his dogs.”
“It’s true,” said Milo. “I saw that up close.”
“If you’re being straight with me, then that is some seriously scary stuff, though this Huntsman sounds like he stepped right out of a nightmare.”
“He’s real, all right,” Milo assured him. “He destroyed our whole camp and killed most of . . . most of . . .”
The tears suddenly started coming, and it made Milo so angry. He didn’t want to cry, but he couldn’t stop himself. The big sergeant looked at him up and down, his face stern, and Milo thought the man was going to yell at him, tell him to suck it up. Instead the soldier hooked an arm around Milo’s shoulders and pulled him close, hugged him, held him.
The way a father might.
The way a friend might.
The way anyone should.
Milo finally got control of himself. It was hard, though, because until now he’d needed to be strong, to be the strongest one around. Now, with the soldier here and other soldiers close, he was able to be himself. To be a kid in a big, bad, broken world full of monsters.
Ramirez didn’t tell him that everything was going to be all right. He wasn’t unkind enough to lie like that. Instead he held Milo and whispered in his ear.
“You’re alive, kid. You survived. You’re tough.”
When Milo could manage, he coughed his throat clear and then pointed the way he’d come. “We need medics. Right now. And transport.”