Ramirez stood quickly. “Tell me.”
Milo did so, and the sergeant took a small, scrambled walkie-talkie from his pocket, keyed it, and made the call to his people.
Hearing him make that call and knowing that help—real help—was on its way hit Milo harder than anything that had happened so far. The tears, newly stopped, came again, and this time he didn’t know if they were ever going to end.
Chapter 29
But of course tears end.
Everything ends, and Milo knew that. Storms pass and night turns into day and wounds heal.
Even so, to Milo it seemed as if there was never going to be anything but pain, fear, running, hiding, fighting, and hurting. Nothing else, and no hope of peace or escape.
He tried not to look at the holo-man, but he couldn’t help it. With the tech destroyed, the man in no way resembled Milo’s dad—but so what? He had. He’d spoken with his dad’s voice, worn his face. Had been him, even if only for a brief time. The lie was devastating. To Milo this new tech seemed even worse than pulse pistols or the barbs of Stingers. This didn’t just hurt flesh or break bones. It broke his heart. It cut him all the way to his soul. It made the pain of the loss of his dad a thousand times worse because it dangled hope in front of him and then snatched it away. It was a kind of wrong Milo had no words for. It made him ache for his father. To have him here, alive and whole, or to know that he was dead. Seeing the holo-man only made the doubt burn like a supernova inside his chest. He could feel it like a physical pain. He loved his dad so much, and he missed him so very much.
Right then Milo wanted his mom so badly he could have screamed.
He almost did.
But didn’t.
Instead he looked up into the gray sky and imagined the Huntsman’s monstrous face. “I’m going to stop you,” he whispered slowly, forcing the words out past the tension in his throat and through clenched teeth. “No matter what it takes, no matter what I have to do, I’m going to find you and kill you.”
Far away, on the other side of the lake, hidden in the heavy clouds above New Orleans, there was a final rumble of thunder. To Milo it sounded like the deep, unnatural laughter of his most hated enemy. A laughter filled with confidence and cruelty. Laughter that mocked Milo’s promise, and threatened worse in return.
As if he were engaged in a real confrontation, Milo stood there, fists balled, glaring his hatred into the windy skies, feeling the seeds of darkness take hold in the soil of his soul. He silently repeated his promise. His vow.
I’m going to find you and kill you.
The rain slowed and slowed and finally stopped, but the swamp dripped and the humidity was oppressive.
Ramirez let Milo have his time, and spent a few minutes talking into his walkie-talkie, receiving intel and giving orders. Soon other soldiers came out of the woods. Like Ramirez they were dressed in camouflage that hid their presence until suddenly they were there. These were well-trained soldiers, highly skilled at moving with almost no sound even through dense foliage. Somehow that level of skill was also a comfort. It proved to Milo that the Swarm had not already won. It made a forceful argument that people—human beings—were sometimes at their best when they were pushed to the edge.
None of these hard-faced men and women mocked him for crying. They nodded to him, acknowledging him, accepting him as one of their own, and that told Milo something about them. They were all survivors, which meant they had all lost something. There was not one person among them who had not shed his or her own tears. Maybe a river of them. Maybe an ocean.
Tears did not make you weak.
Sometimes the courage to cry, to be seen to cry, was a mark of toughness. It was a sign that you cared enough about life, about the world, to continue to feel even when everything seemed to be falling down.
Milo’s tears slowed and stopped. He took a few long, steadying breaths as he thought things through. He worried about what might happen when these soldiers reached the lakeside where Shark and the others waited. The Nightsiders were too smart and way too practiced at not being seen by humans. Mook could just fall apart and look like a pile of rocks, and Iskiel would vanish into the trees. Evangelyne was the problem. As long as she stayed in human form, everything would be okay. What happened if she transformed, though? On one hand, it might help her heal from those terrible injuries. On the other, how would armed soldiers react to a girl suddenly turning into a wolf? No, he thought, call it what it was. How would the EA soldiers react if they were confronted by a werewolf?
What could he do, though? Trying to explain this to Ramirez would never work. No one would believe him, and Milo couldn’t blame them. He was already more than four full days into his association with the Nightsiders and he still found it hard to accept.
He fidgeted as he tried to decide what to do.
“Okay, kid, that’s done,” said Ramirez as he lowered his walkie-talkie. “We have a patrol two miles from that point on the beach. They’ll get there first and evac the wounded. We have a skimmer inbound, and that’ll get the most seriously injured upriver to an exfiltration point.”
A skimmer was a kind of airboat that whipped along on inflated pontoons. Unlike swamp boats, skimmers had nearly silent engines. The EA mostly used them at night for quick runs, but they were rare because they were hard to make. However, it was much safer to use a skimmer than one of the far more dangerous helicopters.
“Where will they take them?” asked Milo. “To the church in Mandeville?”
“Not a chance. One of our people led a holo-man back to the church last night. Thought it was his cousin. Forty minutes later we were hit. A drop-ship, two Stingers, and more hunter-killers than I’ve ever seen.” Ramirez shook his head sadly. “We lost a lot of friends last night, kid. We lost some good people. And that’s why we have to get our butts in gear. That holo-man saw you, which means the Bugs saw you. They probably think you’re a refugee from the church. We need to put a lot of gone between us and here. You ready to rock?”
“Sure. Let me grab a few stones for my slingshot, though. I’m almost out.”
The sergeant grinned. “Don’t bother. I got something better.” He fished in his pack, brought out a small but heavy pouch, and tossed it to Milo.
The bag made a faint metallic clink as Milo snatched it out of the air. He loosened the drawstring and poured some of the contents into his palm. They were gleaming metal balls about the size of marbles but heavier. Milo held one up to examine it, and when he recognized what it was, he flinched. “This is shrapnel from a boomer.”
“Yup. One of my guys fried one in a short-yield EMP trap. That deactivated the bomb, so we were able to pick it apart for tech. These ball bearings were packed in with the explosives.”
The sight of them sickened Milo. He’d seen what happened when a boomer exploded. Several of them had detonated during the hive ship’s attack on his camp. Those ball bearings, hurled with the force of high explosives, were like a spray of bullets.
“Yeah, kid,” said Ramirez, “I know how you feel, but tech is tech, and though this is pretty low-tech, these ball bearings are going to hit a lot harder than any stone you use. These will give your slingshot a whole lot more pop. Might even flip the switch on a Bug lifelight, you never know.”
Milo didn’t want to take them, but as he weighed them in his hand, he thought about the vile deception of the holo-men and how much he’d love to have the Huntsman in his line of fire. It was a dark thought, but it belonged to him now. He nodded his thanks and attached the pouch to his belt.
“Hey,” he said, unslinging his satchel, “let’s make this a swap. I scavenged some tech too.”
“Don’t need Bug night-vision goggles, kid. We have a ton of that junk and—”
“Pretty sure you don’t have this stuff,” Milo said as he opened his bag and removed the two Dissosterin grenades and the gleaming pulse pistol.
The soldier’s jaw nearly hit the ground. He took the pistol gingerly, as if it were as fragile
as eggshell, and held it up. A couple of the other soldiers stopped and gaped at it. “Holy mother of pearl! How . . . how . . . I mean, seriously . . . how . . . ?”
It was all Ramirez could manage to say.
Milo cleared his throat. “I, um, took it off a shocktrooper I kind of ambushed this morning.”
And so there was another piece of the story to explain to the soldiers. He did so very quickly, mindful of their need to flee. When he got to the part about the Huntsman’s ship, a dozen of the soldiers stood in a circle around him, eyes and mouths wide, staring at him as if he was from another planet.
“It’s been a weird week,” Milo concluded.
FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY
Writing down the story that I dreamed . . .
Once the boy had found the library in the huge, dark, shadowy, dusty old manse, it was clear that he had found a place that had been waiting just for him.
It was the library of Gadfellyn Hall.
A forgotten room in a forgotten wing of a forgotten house. Filled with forgotten books that wanted so desperately to be remembered.
When he stepped inside, he stood for a long, long time just staring at all the books. There were so many of them.
So many.
And so many kinds. Tall volumes bound in carved wood, leather-bound books in groups, stacks of scrolls tied in red ribbon, heaps of tablets made of clay and lead, blocks of stone with writing that looked like pictures, even paperback books that looked too new to belong in such an old library.
So many books on shelves and tables or stacked by themselves in crooked towers. Books on stands or laid open on tables or facedown on the arms of chairs. Books that looked like they were being read by someone who had briefly stepped away and then become distracted and forgotten to return. Books with markers in them—strips of cloth, odd pieces of paper, folded receipts, anything that would remember a place. There were books placed side by side on the table so that the text of one could be easily compared with the other. There were small stacks of books beside chairs or on chair-side tables, patiently waiting their turn. There were books pulled slightly out of place on the shelves as if frozen at the instant of being selected.
Books and books and books.
But no people. No sounds at all other than the excited breathing of the boy who stood and gaped in wonder.
For the first time in a very long while, the sad and lonely boy smiled.
For the first time in a very long while, the sad and lonely boy felt as if he’d found his way home. He loved books. In books anything was possible—even the impossible.
Outside, in the hall, there is a single set of footprints pressed into the dust. The footprints lead to the library door and then through it. Each print is filled with dust now.
No footprints lead away, though many years have passed.
Chapter 30
With his eyes still glazed from everything Milo had told him, Sergeant Ramirez led his team away from the clearing and into the woods. The holo-man had been taken down and quickly buried, with nothing more than a fist-sized rock placed over his grave. The idea of a “proper burial” was something Milo knew about only from books. Most of the millions who had been killed during the invasion were never buried at all, and their bones littered the otherwise empty cities of the world.
They went inland, following a path that seemed awkward until Milo realized why. Instead of following any natural path such as an overgrown track, game trail, or deserted road, they went through the densest parts of the forest. The Bugs were highly logical, and if they didn’t have an obvious trail, they’d follow the most likely one. It was how the EA teams managed to stay ahead of the Bugs. Two soldiers ranged ahead to pick their trail and watch for trouble; two others worked their back trail, erasing all signs of the platoon’s passage. It was done quietly and with great efficiency. Milo knew good woodcraft when he saw it, and these men and women were every bit as good as the soldiers his mother trained.
When they were a mile from the sad grave, Ramirez said, “This hologram tech is new, and it’s scaring me silly. Something’s made the Bugs take a jump forward. I mean, the actual tech isn’t new, but their applications are smarter, more devious. We’re losing too many people lately.”
Milo said, “It’s got to be the Huntsman. He was a soldier and part of him is human. Maybe that helps him set better traps.”
“Maybe,” said Ramirez, in a tone that suggested he agreed, although reluctantly. “If that’s the case, then we could be in real trouble. I mean, in worse trouble. The Bugs have muscle and numbers, but we were always smarter, trickier. And we’ve started figuring out how a lot of their tech works. I heard that up in Wyoming our guys are test-flying our own version of barrel-fighters and drop-ships. And there’s a Special Ops squad working the outskirts of Philly that had some prototype sky-boards.” He tapped the pulse pistol that was now tucked into his belt. “This thing is an insane find. We’ve never had a working Bug gun before. Not in all these years. If we can duplicate the tech and figure out how to make those focusing crystals, then we might even be able to turn this whole thing around.”
Except, thought Milo darkly, the Huntsman is out there.
Milo knew that the mutant was the most dangerous X factor in the whole war. His imagination, his knowledge of human battle tactics, and his ferocious insanity were unbelievably dangerous. And if he ever got hold of the Heart of Darkness—or any of the secrets of magic—then no amount of tech was going to stop the Swarm. This and every other world would fall. Including the realms of shadow into which most of the adult Nightsiders had escaped.
“That holo-man saw me and read my mind,” said Milo cautiously. “Does that mean the rest of the Swarm know I’m here? I mean, right here in this part of the woods?”
Ramirez nodded grimly. “I don’t know for sure, but we think that’s how it works.”
“So the Bugs are coming?”
“The Bugs are always coming, kid. But I know what you’re asking, and—yes. Which is why we are not going to be anywhere around here when they arrive. I have scouts watching high and low.”
They ran in silence for a while, and then Milo summoned the courage to ask, “Don’t suppose you heard anything about my mom?”
“No, kid, sorry. When some shocktroopers were killed, the request was passed down to your camp for her to check it out ’cause your camp was closest. Since then, nothing.”
Milo walked for a while with his fists balled in frustration. The big soldier cut him a look.
“Doesn’t mean she’s dead, you know. From everything I heard about Colonel Silk, she is both tough and sneaky. She has a rep for getting her people out of some really sticky situations.”
Almost always, thought Milo. Dad had been on a patrol with Mom when he went missing. But no one can win all the time. Not even Mom, though it hurt him to think it.
“I wish she hadn’t gone out,” said Milo. “I mean, because of the attack and all.”
Ramirez walked a few paces before he responded. “There’s a lot of different ways to look at that one, kid. If she’d been at your camp, she might have been killed.”
“She could have won the fight. . . .”
“Really? Against a hive ship and that Huntsman dude? I don’t think so. No, kid, at most she’d have maybe—maybe—gotten some more survivors out, but she’d have tried to make a fight of it, and there are some fights no one can win.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Milo.
The soldier said nothing, but Milo didn’t want to let it go.
“I’m serious,” said Milo. “My dad and mom both told me that there’s always hope. There’s always a way. Never say never.”
Ramirez merely grunted and they walked on. Ten minutes later the soldier said, “We’ll keep trying to get your mom on the radio. The Bugs have been dropping EMP poppers. You know what they are?”
“Sure. Electromagnetic pulse bombs. They fry anything with a computer.”
“Right. They’ve started
using them before some of their raids. They drop some and then once communications are down, they send in their shocktroopers. Your mom’s radio could have been fried, but don’t worry—the downside to the Bugs’ using those poppers is that even though it cuts out the radios, it pretty much advertises that they’re coming. Your mom, being smart, would have gone to ground. She could be waiting it out in a bolt-hole, letting her trail go cold, letting the Bugs get gone, you dig?”
“I know.”
It was an encouraging thought.
Ramirez had his team stop for a three-minute rest, and he called the rescue team. He spoke very little and listened for a long time, occasionally making noncommittal grunts. Milo tried to eavesdrop, but he could only hear one side of the hushed conversation.
“Good,” said Ramirez. “We’re four miles out and will come at you from the east, one hundred yards in from the water. Out.”
Milo was almost afraid to ask. “Was . . . was everything . . . I mean, how are my friends?”
Ramirez frowned and Milo’s heart sank, but then the big sergeant said, “Everyone’s still sucking air, so we’re good. Couple of your people are in bad shape, but our field medics are top notch. That one kid, the Cajun boy with the spike in him, what’s his name?”
“Barnaby Guidry. He’s our pod leader.”
“He’s in the worst shape, but the doc says they can patch him up. He won’t be scavenging anything for a while. They said whoever gave him that herbal field dressing saved his life. What was that stuff, anyway?”
Milo shook his head. “I don’t know. My friend Lizzie put it together from things she found in the woods.”
“She a medic or herbalist?”
“No, she’s a kid. Youngest member of our pod.”
Ramirez looked skeptical. “Then someone told her what to gather. The medic said it was a very sophisticated mixture. Exactly the right herbs and roots in exactly the right amounts.”
Milo said nothing. Even Evangelyne had been surprised by what Lizabeth had used. She called it “old magic,” whatever that meant. Lizabeth hadn’t studied any kind of magic, and as far as Milo knew, she’d never taken any herbal medicine classes beyond what was generally taught in their camp school.