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To the memory of two great writers who, long ago, took the time to offer advice and encouragement to a thirteen-year-old aspiring writer:
Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson.
They were the mechanics of dreams, the architects of the impossible.
Happy journeys through the limitless forever.
And, as always, to Sara Jo.
FROM MILO’S DREAM DIARY
I had another dream about the witch last night.
The Witch of the World.
I still don’t know what that means.
In the dream the Bugs were looking for something, and they were knocking down trees and breaking open mountains to find it.
We were all running from them.
The shocktroopers were dropping from the landing ships and firing their pulse rifles at us. They’re taller than most people—seven feet or more. Like praying mantises. Worse than that. Huge and ugly, with long legs and two sets of arms. They jumped down to the ground, ready to kill. Some stood on two legs and fired four pulse guns; others ran on four legs, as fast as dogs, and dragged people down.
I saw Shark get hit. And Lizabeth and a few of the other kids.
My mom and dad were there too. Running from the Bugs.
I couldn’t see Dad’s face, though. I never see his face anymore in the dreams.
I wish I could.
The Witch of the World kept whispering to me, and I could hear her even though it was really loud with the explosions.
She does that. Whispers.
I never see her.
I only hear her voice in my head.
She said something really weird, too. After the Bugs attacked the camp and we were all running from the fires, she said that I needed to fight back.
I told her that was stupid. I’m a kid. I can’t even win at grunt-and-grapple games in gym class.
She said that wasn’t what she meant. She said that I needed to find a weapon.
I told her that I had a weapon. My slingshot.
She laughed at me. She said that’s not what she meant.
She said, “A hero does not need those kinds of weapons. A hero is a weapon.”
I told her that I didn’t want to be a hero. I couldn’t be a hero. I’m just a kid.
She said, “Only a fool asks to be a hero. A real hero rises when all others fall. Whether he wants to or not.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, there was a big explosion and I woke up. For a while I couldn’t tell if the explosion was in the dream or not.
I didn’t get back to sleep.
PART ONE
MILO AND THE SCAVENGERS
Six Years from Next Monday . . .
“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”
—HELEN KELLER
Milo Silk wasn’t afraid of the monsters under his bed.
He didn’t have a bed for monsters to hide under.
Milo had a sleeping bag, and that was usually spread out on rocky ground up on Mount Driskill or on moist, buggy dirt in the swamplands along the Louisiana bayou. Sometimes he slept in a net hammock that dangled between a fuel truck and a tank with a crooked cannon.
Besides, all of the monsters were way above him in their spaceships.
It was a Tuesday when everything went bad.
Not that things weren’t bad to begin with. At least that’s what all of the adults always said. Big old bad world.
But every single one of them wanted things to be the way they were before bad became worse.
Milo and his friends learned about it in school. And school was a patch of ground or a fallen log or a muddy beach under a camouflaged canopy. In the bad old days, there were schools with desks and chairs. Now school was wherever the teacher said school was.
All because of the aliens.
All because of the Swarm that had come down like locusts from the stars.
They came in a fleet of hive ships, each one many miles long and made from a thousand kinds of scrap metal. The plates did not look bolted together but instead looked fused, or melted. Or grown. As if they had been chewed into metallic pulp and then spat out to be woven into a spaceship, the way a wasp builds a nest from chewed plant matter. Each vast machine even looked like an insect nest. They filled the skies and blotted out the sun. Impossibly old, still cold from their journey between the stars. Thoroughly ugly, completely alien and utterly dangerous.
The Dissosterin destroyed most of Earth’s major cities in their first assault, and with every passing day, they were ruining more of the planet and wiping out more people. So, sure, things were already way over in the “bad” category. Horrible bad. Scary bad. But in a weird way Milo didn’t really understand how bad it was. He knew that he didn’t know. It was something that was happening to other people somewhere else. He never saw a burning city. He never saw a dead person.
He just heard about that sort of stuff. He once saw a massive hive ship in the far distance, hovering like a storm cloud over New Orleans. A few times he saw Bug drop-ships pass overhead, or the smaller hunter-killer machines buzzing at treetop level. Small robotic insects that came in a hundred frightening shapes. All of them deadly. But none of them were ever close enough for him to get a good look. Or for the Bugs to see him.
The ships he did see were all wrecks. Drop-ships and transports, a couple of the big mining ships that had been brought down by portable rocket launchers.
He saw them much closer in his dreams, though. Each night he dreamed of the hunter-killers coming in swarms.
He dreamed of the small, fast drop-ships deploying the Dissosterin shocktroopers. Many times he would come awake gasping and terrified from a dream to freeze there, clutching his thin blanket, listening for the sounds of war. Or he’d awake in the morning after a long, bad night and be afraid to open his eyes for fear of seeing the camp in smoking ruins and all his friends lying dead.
But those were only dreams. They weren’t real.
In many ways, the whole war was so far away from him that it wasn’t totally real.
Until that Tuesday.
This is the story of what happened on a very bad Tuesday.
And what happened after.
The tree Milo hid behind was called devil’s walkingstick. All thorns and spikes, but it offered good cover. There was a whole row of them growing wild along the muddy slope leading up from the bayou. Most of them were hidden in the mists that moved like armies of ghosts across the flat, still swamp waters.
Milo had his slingshot out, a sharp stone fitted into the leather pad. Eyes open, ears alert, breath almost still in his chest.
On the other side of the row, somewhere in the dense swampy woods, something moved. Not the squadrons of mosquitoes that filled the air day and night. Not the legions of ants that crawled over everything.
Something else.
Something he was positive shouldn’t be here.
Milo was sure it wasn’t anyone from his training pod. The other kids were following different trails, each trying to find what he’d already found. So, it wasn’t them.
That left a lot of things it could be.
Most of them were dangerous.
Not all of them were from Earth.
That was the problem with the world. That was life since the invasion. It was life since th
e hive ships arrived.
He crouched there. Still and quiet, as he’d been taught. Listening to the forest. Watching the movement of each mossy branch, each stalk of marsh grass, each leaf. Letting the natural world whisper to him so that he could hear the sounds of what was unnatural.
The shadow moved.
Too far away to see it clearly beyond the tendrils of Spanish moss that hung from the trees. Too deep inside the shadowy woods to tell anything about it. He licked his lips. The slingshot was good for target practice, and he could take down a squirrel or a rabbit for the stewpot, but whatever was out there looked bigger. There were still a few black bears left in the woods here along Bayou Teche. A rare eastern cougar, too. And some of the older scouts said they’d seen coyotes. A slingshot was no good at all for anything that big.
He had some better stuff in his pockets. Flash-bang poppers, cutwires, and one ultrasonic screecher, but if he used them and it turned out to be a lost deer or a confused raccoon, he’d be doing kitchen duty until he was a hundred years old. Tech was rare these days, and it was never—ever—to be used except in real emergencies.
“Come on . . . ,” he murmured, his voice so quiet it made no real sound. A dozen yards away, bream popped the surface of the bayou, eating water skaters and luckless flies. Cicadas kept up a continuous buzz in the trees. A great egret stalked through the shallows, lifting its stick-thin legs to place each step with great delicacy.
Milo edged along the row of thorny plants, trying to get a better look.
There was a clearing in the woods that hadn’t been there the last time Milo’s pod had scouted this part of the wetlands. On the northeast side of the clearing stood the shattered remains of a small stand of holly trees. Only uneven stumps still stood upright. The rest of the trees had been destroyed and partially burned. Beyond the stumps Milo could see the impact zone. It was about three hundred feet across at its widest and roughly circular. Every growing thing inside had been destroyed. The stink of ash filled the moist morning air.
Milo had been to enough crash sites to be able to read the scene. Something had come in low and hot—maybe a helicopter from the Earth Alliance, or more likely a Bug drop-ship. It had broken up in the air and the pieces had torn through the trees along the bayou. Most of them apparently missed the water, clipped the small grove of hollies, then crashed. None of the pieces he could see looked very large. Smaller than an oil drum. Which meant that the machine was blown to pieces. It must have started out pretty big, though, because there was a lot of debris and a lot of damage to the forest.
Like all of the kids in his pod, Milo had studied photos, drawings, and models of dozens of different kinds of craft. He knew all of the EA stuff backward and forward and could sketch from memory most of the enemy ships. The big city-sized hive ships, the skyscraper-tall harvesters, and the mobile diggers that walked across the face of the world on titanic metal legs, the smaller manned scout and pursuit ships, and all of the robotic hunter-killer drones.
The most common were the drop-ships. These were thirty feet across, round, shaped like hubcaps, with a spherical pilot’s compartment in the center. All along the curved edges were smaller platforms on which the tall, gangly Dissosterin shocktroopers stood. The ’troopers could either detach their mini-platforms from the drop-ship and come down under power, or they could attach steel lines and rappel down. These ships were fast and hard to hit, but they weren’t heavily armed, and a well-aimed shoulder-mounted rocket launcher could destroy one.
Milo thought that the debris in this field might be one of those. That was good news because the EA technicians had been trying to build a drop-ship from parts scavenged from crashes all over the south. Milo had overheard his mom talking about it a couple of times. The drop-ships were incredibly easy to operate, and the lowest-level Bug drones could fly them. A human pilot who was helping rebuild one said that a five-year-old kid could fly one.
The next stage of that project was sketchier, but Milo’s friend Shark said he heard some of the soldiers talking about guys volunteering to crew the drop-ship and pilot it up to the hive ship along with a cargo of ten tons of high explosives.
The plan was maybe five good scavenge jobs away from being workable, which meant that every crash was a potential step toward hitting the Bugs back like they’d never been hit before.
Milo also knew that the EA scientists wanted to get their hands on a living Bug—whether a drone or a shocktrooper. So far they hadn’t been able to, and from the mangled state of this wreckage, Milo couldn’t believe that anyone or anything had survived.
And yet . . .
The whatever-it-was in the forest moved again. Eighty feet away, behind a wall of wild rhododendron that was tangled up with bright orange trumpet creepers. Milo still couldn’t see it. Not really. Just a hint of something dark and big. Definitely big. Much bigger than a raccoon. Maybe as big as a deer.
The color troubled him. Was it a downed pilot in a camouflaged flight suit? Or one of the seven-foot-tall four-armed alien shocktroopers in their distinctive black-green Dissosterin shell armor?
Or something worse?
A Stinger, maybe. Or one of the other mutants the aliens were breeding in their hive ships.
Just thinking about the possibility of it being a Stinger made Milo’s mouth go completely dry. The stone he’d fitted into his slingshot felt ridiculously small and stupid. If that was a Stinger, the stone would do about as much damage as blowing a kiss.
Stingers were monster dogs bred by the Dissosterin. Once upon a time they had been ordinary mastiffs and wolfhounds. Then the aliens did something to them. The camp science teacher, Mr. Rawlins, called it “transgenic manipulation,” which he explained meant that the dogs were altered at the genetic level. Parts of different kinds of animals were combined through weird science. The Stingers had the massive bulk of a two-hundred-pound canine, but their bodies were covered with tough insect armor. Worst of all, they had enormous scorpion tails arching over their backs.
Milo had never seen one, but he’d seen pictures, and the creatures in those pictures came stalking through Milo’s nightmares. He knew kids who had lost parents, aunts, and uncles to Stingers.
He licked his dry lips and studied the crash site. As he saw it, the scene in the burned clearing said everything that ever needed to be said about the world. Something came from the skies and either broke or burned everything that was beautiful and thriving. Leaving ash and wreckage.
And things.
Sweat trickled down the side of his face.
This was their second year in swamp country. Last year it had been only a little above the normal mid-fifties to low sixties of March; but this year the swamp was hot and so humid you could almost swim in the air. Ever since the Bugs arrived and began their strip mining, the whole planet had been getting hotter.
Wait. Something moved.
There was a crack as a heavy foot stepped down on a branch.
It was a small sound, but everything in the woods instantly froze. Birds and bugs and Milo Silk all held their breath.
There was another soft, furtive sound.
Whatever was out there was sneaking through the woods. And it was coming straight for him.
Milo raised the slingshot, ready to fire.
As he did, the day seemed to change around him. There had been patches of heavy storm clouds in the sky all morning, and now they moved to cover the sun. The brightness of morning was instantly transformed into a twilight gloom. Green and yellow turned to purple and gray. Everything clear became hazy and unreal. Details became instantly vague and elusive.
Milo peered into these new shadows, trying to make shapes out of the shapeless walls that had been shrubs and flowers moments ago. The spaces between and beneath the bushes were almost totally black.
He narrowed his eyes and peered into the darkness. The trick to finding Dissosterin in any low-light situation was to look for a faint green glow. Each of them had a small green jewel embedded in their chests.
These “lifelights” were somehow tied to the actual life force of the Bugs and their mutant creations. Soldiers in camp spent so much time working on their marksmanship because if you blew out the lifelight, you stopped a Bug. Shocktrooper, Stinger, or one of their robot hunter-killer devices—they all had the same lifelights.
Milo searched for even a hint of that ghostly emerald glow, but he didn’t see anything like that.
However, as he peered into the darkness . . . something peered back at him.
Milo’s heart froze in his chest.
He blinked, trying to get a better look.
There it was.
Eyes.
Two large eyes stared at him from the shadows beneath the rhododendron.
Strange eyes. A blue that was almost silver. His friend Lizabeth had light blue eyes that the adults called arctic blue, and for a moment, Milo thought that he was seeing his friend. She was out here too, somewhere in these woods along with the rest of their school pod. Twelve kids and a team leader spread over a few square miles of terrain.
The eyes stared at him.
He almost fired.
He did not.
Instead he lowered the slingshot and eased the tension on the band. Not entirely, but mostly.
Those eyes . . .
They seemed like girl eyes to him—though he had no idea why he thought that. It was a feeling. Girl eyes the color of a winter moon.
“Lizabeth . . . ?”
Even as he spoke her name, Milo knew it wasn’t her. Pale as her eyes were, these were paler still.
And . . . different.
Strange.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
The eyes stared at him, unmoving, unblinking. They were low, down at waist level, like someone crouching to hide.
Or . . . a dog?
Was that all this was? A dog?
If so, it was a stray. There were a couple dozen dogs back in camp and some wild strays that followed every time camp was moved to a new location, but Milo knew them all. None of them had eyes like this. And even Captain Allen’s old husky had eyes of a different color—one brown and one a darker blue.