The Orphan Army by Jonathan Maberry Page B

knee and looked down, expecting it to be Killer under the table, begging for scraps like he does. But it wasn’t.
    It was the wolf from the forest, chewing on a beef bone.
    I almost screamed. I mean, it was right there, close enough to bite me.
    Then the wolf’s mouth moved. Not to bite me. It was trying to speak like people do. It couldn’t, though, because it didn’t have a human mouth.
    It scared me. Not because this was an animal trying to talk to me. No, what scared me was that I couldn’t understand it.
    And I was very, very sure I needed to.
    That’s when we started hearing the thunder in the sky. We ignored it, though, the way we always do. At first, anyway.
    I bent down and ducked under the table. I had an idea that if I tried to make my mouth make the same shapes as the wolf was trying to make that I could maybe figure out what it was trying to say. It wasn’t as stupid as it sounds. It made sense in my dream.
    It helped, too. I could feel the shape of the words. Real words, but I had to repeat them over and over before they made any sense. “Thayer . . .” That’s what it sounded like.
    It wasn’t, though. Not “thayer.” It was . . . two words smooshed into one.
    They are .
    When I said the words aloud, I could swear the wolf nodded.
    It kept speaking, though, repeating that word and another. I had to sound it out, too.
    It sounded like “common.”
    It wasn’t.
    It was “coming.”
    When I didn’t understand right away, the wolf got mad and growled at me. Not like it was going to bite, but because it was so frustrated.
    The thunder was getting louder, the storm coming closer.
    Then I got it.
    I said it aloud.
    â€œThey’re coming.”
    They?
    â€œWho . . . ?” I began to say, but I didn’t need to finish the question.
    Suddenly, everyone at the table seemed to finally hear the thunder, and all the laughing and talking just died. It was totally quiet except for the thunder. We all looked up at the storm clouds.
    It was the hive ship.
    It broke through the clouds, and then all the smaller ships broke off from the bottom and came at us.
    Everyone was screaming and running by then. Mom was yelling orders to her soldiers. Dad was yelling to us kids to run and hide.
    Then the first wave of burners and buzzers and drinkers hit us. They look like oversized insects. Moths and locusts and dragonflies and mosquitoes. Some were like mashups of different kinds of insects. Centipedes with butterfly wings; ticks with the wings of blowflies. Hunter-killers, all of them. Relentless robots programmed to destroy.
    We were all running. The soldiers had guns even though no one had guns while we were eating. Now they all had rifles and handguns and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. They started firing at the wave of hunter-killers.
    The Bugs fired back. They don’t use bullets. They fire blue plasma bolts that can burn through anything.
    We all scattered. I saw Shark and Lizabeth running with Barnaby, but I lost them when there was a whole bunch of explosions.
    Then I saw the girl, Evangelyne, walking through the smoke.
    She said, “They’ve stolen the Heart of Darkness.”
    â€œWho cares?” I yelled back. “Get out of here. Get to cover!”
    â€œA great darkness is coming,” she said, and her voice was half hers and half the Witch of the World’s. “It will consume this world. This world and all worlds.”
    Then another ship came down. Not a drop-ship. This is the red one I keep seeing. Big and red.
    It fired on us and then everything went black.

M ilo woke in the dead of night, gasping, clutching with desperate fingers at the edges of the hammock. He was soaked to the skin with fear sweat, his thin sheet tangled like a snake around his legs.
    His skin seemed to burn with the heat of the explosions in his dreams.
    He lay there, panting, terrified, totally unable to move.
    Listening to the