Titan Base (26 page)

Bobby knew something was wrong with them, because he wasn’t sick. He also knew something was wrong because none of the “sick” kids had ever come back.

He wished he had been sick.

He wished this had all been some massive, fever-induced hallucination.

He wished he’d never crossed paths with Ethan and Emma Blackwood and learned the truth.

Bobby turned the key in the ignition. The milk truck coughed once, lurched forward, and the engine died. He cursed, put the truck in park, and tried again. But the adults had seen.

They moved together toward the truck. It was weird the way they walked, with military precision, like robots inside of humans. It gave Bobby gooseflesh.

He found the courage to turn the ignition again, gave the truck some gas, and the thing roared to life.

Bobby shifted into drive and peeled out, fishtailing through the parking lot, dodging parked cars and light poles.

The driveway to the road was just fifty feet—and then escape.

Bobby floored it, and the truck jumped forward.

The steering wheel spun in his hands, though, no matter how hard he gripped it.

He realized it wasn’t only the wheel—the truck slid back and forth, as did the other cars in the parking lot. Even the ground buckled and rippled.

Cracks opened in the asphalt as an ant the size of an eighteen-wheeler stepped from the shadows into the milk truck’s path. With each step, the ant’s tremendous weight shook the entire parking lot.

Bobby swerved.

The milk truck screeched sideways, tilted, and started to tip.

The ant caught the truck in its steel-crushing jaws.

Behind Bobby, Sara and Leo screamed as the insect lifted the truck off the ground … and then it stared into the truck with a ten-foot-wide compound eye.

Bobby would’ve screamed, too, but he was too terrified. His lungs seemed to have stopped working.

He saw himself reflected a hundred times in the ant’s hexagonal eye segments.

This was it. He was going to die, frozen with terror, unable to even try to fight.

And
that
got him mad—enough to snap out of the fear that gripped him.

“Go ahead!” he yelled at the ant. “Try and eat me. I hope you choke!”

The ant hesitated and cocked its head.

Bobby couldn’t believe it. Had he actually scared the thing?

The ant dropped the truck.

There was a split second of free fall, and then Bobby and the others slammed onto the metal floor of the truck.

Bobby got to his feet and wobbled. The world spun.

He then saw what had really stopped the ant.

Another giant bug dropped from the sky. An impossibly large blue beetle landed directly on top of the ant.

The beetle’s impact crunched chitin as it blasted the ant with a beam weapon projected from the rhinoceros-like horns on its head.

The ant screamed and melted from the intense heat. Boiling gray ichor gushed out from its broken body.

More ants scrambled over and
through
houses to engage this new threat.

A red locust landed and wrestled with one. A dragonfly buzzed over the ground, strafing ants with rapid-fire laser pulses that left Bobby blinking back tears.

A huge ladybug landed with a thud next to the milk truck, and then let loose with a salvo of rocket-propelled bombs that turned the advancing column of ants into pieces of twitching limbs and smoldering shells.

Bobby, ears ringing from the explosions, wondered if he’d been knocked out and this was all some weird dream.

A black-and-gold wasp streaked through the sky, laser flashing. It grabbed the last ant and tossed it aside, leveling the corner newsstand in the process.

This was no dream.

Bobby had seen these giant bugs before.

“Blackwood,” he muttered.

Bobby clambered toward the back of the milk truck,
not sure if he was going to kill Ethan Blackwood for leaving him or shake his hand for coming back.

Maybe both.

The wasp landed near the milk truck and its cockpit opened.

The adults at the edge of the parking lot stared at the wasp and at the figure that emerged from it … and then they ran.

“I came back,” Ethan told Bobby and the other kids. “Like I promised. No one gets left behind anymore.”

Ethan looked different from when Bobby had seen him last. Something had happened to him. Something terrible had been etched into his features. There was a new resilience, though, a strength that Bobby had never seen in a classmate—or in any adult, for that matter. There was no fear or doubt left in Ethan Blackwood.

Ethan looked out at the darkness of Santa Blanca and then addressed the adults and the insects he seemed to know were watching and listening: “You think the Resistance is dead. Think again. We’re just getting started.”

He reached out to Bobby. “We’re the Resisters,” Ethan told him. “Join us if you want to fight for yourself, for humanity, and for a free Earth.”

DON’T MISS THE NEXT BOOK IN THE RESISTERS SERIES!

COMING IN OCTOBER 2013!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
   

E
RIC
N
YLUND
is a
New York Times
bestselling and World Fantasy Award–nominated author. He is also director of narrative design for Microsoft Studios, where he helps create blockbuster video games.

Eric has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry. He graduated from the prestigious Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1994. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family. You can learn more about Eric and contact him at
ericnylund.net
.