The Resisters (18 page)

Coach wheeled on Ethan, his hands outstretched as if he was going to strangle him.

Ethan, still bound in duct tape, promised himself he’d never let Coach touch him again.

Ethan drew his knees to his chest, kicked out and up with all his strength, and connected his heels with the Coach’s nose.

Coach Norman fell backward, clutching at a busted, bleeding face.

Meanwhile, the ant lion struggled to right itself. Its six limbs flailed and ripped out boards in the gym’s floor for purchase. The artillery mounted on its back clicked as another shell cycled into its firing chamber.

Was it trying to blast itself upright?

“Get it!” Ethan yelled. “Quick!”

The wasp’s laser stinger pulled back and aimed at the thing.

But the ant lion’s silver armor would reflect that beam. Raw force wouldn’t stop it.

Ethan formed a single thought and sent it to the wasp:
STAB
.

The wasp drew back one ripping forelimb and slashed down into the ant lion’s belly. With a wrenching shriek, it punctured the ant lion’s armor.

The wasp then blasted its laser beam
through
that hole.

The enemy insect bubbled inside, then boiled over and spewed out stinking gray-green ichor over the entire gym.

The two guard fleas jumped away in opposite directions, punching through the walls.

The police officers in exoskeletons rushed the wasp.

The wasp turned and knocked them over like they were toys.

It whirled right and left, unable to decide which of the fleas to chase down and rip apart.

“Here,” Ethan cried.

His wasp approached and towered over him, spiky limbs ready to strike.

Ethan felt the insect’s heart race. He sensed the raw instinctive pleasure of combat thundering in its mind.

“Get me out of this,” Ethan said, and struggled against the binding duct tape. “We’ll fight together.”

The wasp stared at him … and for a moment Ethan saw himself through
its
eyes.

He was small and weak. A mammal. A piece of meat to consume … then there was a bond between the two of them … Ethan was part of the wasp … like (and this last thought was more
his
than the insect’s) … like he was a little brother to this thing.

The wasp struck down with a forelimb.

It split the duct tape through the center (any closer and it would’ve ripped Ethan in half).

Ethan pulled off the remains of the tape and stood.

The wasp’s cockpit armor slid aside. Interior lights blinked on.

Ethan scrambled inside and instantly felt safe.

He wondered about how easy it was working with the insect. He worried about what Dr. Irving had told him … that it was best to be cautious when dealing with human-insect telepathic bonds.

It got easier to understand the wasp, sure, but what price was Ethan paying for that?

Was he becoming less human?

The adults, stunned and knocked down, started getting up.

He and the wasp had run out of time. They had to fight. They had to save themselves … and Emma. Where
was
Emma?

Ethan considered going over to Coach Norman and scaring that information out of him. But Coach wasn’t human and wouldn’t scare. In fact, Ethan could knock him down and a hundred, a thousand, a million others from the Collective would step up to take his place.

Ethan would have to find Emma on his own.

He and the wasp jumped out of the gymnasium and landed on the brick-paved courtyard of Northside Elementary.

Ethan saw the ruined soccer field, and next to that the freshly overturned lawn of Emerald Park. A half-dozen kids hurried along by adults ran onto the grassy field. They
shouted, half panicked. They had good reason after hearing the explosions in the gym.

A zeppelin hovered above the school. Spotlights played over its mirror-Mylar surface.

A second zeppelin was tethered to the field. A stairway had been pushed up to the gondola, and the kids climbed up.

He waved.

That was stupid, because on the cockpit’s view screen, he saw the wasp raise a lethal forelimb.

The kids screamed and pointed. Some scattered, some fainted right there on the stairs, and others ran over them into the zeppelin.

How was he going to get them away without scaring them half to death?

A monitor zoomed in and centered on one of the students.

Emma.

She stood, openmouthed, her dark hair half covering her face, staring wide-eyed at him … or rather staring at the giant wasp. Her face was contorted with revulsion and terror. Emma was so scared, she froze in place.

Then she did a double take, squinted, fascinated and curious, as if she recognized … 
something
.

But the vice principal hurried her up the stairs and into the zeppelin.

No way. Ethan wasn’t letting them take her away. Not when he was so close!

Ethan would just have to grab her now. She’d be scared out of her mind, but at least she’d still
have
her mind.

He ordered the wasp to unfurl its wings. The exoskeleton casing split open. Its wings popped out and buzzed.

The wasp crouched to get a jumping takeoff—

A rhinoceros beetle landed in front of him. It cratered the courtyard and blocked his path.

It was bone white with orange stripes. It was smaller than Felix’s model (although still twice as massive as Ethan’s wasp). It had two tiny spikes instead of horns.

Before Ethan could even react, a second beetle landed next to him.

It fired a missile.

Ethan saw a split second of smoke—the wasp instinctively jumped into the air to dodge—but the missile tracked his trajectory.

It hit him. Exploded.

Red-hot needles shot through the wasp, and because of their mental link, it felt like they shot through Ethan, too.

The wasp’s armor cracked. One of the middle limbs broke.

The wasp tumbled through the air. It landed in a heap.

Ethan’s vision smeared into a blur. He heard the whine of a high-pressure leak. His hands, arms, and legs went numb.

He lay there … unable to move … or think.

“Ethan? Ethan!”

He had to be dreaming, because that was Madison—screaming in his ear. As usual.

He blinked. The wasp’s cockpit came back into focus.

On a fractured view screen Ethan saw two enemy beetles shuffle toward him.

He tried to move. The wasp wouldn’t respond.

Three
more
insects landed, their wings a haze that settled into green-and-yellow locust shapes the size of trucks.

There was no way he could fight all these things alone.

He was as good as dead.

A LOCUST POUNCED ONTO ETHAN’S WASP. IT
grabbed the wasp’s busted leg with jagged forelimbs and razor-edged jaws—and pulled. The wasp’s joints wrenched and popped.

It was trying to rip his leg off!

Ethan yanked his arm uselessly within the wasp’s limb, desperately urging the fighting suit to move.

Instead of getting
more
scared, though, Ethan felt something turn inside his head … and he got mad.

This wasn’t a fair fight.

It’d
never
been a fair fight.

Ethan had been set up his entire life to lose. No matter how hard he tried—the grades he got in school, the awards, the soccer matches he won—he was going to grow up and become an adult. He couldn’t stop that. He couldn’t stop becoming one of the Ch’zar.

Unless he
resisted
them. Unless he
fought
.

The rage he’d felt before in the wasp’s mind was back but now was inside
his
brain as well.

He moved. The wasp moved with him.

They slashed at the locust.

The wasp’s forelimb caught in the locust’s serrated mandibles. They locked, and the two insects struggled.

He pulled at the locust’s head. The locust worked its jaws trying to bite through the wasp’s arm.

Ethan screamed with rage.

He and his wasp yanked free of the jaws—ripped them out, along with the lower part of the locust’s head. Goo and brains squirted over the school’s courtyard with a wet
splat
.

He pushed the dead insect off.

Alarms blared inside the cockpit, and red lines and missile icons flashed on-screen. Ethan instinctively jumped.

Two missiles hit the ground where he’d been standing a split second before.

The wasp landed on the creaking roof of the gymnasium.

The two enemy rhinoceros beetles lumbered toward the smoking crater where he’d been … not realizing he’d escaped.

How was he going to stop these guys?

“Blackwood!” Madison’s voice crackled through the radio speaker in the cockpit.

“Madison?”

Was it her? He hadn’t just dreamed that a second ago?

Ethan wanted to gush his thanks, ask her a million questions—like how she’d found him—but then she’d just tell him what a moron he was.

Instead, Ethan asked, “Where are you?”

“Where are
you
?” she demanded, irritated. “Turn off your stupid stealth mode so we can get a fix on you!”

Ethan glanced about the cockpit. The purple indicators that had lit when he’d gone into stealth mode still glowed. He tapped the nearest button, and they went dark.

“I got you,” she whispered. “Hang tight, rookie.”

The air filled with buzzing.

Against the lightening star-filled twilight sky, Ethan spied flitting dark shapes.

A dragonfly zoomed overhead—there—gone—then a trailing sonic boom.

He’d never heard a more beautiful sound.

A dozen rhinoceros beetles landed in a V formation. They shook the ground with their massive presence. They were Resisters in midnight blue armor, horns sparking with plasma—and they blasted the enemy beetles and locusts to ashes.

“Felix!” Ethan cried.

“Right here, friend.”

A swarm of yellow-and-black-striped Infiltrator wasps engaged enemy red wasps and drones. Lasers and missiles crisscrossed the darkness.

Wounded drones crashed into Main Street.

“You think you get to run off and get all the glory?” Madison demanded.

“Besides,” Felix said, “Colonel Winter says we never leave team members behind enemy—”

Madison broke in: “Robot and insect reinforcements inbound. North by northeast. Lots.”

Segmented centipede-like earth movers splintered through houses and overturned cars. Wolf spiders bounded across rooftops, smashing chimneys. Roaches boiled up through the sewers, pushing aside the concrete sidewalks like they were tissue paper.

A gigantic tarantula bounded onto the gym’s roof and leaped straight at Ethan’s wasp.

The wasp jumped out of the way, wings snapped out to fly—and got blindsided by one of the smaller Ch’zar beetles.

The white-and-orange beetle was a clumsy flier but a
fantastic
wrestler as it clutched him with six pronged legs. The beetle’s side missile launchers popped open.

It was going to blast him into pieces at point-blank range!

Ethan stopped beating his wasp wings.

Wasp and beetle dropped like two stones—and landed on the crumpled remains of the soccer field.

Ethan shifted his grip, focusing on shutting those missile launcher pods. He pushed the doors halfway closed—enough so they couldn’t fire—but hydraulics inside the
enemy beetle’s shell kicked on and started slowly pushing the pods back open.

Ethan wasn’t going to win a contest of brute force with this thing.

He glanced at his monitors (the ones still working) and made sure there were no students on the field. One wrong move and he’d squish his classmates.

Along the corridors and on the grassy fields of Northside Elementary, Resister beetles grappled with mechanical centipedes and spiders and multiarmed robots.

Bombs rained from the air. Streaks of fire shot through the night.

Explosions flattened buildings.

Concrete chunks rained around Ethan’s wasp.

The soccer field was thankfully clear of students.

The zeppelin that had been tethered in the adjacent park slowly rose above the battle.

Emma was on that thing!

He had to get out of this beetle’s death grip before it was too late.

Ethan watched as the beetle’s missile launcher doors continued to push open. Orange-tipped rockets clicked into view. They reminded him of the rockets he and Emma had built, what seemed like a million years ago; only
these
rockets were packed with high explosives.

If fired at this close range, the beetle would blow itself up along with Ethan.

Which was how he had to destroy it.

He curled the wasp’s stinger against its abdomen, heated the laser’s firing chamber … and took
very
careful aim.

He’d get only one shot.

Ethan released his hold and pushed off the beetle. He ripped free of its grip.

The missile launcher doors immediately popped fully open.

He fired the wasp’s laser.

The missiles heated red, then white-hot, and detonated in their launch tubes.

Like a string of firecrackers, all the missiles inside the beetle blew up one after another. The explosions threw Ethan clear of the field and into the wall of the gymnasium, which made the rest of that building collapse.