The Last Orphans

by N. W. Harris

  “Seems a little excessive, having so many loaded,” Shane said, trying to distract himself from the numbness creeping back over him like kudzu swallowing a deserted building.

  “It takes too long to reload these if they’re needed,” Aaron replied, grunting as he pulled the cable back on another crossbow. “This way you can fire off a lot of bolts quickly in a crisis.”

  “I think I’ll leave the shooting to you,” Shane replied, uncomfortable at the thought of seeing the bolt from one of the crossbows kill something or someone because he’d pulled the trigger.

  “I’m not coming with you,” Aaron said, sounding like he anticipated Shane would argue with him about his decision.

  “What?” Shane looked at him in the rearview mirror.

  “I have to try to find my mom.” Aaron’s voice trembled with uncertainty, and he didn’t look up from his work.

  Shane hated himself for lying to his friend. He’d known Aaron since they were little, long enough to recognize he sounded like he already knew his mom couldn’t have survived. Shane deserved to be punched—he should’ve just told him the truth before. Tightening his grip on the steering wheel, Shane glanced in the rearview mirror at Aaron.

  “She’s dead,” he blurted out, hating how insensitive he sounded.

  “You don’t know that,” Aaron said, quiet anger rising in his voice. “She could be okay, or she could be hurt and might need my help.”

  Shane took a deep and shaky breath, and then let it out slowly. He twisted his hands on the big steering wheel and tried to organize his words. Aaron would’ve never lied to him, and he knew he owed his friend the truth.

  “Earlier, when you asked me if I’d seen her,” he paused and sighed. “I’m really sorry, but I didn’t have the balls to tell you the truth.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” Aaron shouted, rising to his feet and leaning toward Shane, while still holding a freshly loaded crossbow in his hands.

  “I’m so sorry, bro,” Shane replied, feeling like he should be shot with one of the carbon-fiber bolts. “I saw her.”

  He waited for Aaron to slug him in the side of the head, almost wanting him to do it.

  “Well?” Aaron’s nostrils flared. Shane saw them do that before, when Aaron broke his arm on the football field last year, though the tall, blond running back hadn’t shed a tear. “What happened to her?”

  “Dogs,” Shane replied, the word choking him. “I tried to throw them off, but there were too many.”

  “Damn you, Shane,” Aaron yelled and punched the metal roof. He spun around and stomped to the back of the bus, sat down in one of the green seats, and put his face in his hands.

  Seeing Aaron so upset made Shane feel like crap, and made the pain of losing his aunt and Granny resurface in full force. He leaned forward on the wheel, feeling like a dump truck full of rocks had just been unloaded on his head, bashing him to a pulp and suffocating him at the same time.

  His thoughts drifted to his father. Shane couldn’t be certain, but his dad had to have been killed as well. No one saw a single living adult since the animals went berserk. Wondering about how his dad died caused tears to well in his eyes. Had he suffered? He hoped not. He wiped the tears clear and tried to focus on the narrow road leading down to the high school, wishing his last moments with his dad hadn’t been spent fighting.

  Tall oak trees grew up on either side, their canopies connected above the road, blocking out the sky and creating an ominous, dark tunnel. Shane’s bus coasted down the hill behind Tracy’s, its transmission whining against the vehicle’s weight. Steve and Kelly drove the last bus behind him. Shane wished Tracy would go faster; he couldn’t wait to be near Kelly again. She sparked a little glimmer of hope in his chest, staving off the cold, dark depression settling in when she wasn’t around.

  Tracy’s bus turned right at the bottom of the hill, and then roared and sped across the street before Shane could see the school. Dread knotted his stomach because he knew she wasn’t the type to mess around. Hot adrenaline bursting through his veins, Shane pulled out of the oak tree tunnel and saw orange flames licking from the windows of the three long, red brick buildings housing the library and classrooms.

  “Aaron,” he yelled over his shoulder. “We got problems!”

  Rushing to the front of the bus, Aaron leaned down and looked out the windshield. Shane floored the accelerator and zigzagged the bus across the street and into the dirt parking lot. Steve’s bus slid up beside him in a cloud of dust. As soon as the diesels stopped rumbling, they could hear the shouts and screams of the kids in the school. They climbed out and converged in front of the buses.

  “Look!” Matt said. “Those guys weren’t here earlier.”

  He pointed at three teenage boys darting across the yard and into the side door of the gym.

  “And they’re wearing orange convict clothing,” Tracy exclaimed. “Grab the weapons—they must be escapees from the juvenile prison.”

  Shane forgot all about the North Georgia Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, an experimental, high-security penal colony tucked away in the woods about five miles out of town. Rumor had it the center housed young rapists, murderers, and the nastiest of gangsters, not the kind of guys he wanted to tangle with.

  “Come on, man,” Aaron said, pushing a crossbow and quiver filled with bolts into Shane’s hands. “We have to get in there and save those kids.”

  If Aaron was mad at him for withholding the information about his mother, Shane could no longer see it in his eyes. He ran toward the gym with the others. Kelly, Matt, and Tracy carried crossbows as well, and Tracy also wielded a large hunting knife in her free hand. Steve and Aaron, who Shane knew hunted deer with bows every year, had high-end compound bows with quivers full of the razorblade-tipped arrows on their backs.

  “We have the element of surprise,” Tracy said. “They won’t know what hit them.”

  “No, no!” A girl’s scream came from inside the gym. “Get off me!”

  Cackling laughter and hoots from several boys followed. Shane’s imagination conjured up what horrible things the convicts might be doing in the gym, and any hesitation about attacking them vanished, replaced by boiling rage.

  “Let’s split up into two teams,” Shane ordered. “Tracy, take Matt and Steve and wait by that side door. Kelly and Aaron, come with me.”

  “These boys will not negotiate,” Tracy said. “We’ll have to shoot first and ask questions later.” The cliché warning made Shane’s stomach turn, and he feared he wouldn’t be able to kill once he was inside. His hands grew slick with sweat on the crossbow’s handle.

  “I got no problem with that,” Aaron said, nocking an arrow and drawing the string back, the razorblade arrowhead aimed at the metal door of the gym. His eyes narrowed like he prepared to unload all his anger over his mother’s death on the young convicts.

  Once she had her team at the door about fifty feet down the side of the gym, Tracy glanced back at Shane as if she awaited his order. Another girl’s agonized scream came from inside, making it hard for him to keep his rage in check. Knowing that being in control would help them stop the convicts, he took a deep breath and raised his hand, then dropped it to signal go like he’d seen the soldiers do in movies. He jerked the door open and rushed into the building with his crossbow leveled and ready to fire.

  The pandemonium inside the gym gave Shane’s squad of rescuers an instant to assess the scene. Five boys dressed in orange jumpsuits had all the smaller kids corralled by the stage at one end. Shane saw one of the convicts slap James, the bold little boy in pajamas he had picked up behind the grocery store, on the face so hard it knocked him to the floor. The surrounding teen convicts laughed. He wanted to run to the child’s aid but was distracted by thugs in orange lined up along the bleachers across the way. Their backs to him, they hooted and cheered as they watched something Shane couldn’t see from his vantage. The bone-chilling screams and pleading of girls carrying from beyond the row of boys swept all he
sitation and fear aside. He silently darted across the gym’s polished oak floor on the balls of his feet, the butt of his crossbow rising to his shoulder.

  “Hurry up, numb-nuts,” one of the boys shouted. “It’s my turn.”

  “Hold her still,” another yelled.

  At an angle between the convicts, Shane got a clear view of the struggling girls pressed against the bottom row of bleachers. Rebecca Swanton, a proud redhead he’d gone to school with his entire life, pushed up for a moment and sank her fingernails into her attacker’s face. The boy shrieked and hammered her back down with a punch.

  Rebecca lay still, knocked out or dead, he couldn’t tell. Murderous hate washed through Shane. He lined up the crosshairs in his scope below the asshole’s bleeding face and tugged the trigger without a second thought. A subtle click and the crossbow’s string thwacked. A quiet sound, yet it rang in his ears. The carbon-fiber bolt rocketed across the gym. Sinking into the boy’s neck, its stainless-steel tip pierced through the other side. The kid dropped to the wood floor, blood spraying out over his hands, which he raised to cover his wound. His eyes wide with shock, he opened and closed his mouth—a fish out of water starved for oxygen.

  “Get away from them, you bastards,” Kelly shrieked.

  The ferocity in her usually angelic voice startled Shane, breaking his dazed stare from the boy he’d just shot. Running at the thugs with her crossbow leveled, she shot one in the groin, and the boy dropped to the floor screaming.

  In the time it took Shane to load another dart, Aaron and Steve launched arrows into eight more of the convicts. The uninjured boys backed away, releasing girls they’d pinned to the bottom row of bleachers. Steve shot again, then charged across the room and tackled two at once, smashing them against the wall. When they tried to get up, he slugged them with his cannonball-sized fists. The other juvenile delinquents tugged their orange jumpsuits back on and charged toward the doors.

  “I’m going to kill every one of you bastards!” Aaron shouted and dropped two more of the escaped prisoners.

  Shane, Aaron, and Kelly made it to the girls on the bleachers. Traumatized, they pulled their torn clothing over themselves and huddled defensively.

  A loud boom echoed through the gym.

  “Watch out!” Tracy shouted. “They have guns!”

  “Aaron!” Shane yelled, spinning around and dropping to his knee with his crossbow raised.

  “I’m on it,” Aaron replied with lethal coolness.

  Releasing one arrow after another, Aaron picked off the three boys who held guns. The others retreated out the doors, scooping up the guns dropped by the downed convicts. Shane, Aaron, and Tracy pursued the convicts out of the gym into the front parking lot. Sheets of rain came down, soaking them and making it hard to see. The orange-clad boys jumped into three pickup trucks and raced away, shooting at Shane and his friends. They couldn’t aim, and only the red brick façade of the gym suffered any injury.

  Aaron rushed into the parking lot and jumped into his old Jeep.

  “Wait,” Shane yelled, shielding his eyes from the rain.

  “We gotta go after them,” Aaron shouted. “We can’t let them get away with that.” He pointed at the gym.

  “No, we have to stay together,” Tracy warned. “Look what happened here when we left these kids alone last time.”

  After a long and defiant stare at her and Shane, Aaron conceded, yelling, “Arrgh,” and punching the metal dash so hard that it should’ve broken his hand.

  Lightning cracked and lit up the world, a deafening crash of thunder coming just after. The bolt touched down in the football field just below the parking lot, so close the air felt charged with electricity.

  “Come on,” Shane said, eyeing the sky with trepidation. “We need to load up and get the hell out of here. Those jerks will come back after they realize they have guns and all we have are bows and arrows.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Matt agreed.

  He stepped out of the gym behind them and stood under the awning covering the door, his empty crossbow dangling from his hand. His pale face and wide eyes expressed the shock of the conflict they’d survived—he looked like Shane felt.

  The wind shifted and blew thick, black smoke from the burning parts of the school across the parking lot. Shane had forgotten about the fire, which still blazed in spite of the rain.

  “We need to get everyone out of there before the flames spread to the gym,” Tracy said, expressing Shane’s concern.

  Aaron slammed his fists on the dash and glared at the road the convicts disappeared down. Shaking his head with disappointment, he grabbed his bow from the passenger’s seat and climbed out of the Jeep. His wet face contorted by hate and frustration, he stepped past Shane and Tracy, and they followed him into the gym.

  The sounds of weeping victims made Shane want to change his mind and go with Aaron after the convicts. The little kids were being tended to by Steve, who was surprisingly gentle despite his size and usual aggressiveness. Kelly and Laura worried over the group of assaulted girls, wrapping them in blankets and shushing them. Shane, Tracy, and Aaron walked toward Kelly, coming across a teen convict with an arrow protruding from his stomach. The convict groaned, his body curled around the injury.

  “Please, help me,” he begged, his face twisted with pain.

  “I’ll help you,” Tracy said with loathsome sarcasm. She kicked him in the head with her black paratrooper boot, rendering him unconscious. Her hostility shocked Shane, though he didn’t feel the least bit sorry for the scumbag.

  “Keep your guard up,” Aaron warned, slipping his bow over his shoulder. “There could be more of those losers hiding in the school.”

  “All the more reason we need to get these kids loaded and get moving,” Shane replied, surveying the dead and dying lying in growing puddles of blood across the gym floor.

  The adrenaline wore off, nausea filling its place. They’d killed at least half of the assailants, and though the escaped convicts deserved what they got, Shane despised seeing the one he’d shot. The attacker’s scratched face looked younger and more innocent than when he was alive. His wide-open eyes already appeared dry and lusterless, his mouth frozen in its last struggle to gasp for air. Blood thickened into red stalactites hanging from the bolt Shane put through the boy’s neck, and a large, green fly sampled some from the edge of the puncture wound. Had there been another way to rescue the girls without killing? He couldn’t think of one, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Trying to shift his attention to the living, he scanned the court and took a headcount of his people.

  “Anyone seen Billy?” Shane looked around the gym again.

  “He’s dead,” Laura said weakly, pointing to the shadowy space between the edge of the bleachers and the wall. His stomach knotting, Shane walked over and saw Billy laying facedown, blood spreading around him.

  “He tried to fight off the convicts, and they shot him,” Laura added. “He was so brave.” She sounded guilty, and Shane guessed she must’ve hidden when the convicts came into the gym. Otherwise, they would’ve attacked her too.

  “Kelly, can you and Laura get those girls loaded into a bus?” Shane asked, tearing his eyes away from Billy and swallowing the metallic pre-puke taste building in his mouth.

  He abhorred how Billy was killed. It seemed sadly ironic the boy died trying to protect a bunch of girls who were never nice to him. After all the kindness the boy doled out over the years and all the crap he’d taken, he deserved a proper burial, didn’t deserve to lay facedown in his blood and be left to rot in the dark corner where he was murdered. There was no time to dwell on it—Shane had to stay focused on the living now, and get them out of the gym before it caught fire or the convicts returned. Resolved to do something, he grabbed a blanket from the edge of the bleachers and gently pushed Billy over onto his back. Then, he said a quick prayer and covered the boy. If there was a heaven, someone as good as Billy was already there. The thought did little to quash Shane’s ang
er and grief.

  Kelly and Laura consoled the girls on the bleachers, wiping their tears and whispering to them.

  “Get everyone loaded into the buses,” Shane growled, rage threatening to take over.

  “They need a minute, damn it,” Laura snapped, glaring at him for his insensitivity.

  “We don’t have a minute,” Shane replied, still sounding more aggressive than he intended. “We have to get going.”

  “It’s okay,” Kelly said, putting a hand on Laura’s arm and flashing a warning glance at Shane. “We’ll take them to the bathroom, help them wash up, and then we can load them on the bus.”

  Even with the chaos and his emotions pushing him around, Shane couldn’t help but be impressed by Kelly’s coolness and maturity, feeling guilty for his lack thereof. She was only a year older than him but seemed more with it than any adult he’d ever known—like she’d been through this a thousand times.

  “Aaron, go with them and stand guard outside the bathroom door,” Shane ordered, trying to adopt a smidgen of Kelly’s self-control.

  Tracy already ordered the rest of the kids in the gym on their feet, herding them to the far wall away from the dead convicts and out the back doors. Steve came over to where Shane stood, looking like he expected to be given a task. His knuckles were busted from hitting the criminals, but all the meanness was gone from his expression. His eyes were wide and a bit doleful, and Shane could tell he was also conflicted about the killing they’d just done. He guessed anyone who wasn’t a natural-born, cold-blooded killer would feel like crap right now.

  “Take a couple of boys and go grab all the food you can carry out of the cafeteria,” Shane directed.

  “I’m on it,” Steve replied and ran toward the door.

  “Steve,” Shane called after him.