The Last Orphans

by N.W. Harris

  A pileup of cars and an overturned cement truck, its lumpy cargo hardening across the road, blocked the west end of Main Street. Shane took the pickup around the lower side of town. The sun had been down for about twenty minutes, and the yellow streetlamps came on, but dreary darkness shrouded all the stores, no one around to turn on their lights. At this time on most summer nights, the restaurants and shops of the hilltop town of Leeville were busy, catering to a handful of locals and hundreds of tourists up from Atlanta to find reprieve from the smoggy heat in the cooler, clean mountain air. But now it looked vacant, so desolate and quiet it creeped Shane out.

  It would be bad enough to think the inhabitants of the quaint mountaintop community had vacated due to some unknown event, rendering it a ghost town. Trapped in this nightmare he couldn’t wake up from, Shane couldn’t help concluding the silence was most likely because everyone was dead, all executed in the worst ways imaginable—their throats ripped out or their skulls caved in by beloved pets and livestock, or perhaps worse, killed by the venom of snakes and murderous insects.

  Turning off the steep alley leading down to the road behind town, he drove past the body of an old man with a deer’s antler protruding from his chest and glanced over at Nat. Thank goodness she was still asleep. He expected the town might be filled with dead and couldn’t bear the idea of the little girl seeing it or of trying to explain to her what happened.

  “So wrong,” Kelly remarked, tilting her head down and shielding her eyes.

  The headlights of the truck illuminated another victim lying in a glistening pool of blood up ahead. Three raccoons leapt off the corpse and waddled into the bushes in front of a bank on the left side of the road. The person’s face and arms were ripped up, with clothing so bloody and tattered that Shane couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a man. Looking at the mutilated body made him worry his dad might not be alive. Guilt surged in him when he realized he hadn’t worried about him sooner. Had they grown so far apart that he didn’t even care if his father had been killed? A bolt of pain shot through Shane’s heart, and he knew the answer was no. He loved his dad, at least when he was sober.

  “They’re all grown-ups,” Kelly whispered.

  “Maybe the animals are only going after them,” Shane replied. He made a conscious effort not to focus on any more of the carcasses.

  “Look,” Kelly exclaimed, pointing out of her window at four kids huddled on the loading dock behind the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.

  With all the dead around, seeing the kids alive was akin to finding water in a desert. He steered the truck off the street and into the parking lot. Before his mom died and his dad started drinking heavily, he used to bring his radio-controlled cars here in evenings with his dad and play until well after the streetlamps went on. His dad would tirelessly help him tweak the cars’ little, gas-powered motors to get the most out of them.

  The headlamps of the truck illuminated three boys and a girl. They backed into the shadow between the dumpster and the building. The relief of seeing someone else alive distracted him from the bittersweet memory of the time he’d spent in this parking lot with his dad. Shane leapt out and raised his hands.

  “Hey, guys. Y’all okay?”

  They didn’t answer and huddled deeper into the shadows, seeming worried Shane had hostile intentions. He guessed their ages to be between seven and ten, probably all elementary or middle school kids. Their wide eyes and pale skin spoke to all the death they’d seen. Maybe they’d even watched their parents get killed.

  “We ain’t going to hurt you,” he said gently, stepping closer to the concrete loading dock. “We’re just wondering what happened here?”

  “It was them bears,” the shortest said, stepping forward. The streetlamp revealed a boy with disheveled blond hair wearing pajamas with bulldozers on them. “They came in the store and killed my mom and dad.” He looked down at Shane hopefully, as if expecting he might be able to fix everything.

  “Mine too,” the girl with brown pigtails and wet, green eyes said, and then glanced behind her at the back of the grocery store. The other two boys nodded as if to say the same happened to them.

  Wishing he had some comforting words, Shane stared up at the kids. What could be done? They couldn’t be left here to fend for themselves, though he wasn’t sure they’d be much better off if they came with him.

  “No sense in you guys hanging out here.” He put on his best adult voice, expecting it might calm them. “Why don’t you come with us, and we’ll try to sort this all out?”

  They eyed him for a moment, and then looked at each other. The smallest pajama-clad boy who had spoken first gave a defeated shrug and climbed down off the loading dock with the others following one by one.

  “What are your names?” Shane asked, hoping to ease some of their sorrow as he led them to the truck.

  “I’m James,” the smallest boy replied.

  “My name is Sara,” the girl said, a confidence uncommon for children her age apparent in her tone.

  The other two boys didn’t answer, glancing down at their feet solemnly. One pushed his hands into his pockets, and the other crossed his arms tightly over his chest as if to hug himself.

  “They ain’t said a word since we found them,” James explained after a moment of quiet.

  Shane looked at the two boys and smiled with all the kindness he could. “That’s alright. I’m Shane, and that’s Kelly in the cab.”

  At the back of the truck, Shane lowered the tailgate. With all the other unnerving crap he’d seen, he’d forgotten about his aunt. Her pale gray, swollen foot stuck out from under the blue tarp. Slamming the tailgate and spinning around, he blocked the kids’ view.

  “Why don’t y’all go up and introduce yourselves to Kelly?”

  James nodded and obeyed, the others following him around to the passenger side window. Kelly must’ve guessed Shane needed her to distract the kids. With that same warm, big sister attention she’d shown Nat earlier, she kept their attention by asking questions—how old they were, what grades they were in, and so on. Outgoing little James replied he was eight. Sara said she was seven. Shane felt the sudden weight of his and Kelly’s new responsibility. Including Nat, they had five young kids to look after now, and he expected the number might continue to grow. But what could they do? Someone had to help these children. They wouldn’t survive very long running around out here by themselves. He could only hope they’d find some adults soon, someone with some answers. But he was becoming more pessimistic with each dead body they encountered.

  Satisfied Kelly had their focus, Shane reached into the bed of the truck and grabbed his aunt’s ankles. Her flesh was cold and spongy in his hands, like it might slip off the bone. He swallowed hard and tugged her onto the tailgate. Wrapping the tarp tighter around her, he gritted his teeth to suppress a gag and then felt terribly disrespectful for it. Lifting her stiff body, he carried her over to the loading dock and laid her in the shadows. Overcome by a wave of shame from his desire to get her corpse out of his arms as quick as possible, he kneeled and whispered a prayer.

  The mournful words the energetic young pastor of their church spoke at his mom’s and his grandmother’s funerals were agonizingly vivid in his thoughts. Tears brimmed in his eyes and flowed down his checks. His simple prayer that his aunt made it safely to heaven, where she’d never suffer again and could rejoin her father, mother, and sister seemed insufficient. When he could think of nothing more to say, he stood and wiped his face with his sleeve. He told himself he didn’t want to leave his aunt there in the open, but it seemed more important to worry about the living, and he didn’t know what else to do with her. In his heart, he knew he just wanted to get as far away from her as he could. Her swollen body represented everything that was wrong, keeping death at the forefront of his thoughts and making him worry about his dad.

  “I’m sorry to leave you here, Aunt Lillian,” he whispered, looking skyward, “but you’re in a better place now anyway, a
nd you don’t need this body anymore. Please forgive me.”

  A low, moaning growl carried though the backdoors of the Piggly Wiggly. It had to be the bears the kids mentioned. Having no interest in coming face-to-face with one of the vicious creatures, he spun away and jogged to the truck.

  Kelly had kept the new kids distracted, and they didn’t seem to notice him moving his aunt’s body. Shane helped them climb in the bed, urged them to hang on, and then closed the tailgate. Getting behind the wheel, he let out a long, trembling sigh. He felt like he should be punished, like he’d committed a heinous crime against someone who’d always shown him nothing but sincere kindness and love.

  “You did the right thing.” Kelly reached over and put her soft hand on his forearm. “She’d understand.” Her empathy showed in her moist, sapphire eyes.

  “Thanks,” he murmured.

  Kelly’s touch and her kind expression soothed him, but wasn’t enough to erase his remorse. He started the engine on Granny’s old truck, and with a last glance in the rearview mirror at the loading dock with his aunt on it, Shane drove out of the lot. He knew from experience, the pain of losing her would stay with him forever, eating away at his soul and tormenting him in the quiet hours of the night when everyone else was able to sleep.

  “What now?” Kelly asked, her tone dismal.

  “I reckon we should drive around town and see if anyone else survived. Maybe we can find some adults.” He expected that wouldn’t happen, but no other ideas came to him, and he didn’t have the nerve to tell her he had no clue.

  Turning right at the next intersection, Shane found a road that wasn’t blocked and got the truck up onto Main Street. Buzzing streetlamps cast the five-block stretch lined with businesses in yellow light, so they could see the full extent of the devastation. Most of the stores’ front windows lay in bloodstained shards on the sidewalk, and bodies littered the street. He navigated the truck around abandoned cars and did his best to avoid running over or even looking at the dead. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he wished he could keep his passengers from seeing the bodies. Their faces were ghostly white, their eyes wide as they surveyed the destruction. Shane knew the innocence and magic of childhood was ripped away from these children; they’d never be the same after this.

  A handful of dogs milled about, sniffing trashcans and corpses with their heads hung low in that same rueful way in which the dogs that attacked Mrs. Morris behaved after they killed her. A horse stood inside Sanford’s Pharmacy, looking out at the truck with a small, colorful box hanging from its mouth, pillaging the candy section. Shane knew most of the people who owned and worked in the stores on Main Street and went to school with many of their kids. He wanted to stop the truck and run inside the hundred-year-old brick and marble buildings to see if anyone survived, or maybe was injured and in need of help. But it was so quiet he knew he’d only find them all dead, mutilated by the animals and insects, and he didn’t have the stomach see it.

  The left side of the truck rocked up and then down, the tire rolling over something soft. Cold horror flowed through Shane. He’d just run over a body and feared it might be someone he knew, perhaps one of his friends’ mom or dad.

  “It was better down below, where there weren’t so many lights,” Kelly said, her skin losing color like she might be ill as well.

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here.” Shane turned on Highway 72, the well-kept, two-lane road going out to the freeway.

  They crept along, avoiding more wreckage on the hill leading away from Main Street. It took fifteen minutes to drive two miles down to the high school. Shane worked on developing a new reflex to keep it together as he drove. The instant his eyes fell on a dead body, he shifted his focus away. He couldn’t stand to see any more human carnage, and defensively made an effort to pretend they weren’t even there. The particularly mangled bodies, or the random bloody parts lying in the road, he had greater trouble ignoring.

  In the front yard of the church, a coyote darted out of the glow of the truck’s headlights, a head dangling from its bloody jaws. The fleeting glimpse of this animal carrying away a piece of someone’s mom or dad, or maybe the historical church’s preacher, was enough to leave the image seared in his mind. Another scar he expected would stay with him forever.

  A flicker of hope ignited in Shane when he saw the school. The parking lot had undamaged cars parked in it, and the lights were on in the gymnasium and cafeteria. His dad’s mechanic shop was further down the road, near the freeway. Shane resisted the urge to drive to it. In all likelihood, his father wasn’t at the shop. He could be at home, or maybe even here at the school.

  “This looks promising,” Shane said. He turned the truck into the school’s driveway.

  “Please, let there be people in there,” Kelly whispered, glancing down at Nat resting on her lap.