The Last Orphans

by N.W. Harris

  Shane watched Tracy ease her school bus filled with kids down into the median to get around the overturned church bus. When she turned it to drive back up on the highway, the tires spun in the wet grass, and the rear of the bus slid deeper into the ditch at the center of the median. She gunned it, and the diesel roared, but the tires sank in the mud. Shane put his bus in park and rushed out, waving his hands.

  “Stop, you’re gonna bury it worse,” he yelled.

  Tracy let off the accelerator and opened the folding door of her bus. “Too much damn weight,” she growled. Her angry voice and crinkled brow made it clear she wasn’t happy about Shane demanding they take on the extra kids. “Everyone off,” she shouted.

  The kids filed out in a hurry, seeming nervous that Tracy would snatch them up and throw them out by force if they didn’t move fast enough. Once her bus was empty, she tried to drive out of the median again, but all she managed to do was throw mud twenty feet into the air and slide deeper into the wet muck.

  “We’ll have to tow it,” Matt said. He and most of the dreary-faced kids had climbed out of the other buses to watch the spectacle.

  “First let’s get this wreck out of the way so we can pull her from the front,” Shane said, eyeing the wreckage. “We’ll have to push it with one of ours.”

  “I got it,” Steve volunteered, rushing to the supply bus.

  “Back into it, so you don’t damage anything important,” Aaron called after him.

  Steve waved his hand in acknowledgment. With more zeal than necessary, he turned his bus around and backed into the rear of the church bus. The overturned bus screeched, throwing sparks when Steve pushed it across the asphalt. Shane worried they might attract some less-than-friendly guests with the ruckus, hoping they could get back on the road as quickly as possible. Once the church bus spun out of the way, Steve turned his bus around, and Shane and Matt rushed in and connected it to Tracy’s with a thick chain they’d picked up at the hardware store.

  “Ease it forward, Steve,” Aaron said.

  Either Steve didn’t hear or his excitement got the best of him, because he gunned it and his bus lurched forward, causing the chain to go taut and bounce like a giant guitar string.

  “Go easy, damn it,” Shane yelled. Steve gave him a “oops” look, and he glared a warning in return. “Y’all need to get back,” Shane told all the kids who stood watching the show, spreading his arms and herding them to a safer distance.

  The chain creaked as Steve advanced. Tracy’s bus climbed up the muddy slope toward the road, and Shane felt certain they’d get it out of the ditch without a problem. The front tires made it onto the asphalt, and a loud popping sound like a shotgun going off startled Shane. Matt screamed. Shane spun around and saw him collapse.

  The tense chain had broken loose from Steve’s bumper and whipped across the road, clanging when it smacked against the side of Tracy’s bus. After a stunned instant, Shane realized the chain had hit Matt. He ran over and saw the bloody mess that used to be Matt’s left leg.

  Matt wailed in agony, putting his hands over his injury, like he hoped to push the protruding bone fragments and ground meat back together. The flailing chain had hit his thigh, and only a narrow string of flesh seemed to be keeping the leg from falling completely off. Blood spurted from the wound, forming a puddle on the wet asphalt.

  Shane cursed and fell to his knees next to Matt, wanting to help him. He didn’t have a clue where to start.

  “Now try to lie still,” he said with a shaky voice, holding Matt’s shoulders to steady him.

  “Get some first aid kits, some blankets, and an arrow, Aaron,” Tracy shouted, then squatted on the other side of Matt. “It’s going to be okay,” she promised, sounding like she’d seen this sort of injury a thousand times before. Shane knew she must be wrong—Matt had lost more blood than he thought could be in a person.

  Tracy took off her canvas belt and tied it around what remained of the top of Matt’s thigh. Aaron came running with the supplies, and Tracy took the arrow and shoved it under the belt.

  “Twist this, Shane,” she ordered, showing him how to turn the arrow to tighten the belt.

  Squatting next to her, Shane took hold of the arrow and turned it. The metallic smell of Matt’s blood and the warm sticky feel of it on his hands made Shane want to vomit, but he bit the inside of his cheek and kept turning the arrow around and around.

  “It’s got to be really tight to stop the bleeding,” Tracy said. She sounded way too cool for the situation, but her calmness made Shane believe everything might be all right if he just did what she told him.

  Matt stopped screaming, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out.

  “Wake up, Matt,” Tracy yelled, slapping his face. “You have to stay awake.”

  Matt didn’t respond. Shane tightened the tourniquet until it made the stub of Matt’s thigh look like the tapered end of a sausage before the bleeding finally stopped. Tracy leaned down and put her ear to Matt’s mouth.

  “He’s still breathing,” she said, calm as ever. Opening the first aid kit, she grabbed a bottle of brownish-red antiseptic and poured it on Matt’s wound.

  “What the hell are we going to do about his leg?” Steve asked, hysterical. “It looks like it’s been cut nearly clean off.”

  “There ain’t nothing we can do,” Tracy replied, sounding aggravated by the question. “The tourniquet has ruined any chance of saving it.”

  “We ain’t gonna cut it off!” Steve stumbled back, his damp face a greenish hue in the light from the bus’ headlamps.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Tracy replied, glaring at the six-foot-tall linebacker like it should be obvious. “Aaron, give me your hunting knife.”

  Aaron grabbed the handle of the knife hanging from his belt. He took a step back, looking at Tracy with wide, freaked-out eyes. Shane was dumbfounded, unable to say anything as he looked at his friends, his hands still holding the bloody arrow. Their voices sounded muffled and it was hard to breathe, like he was wearing a glass jar over his head.

  “Give me the damn knife,” Tracy ordered. “There’s no other way. If we don’t take his leg, he’s going to get an infection and die.”

  “How the hell do you know?” Aaron shouted. “You ain’t no doctor.”

  “Yeah? It don’t take a genius to see it’s gotta go. It’s literally hanging on by a thread,” she replied, holding her hand out for the knife. “And my mom was a vet, so I know a hell of a lot more than you. Now give it to me.”

  Shane didn’t like the idea either, but it seemed pretty clear the leg was gone. “We’ll take it with us, maybe they can reattach it at the hospital,” he mumbled through a mouthful of bile.

  With a horrified look on his pale face, Aaron stared at Shane. He tried to return his tall, skinny friend’s sickened gaze with a resolute expression, unable to say anything else to support Tracy’s dreadful plan. After a moment, a wild-eyed Aaron wiped the corner of his mouth and tugged his knife out of its sheath, handing it to Tracy.

  She washed the blade with the antiseptic and held it above the wound. Shane stopped breathing and could tell everyone around him had done the same. Tracy inhaled sharply and exhaled slowly between pursed lips. She hesitated, glancing up at Shane. He discerned a smidgen of terror in her otherwise-stoic expression. Returning her attention to the wound, she lowered the blade and severed the small piece of meat still connecting Matt’s leg to his thigh with one clean slice, like a butcher cleaving a cow into steaks.

  Aaron turned and ran a few feet away, then spewed his last meal with loud and violent convulsions. Shane couldn’t move, couldn’t take his eyes off Matt’s severed leg.

  Aaron had slaughtered a lot of deer in his life, and Shane didn’t expect him to get so ill. But then again, it didn’t look like a deer leg lying there on the asphalt—it looked like Matt’s leg, wrapped in bloody denim and wearing his left cowboy boot.