The Last Orphans

by N.W. Harris

  Steve gave Shane a what the heck? look. Shane put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head. Then he dropped through the hatch into the Stryker and crawled forward to where Tracy sat, in the driver’s seat.

  “Turn it around,” Shane ordered, hoping he was doing the right thing.

  “We can’t let these punks stop us,” Tracy snapped. “We got them out gunned, and their bullets can’t even penetrate our armor.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not ready to slaughter them,” Shane countered. “Are you?”

  “Well no—of course not,” Tracy replied. It seemed she hadn’t thought about the fact that they might have to kill a bunch of kids. Her brow furrowed and she blinked her eyes, refocusing on Shane. “But we have to get down there and shut the weapon off.”

  “And we will,” Shane replied. “Just turn around, and we’ll drive a few blocks away, then take a different route.”

  “Okay,” Tracy said, reluctance clear in her voice. “But you know they’re gonna come after us when we turn back.”

  “Not if we can steer far enough around them.” Shane feared she was right, but they couldn’t just start shooting—they had to at least try to avoid a fight.

  Tracy started the diesel and backed up a block. When she was well clear of the thugs, she caused the tires to rotate in different directions, pivoting the machine one hundred and eighty degrees so fast it made him dizzy. The Stryker lurched north. Shane grabbed his M-16 and stood through the hatch, worried the gang would attack the rear of the vehicle as they drove away. Still holding his gun in one hand, Shamus waved at him, smiling broadly with his gold teeth.

  They drove over a hill and out of sight. Then Shane dropped inside and told Tracy to turn left and go ten blocks before heading downtown.

  “You know they’ll still catch up with us,” Aaron yelled, reiterating Tracy’s warning when Shane sat down on the Stryker’s bench seating across from him.

  “I think we’ll have a better chance of busting through them. They won’t have time to set up a barricade,” Shane replied, agitated by how both Tracy and Aaron naysaid his ideas but didn’t offer any other options.

  What they would do once they made it past the thugs, Shane hadn’t figured out yet. It was going to be hard to get out of the Stryker at the capitol building if an angry mob surrounded them.

  He crawled forward and looked at the GPS—four miles to the capitol building. Not very far, but Shane expected it would be the roughest drive he’d ever take in his life.

  “Better go topside,” Tracy said. “Just saw a motorcycle cross the intersection up ahead.”

  “If we run into any trouble, just keep driving,” Shane ordered. “Don’t stop until we make it to the capitol.”

  “Got it,” Tracy replied.

  Shane took a deep breath and crawled to the rear of the Stryker. He tapped Aaron on the shoulder and pointed at Kelly. “Take her place.”

  Aaron nodded. Shane climbed on the bench and stood up through the hatch next to Kelly.

  “I need you to go below,” he yelled.

  “Why?” Kelly asked, her forehead crinkling in confusion. “I’m fine here.”

  “Please.”

  “What, you don’t think I can fight?”

  “It’s not that,” Shane stammered. He’d insulted her, though not his intention. “It’s just that…” Shane couldn’t find the words.

  “Fine,” she shouted louder than necessary to be heard over the roar of the Stryker’s diesel engine. She glared at him and dropped below.

  Aaron popped up a moment later, giving Shane a, what did you say to her? look. Shane shook his head and picked up his M-16. Kelly had proven herself in action; she could hold her own. His behavior was as much of a surprise to him as he supposed it was to her. It was an instinctive act to send her below, done without premeditation. He didn’t care if he got killed, but he couldn’t stand the idea of her getting hurt. Whether she hated him for it or not, that couldn’t happen while he was alive.

  “Heads up!” Steve yelled, pointing in the direction they headed. He hadn’t moved from his position on the Stryker’s machine gun since they entered the city.

  Shane leaned forward and saw a group of motorcycles cross an intersection two blocks down. He glanced at Aaron, clicked the safety off on his gun, and saw him do the same. They went three more blocks, Tracy swerving around deserted cars so fast that Shane got slammed against the edges of the hatch, adrenaline masking the pain of the bruises he sustained to his ribs through his bulletproof vest.

  They swerved through another intersection. Shane glanced left in time to see the word MACK on the chrome grill of a dump truck, the shiny, little bulldog hood ornament glaring down at him. It slammed into the side of the Stryker, knocking Shane off the bench, making him fall down the hatch and into the armored vehicle. He blinked in the dim interior, stunned. Kelly lay crumpled on the floor in front of him. The dump truck hit them so hard that it caused the Stryker’s engine to stall.

  “You okay?” she groaned. A red stream flowed away from her split open lip.

  “I’m fine—what about you?” Shane wiped blood off her chin with his thumb.

  A deafening explosion went off before she had a chance to answer. It sounded like it came from beneath them and felt like the Stryker jumped into the air and slammed back down onto the asphalt. When the armored vehicle came to a rest, Shane scrambled to his feet and rose up out of the hatch, his M-16 ready. Aaron and Steve dumped rounds into the street behind the dump truck, and Shane heard pings and saw flashes as kids hiding behind cars returned fire. The Mack truck idled sickly just behind the Stryker, its front end smashed and its driver leaning forward with blood running down his face from a hole in his temple, a precision kill no doubt delivered by Aaron.

  Steve pumped rounds out of his machine gun, yelling the entire time. Aaron had an eerily calm look on his face, like he was in the woods hunting deer. He lined up his sights on a target, smoothly pulled the trigger, and then shifted his gun to the next target, not waiting to see if the bullet hit its mark. A boy fifty yards out dropped.

  Before Shane could level his weapon, the armored vehicle’s diesel engine grumbled to life. Tracy pulled the Stryker forward through the intersection. Shane couldn’t see the damage the dump truck caused, but the Stryker still seemed to be working fine at the moment. There was a large hole in the road and charred marks where the explosion occurred, and Shane realized the thugs must’ve set off some kind of bomb under the Stryker after they’d hit it with the Mack truck. Sparks erupted where a bullet ricocheted off the metal hatch next to him. Without really aiming, Shane returned fire at the cars where he saw puffs of smoke from the gangsters’ guns.

  “Use short bursts,” Aaron shouted, slamming a new clip into his M-16. “We have to save our ammo.”

  Steve clearly didn’t hear Aaron’s advice, still yelling and spraying bullets. Tracy got them across the intersection and onto the next block. The Stryker’s engine roared, and she drove it up onto the sidewalk to get around the cars blocking the road.

  A flash came from inside the darkness of a second floor window of a building they passed, and Shane felt a sharp burn across the side of his neck. He put his hand up to the spot and felt something wet.

  “You’ve been hit!” Aaron yelled.

  “Hit?” It took a second for it to register—he had been shot.

  “Go below,” Aaron said, his expression full of concern.

  The Stryker pulled through the next intersection, and a barrage of gunfire made Shane duck inside before he could respond. Aaron and Steve dropped inside to take cover as well.

  “Close the hatches,” Kelly yelled over the pinging of bullets hitting the vehicle’s armor. “Stay inside. We can shoot out of these little holes.”

  Shane reached up and pulled his hatch closed, as did Aaron and Steve, muffling the sound of the guns outside. But when the bullets hit the Stryker, it sounded like they were inside a drum. Kelly shoved the barrel of her M-16 out of a gu
n port and fired. His ears felt like someone set firecrackers off in them. Shane slid a narrow port open next to Kelly and put his gun through it. When he pulled the trigger, the gun’s report didn’t seem as loud, he assumed because he was going deaf.

  Taking aim at a boy who held a shotgun on his waist about fifty feet from the Stryker, Shane pulled the trigger. He could see the boy’s eyes go wide, the fierce look on his face replaced by a limp expression of shock. Dropping the shotgun, the boy stood for a moment, an eternity for Shane. He seemed to stare into Shane’s eyes, suddenly appearing young and innocent. Then the boy dropped dead to the asphalt.

  The boy’s slack expression seared itself onto the inside of Shane’s eyelids. Every time he blinked, the dying, young face was there, staring blankly at him. Shane’s rifle clicked—its clip empty. Unable to focus on another target, he pulled the barrel out of the gun port and slid the narrow door closed.

  Sitting back on the bench on the opposite side of the Stryker, he gritted his teeth to hold back a surge of vomit. When he’d shot the juvenile delinquent in the gym with his crossbow, he hadn’t seen his face like that of the boy he’d just killed. And this kid looked so innocent just before he died; maybe he’d never really done anything wrong to deserve getting shot. How many good kids had been recruited by Shamus, kids who had the same reservations about killing that Shane did? Maybe they had nowhere else to turn, or the gangster didn’t give them an option.

  Knowing he had to keep fighting, Shane crawled forward toward the green, canvas bag filled with M-16 clips sitting just behind Tracy. His ears ringing, he couldn’t hear very well, but he felt a disturbing change in the vibration coming from the diesel and knew something was off. He leaned over Tracy’s shoulder and saw the oil pressure dropping to almost nothing and the engine temperature climbing into the red.

  “The engine must’ve taken a hit,” Shane yelled into her ear. “It won’t make it much longer.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Tracy asked. Her expression frantic, sweat drenched her face as she jerked the steering wheel back and forth to get around obstacles in the road.

  Looking out the slit of bulletproof glass that comprised the windshield, Shane could see Shamus’ gangsters running ahead of the Stryker, ducking into buildings and shooting at the armored vehicle. There had to be hundreds. If they broke down here, the gangsters would encircle them, wait until they used up all their ammo, and then crawl all over the Stryker until they found a way to break in.

  “Get us out of here,” he ordered.

  “What?” Tracy glanced back. “Shouldn’t we just plow through and try to make it to the capitol building?”

  “We’ll never make it,” Shane replied, giving in to his instincts. “We have to lose these guys before our engine dies. Turn us around. Now!”

  Tracy looked at him again, like she planned to object. But his expression must’ve convinced her, because at the next intersection, she spun the heavy vehicle around and gunned the engine. After heading a few blocks in the opposite direction, the pings of bullets hitting the armored hull diminished and then stopped altogether, the thugs seeming satisfied they had won the fight.

  Kelly leaned back from her porthole with a confused expression on her face. She crawled over and shouted into Shane’s ear. “What happened? Why did we turn back?”

  As if to answer, a loud, banging noise came from the diesel and an acrid stench filled the cabin. Shane knew the smell all too well. It was the odor of metal grinding against metal. There was no oil left in the engine to lubricate or cool it. The smell meant the overheated engine was about to seize.