The Last Orphans

by N.W. Harris

  Crawling to the corner on his hands and knees, Shane took aim at the second mini-gun. He hit the box it sat on when the spinning barrel turned all the way to the left. The mini-gun swung toward him and fired a burst of rounds. Shane slid back just in time, but his M-16 caught a bullet in front of the trigger, knocking the gun out of his hands. It slid across the floor and slammed into the wall.

  “Did you get it?” Tracy asked.

  “I think so,” Shane replied, looking at his hand. His wrist hurt from the impact, and his knuckle was busted open and bleeding, but his fingers still worked when he made a fist.

  Peeking around the corner, Shane saw the mini-gun he’d just hit had stopped moving back and forth. He retrieved his gun and slid it across the floor to the right side of the tunnel, just below the access door to what he hoped was the battery room. The automated guns lowered their barrels and began shooting, but they didn’t pivot, only spraying the left side of the tunnel.

  Turning back to look at Tracy and Steve, Shane leaned against the wall and said, “Yeah, I got it. But the mini-guns will still fire when we try to get to that door. We could be hit by a ricocheting bullet.”

  “We could be hit by a ricocheting bullet,” Steve repeated in a mocking voice. “You sound like such a wuss.”

  “Shut up, fat-ass,” Shane said, turning toward Steve with his fists balled up.

  Tracy stepped between them again. “Hold it together, damn it. I personally would rather get hit by a ricocheting bullet than have one of you lackeys kill me. Now let’s try to get to the battery room door and shut this thing down before we lose it.”

  Shane resisted the overwhelming urge to pummel the scowl off Tracy’s freckled face. But a dwindling part of him still realized the weapon in the laboratory at the end of the tunnel caused his anger. He latched onto those fading rational thoughts and turned his attention to getting to the battery room.

  “We’ll have to stay to the right,” he said, peering around the corner.

  “No need to state the obvious,” Tracy said, pushing him from behind. “Just go.”

  Gritting his teeth to keep from attacking her, Shane leapt to the wall with the battery room door on it. Tracy and Steve followed.

  They crept forward, and the mini-guns started firing, filling the left side of the narrow hallway with a torrent of bullets. The guns fired so many rounds in close succession that Shane couldn’t hear the individual explosions as each bullet was shot. Instead, he heard a loud roar that made his ears feel like they might start bleeding. Dust and smoke filled the tunnel, and bits of concrete sprayed him. Shane turned around and pressed his stomach against the wall to protect his face. Slipping deeper in the tunnel, his hand found the battery room door.

  The handle wouldn’t turn—the door was locked. Coughing and choking on the thick dust and smoke, Shane felt behind him. Finding Tracy, he felt his way down her arm and to her gun. He couldn’t see her, and the deafening noise from the mini-guns made it impossible for him to tell her his plan. When he tried to pull the gun from her hands, she resisted.

  Cursing, Shane grabbed her free hand and pulled it in front of him. He put it on the door handle and felt Tracy pull down. Apparently realizing he planned to try and shoot out the lock on the door, Tracy pulled her hand back and shoved her gun in front of him.

  Shane rested the barrel of the gun on the door just in front of the door handle and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in his hands, and the blast knocked the barrel hard to the left. When he went to try the door, a sharp, hot piece of metal cut his finger, but the door lock hadn’t been broken. He wiped the blood on his shirt and stuck the barrel of the gun to the door latch again. Choking on dust and frustrated to the point of madness, he unloaded half of the M-16’s clip into the door.

  He pulled the gun away, and the door swung outward. Leaping through it, Shane gasped at the clear, albeit musty air. He wiped his eyes clean and saw a large room, lit by a row of fluorescent lights hanging from the low ceiling. The center of the room was filled with giant, black, plastic blocks, standing up to Shane’s chin and with thick wires hopping from one to the next on top of them. Only the twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot open area near the exit from the room where Shane stood and a small walkway around the perimeter of the big black blocks was clear.

  “Those look like batteries! This has to be the power supply,” Shane said, turning around to look at Tracy and Steve.

  Dust billowed in through the door, and the mini-guns still roared outside. But Tracy and Steve had yet to come into the battery room.

  Fearing that they’d been hit by ricocheting bullets or concrete shrapnel, Shane held his breath so he wouldn’t suck in any more dust and rushed to the door. He stuck his arm out and reached back up the tunnel to where Tracy had been standing. Feeling only the concrete wall, he groped down toward the floor and found someone’s back. Shane grabbed his friend under the armpits and pulled. Once in the battery room, he saw he’d fished Tracy out of the choking cloud of dust. Her lower back had an area surrounding a tear in her shirt that was red, wet, and growing larger.

  “You’re bleeding!” Shane said, fearing she’d been hit by a stray bullet.

  “Steve stabbed me,” Tracy replied, grimacing as she pushed up onto her knees. “He must’ve hit a rib; I don’t think the blade went very deep. You’d better watch yourself. He’s lost it.”

  The mini-guns stopped firing, but Shane could still hear the whining sound of their motors spinning. They must have depleted their ammunition. He picked up Tracy’s gun and pointed it at the door, worried that Steve would leap out of the dust-filled tunnel, and he’d have to shoot him.

  “At least those damn mini-guns finally ran out of bullets,” Tracy said, glancing out at the hall. Reaching back and putting a hand over her wound, she grabbed Shane’s arm and pulled herself up.

  “Maybe you should just stay down,” Shane said.

  “No, we have to shut this thing off.” She hobbled to the batteries and leaned on them. “You guard the door. I’ll find a way to cut the power.”

  Shane glanced at her and in an instant, he decided the right thing to do would be to shoot her and put her out of her misery. She probably wouldn’t live very long with that hole in her back anyway, and she had to feel miserable after being shot in the leg and now stabbed. He raised the gun and took aim at Tracy’s head.