Free The Last Orphans by N.W. Harris Page A

trauma they’d experienced over the last few hours. They looked so young, hardly old enough to take care of themselves. As horrible as it was to ignore the other children stranded throughout town, Shane knew his friends were already being pushed to the edge of breaking. They couldn’t handle any more responsibility at the moment, and neither could he.
    Matt grab bed a shopping cart and a flashlight from a rack near the front doors. Shane and the others followed suit, and they worked their way through the dark store, loading everything of any possible use into their carts. They found plenty of jerry cans for extra fuel and water, pouches of freeze-dried food that could be eaten in an emergency, and camping gear, though Shane hoped they would make it to the military base in a few hours and wouldn’t need most of the stuff. He found pants and a T-shirt and finally got out of the Sunday clothes he’d been wearing since Granny’s funeral that morning. He sighed with relief, slipping his tired and blistered feet into a pair of soft, padded hiking boots. His mood lifted when he stood.   
    Aaron made it to the back of the store first. “This is not good,” he announced.
    “What?” Tracy asked.
    “All the guns are gone.”
    “No freaking way,” Shane gasped, looking at the empty rack behind the counter. The glass doors the guns were usually locked behind lay in shards on the floor. The display case where the bullets were kept was busted open and cleaned out.
    “Must have been whoever got here first,” Aaron mused , sounding frustrated. “Greedy as all get out. They could’ve at least left us a rifle or two.”
    “They didn’t touch the archery section,” Kelly called from the far right side of the gun counter.
    Aaron perked up, and they all rushed through the ransacked gun area toward Kelly, like they worried someone else might run in and claim the weapons before they could get to them. The beams of their flashlights found a plethora of compound bows, crossbows, and arrows hanging on the wall and in empty whiskey barrels at the end of the aisles.
    “I deer hunt with these,” Aaron said, picking up an arro w with a triangular, black razorblade at its tip.
    “Hey, it’s better than nothing,” Shane said.
    “The good thing is, as long as we retrieve our arrows, we’ll never run out of ammo,” Tracy added, climbing onto the counter and taking a camouflaged crossbow with a scope mounted on it off the wall. Her eyes gleamed as she flipped it over in her hands. It had to be the most expensive weapon in that part of the store, the kind everyone would admire but few could afford. All the weapons in the corner had lethality in common. They looked badass, but Shane was nervous to think he might have to use one.
    “Let’s load ‘em up.” Shane grabbed an armful of bows and balanced them atop his piled-high cart, and then hung more over his shoulders. They felt foreign and uncomfortable in his hands. He was one of the few boys in town who never hunted, an embarrassing secret he hid from his friends. Hunting was a rite of passage in Leeville. It wasn’t that he never had the opportunity—it was just he couldn’t stand the idea of killing, so he’d always found an excuse not to go. The weapons and Tracy and Aaron’s enthusiasm made him uncomfortable, but he relished the notion of facing down a bunch of wild dogs or charging cattle with his bare hands even less.
    They made several trips in and out of the store, packing the third bus full. Tracy organized the supplies, shouting orders in an annoying and near condescending way the entire time. At least the work took Shane’s mind off the horrors he’d seen that day. The jerry cans went in last, with Tracy using a black marker to label some for diesel and some for water. When they finished, sweat dripped off everyone’s face and Shane’s arms ached.
    T hey took the buses across the street to the gas station and filled them up. The doors to the convenient store