Aric Davis - The Fort

“I can,” said Luke, as he lay the gun on the fort’s windowsill, quickly took aim, and fired.

The bullet hit the man in his right calf. He screamed, and Luke fumbled trying to get another bullet chambered. He had the magazine out, but bobbled the round and dropped it onto the floor of the fort. Finally, his fingers found it, and with shaking hands, he slid the bullet into the magazine. “They’re gone,” said Scott flatly, and when Luke looked up he saw that it was true. Rain was falling heavily now among the trees, and there was no sign of them. It was as if they’d never been there at all.

“We need to get this gun back to my house,” said Scott. “And then we need to call the police.” He looked for the empty brass on the floor of the fort, but gave up quickly—it could have been anywhere. “Now, we need to go now!”

19

Hooper felt the bullet before he heard it. It was a sharp, stinging pain, and when it was followed by the distinctive crack of a rifle, he was immediately sure that he’d been shot. He screamed, bellowing with everything he had in his body, but the worst part wasn’t the pain, it was the look on her face. Amy was smiling. She looked beautiful, utterly vivacious and full of life, so happy to see him suffering. I’ll remember this, you little bitch.

Hooper staggered from the pain, then got his legs back under him and forced himself to fight the instinct to look for where the shot had come from. Instead, he bit into his cheek, hard, pushed the gun harder into her back, and moved her into thicker brush, popples, brambles, and prickers.

It wasn’t a direct line to the house, not anymore, but Hooper figured that was OK. Someone had seen him, and known that what was happening was bad enough to risk shooting at an armed man. Hooper wished he could see who’d done it and kill him, shoot him in the stomach and watch him die like a dog. Did he understand the lengths Hooper had gone to get Amy, to keep her? Why would anyone want to take something away from a stranger? Hooper understood the risks law enforcement, posed but hated to imagine the kind of person who would try and take someone like Amy away from him. He had, after all, already lost her once.

Once they were hidden among the trees, Hooper took a minute to listen. It would have been easy for someone to have pursued them to this point, but the brush they were in now was thick enough that no one was going to be able to just sneak up on them. He gave a look to his leg, leaving the gun pointed at Amy’s back. There was a little hole in his jeans, and he was bleeding, but not much, at least not yet. Not ready to see the hole, Hooper pulled the front of his pant leg up, hoping to see that the bullet had passed through, and winced when he saw that it hadn’t. That’s not good.

Knowing that he needed to ignore the pain, both present and yet to come, Hooper pushed the pistol into her back, hard. Amy arched away from the gun, and Hooper said, “Move.” She did.

They came out of the popples after a few hundred feet of walking through the tightly wound brush. Hooper could see the burrs all over Amy, but didn’t care like he should have. Bile was churning in his stomach, and nausea swept through him as he walked. Rain was pouring over them, and there might have been thunder, but he wasn’t sure. When he finally saw the row of houses as the trees began to give way to civilization, he ground the barrel of the pistol into Amy’s back, as though trying to share some of the pain from his leg. “If you yell or try to run, I will shoot you.” She didn’t say anything, just kept walking ahead of him with the gun in her back.

They finally made the fence, just as a tremendous roar of thunder made Hooper think for an instant he was being shot at again. He stumbled, and for a second he felt like she might run, but the moment passed. They crossed through the fence, and Hooper shut the gate behind him. The small amount of strength and energy he had left was fading; he wanted to collapse on the lawn and just sleep for a few days. He knew that was impossible, though. As much as he hated the idea of going to jail, he hated the idea of losing Amy even more. That thought was enough to fuel him to herd her like livestock into the house.

He needed to get her into the basement and himself looking normal again. It was possible the person who had shot him had recognized him, but Hooper thought he looked too nondescript for that to happen. Either way, though, the cops were going to be here soon, that was pretty much a guarantee. Hooper slammed the sliding door shut behind him, then locked it and dropped the blinds closed.

20

Scott set the rifle back where he’d found it in Carl’s room in the basement, gave one more look around to make sure there was no other sign that he’d been in there, then shut off the light and headed upstairs. Tim was lying on the floor with a wet towel on his forehead, still looking like he might pass out. Luke wasn’t doing much better. He was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a thousand-yard stare. “You guys need to snap out of it,” said Scott. “Like, right now. I’m going to call the cops.”

They had run from the fort, not considering what would have happened if the man who had been with Molly had been laid up and waiting for them. He hadn’t been, though. By the time they burst from the woods and back onto Scott’s street, the rain had turned from a summer shower to a full-on thunderstorm. Lightning crackled in the sky, and thunder rumbled. Scott unlocked the door, and they had made it into the house when Tim’s knees buckled. “You have to help him,” Scott said to Luke, running on to the kitchen to get a towel to dry the gun, and then booking it downstairs.

“We have to tell the cops that I shot him,” Luke said now, flatly. “If we don’t, they’re going to figure it out later, and I’m going to get in a ton of trouble. I shot him. Holy shit, I shot a pers—”

“Shut up,” said Scott. “I understand that you guys are freaked out, and I am too, but we need to get our story straight, and it can’t involve the rifle.”

Luke and Tim, who was propped up on one elbow now, stared at him.

“If this guy gets caught,” Scott said, “and if they pull a bullet out of him, then we admit to it. No one will think it was a big deal because a bad guy got caught. If we say we did it before he gets caught, though, we’re just admitting that we shot someone. And we shot him, Luke, not just you. We did it.” Scott took a deep breath, and then continued.

“I’m going to call the cop that I talked to, and then you guys are going to call your parents, and I’m going to call my mom at work. The story we’re going to tell is simple: we tell them everything that happened except for the part about the gun. All the rest of it’s fine: we were up in the fort shooting air rifles and—”

“Luke and I don’t have our air rifles with us,” said Tim. “If that cop that Scott talked to is the same one that was at my house, he’s going to be able to see through our lies really easily. He made me feel like I’d done something wrong without even talking to me.”

Luke nodded in agreement and said, “We’ll just say we were all shooting your air rifle, Scott. That works. And it’s really close to the truth.”

“I’m going to call him now,” said Scott. “Remember what I said.” Scott dug the card from his pocket, then took the phone off of the cradle and spun the number in. He held the phone to his ear, and someone said, “Van Endel.”

“Is this Detective Van Endel?”

“This is he. Can I help you?” The detective sounded busy, gruff, and Scott could already feel fear rushing through his veins like fire. “Uhh, yeah,” said Scott. “My name’s Scott Dijkstra, and I talked to you yesterday. I was the kid you saw with muddy shoes. My friends and I think we saw Molly Peterson with a man. He had a gun.”