Aric Davis - The Fort

Hooper set the box on top of the ladder and took a moment to rest and enjoy this minor triumph before setting to conquering the ladder in reverse. He managed to descend two rungs, but then his injured foot clipped a rung and he was airborne, the tackle box still firmly gripped in one hand, his other scrabbling futilely for a hold on the ladder. The moment didn’t last long. Hooper went from flying to landing with a teeth-rattling crash on the hood of the Dodge, the tackle box’s contents exploding across the garage.

The world flashed from black, to black and white, to black again. When Hooper opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on the hood of the Dodge, his leg, back, and head screaming. He pulled himself to a sitting position and then slid from the car and collapsed on all fours onto the garage floor.

He shook his head once to clear it, then tried again. It wasn’t working.

The last memories he’d had were of Vietnam and being shot, but he was in his garage. Even through the pain, Hooper knew that he had not really just been in the jungle. You’re in your garage , he told himself. You were getting your fishing stuff down from the rafters. Why? The bullet’s strike flashed back to him, but why had he been shot if he really hadn’t been in Vietnam?

Amy.

The thought of her brought it all back, and Hooper slowly began gathering his wits, along with the scattered supplies from the tackle box. He kept a neat garage, thankfully, but it still took him a long time to gather the things he needed. When he’d finally located the two small forceps he used to tie flies, he stood, using the car for support. He groaned when he saw the hood. The damage may have been only cosmetic, in the form of one large, man-shaped dent, but it would need to be fixed. There was no way someone like Carl could see the car in this condition and not ask him what in the hell had happened to it. Hooper shook his aching head, thinking about the repair bill—engine work was something he could do, but body work wasn’t—then headed into the house.

He went to the bedroom first and took the small revolver from the nightstand before limping to the kitchen, where he found the pot of water boiling over. He dropped the forceps into the water and then reduced the heat. After scrounging through the knife drawer, he selected a paring knife with a three-inch blade and held its tip in the water for a few minutes. Then he grabbed a plate and a pair of tongs and used the tongs to retrieve the forceps, which he set on the plate with the knife. Finally, he shut off the stove and dragged his afflicted leg toward the basement, the plate and steaming makeshift instruments in one hand, the bottle of Everclear in the other, and with the pistol tucked into the waistband of his briefs.

He slid down the steps in the way he was becoming accustomed to, with his body pressed against the wall to take as much weight as possible off of his leg. He made the bottom without dropping the plate or the bottle, though he could feel his underwear was in dire need of hiking up. The pistol was slipping from his waistband, and with his hands full, Hooper was unable to retrieve it as it slowly slid next to and then under his dick, the weight of it tugging down his shorts a precarious couple of inches.

Amy was just starting to come to, but her eyes widened when he set the plate down and she saw what was on it. “Calm down,” said Hooper. “That shit ain’t for you.” He reconsidered and said, “At least, not in the way you might be thinking.”

He set the Everclear next to the plate, both of them just out of what he figured would be her reach, then walked behind her. Seeing Amy normally made him hot, but today sex was the furthest thing from his mind. His cock felt small and useless next to the cold steel of the revolver, and Hooper removed the gun and held it next to his leg, happy to have it out of his shorts.

Hooper set the pistol on the ground and removed her handcuffs, noting the red stripes that were banding both of her wrists from the weight of her bonds. When he circled her again, she was sitting patiently like a good girl with her hands in her lap, so he bent down to loosen the straps, keeping the ball gag in her mouth. “Same rules as last time, Amy,” he said, then plucked the gag from her lips.

“I need some water,” she rasped. “Please, can I please have some water?”

“When we’re done,” said Hooper. “You got to help me first, though.” He pointed at his leg but didn’t look at it—he was terrified of what he might see if he did. “You’re going to get that fucking bullet out of my leg, and then I’ll get you more water than you can drink.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it, but I need some water first. My hands will shake too much if I don’t have any, and you’ll just get mad at me.”

Hooper looked into her eyes. Not steely, that had been taken from her, but she was telling the truth. “Fine,” he said, moving the plate and bottle farther from her just to be safe. “But when I get back, no more fucking around.” He looked at the clock over the washing machine. It was almost 6:00 a.m.

38

Despite having snuck out the night before, Tim was the first one up in the house. He dressed quickly, walked to the kitchen, filled a water bottle from the faucet, and went outside. The sun was up, but barely, and Tim opened the garage so he could get to the equipment. He dragged the wheelbarrow and transfer shovel out of their places at the rear of the garage, then filled the wheelbarrow with pea gravel from the slowly diminishing pile and began to push the thing around the house.

Between his and his dad’s trips around the garage to the site of the patio, they had managed to wear a groove from the heavy wheelbarrow into the lawn. Tim had no idea how many trips around the house they’d made, nor did he really want to. He was still shocked that he had been dragged into the whole thing. His dad had been almost impossibly cool about not treating him like a slave just because he’d been unlucky enough to happen to be born a boy and heavy lifting needed to happen. Of course this happened. It was going to be the perfect summer; something was bound to ruin it.

How could he bitch about having a bad summer? The thought burned a pit into Tim’s stomach as he dumped the wheelbarrow’s contents into the hole in the yard. Luke was living in a tree fort, some other kid had gotten killed and left at the drive-in, and Molly was still missing. His face went hot. He felt like a total jerk.

He set the much lighter wheelbarrow down, grabbed a rake that been left leaning against the house overnight, and began spreading the dumped rocks around the hole. When he was done he dropped the rake, grabbed the wheelbarrow, and walked back around to the front of the house.

This is never going to be finished.

Tim was on his tenth trip back to the pile when he rounded the house and saw his dad. “Early start?” Stan asked. “Looks like you made another dent—not bad.”

Tim began filling the wheelbarrow with the shovel. “Yeah, I figured if I wasn’t sleeping I may as well get to it. No time like the present, right?”

“No, I suppose you’re right,” said Stan. “Is the rake out back?”

“Yep, I must have missed it last night when I did cleanup. Sorry about that.”

Tim didn’t see it, but his dad got an odd look on his face when Tim said that, as though an idea popped into his head for the very first time. It was the sort of look that Tim would have described as weird and his mom would have said “uh-oh” about. Stan walked around the house, the look still on his face, and Tim continued filling the wheelbarrow.

When Tim had bullied the wheelbarrow back to the hole for the fifth time, he saw that his dad had strategically moved the pea gravel he’d been dumping to the corners farthest from the front of the hole. That way they wouldn’t have to make the edge of the hole uneven by running the wheelbarrow in and out of it over and over again.