Aric Davis - The Fort

Tim left his dad and the tamper behind him but brought the water bottle along for the trip. The ache in his arms stayed with him, though, as he slowly walked around and then into the house through the open garage door. “Mom,” he called as he walked inside and kicked off his shoes. “Dad wants you to go outside and look at the ground.”

“Did he finish it?” his mom asked from the kitchen. “It’d be amazing if he did—we haven’t even had the pavers delivered yet!”

“Not yet,” Tim said, walking to the sink and dumping out what was left of the water in his bottle, “but we’re making progress.” He turned the sink to cold and let it run for a minute before refilling the bottle.

His mom was doing some prep work on dinner, or at least that’s how it looked to Tim as he sat at the table. He considered getting himself a snack but decided that a moment to sit trumped the growing hunger pangs in his belly.

Tammy washed her hands, then dried them on a towel before walking out through the garage. She had to go the long way around too, since the slider and the patio were out of service.

Alone in the house, Tim remembered Becca. He stood, then crept to her room, as though on some sort of clandestine mission. When he knocked on her door, Becca made some neutral sound that wasn’t a no, and he walked inside.

Becca was reading again, the same book as before, but when she saw it was him she dropped it in her lap and stared at him. “What do you want?”

“Mom and Dad are both outside. Can you call whoever was with Molly when she was taken?”

Becca narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure I’ll have time? I really don’t need Mom any further up my ass.”

“Yes, I’m positive. Just hurry! I’ll go stand by the door as a lookout.”

“Fair enough,” she sighed. “But you better let me know if they’re coming, because I’m going to be on the phone in their room. That’s like double trouble if I get busted.” Tim looked at her quizzically, and she rolled her eyes. “Jesus, sometimes I wonder if we’re really related. I can’t use the kitchen phone. Mom would be able to see me from outside. Now get out of my room and go watch the door.”

Tim ran toward the door to the garage. We’re just lucky Mom can’t use the slider like normal, because of the patio. He smiled, the first time he’d done that since his work on the never-ending project had started. It was finally good for something.

Tim stood waiting by the back of the family room, where he had a good view of the door from the garage. For what felt like an eternity he waited for the sound of the knob turning, or for Becca to appear and tell him that it was done. He felt weird, somehow both tense and sleepy. He was wondering if maybe this was how high schoolers felt during exams, or how his dad felt grading exams, when he heard Becca walking from their parents’ bedroom to her own at almost the exact same moment the knob to the garage door started to turn. He slipped down the hall into the bathroom, in case his mom checked for him, and when he heard her in the kitchen again he darted off to Becca’s room.

He opened the door without knocking, slid inside, and closed it after him. “Well?”

“It was a dark green Dodge Dart, the Colombia model. Jeff, one of the guys who saw her get in, remembered.” While Tim was repeating that to himself— dark green Dodge Dart, Colombia model —Becca went on talking, probably stir-crazy from being grounded. “Jeff’s a pretty good guy, but…Did I tell you I’m kind of scared to hang out with anybody from that crowd again? It’s a total bummer, like, I busted ass to get in with the cool kids, and they seem pretty stupid in retrospect.”

“I’m glad you could help. Same for your friend,” said Tim, once he was sure he had the car’s make and model down. “But what you guys did, and then didn’t do, was pretty awful. Ripping off a bunch of jerks is one thing, but then you lied to the cops, even when one of your friends was in trouble.” He stood.

“So what now?” Becca asked, but like she was only mildly interested. Tim wondered if she’d heard anything he’d said.

“Now I think we have to find that car, and then…Well, after that, I don’t know.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid, OK? And keep us out of it. How about just an anonymous phone call telling them about the car?”

Tim scoffed at that. “There’s no way they’d believe it. That Van Endel guy is so used to getting lied to, or at least thinking he’s getting lied to, that I doubt he’d even follow up. And if he did, whoever has her would just lie his way out of it if the cops did stop by. Not that they would. They probably made like a million of that car.”

Becca frowned. “I can’t recall seeing many of them, not around here, anyway.” She paused, then cocked her head as if realizing something. “Do you think Mom and Dad will let us go see the fireworks?”

“I don’t know,” said Tim. “But it won’t matter too much. Everybody lights them off all over the place anyways. Either way, we’ll get a show.”

43

Hooper woke up stuck to the floor. His leg had soaked through the towels, and it now felt as though an industrial-strength adhesive had been used to bind him to the cement. Amy was either asleep on her side or pretending to be asleep. Not that it mattered now—Hooper had no use for her at the moment. As bad as he felt, she couldn’t have been more useless. He grabbed the gun, ignoring the plate and the bottle of Everclear for now, and then tried to stand.

His leg came free of the floor slowly, making a sound like a giant zipper as it parted ways with the cement. A hot, fresh wave of pain blasted off the wound. Without touching it, Hooper waved a hand near it and felt a palpable heat rising from it. Holding on to the wall near the stairs, he tested his weight on the leg. It would work, barely. He knelt, then slowly extended his arm so he wouldn’t fall, and grabbed the ball gag. He stood again, then hopped on his good leg over to the pole that Amy was tied to. Once there, he slid down and then slipped the gag into her mouth. She stirred but did not wake as he attached the harness and then tightened. He seemed to recall her yelling out for help, but he could have been wrong. The memory of the basement surgery flashed back at him, and then a darker cloud ran through his mind. That kid or possibly even kids in the woods.

Hooper might not have been well enough at the moment to go after them, but he smiled, imagining himself with two healthy legs. The smile didn’t last long, though, as there came a thunderous explosion from outside. Hooper scrambled, pain be damned, to the window. What he saw took his breath away. Fuckin’ Charlie is fuckin’ bombing the goddamn town! There could be no other explanation; mortar bursts were erupting throughout the night sky, exploding shrapnel in deadly glory, exactly like the shrapnel that had nearly killed him back in the shit, back in the jungle.

Hooper ducked as a shot roared up from somewhere impossibly close to the house and exploded with precision next to it. Something in his mind popped, and he fell to the ground, shaking in a violent dance on the floor.

Some minutes later, he forced himself to sit up, cringing at the sound of the bombs bursting in the air. His injured leg was literally trembling, pulsing with his beating heart. Scared to look at it, but knowing he had to, Hooper began to turn his head, then stopped when he saw the stretch marks mottling the swollen skin. Scrabbling like a drunken crab, he began spinning on the floor, taken by madness and pain and screaming inaudibly at the same moment a mortar exploded and the back of his leg rubbed on the floor. The shock was too great. He expelled urine and shit from his body in a great flood and then lay in it, morbidly cooling off as the mess of fluids gave away the heat it had gained in his body.