The Fort (Aric Davis)

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