The Fort (Aric Davis)

his jokes, it was still lucky for them to be with such a good-looking guy. His mom had always said he would grow up to be a handsome man, and she was right.
    Hooper got dressed slowly—bright blue briefs, a tight black T-shirt, and jeans. He slid on a pair of cowboy boots, no socks, and then pushed a snub-nosed .38 into his pants pocket. He practiced drawing the gun a few times, sliding it in and out of his jeans to make sure it wouldn’t get hung up on anything if he needed it quickly. It passed the test well, as he’d figured it would. He’d had the hammer bobbed a few years back, and had replaced the factory rubber grip with a smooth faux-pearl one. The grips made the revolver almost too slick, especially when shooting, but Hooper didn’t figure he’d need to do any shooting tonight. Usually the knife, a KA-BAR just like he’d had in Nam, was enough, if it came to that. He slid the sheathed blade into his boot, and did a little dance as he left the bedroom.
    Hooper walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk from the half gallon in the fridge. He drank it quickly, then placed the glass in the sink and rinsed it out; the last thing he needed was flies. Hooper kept the house immaculately clean, everything in its place. It was how his mom had raised him, and since this was her old house, it was only fair to honor her memory by keeping it the way it had been when she was alive. Hooper checked his watch. It would be dark soon, and time to leave.
    Hooper walked from the kitchen, thinking, like he always did, about Amy, his little sister. She’d disappeared when he was in Vietnam, when she was just sixteen years old. He had some theories about where she might have gone, and why she would have left, but he really wanted to ask her himself, find out why she’d wanted to do something so hard on their mom. It just wasn’t a fair thing to do. Hooper could remember Amy like it was yesterday. He’d slowly watched her develop, and he could remember the smell of her hair like his nose was buried in it right now.
    There were a lot of girls out there who looked like Amy, but Hooper was pretty particular. Usually, he’d cruise up and down Division Avenue, heading south and looking at all of the working girls. It was normal not to see a girl who looked like her, and on those nights, Hooper would pick one of the other girls and fuck her in his car, then drive her to where she asked him to. Those girls never saw the pistol, or the knife. The Amy look-alikes got a different sort of treatment. Hooper liked to rape them at knifepoint, sometimes at the drive-in, sometimes other places on the north end of town—he wasn’t too particular about that part. While he raped the Amys, he always asked why they had left, and if they knew how much they’d hurt Mom. None of them ever knew the answer to either question.
    When he was done, he drove the women to Riverside Park. Usually, by about that point he would start to realize just how much they didn’t look like Amy, how they couldn’t possibly be Amy. By the time he would get to the park he would be furious, and the usual pathetic crying didn’t help at all. Hooper had done the same thing fourteen times, finishing by stabbing the fake Amy once through the liver with the KA-BAR, and then choking them into silence. The bodies were found by the police, and usually made the news. No one was looking too hard—after all, they were just prostitutes, street trash not worth much more than a dog or a cat. Hooper smiled. He probably wouldn’t find Amy tonight, but he could sure as hell go looking, and have a nice time either way.

4
    Scott’s mom had to work late on Mondays, so he and his stepdad, Carl, ate cold leftover pizza from the fridge, neither of them speaking as the meal was slowly consumed. The TV spoke for them. The news was on, and once again, the talking heads were arguing over whether or not the United States should retaliate further against Iraq for its missile attack on the USS Stark in May. Thirty-seven sailors had been killed, and apparently that was enough for the ‘nuclear’ word to be used.
    “They should do it,” said Carl. “Fuck it. Turn the goddamn desert to glass, then send a couple up for the gooks and Russians. Get this Cold War hot, and let God figure it out.”
    Scott knew better than to refute his stepdad, or to even bother trying to argue an alternative viewpoint. Carl Andrews had been living with them since Scott was six, two years