The Fort (Aric Davis)

looked to be of a similar build as the one they’d seen in the woods, though he had a gut Luke didn’t remember seeing.
    He wished Scott and Tim were with him, and not for the first time. It would be nice to have someone to talk to, and to ask questions about how they remembered the man looking.
    The other house that had stuck out as being a little off had many of the same characteristics as the first one, though there was no injured owner visible to add more weight to the picture it painted. The house was made of red bricks and was small enough that Luke couldn’t imagine anyone other than a single man or woman living in it. The yard was unmowed, and the grass had yellow and dead patches, even with the rainy spring and June that they’d had that year. In addition to the ratty yard, the car in the driveway was an ancient El Camino. It was black but looked like it had been painted with a roller or something, and there were several dried spots of black, too dark to be oil, in the driveway around the car.
    What made the house stick out most of all, though, was the impression it gave of having somehow been taken from another neighborhood and just transplanted there. There were no other brick houses on that stretch, and it didn’t fit the mold that all of the houses on the same strip seemed to come from. The rest of the houses were ranch-style, with attached garages and aluminum siding. Families were outside most of the other houses, messing around and lighting off small fireworks, but the little brick house had no one outside.
    Luke had forgotten all about the Fourth until he’d been out on his little recon mission, but the signs of it were everywhere: blackened fountains and cakes lined the bases of driveways, sticks from bottle rockets littered the road and yards, little kids ran around with sparklers and snap-pops. It made Luke homesick in a way that he hadn’t been since this had all happened. He wasn’t telling his friends about his trips to the gas station to buy food during the day, or about what it was like not having his crazy mother and sisters around. Frankly, it was sweet as hell, but there was also a sadness lingering over him that he knew wasn’t going away.
    He felt like a traitor for thinking it, but Luke had a feeling that this was all going to blow over, and without anything happening. Molly was going to be found dead, or maybe one of his friends would get caught sneaking out, and then that would be it. There would be no clearing their names, just a stigma that was going to follow him through the rest of middle school, and maybe on into high school. It would follow his friends too, but it would be different for them. After all, everything else outside of school was different for them; it was only a matter of time until his school world caught up. He would no longer be just another student. He’d be that trailer-park liar, or some other, equally awful version of that, in the eyes of his fellow students and his teachers. That part almost stung the most: knowing that for the foreseeable future, adults were always going to assume that he could be lying to them. The thought fueled Luke as he pushed on through the suburb, finding clues that didn’t matter and looking for answers that weren’t going to reveal themselves.
    The house appeared before him only moments after his self-defeating train of thought had eked away the last of his interest in searching for it. He almost didn’t notice it. It had its back to the forest, and the backyard was fully encompassed by a tall wooden fence. Neither of the houses on either side of it was two stories, so the backyard would be basically impossible to see into. Luke could see that the fence went almost all the way to the trees.
    Cutting through the yard of a neighbor a couple of doors down, he looped around into the forest and quickly came upon a cluster of popples that looked quite similar to the one the man and Molly had disappeared into. He spent some time trying to orient himself to where the fort would be in relation to where he was standing. Unless he was mistaken, Luke was pretty sure this house was in exactly the direction they’d seen the man and Molly walking.
    He cut back to the street and gave one last look to the mailbox. The address was stenciled on it, and above it the word HOOPER .
    Luke headed back to the fort at a dead run.

42
    Tim and his dad had finished tamping down about ten square feet of gravel when Stan sat down on the edge of the