The Fort (Aric Davis)

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.
    Hooper lay there for a long time. As terrible as the endless barrage was, he seemed to be safe. The ground wasn’t rumbling like it had back in the shit, and no one was screaming in pain from shrapnel, like he had been on that awful night of fire and lead. No one came for me then, and they won’t now, either. Help hadn’t come until the next morning; those pussy medics had had to wait until the area was clear to come get him. The men around Hooper had died slowly, their screams sputtering out like motors running out of fuel. Not again, not again , thought Hooper, a moment of clarity allowing him to see the filth he was lying in. The moment begged for another, and Hooper all but dragged himself to his feet, his injured leg leaking blood and pus as he dragged it behind him to the bathroom, his foot turned sideways and the leg dying the slow