The Fort (Aric Davis)

the loudest thing he’d ever heard, and then he was back in the fort playing rock-paper-scissors. It was summer and it was wonderful, and then the world went black.

51
    Van Endel woke with the sun. He shaved, showered, and ate quickly, and decided as he flipped through his Moleskine that he would stop at Luke Hutchinson’s house first. He was the only one of the three boys whom Van Endel hadn’t spoken with after he’d initially gotten their permission to talk, and he figured that was as good a place to start as any, especially since the boy’s mother had never made an appearance at the station. He was familiar with the area they lived in from his time spent as a uniform breaking up fights and busting drunks. It was one of the low-income spots on the north end.
    Van Endel parked the Caprice and checked the address on the trailer with the one in his book. He was at the right place. The house was fairly nondescript and seemed to be in the same state of lazy disrepair as the ones around it—not trashed yet, but on the way there.
    He walked down a short path, the heat of the day making beads of sweat appear on his hairline. Thank God Doc and I really did have only one last night. Weather like this makes even a little hangover unbearable. Van Endel knocked twice on the door and counted to sixty in his head as nothing happened. He knocked again, harder this time, and for longer. Van Endel gave a look to his watch. It was early, 9:00 a.m., but not crazy early.
    There was a noise at the back of the trailer, and then the sound of a door slamming. Curious now, Van Endel walked around back and saw a man with his pants down to his knees attempting to scale a fence surrounding the park.
    “Get down right now,” said Van Endel, his gun and badge appearing in his hands as easily as taking a breath.
    The man did so and began fiddling with his pants, which, as it turned out, were on backward.
    “On the ground,” said Van Endel. “Forget your pants, buddy, just get your ass down.”
    The man complied, lying flat on the lawn. Van Endel cuffed him, then stood him up, holstered his pistol, and pulled the man’s pants up and buckled them behind his back.
    “What in the hell are you doing running?” Van Endel asked as he walked the man around the trailer and back to the Caprice. “Especially running with your pants down?” Van Endel opened the car door and slid the man in, giving a sad look to the state of the man’s pants against the clean interior. “C’mon, buddy, out with it. What’s going on in there?”
    “I didn’t have nothing to do with it,” the man said. “I was in there fucking Emma, the mother. I didn’t touch them kids.”
    Van Endel shook his head and looked to the trailer. Smoke was coming out of an open window. It wasn’t enough to suggest that the house was on fire. It looked more like someone was burning something. Van Endel slammed the car door on the man who claimed to have been fucking Emma, the mother, then took his walkie-talkie from the front seat. The walkie squawked, and Van Endel barked into it where he was and what he was doing. “No clue what I’m walking into, so tell them to hurry.”
    The smoke was intensifying, so Van Endel left the walkie on the hood of the Caprice, unholstered his pistol, walked to the front door, and kicked it in. Smoke billowed out as he strode in. Two bored-looking twin girls in their early teens sat watching TV on an old and battered couch. They looked at him and then back to the TV. “Get outside, now,” he said, but the twins just ignored him. Van Endel walked past them to the source of the fire.
    There was a woman kneeling on the floor of the trailer, busily feeding stacks of photographs into an oven that was billowing smoke. As far as Van Endel could tell when he stepped closer, the pictures were of the little girls in the living room, and they hadn’t been taken at Kmart. In the first couple of shots that Van Endel could see, the twins were posing nude with each other, but then he could see others where worse things were happening, with very white-bodied men, both with and without underwear.
    “Goddammit,” said Van Endel.
    The woman kept frantically shoving sheaves of the photos into the oven, so he grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her onto her ass on the floor, then turned off the oven. Van Endel made himself look calmly around him. There was enough evidence on the floor that he didn’t need to empty the still-burning contents and risk