We were stuck in construction traffic for eight hours. We finally found out what they were building. Finale
When I was a kid, I watched my best friend die.
There was a stream in the middle of the woods behind my house. It marked my parents’ property line. Then, on the other side of the stream was an old tree house. I don’t know who put it there, but I never saw anybody else come near it, so Silas and I claimed it as our own. It was in rough shape when we found it, but it had good bones, and over the years we patched in the rotten parts with bits of wood from dad’s workshop.
Each summer, Silas would come over nearly every day and we’d go to that tree house. We had all sorts of forbidden things there, stashed in an airtight plastic bin. A pint of whiskey, a pack of smokes, a few of dad’s old Playboys… things like that. We’d work on repairing the tree house, taking breaks now and then to look through the artifacts from the strange, alien world of adults, and make up stories.
One year, when we were 12, we got a late start. I went on a two week vacation with my family right after school was over, and by the time I got back, spring was in full bloom. By the time we finally got to work, the path back to the tree house was overgrown, and we had to spend a couple of days clearing it with old, dull army-navy store machetes. When we did make it back, we saw that there were a few new spots of rot, but otherwise, she looked in good shape. We decided that we’d make the repairs later, because we were eager to make up for lost time. We wanted to get back to the enclosure of the tree house… our world.
I started climbing the ladder.
“Careful,” said Silas from below. “That next step looks rotten.”
I saw that he was right, so I skipped that step, and finally made it to the top. I unlatched the door, pushed it open, and stepped inside, feeling that thrill of having something that nobody else in the world has, or even knows about.
A minute later, I saw Silas’ head appear, and then he was all the way up on the platform, outside the tree house. He was smiling, and then, suddenly, he was screaming, clutching his neck, running inside and slamming the door behind him. He swatted wildly at his neck, his eyes wide with fear, and cried out in pain.
“What’s wrong?!” I shouted.
“Something stung me,” he said. “But I think I got it. It hurt.”
Then we heard it, through the door. The buzz of an angry swarm of hornets.
“Oh shit!” I said. “There’s gotta be a nest around here. They sound pissed. What do we do?”
Silas wiped his eyes dry, where a few tears had formed. “They can’t get us in here,” he said. “They’ll go away after awhile. Then we sneak past them, get some spray, and nuke the assholes.”
But he was wrong. They could get us in there. I don’t know how exactly they got in… but they got in. Before we knew what was happening, we were both covered in hornets. I twisted in pain from dozens of stings, unable to escape, unable to think.
I saw Silas stagger back, and then he was up against a rotten section of the wall, and then the wall collapsed, and he was falling down.
