Chapter 6

They returned to the same branch library that they had used before and entered by the same door. They had not yet learned how to hide their activities, so they were in a lot more danger than they realized. The main thing they had going for them was the arrogance and incompetence of the local police. It had been years since they'd had anything worse than DUI (Driving Under the Influence of drugs or alcohol) to deal with. They were cruel and intolerant when it came to slaves, but they had no idea how to cope with a real rebellion.

The men entered the library and turned to their various tasks. Joseph knew exactly what he needed to do, so he was the one occupied with his task while the other two were still trying to figure out how books were posted in the library. They couldn't work it out with their limited education, so they resorted to walking up and down the aisles looking for the kind of books they wanted.

Otto found the books on weapons and started thumbing through them in consecutive order. Some were not useful because there were not enough pictures to tell him what the book contained, and he did not yet know enough technical words to be able to read the book. Oh, he could sound out the word, but he had no frame of reference to tell him whether or not the word was important to his search.

Finally, he found a picture that rang a bell. He looked at a picture of an item he had seen in the sporting goods store, a krosbo. He studied the picture and the description associated with it and realized that it was a weapon that flung darts at a high speed toward the target. Nearly three pages of text were associated with the krosbo, and the book suggested that this might be something important to them. Otto took the book with him and went to find George.

George still had not found anything that he could use, so he welcomed the interruption from Otto. "George, look at this. It is something called a krosbo, and I saw several in the sporting goods store. I think that it could be important, but I can't read well enough to be sure. Here, see what you think."

George could read a little better than Otto, so he did grasp a few of the salient facts that Otto had missed. "Otto, this looks to me like you have hit the jackpot! From what I can make out, this shoots a dart as much as 100 meters and can kill at that distance. It says that the weapon is easy to use and can be mastered in a few weeks. We are basically helpless the way we are, so I say we should look into this krosbo thing as soon as possible. Let's see how far Joseph is along in his search. If he is ready to leave, we will have time to go by the sporting goods store and pick up three of them and all the darts that we can find."

Joseph was ready to leave within 10 minutes, so they went to pick up the krosbos. The store they wanted was only four blocks away, so they got there very quickly. Once inside, Otto remembered where he had seen them, so he led the group to the five krosbos of various sizes on display. They were protected by a light chain intended to prevent casual shoplifting, but not intended to resist Otto when he was determined.

Otto broke the light chain, and they took the krosbos from the shelf for examination. They had no way to determine which one was the most suitable for the job they had in mind, so they took them all. They found five packages of darts of slightly different sizes, apparently sized to fit each one of the krosbos. There were 24 darts in each package, so the weapons and ammunition were somewhat bulky, but they fit onto the wagon with a minimum amount of bother. Out of fear of getting caught, they hurried home and examined their new weapons there.

Fortunately, each krosbo had an instruction book, and they were able to work out how to cock and load the weapon when they all worked on the problem. One of the instruction books went into detail on how to aim the weapon and how to estimate how much drop to allow for as the range changed. This book was full of very helpful pictures, so they were able to learn most of what they needed to know before the night was over.

The next floor down was essentially empty of walls and partitions, so it was the ideal place for a shooting range. They found an old door to use as a target, and each man took a practice shot at the target. None of them came anywhere close to the aiming point, but they all managed to hit the door, so they were likely to advance rapidly with their accuracy. All three were very good at taking instruction, so they made rapid progress in their aiming ability. This krosbo had a good set of sights, so they were able to learn very easily. The book suggested that they prop against something as they learned to shoot, as that would help to keep them from wandering with their aim.

Nobody was surprised when Otto seemed to be the better marksman at this early stage. However, both Joseph and George were very close behind. The realization that they had some honest-to-God protection, now, from being recaptured was all the incentive they needed to practice, practice, practice! Though not the repeating style of krosbo, they could cock and reload so fast that it hardly made any difference. Otto suggested that they scour the city for as many of these wonderful weapons as they could find. Most especially, they needed to stock up on the bolts, as the darts were called.

This was the selective-kill weapon that they were looking for. Explosives were still on the list of weapons to be used, but the krosbo was more to everybody's liking. Joseph came up with an idea for enhancing the bolts by dipping the points in George's wonderful pepper extract. That way, even a scratch that just broke the skin would prove debilitating. They did not have to be such accurate shots if the pepper extract worked as well as Joseph hoped.

Dammit, they had to try it out! They had been buzzing around for nearly three weeks, but they had done nothing to carry the fight to the enemy. Tonight was the night to reverse that policy. They didn't know who they were looking for as a victim, but they might never know if they did not start their hunt. The most obvious targets were cops, but even they were not so easy to find. Joseph was elected to lead the hunt, since he knew the most about hunting from his reading of the Tarzania books. They would be hunting people instead of food, but, surely, the principle was the same.

They let the night come on with eager anticipation of their first hunt. Each man carried a krosbo and a quiver of bolts that had been dipped in the pepper extract. They figured that the best place to find cops was toward the middle of the business and entertainment districts. That meant a hike of about three miles, but they were in good physical condition, so that was no deterrent.

They practiced their stealthy moves on the way. Joseph positioned Otto as a flanker on one side of the street while he and George worked on the other side. They practiced dodging from one recessed doorway to the next, and they actually got pretty good at it by the time they got downtown. No matter what, this was fun. They never had the chance to play their own games as youngsters—they always had to play the games their owners wanted, and they were almost never any fun to the slaves, since they usually ended in some form of pain to the boys, usually to the cock and balls.

The first cop they saw was riding one of those two-wheel Segway-type devices. The cop was approaching them on Otto's side of the street. Joseph used hand signals to tell him that he was to proceed with the honor of the first kill. Otto was thrilled at the opportunity, and, as a result, got something like buck-fever. The difference was that he fired too soon, and only wounded the cop in the thigh just below the hem of her uniform shorts.

This was one of the dipped points, of course, so the woman screamed from pain all out of proportion to what would have been produced just by the strike of the bolt. She tossed and writhed on the street, and she made her wound worse by trying to pull out the bolt the reverse of the way in went in. The shape of the point made that impossible because barbs dug into the flesh and kept it from moving. The only way to remove the bolt in that direction was with an arrow spoon, and nobody knew anything about that sort of medical instrument in this day and age. The alternative was to drive the bolt through in its original direction, but that was going to hurt just as much. The only practical solution at this point was to cut the bolt out, and that, too, could prove fatal at the hands of an amateur.