Chapter 34

I was up pretty close to the crack of dawn Friday, eager to get out and test my brand new Liberator. I'd dismantled, cleaned and packed up the printer the night before, putting everything neatly back into the boxes; no point to leaving housekeeping evidence of what I'd been up to the day they'd been forbidden entrance. By the time they saw the room again it'd show nothing but two days' worth of being lived in.

Eager though I was, I made myself go down to breakfast and then wait a while longer. Early mornings, I knew, were prime time for hunters; they'd be thick on the ground, and they wouldn't thank me for scaring off the deer.

On the way back up to the room I stopped briefly to double-check with the desk clerk—another of the teen-age clones who seemed always on duty there—about one of the hunting areas on the map I'd picked up earlier, mentioning that I planned to go hiking there and asking were there any precautions I should take. Bright colors, she said, preferably orange. When I told her the only jacket I had with me was dark brown she popped into the back room and emerged with an orange vest; the lodge, she said, kept a few on hand "just in case."

I thanked her and took it gratefully. It would be ironic indeed to have escaped Walter and Cesar Romero both and then get shot down by some myopic weekend warrior too dim-witted to notice that his target had two legs instead of four and lacked a rack of antlers. An irony that I would definitely not appreciate.

Around 9:30, by which time any self-respecting deer would be laid up for the day, I put on my jacket and vest (which fitted me like a tent but would color me human to any lurking hunters) and headed out, the Liberator and my box of ammunition in my pockets. The weather was appreciably brisker than a few days before, with a definite nip in the air and a fairly heavy overcast; perhaps the snowfall eagerly awaited by the lodge management was at last on its way.

The access to the hunting area was marked by a fairly wide gravel shoulder along which several cars were parked. But there was still room, and I slid my rental into one of the vacant spots. From there I hiked up a dirt path about thirty feet—enough to be out of sight from the road—and then branched off far enough that I couldn't be seen by passing hunters walking to and fro, either. Then I started looking around for a tree with a low-hanging branch creating a crevice into which I could wedge the Liberator.

I knew little about guns, but one thing I did know was that if they were incorrectly made or maintained they could blow apart when fired. And if they did that when they were in your hand, well, bye-bye hand. If this weird-looking thing was going to explode I wanted something else to take the blast. A few feet further along I found just what I was looking for, a smallish tree whose trunk obligingly forked at about chest height.

Tensely I pulled out one of the bullets I'd brought and loaded it into the Liberator, cocked it, and wedged it firmly into the cleft, pointing carefully down, so the bullet would lodge in the Earth instead of God knows where. A few feet away I grabbed up a fallen limb and stripped away a few twigs. I ducked down out of the way of any backblast, brought my stick up against the trigger and pushed firmly.

Click. The same click when I'd tried the thing unloaded back in my room. But no bang. The thing had misfired.

"Uh," I grunted unhappily. "I bought a wooden whistle and it wooden whistle," I added musingly.

"What?" Susan asked.