Gun Machine

The auto repair shop across the street closed for a late lunch. The hunter found the access alley behind the hardware store, walked around the block, broke into the auto repair shop, and took a few things they wouldn’t immediately miss, including a jacket and a ball cap that had been stuffed into a bag at the back. They stank of machine guts, but he wanted to be less obvious in his comings and goings over the next few hours, so he put them on in order to walk his wrapped spoils back to the hardware store.

In the cool shade of the abandoned store, the hunter began to make tools.

He carefully twisted long lengths of twine together and set them to soak in the can of gasoline he’d taken from the auto shop.

The dead thing was nothing but raw material now. The hunter cut many thin slices of its clothing off, having looked at it and determined there were plenty of polymers in the weave of its orange suit. The hunter soaked the strips in its blood. Once they were sodden, the hunter stuffed them into two of the three empty water bottles he’d found in the store’s back room, along with the handful of Styrofoam packing beans he’d gathered from the floor.

The hunter couldn’t find a decent hacksaw in the place, and it might have made too much noise in any case. He crept around the house in search of the weakest-looking copper pipes and spent patient minutes prying two of them from the walls as quietly as possible. He spent a short while grinding the tip of a bolt, and then used it to punch breathing holes down the lengths of both pipes. He then fed a length of twine down each of the pipes. He had to keep himself aware of the passage of time. This kind of work warmed and entranced him so wonderfully that he could have lost days to it. The preparation of tools was beautiful to him, even improvised tools such as these. The tying of a knot around a nut was an act of devotion and a preservation of sacred crafts as much as the creation of a prayer tie from tobacco leaves. He mixed gasoline with the blood and fabric and Styrofoam, and looped the free end of the twine around the far end of the pipe so as not to lose it when he dropped the knotted end of the twine into the bottle. He pushed three or four inches of the near end of the pipe into the bottle and made a seal with duct tape lifted from the auto shop. One end of the twine was inside the bottle, weighted by its nut; the other was still looped around the end of the pipe. He repeated the process with the second bottle.

He hefted one of his copper spears experimentally. The length was good. He then searched for things to weight the standing ends of the bottles, to give more predictability to the lift.

The front door of Kutkha’s property was still a problem. Having weighted the bottles to his liking, the hunter prowled the building for more ingredients.

He came across an old broom, its shaft splintered, its imitation-horsehair brush balding and brittle. It solved a problem farther down his list. He slowly split it all the way in half—he didn’t want the crack of breaking it sharply—and with his knife began to feather the top end of the wood into tinder as he walked the empty building.

Within ten minutes, the hunter had found a half-empty hand-sanitizer dispenser, a mostly full bottle of drain cleaner, a folded tube of strong glue, and a disposable lighter that looked to have five millimeters of butane in the bottom. The hunter took off his gloves and squirted a tiny drop of the sanitizer onto a fingertip. He sniffed it, and then rubbed it swiftly with his thumb. Alcohol based. Heaven alone knew what the attendant scent was supposed to be, he thought sourly. He knew he had a scattering of nails and pins downstairs. He took his knife again and dug into the walls of the room he was in until he found the lighting circuit’s wiring and pulled several feet of it free of the plaster.

Downstairs, he put his tinder down and took up the gun he’d removed from the dead thing on the floor. It was a version of a Beretta 92, some newer iteration that he hadn’t seen. It was a little lighter in his hand than he had been expecting given the make. Some parts were plastic, he saw on closer inspection. Unmistakably a Beretta 92, though, nine-millimeter and workmanlike. The slide was strong and smooth. He extracted the gun’s magazine and pulled a bullet from it. The hunter sliced the top off the third bottle, poured the dregs of the gasoline can into it, unscrewed the dispenser arm from the hand sanitizer, and squirted that on top of the gasoline. He went foraging for nails. To his great pleasure, ten minutes’ diligence saw him collect a substantial number of aluminum clout nails. In the bottle they went.

As the dead thing stiffened and then softened on the other side of the room, the hunter worked with his knife on the bullet and the wiring and other things, and his heart grew light.