Gun Machine

It was late afternoon before he had completed his construction to his satisfaction. The hunter then turned, methodically, to the preparation of tinder. Moving as quietly as he could, he broke up the particleboard display stand and began to arrange its pieces. He feathered and shaved more tinder, ensuring he could easily reach it even as he began to gather more wood to it.

It would make a grand fire. A fire that would cook the dead thing down to a pile of black sticks, with the remains of its polyester clothes melted over them.

The hunter stopped then, took his last piece of squirrel meat, and took his time chewing it, considering every angle of what he had done and what he was going to do.

The sun came low. The hunter stood his weapons by the back door and went up to the roof to look around and wait. He had a reasonably good view from the rooftop at the corner of the block. He knew how to reach the side road and Kutkha’s backyard from the hardware store’s access alley.

The sun ticked down. The street grew silent.

The military man opened the front door, threw out two garbage sacks, and closed the door again with an audible click.

The hunter moved.

Five minutes later, and acutely aware of the passage of time, the hunter was unseen at the front door of Kutkha’s property, pushing a nail into the wooden footboard of the front door, kicking a garbage sack—What a gift! he thought—in front of the door, and lowering a filled water bottle containing improvised partitions onto the bag. He extended the wires that hung out of the bottle and wound the end of one of them around the nail in the lower door frame. He pushed in another nail next to the door lock, wound the other wire around that, checked his work, and moved quickly away.

In the dark of the hardware store, the hunter struck sparks. The pyre around the dead thing caught immediately. He took more tinder out of the back door with him in one of the small storage trays. Outside, he heard a car. The hunter stopped moving and listened, intently. He heard the car move down the access road, turn, negotiate the passage into the backyard, and stop.

The hunter struck sparks into his tinder and got fire. He lit the tips of the soaked twine where they stuck out of the ends of the two pipes and slid through the door in the fence that separated him from the access road. With five steps he remained out of sight of the backyard but had a clear line of sight to the rear of Kutkha’s building.

He hefted his first spear and hurled it over the fence and through a third-floor window. He snatched up the second while the first was in flight, calculated a correction and the extra force, and flung the spear through a fifth-floor window. He could see little flickers of light through the breathing holes down the spears as the gasoline-soaked wicks burned toward the bottles. There was a flat report from the third floor, like a giant striking the ground with a cupped hand. Homemade napalm—clotted blood, plastics, and gasoline—erupted, and he was rewarded with shrieks from the third floor. A fifth-floor window blew out as the second napalm bomb went off.

The hunter drew the Beretta and moved into the backyard.

There was a large seven-seater car parked there. The hunter made out the small faces of four small people in the rear of the vehicle, and saw that the doors were locked. Two men stood by the left wing of the car, their backs to the hunter.

He shot the first through the back of the neck. The bullet careened around the man’s face and tore through the right joint of his jaw as it exited, so that the lower jaw swung around as if on a hinge toward the hunter.

He shot the second through the back of the head and heard the smack of a chunk of brain the size of a baby’s hand hit the wall of the building.

Kutkha had a briefcase in his hands. Behind him was the idiot boy. Beside him was the military man, already moving for a concealed weapon.

The hunter shot the military man through the forehead. For a long second, the man refused to die. His eyes flashed with outrage. He opened his mouth as if to speak his mind at the intrusion, and half a pint of bright red blood fell out of it. His legs gave way and he fell to the ground in a coiling motion, like a clubbed snake.

The hunter snapped his gun down and shot Kutkha in the groin, accurately castrating him. He shoved the screaming Russian away and shot the boy twice in the brain, smiling as he told himself the second shot was in case he missed the brain the first time.

The third and fifth floors of the building were now fully ablaze. The shrieking had one or two voices fewer in it.