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Blaster Caster

Some hunters talked to their guns. Mitch had a gun that talked back, in a voice he could not ignore!

By Eric WolfPublished 2 years ago 8 min read
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Blaster Caster
Photo by Rajas Chitnis on Unsplash

It was maybe a week after my father died that I brought the weapon home — for him. And never, even while I piloted the car to a hunting area, did it cease talking. “Drive better, son,” it barked, as I launched the car into motion. “Are you trying to get us killed, before we’ve even made it out of Ann Arbor?

“Well, you’ve got no worries on that score,” I mumbled. I was afraid to speak up, to let him know how I really felt, but not even all of his gripes were logical — and if nothing else, Dad always claimed that he preferred to be sensible, about life. Even if I had shown any tendencies to reckless motoring, it had never cost him — even back when I was a student driver, there were no tickets or accidents or court appearances to support its… sorry, his griping to me.

Perhaps, griping at me would be more accurate, about this or that. It was an uncanny imitation; just this constant yammering, in a steady stream of grousing and bitching, which made it equal parts infuriating, and strangely heartwarming.

“Why are you stopping?” the weapon barked, in Dad’s voice, again. I remember resenting that it had copied only his dry rasp — the sound of his illness, not the lighter, more ear-friendly sound of his younger, healthier days. “Mitch…can’t I hope, just this once, that it won’t take us all day to get up there? You’ve got the bladder of a small child. We’ve got to stop, every quarter-mile, for —”

I awaited a green light, in more ways than one, taking the deep breath to calm my nerves more than to fill my lungs with oxygen. “We’re stopping for just one minute, Dad,” I said to the weapon, as ridiculous as that sounds. “I want to see if Julia is working tonight. The Algonquian is just a couple of blocks, now.”

“I thought we were done with her,” hissed the Caster-Blaster. “After that whole misunderstanding…” The weapon paused; it seemed to be gathering its thoughts, Dad’s thoughts. Incredible! Had it done more than capture the pattern of his mental processes? Could it… think?

Julia had not misunderstood us. She was working at the Algonquian bar a year before I had ever stepped inside, with some of my work buddies from the University of Michigan. One of my friends, Carl, made no secret of his interest in her. She made haste to express her disinterest in him; he took it in stride and we went back a few more times, for beers and burgers, before she made it known that she was displeased with me — for the opposite reason: “So I’ve got to ask you, Mitchell: why don’t you ever ask me out?”

She just put her cards on the table, in lots of ways; that wasn’t the only thing I admired about her. Even her “Yooper” (Upper Peninsula) accent, a touch rural for my taste at first, had grown on me; maybe she reminded me of my ex-wife, Sandy, a Georgia peach with whom I had loads in common, except for a desire to move back to Atlanta and a few minor quibbles: diet, politics, religion, taste in music — well, we were young, fresh out of college, and in love, but… not for very long. My dad never warmed to her, either, but he was practically her fan-club president when compared to how much he had disliked Julia, almost instantly.

^^^^

“You thought she was a burglar,” I yelled at him, feeling such intensity that my feet tapped the brake; the car slid on loose gravel on the highway shoulder. I tend to pull over when I get too emotional to drive safely, but I wanted to get where we were going. “She shows up on the porch, a little bit after dark, not even late-night shows on yet, and you bark at me to shoot her, like we’re in a crime neighborhood. She could hear you, Dad! It’s bad enough, she wanting nothing to do with you when I brought you home, but you do that?”

The weapon was the newest edition of neuro-adaptive hardware, and only his demise would had have prevented Dad from wielding it with pride. Even as he was slipping away from us, in hospice, it pleased him to hear that I had paid a last sum to acquire the Caster-Blaster Model 137 magnetic arrowgun — with all the bells and whistles of your modern hunting armament. Naturally, the “bell” that made it a prize to be possessed was its memory-cells core, which fattened the butt of this weapon. This, the advertisement promised, contained the “synaptic silhouette” of Dad’s recollections, his opinions and his skills.

It was a gun that could speak with a person’s voice, from a person’s memories. I had no means of recording Mom’s thoughts; the technology came along after she had died, and anyway, she hated hunting, and guns. (She loved the Detroit Lions. We forgave her!) I couldn’t think of anyone more suitable, for the honor of giving his voice to my gun, than the man who had taught me how to hunt, before I could drive a car or buy a frosty glass of beer with my own money.

Slapping her voice onto a Caster-Blaster would have been an insult to the lady, not that she would ever have let a moment’s use of it go, unaddressed. I could only imagine that if I had ever raised it to aim at a buck, or a goose, she would have been up in arms, no pun intended

I wasn’t in the place ten seconds; Julia wasn’t scheduled for work, and had not felt like risking a run-in with me by showing up for a meal and a game of pool. Got back in my car, ignoring the new torrent of complaints “Dad” launched at me, and put us back on the road, north, to our ultimate destination…

I had never been much of a hunter. Dad had blamed it on lots of things: comic books, not enough religion, and the end of military conscription in the United States. He had served our country faithfully, in the Marine Corps; he wanted a second-generation Marine, but I had let him down by preferring university life and a high-paying job in I.T. I had made efforts to bond with him, sure — going a few times into the northern woods with him to blast defenseless deer, geese and other critters. I had a pretty good aim; he told me, it would deteriorate, if I didn’t keep in practice. Deteriorate, it did; I regretted that, at first.

“We’re there,” I said unnecessarily, as the Model 137 seemed quite capable of discovering that on “his” own. I took a deep breath of the cold air; the season was almost over for hunting, but that made little difference to Dad. He never paid much heed to when authorities said it was okay to hunt, in later years; it seemed like one more thing getting in his way, as his time began to run out.

Months purchasing the Blaster in regular installments had paid off in the end, but for Dad, it was the end. For me, there was the flu-like pain of grief, in my every joint, in every breath, as one thing after another had reminded me of him. He had rejoined my mother, in some mysterious realm. I missed them, but I was in no hurry to rejoin them myself; it was a paradox, this grieving thing.

^^^^

I slung that arrowgun over my shoulder, which Dad’s encased intellectual handprint just loved — “I can’t see a goddamned thing,” it shrieked. “Let me down so I know what we’re doing. I swear, Mitchell, you don’t mind your father worth a cold goddamn any more. You kids just —”

“‘Kids’?” I just wanted to scream. “I’m thirty-seven, Dad! I’ve got an ex-wife I’m never going to be with again. I’m in a good job that you’ve never appreciated. This, for crying out loud… you can’t just bulldoze me any more. Julia’s going to turn thirty-one next week. I am going to try to win her back, and you are not going to wreck that for me, are we square on that?”

“Okay, mister tough guy,” the arrowgun barked. “Let me have it, right between the eyes. You don’t want to be out here, with your old man? Fine. Just want to tell you, though, that you are one ungrate —”

A deer emerged from a distant thicket. I had almost missed it. It was a buck, all right. He was a real beauty, too, with multiple points; I couldn’t see exact numbers, but he’d lived well and grown up to be a real specimen of his kind. He’s more of a man than I will ever be, I thought, smiling because it was just so damned funny, and he’s not even human.

“Well, are you just going to stare like some starstruck girl?” the arrowgun spat at me. “Line it up, take your time, but not too much time, and put the distractions out of your mind... squeeze off a shot, fast, to wound it. Go, Mitch!”

I raised the arrowgun. I could see the buck grazing; it either didn’t sense me, a rare thing indeed if it were true, or it felt it could manage to escape me, from a distance this great. “Dad”, at least, knew to shut the hell up, at last. I could, if I followed his instructions, still make him proud.

I took a deep breath of cold air, centered the buck in the target-finder scope, a deep gulp of air suspended in my lungs. “I love you, Dad,” I whispered, not caring whether "he" could hear me, or what he thought about I had expressed.

My finger strayed from the trigger function. I tapped a control button on the side of the weapon. It was a simple matter to remove the central power unit from the gun butt, which disabled its memory core. “Dad” was thus effectively silenced. I pocketed the components I had removed, and slung the arrowgun over my shoulder. Long after the buck had raced off to his next adventure, I made my destination, a spot in the thicket enclosed by trees. I dug quickly, until the hole was sufficient in scope to contain the removed components. At least now “Dad” would have what his earlier cremation had denied him: a decent burial.

© Eric Wolf 2022.

familyFantasyLoveSatireSci Fi
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About the Creator

Eric Wolf

Ink-slinger. Photo-grapher. Earth-ling. These are Stories of the Fantastic and the Mundane. Space, time, superheroes and shapeshifters. 'Wolf' thumbnail: https://unsplash.com/@marcojodoin.

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