Hunters by Chet Williamson Page B

leather-topped, rubber-bottomed boots lined
with felt kept his feet toasty without feeling sweaty, and the L.
L. Bean jacket, pants, and thermal underwear kept the rest of him
warm.
    The only cold parts were his exposed face and
his hands, which he kept jammed into his pockets, his rifle wedged
under his arm. "Light cotton gloves," Walter had said, "is all you
need. Got to be able to pull that trigger when the time comes."
Sure. If the time ever came. Walter had painstakingly told
the virgins just how they should hunt, moving slowly from spot to
spot, then waiting for a deer to show up.
    Tim thought it was like fishing, boring as
hell. And it didn't make any sense either. The more ground you
covered, the more likely it was you'd eventually run across a buck,
right? So instead of still hunting, he practiced what he referred
to mentally as hike-hunting, just walking through the woods hoping
to finally run across an antlered sonovabitch.
    He just hoped that it didn't snow the way the
weathermen said it might. It sounded like it could be a real
monster storm if the worst case scenario came true. Tim only liked
snow when you could ski in it. Walking miles through it looking for
deer sucked royally.
    Skiing. Now there was a thought. Nice sunny
slopes, a big warm lodge with a Jacuzzi and a good restaurant, a
cozy room with a big fireplace and a sweet young thing who thought
a young lawyer would just be the greatest thing in the world to
screw. They'd all seen the movie of The Firm , even if they
didn't read, and knew that lawyers were the best catch of all these
days, now that Bill Gates was hitched. There were still girls who
didn't give a damn about sexual harassment, who loved to flirt, who
gave as good as they got, and who were capable of giving a helluva
lot more.
    But up here in the wilds of Jefferson County?
Jesus, the only available girls he'd seen in the bar in Brookville
had been pitiful looking things, and invariably the handful of
women hunters he had seen had looked like those girls' pinheaded
sisters, the kind their families kept chained in the attic and let
out only at deer season to fill the larder for the winter.
    And just as that thought crossed his mind to
make him snicker and shudder simultaneously, one of the best
looking women he had ever seen stepped from out of a tight grove of
trees with a white, pearly smile that turned that dark forest into
Aspen under the sun. Thank you Jesus, Tim Carlton thought as he
smiled back.
    She was just the way Tim liked them, short
and petite, with big breasts that even a thick, down-filled jacket
couldn't hide. Red hair crept out from under a blaze orange toque,
but her skin belied her hair with its bronze, healthy tan,
accentuated by the rose in her cheeks. Christ, but weren't tanned
redheads just the foxiest things in the world, rare and
beautiful?
    She carried a rifle under her arm, so she was a hunter, and that normally would have been a negative.
But for some reason Tim felt turned on by even that, as though he
had just come across a sexy and spirited tomgirl. And hell, if she
hadn't gotten her buck the first day, she couldn't be all that great a hunter.
    "Hey," she said brightly.
    "Hey yourself," he replied, trying to look
like less of a dweeb by taking his hands out of his pockets. Ready
for action. "How's the hunting?"
    She shrugged. "I'm not dragging anything home
yet."
    He gave her the Tom Cruise grin. "Maybe your
luck'll change."
    "What, now that I've met you?"
    Holy shit, he thought, she zinged it right
back. That was a come-on, sure as hell. Tim suddenly felt that he
had been dropped into a scene in which Penthouse Forum met Field and Stream . But now was most definitely not the time
to lose his cool. "Could be," he said. "Where have you set up
camp?" Good, that sounded macho.
    "Real close by." That was good. "About a mile
down that hollow." That was better. "It's my boyfriend's
cabin."
    That was bad. Tim felt his smile drift in
spite of his efforts to hold it. He