Accidental Death, by Peter Baily

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Title: Accidental Death

Author: Peter Baily

Illustrator: John Schoenherr

Release Date: February 4, 2008 [EBook #24517]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ACCIDENTAL DEATH

BY PETER BAILY

The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded.

Illustrated by Schoenherr

[Illustration]

The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow.

The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness.

Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. But the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake wi

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