The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (2 page)

Crashing was becoming routine. She was more
curious about who she was going to meet from Tombstone than she was
afraid of the impending impact. She’d never met anyone from the
Tombstone hunting camp, although their reputation for being
hardcore, psycho Slark-killers was well-traveled.

Her thoughts were interrupted by four
concussive explosions slamming into the underside of the
airship—shoulder-fired rockets. One must have snuck through a chink
in the ship’s defenses as the dirigible’s descent took a violent
shove from soft flutter into chaotic tumble.

“Oh, you guys are dickheads,” Gieo growled.
She reached into her pocket, thrust the mouth guard over her teeth,
and braced herself for impact. The ship hit with an explosive crash
as the blimp portion ruptured. The boiler launched itself away from
the wreckage, and the pilot whipped around inside the spider room
like whirling dervish.

Chapter 2:
Taciturn retrieval.

When Los Angeles
fell, Fiona was twenty-one years old. She even still had a Lakers
bumper sticker on the back of her car. The modified muscle car,
more precisely two different American muscle cars melded together
with a repurposed engine from a Slark fighter, cut a fiery streak
across the Cochise badlands at over 100 mph. The car was a
straight-line bullet of raw power with a spiked cattle-catcher on
the front and a trail of fire and smoke behind. Fiona, who had lost
her driver’s license a full year before the Slark invaded, kept as
trophies a few of her old speeding tickets on the dashboard to fade
in the desert sun. Anyone trying to take away her right to drive
now would have to make their case to the business end of her Colt
Anaconda .44 Magnum.

Some insane, dirt-worshiper from the ruins of
Tempe claimed to see an aircraft and called it in to the Tombstone
defense grid. At least, that’s what Zeke had radioed her to say.
She was the closest, and he wanted to know for sure; not that he’d
offered anything in return for her time or fuel.

It was a fool’s errand. Nothing flew but
birds, bugs, and bats. For awhile, after the Great Purge, both
sides tried to regain the sky. Nothing stayed airborne for long as
the antiaircraft guns far out-paced low-tech aircraft. Fiona
suspected she wouldn’t find anything, but, nearing the coordinate
estimates radioed in, she spotted a smoke spire on the horizon. If
there was an airship, the Slark had long since shot it down. It
served the idiot right, whoever they were, but, if Fiona hurried,
she might still catch the Slark recon team in their work and take a
few heads.

The alleged aircraft, which looked to be
nothing more than twisted metal, smashed wood, and billowing cloth,
had crashed relatively close to the old 10 highway. The Slark recon
team, four of the ugly lizards in all, was attempting to set up a
perimeter around the crash site, partially on the patchy highway,
covering their movements with shoulder-fired rocket tubes. Fiona
yanked the emergency brake and spun the wheel to the right, sending
the roaring beast of her car into a whirl. The resulting cloud of
dust and exhaust smoke blew through the crash site, obscuring the
direction she was coming from. Correcting her course, aided by the
spinning compass on the dashboard, she gunned the engine, released
the brake, and roared forward through the opaque dust cloud. Two
loud clangs followed by meaty squish noises let her know her
cattle-catcher had collected two of the Slark. She slammed on the
brakes and came to a stop. As the cloud passed her by, she stepped
from the car, jerked her Colt Anaconda from its hip holster, and
scanned the area for the remaining two. Through the slowly clearing
haze, she spotted them fleeing in their weird, sidling run. With
her gun arm fully extended, she sighted in the first, fired, swung
over to the other, sighted again, and fired. Both Slark hit the
ground in quick succession with gaping bullet holes in their backs.
Fiona twirled the massive, chrome-plated revolver a couple times
before letting it settle back into the holster slung low on her
slender hips.

A lanky goddess, a hair under six-feet tall,
she moved with the practiced grace of a career predator on dusty
cowboy boots. Scarce times had carved every drop of fat from her
body, leaving only lean muscle on a willowy frame. She further
accentuated the hard-edged, straight lines of her body with tan,
skin-tight leather pants and a tight, denim jacket two sizes too
small for her long torso, leaving ample space to easily get at the
bandolier belt for her pistol. A wide-brimmed, russet cowboy hat
kept the desert sun off her short-cropped red hair, while wrap
around Oakley sunglasses shielded her blue eyes. Her heavily tanned
skin, formerly from tanning beds, was now a natural product of her
time spent in the desert.

“You may as well come out,” Fiona said to the
smashed kindling of the crash site.

A curious leather top hat, pulled tight over
four purple braids and brass goggles, poked out of the wreckage.
“How did you know I wasn’t another one of them?” the pilot
peeped.

“You don’t smell like fish barf,” Fiona
replied. She slid the Wakizashi, a much shorter katana, from its
wooden scabbard along her back, and set to the task of cleaving the
heads from the bodies, starting with the mangled, four-armed,
two-legged, five-foot tall lizard men tangled in the spiked
framework on the front of her car.

“Thank you, I try to practice good hygiene.”
The pilot extracted herself from the remains of her airship,
dusting off her tailed tuxedo jacket and tight riding britches.

“I didn’t say you smelled good,” Fiona
corrected her. “I said you didn’t smell like fish barf.” She
punctuated the sentence with two quick slashes of the sword,
decapitating the impaled bodies in twin sprays of green blood. It
was a lucky hit, both heads were already impaled on spikes, and the
severed bodies came away easily.

“My name is Gieo,” she said. The pilot’s
clothing might have looked like a traditional English horseback
riding outfit if not for all the buckles, leather straps, and brass
gizmos adorning it. She trundled out of the scattered remains of
her ship, hand extended, half-blind with her dusty, pilot goggles
still over her eyes. She blundered past the two dead Slark on her
way toward Fiona.

“Yo?” Fiona asked, raising a curious eyebrow
at the small, strange pilot.

“Gieo,” she repeated, slower this time.
“There’s a ‘G’ on the front. It’s Korean—I’m Korean, from Orange
County.” When Fiona didn’t shake the offered hand, Gieo pulled it
back and used it to pull the goggles onto their resting place along
the front of her leather top hat. “So, how long until the rescue
crew gets here to help me salvage my airship?”

“Probably never.” Fiona walked around Gieo,
to claim the heads of the two Slark she’d shot. “Don’t even think
of asking for half the bounties on these guys either.”

“No, no, those are all yours.” Gieo nearly
threw up when Fiona hacked off the triangular heads of the dead
Slark. “I’ll just get my things and we can be on our way.”

“Whatever,” Fiona said.

The little pilot scampered past her back into
the wreckage. Fiona wiped her blade clean with a scrap of cloth
from one of the Slark and re-sheathed it. She finished mounting the
other two heads, in much better condition than the first couple, on
the spikes along the front of her bullet-shaped, silver car. Her
hand instantly jumped to the butt of her gun when she heard the
pilot shriek.

“It’s broken!” Gieo stumbled back out of the
airship crash with a cornucopia of devices cradled in her arms,
discarding most of them as she went, finally filtering down to one
specific machine, no bigger than a television remote, hemorrhaging
copper wires.

“What is it?” Fiona asked, hoping it wasn’t
something useful she might later steal.

“It’s a Sapphic Intimate-Encounter
Reciprocity Concluder,” Gieo said glumly.

“Um…okay…what does it do?”

“Only let’s a lesbian couple know when
they’re done having sex, duh,” Gieo said. “Without it, girl-girl
sex could hypothetically go on indefinitely. I mean, how else would
you know when you were done?”

“Usually when everyone’s happy or my jaw
starts hurting.”

“You’ve clearly had better lovers than me.”
Gieo tossed the broken device over her shoulder, searched the
scattered items on the ground around her, and retrieved a leather
tool-kit. “Okay, let’s go.”

“You’re over it, just like that?”

“Catastrophe breeds necessity, which is the
mother of invention.” Gieo circled around to the passenger side of
Fiona’s car and waited to be let in. “My entire airship just got
blasted out of the sky—a little perspective here, please. Besides,
I stayed up two hours this time—a personal best!”

“You do this a lot?” Fiona slid into the
driver seat and unlocked the passenger door.

Gieo hopped in and situated herself on the
hot, vinyl seat. “If you know a better way to test whether
something will keep flying after being shot, I’d like to hear
it.”

With a whiplash inducing jolt, Fiona’s car
spun back in the direction it had come and fired out in a straight
line across the desert, leaving scorched earth and a smoke trail
hundreds of yards long in its wake.

“Is it always this loud?” Gieo shouted over
the thundering of the car. “Is this a Slark fighter engine? Where
did you get it? How did you make it compatible with a 2009 Allison
transmission? Why does your car look like a Challenger fucked a
Mustang? Can I take it apart? Why do you even have a passenger seat
if you don’t want to talk to passengers?”

“I didn’t have a compelling reason to take
out the passenger seat until now,” Fiona grumbled.

“Hey, I know you!” Gieo shouted, oblivious to
the barb.

“I’m sure you don’t…”

“Yeah-huh, you’re Fiona Bishop,” Gieo said.
“You’re the Victoria’s Secret model that stabbed the paparazzi guy
in the mouth with a penknife at LAX. What did he even say to
you?”

“He wasn’t real paparazzi, just some
freelancer, and I don’t remember what he said.”

“Uh-huh, sure, are you still crazy? I read on
Perez, back when there was an internet that you plead
insanity.”

“I was crazy back when the world fancied
itself sane. Now that the world has gone insane, I like to think
I’m just a little more colorful than most. Besides, that was all a
long time ago.”

“It wasn’t that long ago…like six years,”
Gieo said. “I had the hugest crush on you in high school.” Fiona
became uncomfortably aware that the purple-haired pilot was sliding
closer, leaning over the edge of the center console. “I used to
touch myself watching the Angel series video on your website. I got
kicked out of a SAT prep program for writing inappropriate essays
about you.”

“What are you doing?” Fiona asked
quickly.

“Nothing, shut up, keep your eyes on the
road, we’re going like a hundred or something.” Gieo’s hand found
its way onto Fiona’s thigh, gripping the tight, muscular quad
meaningfully. “I heard the model-turned-talk-show-host went all
stalker over you and tried to break into your house. What was her
name?”

“Tyr...” Fiona squirmed when Gieo’s hand
pressed into the crotch of her leather pants, cutting off the rest
of her answer. “What if I’m not…”

“…into girls? Into me? Whatever, it’s just a
hand either way, right? Don’t look down or over and I’m whoever you
want me to be.” Gieo’s deft fingers unbuttoned, unclasped, and
unbuckled everything in her way with remarkable alacrity.

“What are you?” Fiona muttered, feeling the
soft, talented fingers make their way down the top of her unzipped
pants.

“I’m the last scientist on earth, the airship
pilot extraordinaire, the three-time Junior Aerodynamic Expo of
Laguna Beach winner, but you can call Gieo or ‘oh baby’.”

The pilot was flippant, sarcastic, arrogant,
unflappable, and most likely full of shit, but it had been so long
since Fiona had let anyone even come within arms length of her, let
alone touch her, that she thought she might go with it to pass the
three hour drive back to Tombstone. Gieo’s fingers froze before
touching anything of much interest. Fiona turned to find the pilot
frowning.

“What?”

“You’re not wearing underwear.”

“I never really liked underwear.”

“But you were an underwear model.”

“Is any of this a problem?”

“No, I can pretend, I guess.”

“Fuck off.” Fiona grabbed Gieo’s hand by the
wrist, pulled it from her pants, and tossed it back to the pilot.
“My reality doesn’t have to match up with your fantasy. The person
you thought I was died years ago if she ever really existed at
all.”

Gieo laughed and bit her thumbnail around a
coquettish grin. “Oh, I like you,” she said. “You’re prickly in
some delightful ways.”

“Whatever.” Fiona stomped the accelerator to
the floor, rocketing the car up over 200 mph. The desert flew by in
a blur. The thunder of the engine and the enormous, solid-form
rubber tires roaring along the worn asphalt prevented any further
conversation for the rest of the ride. Fiona backed off the
throttle as they roared into the outer limits of Tombstone. A
faded, wooden sign on the outskirts informed them they were
entering the town “too tough to die” with a population of 1,500
badasses. The population and motto were original to the sign, but
the “badasses” part had been added with a can of orange
spray-paint. On the main thoroughfare, Fiona brought her muscle car
to a dusty stop in front of the Slarkhead Saloon. She buckled her
belts and zipped her pants, remaining in the car for an awkward
moment after.