The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (28 page)

Veronica did, pressing the edge of her hand
against the slit between Gieo’s legs, finding the hard dot of her
eager nub with the knuckle of her thumb, and teasing it back and
forth, up and down, through the material of her shorts, sending
much anticipated shockwaves of pleasure through Gieo’s body. Gieo
panted, gasped, and pulled ever closer to climax, head held up and
throat slightly strangled by the collar that was to make her
Fiona’s alone.

“Did you want me when you first saw me?”

“No,” Gieo said between moans. “When you
saved me from the cultists, I saw something dangerous in you that I
liked. It frightened and excited me.”

“I’m getting a little sick of hearing how
much I scare everyone,” Veronica said, letting a little slack on
Gieo’s collar to make talking and moaning a little easier.

“I’m not scared for the reasons Fiona is…”
Gieo had to pause in her speaking, had to pause in thinking as a
whole when she finally came, in a low, earthy moan ending in a
satisfied hiss tempered by a tinge of shame. Veronica slowed her
rubbing and released her hold on Gieo’s collar, letting her head
dangle near the floor. Idle, delicate fingers stroked the sensitive
hairs and skin at the nape of Gieo’s neck in a lovely way that sent
tingles to match the shivers of her orgasm.

“Then why?” Veronica asked softly.

“Because I want to be you.”

Veronica helped Gieo to her feet and scooped
the pilot up in a delicate, surprisingly romantic embrace that left
Veronica’s hand at the nape of Gieo’s neck, never relenting on the
gentle caresses that felt so heavenly. Veronica kissed Gieo lightly
on the lips, gave her a final squeeze, and walked away without
another word.

Chapter 18:
Riding out for the
territories.

Fiona waited at
the makeshift corral that was once the high school football field.
The last patrol of the day came galloping in just before the sun
dipped below the horizon. Fiona held the gate for the twenty odd
riders and walked it slowly closed when they were through.
Stephanie rode as the captain of the unit, although Fiona had
wanted Cork in charge; Veronica insisted on Ravens in every
position of leadership, leaving Cork as the official second without
hope of promotion. Cork, a former Texas Ranger—of the lawman kind,
not the baseball playing type—was a natural leader, a skilled
horseman, and a crack shot with pistol, rifle, and shotgun; Fiona
had plans to utilize those talents regardless of Veronica’s
decree.

Cork handed off his gelding to one of the
stable boys, who had formerly been a grease monkey, and loped
toward the stretch of fence Fiona was leaning against. He had the
swagger and lean body of a man half his age with the weather-beaten
rawhide of a man twice his years or more. His salt and pepper,
handlebar moustache blew in the wind after he came to rest against
the fence beside Fiona, taking on a stillness only broken by the
breeze through his facial hair.

“Ten,” Cork said in his low, even voice.
“Glad we don’t have to lug heads anymore.”

“Since my goal is clearing space you’d only
want to exaggerate down if you were going to at all,” Fiona said.
“Is Stephanie pulling her weight?”

“She doesn’t weigh much.”

Fiona smirked. “Was that a joke from stoic
Cork? I thought you got your nickname for how quiet you were.”

“I only ever talk to you, ma’am,” Cork said.
“You’re the only one of these ladies that wouldn’t shoot me for a
wrong word or misstep.”

“I don’t know about that. Stephanie might
even be sweet on you if you talked more.” Fiona nodded in
Stephanie’s direction. She was currently barking orders at the
remaining hunters, verbally chasing them into rank and file,
demanding an accounting of all rounds spent. She might not be a
hunter, but she certainly cuts to the quick as a disciplinarian,
Fiona thought.

“Sounds like fraternization.”

“It does at that, but I’d feel a whole lot
better about the merger of Tombstone and the Ravens if people
started getting along,” Fiona said. Silence hung between them for a
time. Fiona could sense Cork’s imminent departure to finish tending
his weapons and mount—he had that potential energy look about him
like a loose rock ready to tumble. “I want to start sending some
smaller patrols east.” She hadn’t fully worked up the nerve to say
so just yet, and her voice rose when she did, but she also didn’t
want him to walk away and have to call him back. It was a ludicrous
statement and she was hoping Cork wouldn’t piece things
together.

“Nothing east of here but dead Mexicans,”
Cork said.

“It’s the direction Zeke went.”

“I see.”

“I’ll mark it down as a sub-patrol of five
when Stephanie is leading one of the larger columns in the west.”
Fiona finally turned to look at the old Texas Ranger, waiting until
he finally nodded. “Pick four of the best and keep your head on a
swivel. Zeke’s craftier than any Slark.”

“I’ll do just that. Good evening, ma’am.”
Cork tipped his hat and began swaggering back to the stables where
the rest of the hunters were conglomerating.

Fiona pulled herself away from the fence,
mounted her roan mare Tyra, and set off toward town at a brisk
trot. She had a patrol of her own in the morning and a craving like
hunger rising between her legs that she desperately needed Gieo to
tend to before bed.

Gieo paced the rooftop until sunset and then
paced a little longer for good measure. She was starving, thirsty,
and overheated, but she couldn’t allow herself to deal with any of
those things until she figured out what she was going to do about
her infidelity.

Veronica was such a chaotic, dangerous
figure; Gieo wished she would go away and stop making things
complicated. Immediately after thinking that, she hated herself for
it, knowing Veronica was only partly to blame for what had
happened.

There wasn’t even a good reason for it, not
that Gieo believed there ever was a good reason for cheating, but
in this particular case it was downright unconscionable considering
her sexual needs were more than handled and her relationship with
Fiona was rocky, but relatively stable. Excuses she wouldn’t have
bothered with, but she wished she at least had an explanation worth
anything. All she could come up with was that something about
Veronica got inside her head and crawled around. Superficially,
Veronica was every girl who had ever made Gieo’s life miserable,
all grown up into exactly the type of successful, powerful woman
she always thought they would grow up to be—but that wasn’t the
real Veronica. Underneath there was something insecure and
vulnerable—something that Gieo shared with her. She suspected
Veronica knew what it felt like to be an intellectual outsider, to
live among a population neither capable nor interested in
intelligent conversation, and to feel crazy sometimes for seeing
the world in such drastically different ways than everyone else.
Veronica was a fellow genius and Gieo couldn’t help the kinship of
outsiders inherently felt between them.

It wasn’t until she’d nearly forgiven
Veronica and herself for what they did as almost inevitable that
she stopped to consider Veronica’s motivation. If her true goal was
to get Fiona back, the plan seemed more likely to earn them both a
bullet. It couldn’t be as simple as that, but the thought did raise
concerns. Exactly how dangerous would Fiona be if the news was
broken when she was armed…? Gieo briefly entertained the notion
that getting shot by Fiona might not be a bad way to even the
scales; this was quickly dismissed by the memories of what Fiona’s
.44 magnum did to people.

Gieo’s thoughts were cut short when Ramen
helicoptered in from the airfield on his twin rotors. If a robot
could look self-satisfied, that was exactly what Ramen looked. For
just having a couple of antennae and visual sensory apertures to
emote with, he did a remarkable job of expressing emotion.

“We’re a week, maybe two, away from having a
completed fleet with the big daddy set up for you and me, boss,”
Ramen said. “This’ll be the shortest time between flights for us
and the first time we’ll have escort ships and planes—actual
planes!”

Gieo stopped her pacing and glanced over to
the hopping little robot. “What are you talking about?”

“Crop dusters!” Ramen fluttered a few feet
off the ground in his excitement, sending clouds of dust away from
the rooftop. “Someone found half a dozen crop dusters at the old
airport and we’re retrofitting them to burn ethanol. Each escort
dirigible will be able to launch real fighter planes!”

“I have no idea how to fly something like
that and no prayer of teaching anyone else,” Gieo grumbled. “It’s
such a good idea though and all we’d need to do is just find one
pilot with half a brain to explain it.” Gieo shook her head and
groaned in frustration. “But I can’t even think of a way to start
looking because Veronica is pushing to enslave the town of Juarez
and I cheated on Fiona this afternoon. My brain is a little too
full with girl-trouble right now to divine an answer to a sudden
need for crop-dusting pilots.”

“You cheated on tall boss with blond
boss?”

Gieo nodded; Ramen let out a low, somber
whistle.

“Did you kiss her?”

“Sort of.”

“Feel her up?”

“Not really.”

“Lick her in inappropriate ways or
places?”

“No, and it’s weird to hear you talk like
this.”

“So what
did
you do?”

“Let her yank my collar and rub me through my
shorts,” Gieo said, a little too loudly. “Why am I even telling you
this? I need to be figuring out a million things and none of them
are easy!”

“Let’s take a step back, look at the list of
things to do, and find an easy one that you can fix right now.”
Ramen clattered over on his two mini-crawler legs, and placed his
little omni-tool hand on Gieo’s wrist. “Like you’re always
programming me: be solution oriented.”

“Fine, okay, something easy…” Gieo thought
for a moment. “I’m hungry. We can fix that.”

“Sure we can, boss!” Ramen hopped over to the
crate Gieo was sorting earlier and fished through to the bottom,
coming up with a brown, plastic packet easily identifiable by
anyone in the post-apocalyptic world as a meal-ready-to-eat, or MRE
in military acronym-speak. The surplus, dehydrated, vacuum-sealed
meals were designed to survive ages and possibly even nuclear
explosions. They tasted horrible, made promises on the labels that
the withered remains of food inside could never hope to keep, and
required boiling water to make edible, but they were plentiful,
almost completely immune to spoilage, and theoretically they were
scientifically designed for maximum nutrition.

Gieo took the offered MRE and stopped short
of tearing it open. On the packet, near the bottom where a blank
line usually indicated the MRE was surplus that was never delivered
to the military, there was a designation number. Whoever had traded
the MRE to her had taken it from an actual military unit. The
insignia was rare on its own, but the actual designation of the
unit was downright baffling—the 76
^th
Space Control
Squadron of the Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
The MRE had belonged to a missile command soldier, and quite
possibly an astronaut.

“Where did we get this?” Gieo asked in a
hushed whisper.

“From the Colorado hunting party staying here
when we first arrived in town,” Ramen explained. “They traded us a
bunch of those for an old winch we got from installing a tape deck
in Jackson’s Wagoneer, which we then got a partial spool of chain
for when we parted out the…”

“The men in the hunting party,” Gieo
interrupted, “were any of them wearing any old military clothing?
Search back through your visual databases.”

“Almost all of them at one point or another,”
Ramen said. “I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

Gieo tried hard to remember what the burly
mountain men looked like. If she mentally gave them a shave, cut
their long manes of hair, and put them in flight suits rather than
the heavy coats of trappers, she could almost picture them as the
soldiers they once were.

“We had a whole hunting party of pilots and
astronauts in town a few months ago and we didn’t even notice,”
Gieo muttered. “I guess we can wait and see if they come back.”