The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (35 page)

Carolyn opened the door, grasped Fiona by the
front of her t-shirt and pulled her inside. The Red Queen was
beautiful, matronly, and fertile looking in all the best ways. She
was what Fiona imagined a pornographic version of Mother Nature
might look like, although she assumed the pornographic part existed
strictly because Carolyn did mostly pornographic things when they
were alone together. Carolyn pressed her sumptuous body against
Fiona’s letting her feel the warm, soft curves, the excited heaving
of her breasts as she breathed heavily with anticipation. How this
idealized version of motherly and womanly had come to be the head
of the chess set meant for war and blood, Fiona could never
understand, but the incongruity of her position with her appearance
hadn’t once prevented Carolyn from displaying dazzling competence
as the Queen of Battle.

Fiona kissed her, wrapping her hand through
the thick braid at the back of her head to control the depth of the
kiss. Carolyn responded by grasping Fiona’s ass roughly with both
hands, pulling her in closer to grind lewdly against the
gunfighter’s leather-clad legs. They were about the same height,
although Fiona peaked at forty or fifty pounds lighter than Carolyn
at her lithest, and the Red Queen used this advantage to full
effect. Fiona was lifted through the kiss by the hands on her ass,
and she allowed herself to pull up from the ground, wrapping her
long legs comfortably around the shelf of Carolyn’s ample hips on
the narrows before they taped into her slender waist. Fiona kept
her upper body bent enough to hold the kiss while Carolyn walked
her across the room to the bed, depositing her on the tangle of
sheets and blankets in an unceremonious flop.

Many of the other girls and even a few of the
male soldiers collected by the Ravens viewed Carolyn as the great
mother, the heart and soul of the organization, the maternal
influence watching over them. This was made all the more real as
Carolyn had a son, a stoic little boy named Frankie after the
author of his mother’s favorite book, who all but worshipped the
greatness of his mother, while coming to represent the power of the
Red Queen to not only survive but effectively raise offspring in
the aftermath of the invasion. But Fiona saw Carolyn in no such
light as her own mother had long since soured her on the entire
concept of what maternalism was. Instead, Fiona saw in her
something greatly sexual and womanly, which were traits mostly
ignored by the others. This ability to see her maternalism as
inherently sexy endeared Fiona quickly to the Red Queen. Only one
other, a fellow malcontent without a solid reference for mothers,
saw things the same way as Fiona, but in the heat of the moment in
the recalled dream, Fiona couldn’t bothered to even think of this
other’s name.

Standing above Fiona at the foot of the bed,
Carolyn slipped her billowing blouse off over her head slowly,
revealing her mountainous breasts held pertly in a satiny
cream-colored bra. She had the type of breasts Fiona imagined would
look grandiose regardless of the garment or position. Her skin,
which had formerly been white with a dappling of freckles, had
tanned to a deep bronze, as had most people’s out in the desert,
leaving her with an exotic glow in juxtaposition to her bright
orange hair. Fiona slid to the edge of the bed to sit with her legs
spread around the standing Carolyn. She wrapped her arms around
Carolyn’s hips, pulled her close, and kissed hotly across her soft
stomach, up onto her breasts, burying her face in the warm luscious
mounds. This was what Fiona remembered most about Carolyn and what
made the dream such a heartbreaking reminder of something she’d
lost and might never have again; the warmth and comfort she derived
from pressing her cheeks into Carolyn’s chest was an act so pure
and honest she always felt cleansed after doing so.

Carolyn parted before Fiona was ready, lifted
one of her legs to plant her foot on the outside of Fiona’s hip,
and slowly pulled up the hem of her beige sun skirt. Fiona
immediately shifted her focus to the curvaceous leg beside her,
kissing along Carolyn’s inner knee, up her inner thigh, along the
smoothest, softest skin as the leg’s width grew, until she could
see, smell, and almost taste the bright red fire between Carolyn’s
legs. Carolyn hated underwear, wore it only when absolutely
necessary, and seemed to thrill at the ease of access it granted.
Fiona pressed her face into the orange curls, seeking out the soft,
wet folds of her lips just beneath. Carolyn’s strong fingers
interlaced into Fiona’s hair, her hips rolled and writhed at the
instant attention, and her breathing sped from anticipatory panting
to eager gasping. Fiona licked, suckled, and tongued under the
direction of Carolyn’s hands in her hair until her face glistened
and shone with the dew of her lover’s pleasure. Carolyn’s orgasms
were shallow, rapid things, like bunnies jumping across the surface
of her skin, and could go on as long as Fiona could manage or
Carolyn could stand. In this case, Fiona felt the dream diverge
again from reality. Her younger self, in truth, had quit long
before Carolyn had wished it, but in the dream, Fiona had pressed
on until Carolyn could no longer endure the mounting, tingling
pleasure. In both cases, Carolyn ended up thrown onto the bed, with
Fiona crawling up her to share a kiss. Carolyn loved the taste of
herself on Fiona’s lips, wrote poems about the shared intimacy of
the act, and always demanded passionate making out after Fiona had
gone down on her.

Fiona obliged with a long, deep, adoring
kiss, pressing her tongue and lips against Carolyn’s more with the
goal of passing on the slippery wetness to her than an actual kiss.
When Carolyn had tasted all the interior of Fiona’s mouth had to
offer, she licked at her chin, nose, and cheeks to tongue off the
rest.

With their kiss shared, Carolyn laid back,
her eyes shining with the afterglow of true satisfaction, her lips
pink and wet from the aggressive kiss, and her skin flushed red
across her cheeks and nose. Staring at the ceiling over Fiona’s
right shoulder, she said the words Fiona had struggled for years to
forget. “I love you in ways I could never love her.”

Fiona awoke with an angry jolt, sitting
straight up in bed. She was aroused by the dream and her heart was
racing, but it was all crushed under the weight of what she’d
finally remembered. She was the problem. Wherever she went, she was
the problem.

Despite the Ravens’ strict rules about drug
use, Fiona had used what they grew to control the populace as
recreational fun or self-medication depending on the day or her
mood, leaving her with, at best, a patchy memory of her time in
Vegas. Despite the fanciful concoction of revised history Fiona had
created over the years, she couldn’t change what had actually
transpired. Her often drug-addled, arrogant, younger self hadn’t
seduced Veronica until after she’d heard those words from Carolyn.
And, as far as Fiona knew, Veronica still didn’t know that Carolyn
was cheating with Fiona long before the ultimatum Fiona gave
Veronica that nearly split the Ravens. Somehow, Fiona had forgotten
entirely her brief, intense relationship with Carolyn. A
combination of shame, drug use, and time had buried the
indiscretion until seeing Carolyn again brought it back to the
surface.

Carolyn had every reason to hate her. Fiona
was a betrayer, a cheater, a liar, a jilter of honest proclamations
of love, and a cruel, unthinking thief. She hadn’t loved Carolyn,
certainly not in the deep, abiding sort of way Carolyn loved her,
and so she’d stolen Veronica, whom she did love, and expected the
world to accept her wisdom as its own. In retrospect, Fiona knew
the only thing that kept Carolyn from killing them both, was a
trueness of love and spirit that neither Fiona nor Veronica
possessed. Veronica was the only other to see in Carolyn what Fiona
had; she doubted Carolyn could have trusted the affections of
anyone else after being betrayed so thoroughly by both Fiona and
Veronica.

Worse than the guilt Fiona felt over what
she’d done to Carolyn was the terrible fear that Gieo might learn
of what Fiona really was and not want her anymore. She came to the
grim reality that there were still too many people alive who knew
of what she’d done for Gieo to never find out. Fiona would have to
tell her and hope.

Gieo was beginning to wonder if maybe
Tombstone and her own workshop were the only places left on the
planet without comfortable beds and running water. She awoke to a
chill in her room in the main hunting lodge. The evening before had
been productive, after a fashion, although the woman she had hoped
would be her biggest support turned out to be the biggest obstacle
to getting the pilots to return to Tombstone with her. McAdams’
wife Charlotte, a stern woman with tightly pursed lips and
premature gray in her chestnut hair, hadn’t wanted Gieo to stay any
longer than was necessary and certainly hadn’t wanted her to take
the military men back to war.

The night before, they drank pre-war beer,
exchanged flight stories, and ate dishes derived from every
creature the Rocky Mountains could provide long into the night
without much headway ever being made toward the Air Force pilots
joining her cause. Much of what transpired was more than fuzzy in
the cold light of dawn as Gieo’s Asian lineage gave her nothing in
the way of alcohol tolerance and her petite size left little
territory to spread so much beer over. She’d tried her best to keep
up, to show herself an equal to the true pilots, but ultimately
only succeeded in getting unintelligibly drunk with a splitting
headache and mouthful of cotton the following morning as her
reward.

Gieo wrapped herself in the quilt from the
bed and made her way over to the sliding glass door that led to the
second-story balcony. She parted the curtains and eased open the
door. Out on the balcony her bare feet crunched over a fresh
powdering of snow frozen by an early frost. True to her hopes, the
cool, mountain air did have a reinvigorating effect on her hung
over mind.

She slid the door closed behind her and made
her way out into the rarified mountain air. She’d forgotten autumn
was coming to everywhere but the desert and the high Colorado
elevations had sped the cold in even faster. She heard another door
slide open and a similarly quilt-wrapped woman stepped out onto the
balcony a few rooms down. Gieo glanced over to find it was
Charlotte. Clutched in the hand not holding together her quilt
robe, she carried a mug of what smelled like tea from the steam
wafting across the space between them.

Gieo offered Charlotte a wan smile, which
wasn’t returned.

“Why do you insist on carrying my husband
back to war?” Charlotte asked without as much as a good
morning.

“We never stopped being at war,” Gieo
replied.

“He’ll go no matter what I say,” Charlotte
said with a quiver in her voice that nearly cracked Gieo’s heart.
“I think it’s what he went looking for when he took the hunting
party on a tour through the free cities.”

“I don’t want to cause any rifts.” Gieo
turned and stepped over to the edge of the side railing to come as
close to Charlotte as the separate balconies would allow. “I won’t
use your kids to try to change your mind, but don’t you want to
live in a world free of the Slark? Don’t you want a chance to
rebuild without wondering if those giant crawlers are going to come
rolling down those mountains to wipe out everything you’ve built
here? Your husband and his friends are special men, brave and
talented in ways that could make a difference.” Gieo’s feet began
to burn numb from the cold and she shifted to just one to give the
other a rest. “Look, this is all stuff I brought up last night, and
stuff you probably already knew. If he’s going to leave anyway,
wouldn’t you rather he left with your support? Parting on bad terms
when one person might not be coming back isn’t good for anyone.”
Gieo’s voice wavered at the end, though not intentionally, but she
saw that the verbal shake had accomplished far more than her words
in persuading Charlotte.

“Fine, then promise me they’ll come back,”
Charlotte said, her voice and demeanor noticeably softer.

“I always do, and I’ve never had this much
support or experience on my side,” Gieo said.

“It’ll take them awhile to set things right
to leave again, and a few days to get there,” Charlotte said. “He’s
a good man in a world with precious few left. Bring him home to me
when this is over.”

“I will, Charlotte, I promise,” Gieo said.
She didn’t want to make the promise she couldn’t possibly assure,
but simply saying the words strengthened her own resolve to make
them true and had a profound effect on Charlotte who finally smiled
to her.