The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (7 page)

Gieo sat on the roof of the saloon beneath
her beach umbrella watching the feeds from the security cameras
Ramen had installed for her. The outing to the church was as
productive as she’d hoped. An old Jewish couple, who only went to
the church for the same networking opportunities Gieo was there
for, happened to have a few industrial washers and dryers; they had
a notion of getting out of the leather tanning business to open a
laundry if the machines could be fixed. They’d given her a down
payment of three jugs of agave white lightning for her to start
work later that week.

Of course, the biggest deal she’d managed to
broker was with Zeke. Somehow he had it in his head that Fiona
should poison the Hawkins House, and he tried his best to put it in
Gieo’s head that she should convince the gunfighter to do it. Gieo
offered to do him one better, cut out the middle woman as it were,
and do the job herself. Zeke was disinterested in how it got done
so long as it got done.

On the flattop roof of the saloon, warm
beyond reason even in the shade of the umbrella, Gieo sat with her
four jugs acquired at church: three filled with cactus moonshine
and one of strychnine. Ramen had easily infiltrated the Hawkins
House compound while they were busying themselves about the weekly
communion of wood alcohol. The cameras he’d set up were dusty,
scratched, and gave off a poor signal, but the receiver Gieo had
for them, powered by a solar panel ripped off a cattle gate outside
Phoenix, boosted the reception enough for Gieo to make out what was
important, where the defenses were, and how she might infiltrate
the compound.

She didn’t know what she was going to do with
the poison just yet, but there was no real reason to waste
it—something as valuable as a gallon of raccoon poison could have
any number of uses, even if it didn’t fit into her immediate plans.
As she watched the feed, she made notes in her Hello Kitty notepad,
sketched a vague map, and listed possible uses for the poison.

Ramen clattered around the roof between their
many projects in various states of completion, whistling a jaunty
tune. He was making remarkable progress in cataloguing the incoming
tech from various jobs, the payments Gieo hadn’t quite figured out
what to do with yet, and assessing the prices things might fetch
once repaired.

“We should have done this years ago, ma’am,”
Ramen said.

“Opportunities arise when they are meant to,”
Gieo replied.

“So you’re Buddhist again now?” Ramen
asked.

She’d leaned forward, almost involuntarily,
to peer at the fuzzy picture on the LCD screen. Children, none
older than four or five, were being given doses of methanol from a
colossal tank in the middle of the compound. From what she could
tell, the largest tank likely also carried the highest
concentration. The smaller tank, the one garden-variety cultists
weren’t supposed to know about, appeared to be the gas tank on a
scuttled Dodge pickup. The mucky-mucks of the cult, easily
identifiable by their orange parking-cone hats, snuck over and took
a drink from a hose running out of the gas cap when they thought no
one was looking.

“Right now, I’m planning on being the angel
of mischief and mercy,” Gieo murmured.

The thundering sound of Fiona’s engine
encroached on the peace of the town like rolling thunder. Gieo had
begun to look forward to hearing the engine as it meant the
redheaded gunfighter was almost home; unfortunately, she wasn’t all
that happy to hear it after that morning.

She leaned on the two-foot tall lip running
around the edge of the roof, watching the silver car pull up in
front of the saloon. Four fresh Slark heads lined the front of the
grill. She’d had a good day. When Fiona stepped from the car, Gieo
placed two fingers in her mouth and let out a loud, sharp whistle.
Fiona snapped her head up.

“I want to talk to you,” Gieo shouted.

“So talk,” Fiona shouted back.

“I said talk, not shout.”

Fiona stomped up into the saloon with her
head down. Gieo could hear her petulantly clomping all the way up
the stairs and finally bursting onto the roof. Gieo hated to admit
it, but Fiona was unreasonably attractive when fuming mad. When
Fiona folded her arms over her chest, cocked her hips to one side,
and jutted out her lower lip until a little glisten was showing she
created a sexiness that Gieo couldn’t quite put her finger on.
After studying Fiona’s pout for awhile, she decided it was
remarkably similar to one of the poses she often used in the
catalogue; other models usually looked spaced out and dead behind
the eyes, but Fiona always seemed lively and perturbed.

“Did you have fun at church?” Fiona
asked.

“I had productive at church,” Gieo said. “But
that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to apologize
for earlier.”

Fiona’s entire demeanor softened at the mere
mention of apology. Gieo noted the smoldering, angry sexiness
softened as well; she resolved, no matter how difficult it might
be, to not make Fiona angry just for sexual purposes…at least, not
very often.

“Could you take the goggles off?” Fiona
walked over to where Gieo, standing just outside the ring of shade
provided by the beach umbrella.

“Oh, sure,” Gieo said. She’d forgotten she
was even wearing them. She pulled the green tinted goggles off and
reached out to set them on the lip of the roof next to her chair.
Fiona’s eyes followed them instinctively, but immediately refocused
on something below at street level. “I’m really sorry for…um…what
are you doing?”

Fiona yanked her gun from its holster, took
two steps past Gieo to the edge of the roof, and fired once down
into the street. When the ringing cleared from Gieo’s ears
following the explosive .44 magnum round being fired right in front
of her, she heard a man groaning in the street. She jumped to the
edge of the roof and looked down to find Jackson Roy, the hunter
who had asked her to keep an eye out for a power drill, bleeding in
the street, desperately trying to hold his right forearm
together.

“You stay where you are, Jackson,” Fiona
shouted down.

Fiona turned on her heels and was running
back for the roof access ladder before Gieo could even ask what was
going on. Gieo jumped up to follow but struggled to keep pace,
losing track of Fiona before she could even get to the saloon’s
main floor. Gieo ran out between the saloon’s swinging doors, and
nearly got her head blown off when a spray of bullets passed at
Fiona’s height across the plank front of the building. Gieo ducked,
even though the shots were intended for someone six inches taller
than her, and barely caught a glimpse of Jackson standing in front
of Fiona’s car with a steaming Mac-10 in his good hand. Another
report of Fiona’s Anaconda echoed through the street and Jackson’s
right knee exploded in blood and bone fragments. Fiona emerged from
the alleyway on the side of the saloon with her pistol trained on
Jackson’s downed form.

In a daze, Gieo plucked several splinters
from her hair, and began walking toward the scene of carnage. Fiona
had her Wakizashi out and was demanding that Jackson tie it off.
Tie what off, Gieo wondered. She couldn’t see exactly what Jackson
was doing in front of the car, but he seemed to be working a
leather strap with his teeth. Fiona lifted her sword. Time finally
caught up with Gieo’s mind.

“Wait!” Gieo screamed and ran to intercept
Fiona’s sword arm.

Fiona stopped with her sword raised, clearly
aimed at taking off Jackson’s wounded arm. Gieo hadn’t really
expected Fiona to stop simply because she’d shouted it, and wasn’t
really sure what else to say once she did.

“Why are you chopping off his arm?” she
asked.

“Do you think I should take his head
instead?” Fiona answered by way of question.

“What!? No!” Gieo said. “Why did you shoot
him in the first place?”

“He was trying to steal my heads.” Before
Gieo could protest further, Fiona’s sword fell, hacking off
Jackson’s arm at the elbow. The tourniquet, which was apparently
what Fiona had demanded Jackson tie off, stemmed much of the blood
loss, but Gieo still nearly vomited from the sight. Fiona slid her
gun back in its holster, picked up the hand, and swatted it down on
one of the spikes along her grill, impaling it next to the four
Slark heads. At that, Gieo did go ahead and throw up next to
Fiona’s front wheel well.

“Man’s dead anyway,” Zeke said from across
the street, standing out on his balcony to watch the entire show.
“You ought to take his head.”

Fiona sheathed her Wakizashi and picked up
Jackson’s discarded Mac-10. She slid the clip from the hand-held
machine gun, and judged it to be about half-full by the weight.
“You’ve got to the count of ten to get out of my sight before I cut
you in half with your own gun,” Fiona said.

Jackson tried to stand, stumbled, tried
again, stumbled again, and finally made it up onto his one good leg
before passing out, falling flat at Fiona’s feet. She dropped the
gun on his back and flipped the bullets out of the clip like rain
over his downed form.

“Rawlins!” Zeke bellowed. Officer Rawlins
blundered out of the front door of the old city hall beneath Zeke’s
balcony, whipping his head around wildly to find the source of his
boss’s voice. “Get that piece of shit out of Red’s way.” Rawlins
jumped to the task and went about hauling what was left of Jackson
back into the city hall. Zeke looked down at Fiona for a moment and
nodded with something akin to grim respect. “I’ll have Rawlins
deliver Jackson’s car by sundown tomorrow. I believe he has two
heads on his grill; that’ll settle you up for the week.” Zeke
disappeared back into the dark recesses of the city hall as the sun
began to set.

Gieo wiped her mouth with the back of her
hand when she was quite certain she’d thrown up all she had in her.
With a stabilizing hand on the fender of Fiona’s car, she looked up
at the gunfighter as though seeing her for the first time. Fiona
seemed contemplative, almost melancholy.

“It’s been almost two years since someone
tried to steal from me,” Fiona said, barely above a whisper. “I’ve
gone soft because of you and people know it.”

“That was soft?” Gieo asked.

“If you weren’t here, I would have cut his
head off and dragged his body through town behind my car as a
message to the other hunters.” Fiona brushed past Gieo on her way
back into the saloon, sending one final remark over her shoulder
before stepping through the double doors. “Welcome to the real
Tombstone, Stacy.”

Chapter 6:
Aggravated mischief.

Gieo returned to
her rooftop perch with a head full of concerns and a stomach full
of butterflies. She’d had a serious lapse in judgment, an
unpleasant mistake with potentially catastrophic consequences. How
she saw Fiona made a drastic transformation after seeing her gun
down a man, whose name they both knew, with the cannon she kept on
her hip and then dismember him according to some draconian code of
the fucked up post-apocalyptic, new Old West using a sword she kept
on her back. Even for the new world order, this was bizarre. Fiona
was absolutely right when she claimed Gieo didn’t know her.
Whatever remained of the fashion model, traumatized girl, and
probable cocaine addict had been completely burned out by the
desert sun, replaced by a hardened gunfighter with psychotic
tendencies.

Gieo took failure well though; her parents
had pretty much insisted on it. Failures and lapses in judgment
were opportunities to learn, change, grow, and come back with a
better plan. She needed data, information, and a removed
perspective to formulate new thoughts and opinions.

Firstly, she had to stop sleeping in Fiona’s
bed. Whatever else was going on between them, the sexual teasing
she was giving the gunfighter might have added to the volatility.
Besides, when the fun of sexually topping Fiona wore off, the
charade always left Gieo with a ridiculous case of the hornies that
she hadn’t remotely started to deal with yet.

Secondly, she would need to learn a lot more
about the town, which would be easily accomplished with a telescope
and time spent observing. She set up a low-power telescope she’d
acquired in a trade with someone for something—she really couldn’t
remember how she’d come by it as more and more stuff kept coming in
and going out. It was easily fixed by repositioning the internal
mirrors, but she hadn’t figured out what to do with it until that
point. From her perch on the front edge of the hotel, using the
telescope, she could see much of the town as no building was taller
than a couple stories.

Thirdly, and lastly, she needed a stiff drink
to get the image of Fiona cutting off Jackson’s arm out of her
head. Unlike most survivors of the Slark invasion, Gieo hadn’t
really seen or encountered much violence. Her parents had done a
masterful job of shielding her, which she had to offer up a
whispered prayer to whoever was listening to thank them. They’d
died, just like most people’s parents, in one of the many gas
attacks the Slark made on relocation colonies set too close to the
frontlines. But even this was without violence as the gas simply
put people into a sleep they didn’t wake up from. Gieo dipped into
one of the jugs of cactus white-lightning with the goal in mind of
taking the shake out of her hand. Drinking the clear liquid from a
tin cup, she decided it tasted like a mixture of tequila, agave
tea, and gasoline. In addition to the stomach churning taste,
horrible burning sensation it made all the way down her throat, and
mind-numbing properties, she also suspected it might be
hallucinogenic.