The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (9 page)

The black, spandex cat suit had actually been
a cat costume for Halloween at one point, which was precisely why
Gieo still had a fluffy black tail following her around. She
suspected the cat suit might be overkill considering the guards
looking for her were likely night blind in addition to being mostly
blind all the time, but it also didn’t have a lot, aside from the
tail, that might get caught on wire traps, which she suspected
would make up the majority of the House of Hawkins compound
defenses. She’d stuffed enough cotton into the jug in her backpack
to prevent it from sloshing, even at a dead run. As stealth went,
she was pretty well equipped. Despite the fact that it was an
insanely stereotypical thing for a cute Asian girl to do, Gieo put
on the accompanying kitty-ear headband to match the rest of the
suit. It’s not like anybody would see her if she did things right,
and she liked wearing the ears, although she would never admit that
to anyone out loud.

For all the threats leveled against the
Hawkins House cult, their primary defense appeared to be their
overall creepiness; Gieo had studied them carefully and had found
half a dozen ways into the compound without the slightest
difficulty. She crept under the barbed wire fence on the eastern
slope, using a couple snapped branches off a sagebrush bush to hold
up the bottom wire. She proceeded at a slow, low to the ground
crawl, keeping a careful ear and eye out for rattlesnakes. Instead,
her hand struck something metal, partially buried in the dusty
ground. Suspiciously, she brushed away some of the dirt to find a
coyote trap. Rather than jamming a stick into it to disarm it, she
carefully flipped the trap over to point the pressure plate toward
the ground so the jaws would close wrong-side down if stepped on.
Her slow crawl revealed three more traps on her path; she flipped
these over as well.

In the heart of the compound, she snuck
between two scuttled school busses. Only a dozen or so paces in,
something caught on the tips of her kitty ears, nearly pulling the
headband off. She stopped, looked up, but couldn’t see anything.
Reaching up, she felt around until she found a tightly strung
strand of piano wire across the gap at the perfect height to
clothesline/garrote a full grown man. She had to hand it to them,
for crazy blind people, they sure had a lot of tricks up their
sleeves. Skulking her way through the maze of vehicles being used
as apartments, she found several more of the piano wires, including
a few strung much lower intended to trip intruders. The neck-height
wires weren’t a problem even if she had to run back the same way,
but the trip wires needed to be dealt with. She hadn’t brought wire
cutters, something she was quickly regretting, but she had brought
glow-sticks. She cracked, shook, and placed one of the glowing
green tubes at the mounting point of the wire, faintly illuminating
the length of each trip-line.

The vehicles turned into apartments gave way
to open ground, a lot of open ground, at the center of the
compound. She would have to cover sixty feet or so to reach the old
Dodge acting as the mucky-muck’s personal methanol stash. She took
several calming breaths and scanned the area for any movement that
might indicate a guard. The waxing moon lit the compound just
enough to give vague outlines of where people were. She waited for
her gap and made a mad dash for the middle ring of the
inner-sanctum. One ring of benches away from the target pickup, she
skittered to a stop, seeing a seated old man on one of the old park
benches lined up like church pews. With nowhere to run and nowhere
to hide, she crouched as low to the ground as possible, and prayed
he wouldn’t see her.

The man cocked his head to her side,
listening intently for the sounds she’d made when she’d slid to a
stop. When no further noise followed, he glanced over to where she
was crouched, his milky old eyes clearly unable to make out much in
the low light.

“Oh, good evening, Miss Kitty,” he said.

Gieo’s heart leapt into her throat.

“Are you out on your nightly hunt?” he
asked.

Gieo made her best ‘meow’ noise and began
rubbing her side along the bench like a cat. The old man squinted
to make out what she was doing, and seemed satisfied that the fuzzy
black figure was close enough to cat size and shape.

“I won’t frighten away your prey then,” the
old man said. Under great protest from his arthritic joints, the
old man managed to pull himself from the bench and tottered back up
toward the main church, tapping with a knotted cane.

Gieo struggled not to burst into nervous
laughter. After regaining her composure, she skulked on hands and
knees the rest of the way to the Dodge pickup, careful to still
look like a cat to any mostly-blind passerby. She slipped easily
under the propped up truck. Little remained of the inner-workings
of the vehicle. A garden hose ran from the gas cap along where the
pipe had rusted through, and into a hastily cut gap in the gas
tank. Gieo carefully unzipped her backpack. The sound of the zipper
was deafening in the silence of the compound. Once the bag was
open, she waited with bated breath for any noise that might
indicate she’d been heard. When she was certain she’d gone
undetected, she slid the jug between the leaf-springs, unscrewed
the cap, and slid the hose from the methanol-filled gas tank into
the jug instead. With her work done, she carefully zipped up her
backpack and slipped out from beneath the pickup on the opposite
side from which she’d come.

She turned to flee and immediately bumped
right into a soft, warm wall. Rebounding back a little, she glanced
up to what she’d run into, and ended up looking right into the face
of Yahweh Hawkins himself.

“
Ay shibal!
” she cursed in Korean.

“Demon speech from a half-cat, half-woman
succubus!” Hawkins shouted in alarm. Wild eyed with a matching
wild, wiry gray beard and head of hair, he looked more like a
garden variety homeless man than a high priest of a holy order, but
Gieo knew, from watching the video feeds that he was revered to a
godlike level within the cult. His startled utterance immediately
jumped the entire compound to attention, and she heard the tapping
of dozens canes closing in on her from all sides. The old cult
patriarch lifted his hands to make a grab for her, which she easily
ducked under. Slipping around behind him, she swung her foot up
between his legs as hard as she could, feeling the satisfying thump
of his testicles against the top of her shin. Yahweh Hawkins
dropped like a groaning scarecrow cut from its posts.

“
Shibal nom, Geseki,
” Gieo hissed at
him. “Blinding children in the name of your made up god…you’re
lucky I didn’t kill you like Zeke wanted.” With that, she ran.
There were subtler, less testicle-crushing and obvious ways to
implicate Zeke in what was about to happen to the cult, but she
didn’t have time for any of those anymore, and there was a very
slim chance, she hoped, that Hawkins might believe Zeke was
summoning demons to attack him, which would be a fantastic and
hilarious accusation for the despotic mayor to have to address.

Gieo split between two guards, who barely saw
her racing past, on her way through the gap between busses that
she’d come through. They altered course and gave chase, but she was
already down the corridor, leaping over the lighted trip-lines and
passing beneath the neck-cutters. At the far end of the bus, she
spotted a man’s shadow illuminated across the path she wanted to
take through the overturned traps, waiting in ambush for her. She
almost giggled at the blind-man’s blunder; just because he couldn’t
see his own shadow didn’t mean she couldn’t. She ducked into a
baseball slide at the end of the corridor, easily passing under a
cane swung at head height. As she was scrambling to her feet on the
other side, she heard something metallic snap closed and felt an
enormous tugging weight on the back of her suit. She glanced back
to find her fluffy kitty tail, dusty from the slide, caught in a
smaller trap that she hadn’t overturned. She grabbed the tail and
trap and yanked, pulling the mounting stake from the ground.
Reasonably free, she resumed her run for the gap in the fence that
she’d entered through, jangling the trap from her tail as she
ran.

She ducked under the barbed wire propped up
by sticks and wriggled most of the way through before the trap,
still dangling from her tail, knocked out both the twigs, snapping
the wire down on the backs of her thighs. She felt the barbs press
against her skin, embedding themselves in the spandex, but not in
her yet. She knew, if she struggled, she ran the risk of tetanus or
worse, but the panic began to rise when she heard the tapping canes
closing in on her. She tried to roll to her side, tried to restore
the sticks holding up the wire, but to no avail. Failing that, she
tried to pry the trap from her tail or break the tail off to
extricate her from the trap, but the trap’s teeth had bitten firmly
into the wire running down the center of the tail, making it no
easier to remove than the barbwire. She’d nearly given up on any
option other than blindly thrashing her way free when she heard
Ramen’s whirring chopper blades.

“She’s over here, tall boss,” she heard him
call. His head lamps flashed over her in friendly yellow light,
illuminating her prone form pinned beneath the fence.

Before she could explain how happy she was to
see him, the night exploded in thunder claps and muzzle flashes.
Fiona stormed in behind Ramen, gun arm extended, firing the
hand-cannon back into the compound. The massive slugs whirred three
feet above Gieo’s head, sounding like angry hornets flying faster
than the speed of sound. Screaming and bodies falling followed, but
Gieo couldn’t get her head around far enough to see how many of the
cultists Fiona had shot. The remaining cane-tapping guards fled
back into the relative safety of the vehicle cluster.

Ramen, using one of his omni-tool hands,
quickly cut away both the barbed wire and the tail just above the
trap, effectively freeing Gieo from the fence. Gieo scrambled to
her feet and immediately ran to Fiona. She had intended on saying
something witty, possibly flirty, and then kissing the lanky
gunfighter, but she never got the chance.

Fiona slid her pistol back in its holster
before Gieo got to her. She grabbed the pilot by the arm and
roughly shoved her in the direction of the road where Fiona’s car
was still idling with the driver side door open. When Gieo was past
her, Fiona gave the pilot a hard kick in the behind.

“Get in the fucking car, reckless bitch,”
Fiona growled.

Chapter 7:
Collared and
collected-on.

The drive back to
town took a looping, crawling course around the outskirts, keeping
the engine low enough not to be easily heard or seen, so as not to
let anyone know a hunter was involved in the sabotage of the
Hawkins House. Gieo could tell from the white knuckles of Fiona’s
hand at the top of the steering wheel that she wasn’t happy.

“Do you know what they would have done to you
if they’d caught you?” Fiona finally spoke.

“Rape, torture, blinding, attempted
conversion to their wacky ways,” Gieo replied. “I knew the risks;
I’m not stupid.”

“Not stupid, but plenty reckless,” Fiona
snarled. The car nosed its way back into town finally, stalking
through the empty streets like a prowling jungle cat. “How could
you just poison people like that?”

“You don’t really believe I used the poison,
do you?”

Fiona looked over to Gieo for the first time
since they’d left the compound. She could see true concern and hurt
on the pilot’s face. “No, but that’ll piss off Zeke and make
collecting on the bargain impossible.”

“Not like I could collect anyway.” Gieo
flopped back into the seat in a huff and stared out the window up
into the night sky. “Apparently, I’m your property.”

“Who told you that?”

“Rawlins.”

“That asshole,” Fiona grumbled.

“Asshole or not, is it true?”

They pulled up in front of the saloon. Fiona
took the car out gear and slowly wound down the engine. The hot
metal of car ticked lightly as it cooled in the chilly desert
night. They sat listening to the pings that interrupted the silence
between them for a time before Fiona finally spoke. “In a sense, it
is, but it’s not what I want or believe.”

“Great,” Gieo grumbled. “So if I’m going to
stay in this town, should I just wear a dog collar with your name
on it to avoid confusion?”

“We could get you a leash too,” Fiona chided.
“It’ll at least keep you from running off to do dangerous things
without backup.”

“Fuck you.” Gieo made to open the door to
escape the car, but the gunfighter grabbed her arm and pulled her
back in.

“I’m sorry,” Fiona said hastily. “I thought
we were joking around.”

Something strange and slightly unsettling
occurred to Gieo in the moment after. It was a reprehensible
thought on the surface, and one her pride immediately wanted to
reject, but the taboo, twisted nature of it appealed to her on a
sexual level in something of an upsetting way, while the
practicality of it would solve a lot of the problems she’d created
that night by not actually honoring the deal.

“Actually, that’s a good idea,” she said.

Fiona released Gieo’s arm and gave her a
perplexed look. “Wait…what is?”