The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (24 page)

“I’d like to be one of you,” Gieo said.

“Oh, sweetie,” Veronica said, “you were born
one of us.” Veronica slipped her arm around Gieo’s shoulder and
guided her over to a tall, brawny blond wearing a lab coat over her
military fatigues. “This is Dr. Davidson, White Bishop and chief
medical officer of our cell. I think you and her could help each
other a lot. Dr. Davidson, this is Gieo, White Rook and air force
commander.”

“Please, call me Silvia,” Dr. Davidson said,
taking Gieo’s hand to shake it. “Let’s get started on some water
purification systems, an electrical grid, and sterile areas for
medical work. I could use a fellow egg-head to get this place up to
speed.”

Gieo smiled up to the angular face of the
tall doctor; it all sounded like heaven to her.

Fiona and Danny strolled the perimeter of the
gas station turned Slark fueling depot for the tenth time as the
sun faded in the west. He had his Winchester 30/30 across his
shoulders with his wrists draped over opposite ends. She knew, like
her classic pose of leaning against the wall, that the posture he
was in afforded him almost an instantaneous jump of the rifle into
firing position; she’d taught him well.

“So, are you in love with that Gieo girl?”
Danny finally asked, breaking the silence they’d been walking in
for the last hour.

“I don’t know,” Fiona said, “probably,
although that hardly matters since I’ve been in love before and
that didn’t exactly pan out.”

“Before was Veronica?”

“Yep.”

“You ever been in love with a man?”

“Nope.”

“Bad luck for me, I suppose.”

“You need a psychotic redhead in your life
like you need a flesh-eating virus.”

“Must be the lack of options making me talk
crazy.” Danny chuckled.

“Must be.”

“But man did I ever want you before the Slark
invasion,” Danny said. “I used to spank it to your catalogues twice
a day when I was in junior high.”

“That particular affliction seems to be going
around,” Fiona said. She glanced at him out of the corner of her
eye—a little chaos tic caught her off guard. “Do you still think
I’m beautiful?”

“You saved my life, kept me from slavery, and
taught me a trade,” Danny said. “I’m going to think you’re
beautiful when you’re old, toothless, and weather-beaten because
yours was the first face I saw when I peeked out of that boxcar.
You were standing on the hood of your car, under-lit by fire, hair
blowing in the wind—best night of my life. I actually thought I’d
died and gone to heaven seeing as there was no rational reason my
fantasy woman should be dressed up like a samurai cowboy, saving my
life.” Danny gave her a long look over out of the corner of his
eyes and nodded. “Objectively speaking, yeah, you’re gorgeous.”

Scampering footsteps across open ground drew
their attention to the gas station. In an instant Danny’s rifle was
in his hands and Fiona’s Colt was out of its holster. They both
relaxed when they saw the grease monkeys running over to them.

“Are you two here about Rawlins and the blind
fuckers?” the lead grease monkey asked.

Fiona slipped her gun back into its holster
and straightened her posture. She’d never actually heard one of the
grease monkeys talk; it hadn’t even occurred to her that they
could, but just chose not to. A sick, post-apocalypse,
worst-case-scenario part of her had thought they’d had their
tongues cut out or something.

“You guys talk?” Danny asked, indicating she
wasn’t the only one.

“When we want to,” one of the others
said.

“You’re two of the nice ones,” the leader
said. “You never hit us, always gave us a tip, and never called us
names just for doing what we had to, so we thought we’d give you a
heads up that the Slark fuel’s about gone.”

“Yeah, we’ve pieced that together,” Danny
said.

“Oh,” the leader looked crestfallen until
something dawned on him. “Did you know that Zeke told Rawlins to
come back here with his posse of methanol drinkers after the sun
went down?”

“Told him to wait for the signal,” the one
who had spoken earlier added. “That they’d know what to do if it
came.”

“That gives us the when and who,” Danny
said.

“Thanks,” Fiona said. “You’d boys best find
another place to sleep tonight. If this goes sideways the fueling
depot won’t be more than a black smudge on the world come
morning.”

“Thanks, miss,” the leader said, “we’ll do
that.”

As the grease monkeys jogged toward town,
Fiona overheard one of the boys grumble, “I told you Zeke was going
to kill us.”

The desert sky in the west was painted red,
pink, and orange with the last of the sun falling below the
horizon. Fiona glanced back to the gas station and turned a slow
circle. The Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, or what was left of
it anyway, would be the quickest way, but Rawlins was no fool. She
pointed down 10
^th
street, which bisected the highway
creating the corner the depot sat on. It was seldom used and
wouldn’t arouse any specific suspicion if methanol drinkers were
seen on it.

“That’ll be where he comes from,” Fiona said.
“If we camp out in the cluster of houses across the street, we
should be able to pin them against the station, which’ll prevent
them from using the fire bombs for fear of blowing it while they’re
still in range.”

“Ambush hunting is just my style,” Danny
said.

Getting positioned with good sightlines for
shooting and good cover for being shot at didn’t take long at all,
and soon Danny and Fiona had the gas station in their sights with
the trap ready to be sprung. Dark came on slow, as it tends to in
the dog days of summer, creeping across the sky with agonizing
reluctance. More irritating still was the fact that Rawlins wasn’t
remotely punctual. The air was already turning cold when he finally
pulled into the station’s roundabout with ten armed cultists
dangling off the back of his tow truck. Rawlins had it in his head
that he and Fiona were heading for a bedroom at some point in their
future and she had it in her head they were heading for a dust-up.
Fiona grinned with grim satisfaction about the chance to finally
prove him wrong and her right. Rawlins barked orders to his cultist
minions who carried out the commands with all the stealth and
accuracy of blind lunatics with brains burned by too much sun and
years of wood-alcohol consumption.

“Do we wait for the signal?” Danny whispered
to her.

“What’d be the point?” Fiona replied. “The
sooner we clear them out, the sooner we can get out of here. Swing
around to their right, using that fence as cover if they pinpoint
our hiding hole.”

“You got it.”

Rawlins, the only one of the bunch with
vision enough to know what good shooting sightlines were, kept
himself mostly obscured from the street side of the station while
most of the cultists milled about as though their blindness also
prevented them from being seen. Fiona and Danny picked out their
targets from the cultists wandering closest to their ambush
position, and fired almost simultaneously. Even in the dark and
open air, it was impossible to tell where the shots had come from.
Two cultists dropped at the edge of the formation. The rest
panicked and took to spraying every direction they could find in
wild swings of their assault rifles.

In the ensuing chaos, Danny and Fiona took
two more.

From his position, guarded by the hood of his
truck on one side and the driver’s door on another, Rawlins picked
out the position the second shots had come from. He shouted to
redirect the cultists. The methanol drinkers, driven almost deaf by
their errant firing, didn’t appear to hear Rawlins. Danny sprinted
from cover before Fiona could grab him, picking his way along the
fence line to flank their position when two of them stopped to
reload. Rawlins finally got control of them in the moment of
silence and redirected them to fire on Danny.

Fiona popped from her hiding spot and dropped
the two who were drawing a bead on her partner. Rawlins was out
from his truck with his pump shotgun in hand, making for Danny’s
new position. Fiona shot at him, winging one of the cultists with
the first shot and killing a second outright when Rawlins ducked
behind him as a human shield. Fiona snapped down the front of her
Colt to yank the spent shells. Loading new slugs from her bandolier
belts took an eternity. She heard Rawlins’ shotgun report; she
heard Danny’s Winchester return fire. She snapped her gun back
together and looked up from her work of reloading just in time to
see Rawlins catch Danny with a blast on the run. Danny stumbled a
few steps and dropped into the dusty side yard of one of the
houses.

Fiona burst from her cover, putting down the
remaining two cultists with well-placed headshots. She stormed at
Rawlins with her gun leading the way. He spun his shotgun on her,
recognized who he was about to blast, hesitated one moment, one
moment too many, and Fiona blew his trigger hand clean off at the
wrist.

She covered the rest of the gap between them.
He’d fallen to his back, abandoned the gun as valueless without the
requisite two hands to operate it, and clutched feebly at the
gushing stump that was once his hand. She stepped over him,
leveling the massive barrel of the Colt Anaconda directly at his
forehead.

“You hesitated,” Fiona said, her voice icy as
death.

“I couldn’t shoot you,” Rawlins said. “I love
you. I’ve loved you since I saw your picture in that catalogue.”
Rawlins looked away from her. His face was loosing its color
quickly as the life drained from him out of his destroyed wrist. “I
always knew I’d be shot dead someday, but I never thought it would
be you doing the shooting.”

“Because you’re a stupid fucker.” Fiona
pulled the trigger, exploding the back of Rawlins’ head across the
gas station tarmac.

She ran to where Danny went down. She hoped
he had just been winged. He was a young man, twenty maybe, if
anyone would be in good enough shape to bounce back, it would be
him. When she saw his body still prone, the rifle just out of
reach, her hopes changed to having just enough time left with him
to say goodbye. She grasped his coat and rolled him gently onto his
back. He was dead. The heavy shot had taken him directly in the
heart. He was probably gone from his body long before he even hit
the ground. Fiona sat hard on the long, dead grass stained with
Danny’s blood and cried. She hadn’t cried since Vegas, hadn’t
really allowed herself to, hadn’t really had a reason to, but with
Danny gone, the last evidence that she’d ever done something good
with her life, she couldn’t stop from crying. She cried until her
throat hurt, until she hiccupped painfully. And even then, it
didn’t feel like enough.

The sky lit up with blinding, white flares,
not above the gas station or the outskirts where the old high
school was, but right above the north end of town. The disorienting
strobe flares held in the sky like balloons. They weren’t Zeke’s
signal or something the cultists were using to enhance their lousy
night vision. No, she hadn’t seen them since Barstow; they belonged
to the Slark. She could already hear the clattering of their
crawlers in the distance.

Fiona scooped up Danny’s rifle and ammo belt
and ran for her car.

Chapter 16:
Trust in honor and a lack of
options.

Fiona roared
away from the front of the saloon north through the heart of the
city. If she could reach the Slark when they were still in the
ruins of the Mountain Road suburbs, she might be able to turn them
east toward the high school rather than let them hit the
undefended, unsuspecting town while every armed person was away.
The cataclysm on the east coast had destroyed anyone in the Slark
community above blue collar status; their advanced military tactics
were gone, as were humanity’s, leaving them with undisciplined
troops led by the strongest, but seldom smartest, of their
soldiers. Tricking them into calling off their attack to chase a
car they might know well was a long shot, but a logically sound
one.

Fiona’s car, when pushed to the limit, was
more than capable of getting ahead of the formation, lighting up
the night sky with its flaming trail to make sure they’d know
exactly which way to follow. The Slark were still picking their way
cautiously toward the town through the sparse homes held in the
northern hills when she pulled up to the ruined edge of Cactus
Road. She slipped from the car, sitting on the top of her door,
leaning across the roof with Danny’s rifle. In the flickering
strobes of the Slark flares, she found a target and fired. The
shot, a long one, missed the head of her prey, but clipped one of
its legs. The resulting panic caused by the Slark’s wound spread
through the line. She flicked the lever-action and fired again,
this time finding center mass, plucking an uninjured Slark from its
perch on the side of the centipede-like vehicle. This time, the
Slark scanned the area and found the sniper in question. Fiona
considered levering in another shell to take out one more, but
didn’t see the need for it; they’d seen her and shifted their
attack in her direction. She slid back into her car, gunned the
engine, and launched into the expanse of open desert between Cactus
Road and the high school.