The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (25 page)

The dust, brush, and errant rocks would tear
up her car, there was no avoiding that, but if she was lucky, if
she picked her path right, she could make it to the high school
before mechanical failure would stop her. She heard smaller rocks,
the trunks of sage brush, and other unidentified objects of density
ricocheting off her cattle-catcher, several making it through to
bounce along the undercarriage. She hadn’t struck anything to flip
the car yet, and was beginning to feel a little cocky about her
chances when she spotted her first cultist. She veered to the
right, heading a little further north to find the edge of the
formation only to discover several more cultists. When the options
became slow to the point of turning entirely north or try to weave
between the blind men and women, she chose the latter, hit the gas,
and left an easily tracked trail right through the middle of the
cultist army. Though not really trying very hard to avoid clipping
stragglers, as her only real concern was not plowing into a group
large enough to stop her car, she ended up missing everyone
entirely, finally emerging on the other side with the well-lit high
school beckoning her in.

The Raven defense line recognized her car, a
small blessing considering the shit-storm the night had turned out
to be, and a few of the women quickly rearranged the barricade to
form an opening large enough for her to drive through. She hit the
hole with her car on its last legs. She wasn’t sure what she’d
sucked into her air intakes, but she could imagine it would take
the grease monkeys a day’s work or more to get it all back out.
When it didn’t look like her car was going to make it all the way
into the compound, several of the women jogged over to give it a
push, letting it come to rest in the faculty parking lot.

Fiona slipped from the car with Danny’s rifle
in one hand and his bandolier in the other. Before she could even
fully shut the door, Gieo pounced her, knocking Fiona back against
the car. The pilot was dressed differently, smelled faintly of a
foreign perfume, and stood several inches taller than Fiona
remembered her being, but none of that mattered. She squeezed Gieo
tight with one arm and kissed her full on the lips. The pilot threw
her arms over Fiona’s shoulders and returned the pleasure.

“What are you wearing?” Fiona asked when
their kiss fizzled in its own time.

“The Ravens’ uniform, apparently,” Gieo
replied, flush with excitement both sexual and cerebral.

Before Fiona could respond, Veronica’s voice
rang clear and loud out into the desert night, amplified by the
loudspeaker system liberated from the top of the scoreboard.

“Zeke, Yahweh, or whoever is in charge of
this encroaching band of blind fuckers who are suddenly illuminated
clear as day,” Veronica shouted. “You’ve got Slark behind you and
light enough on you to make you easy targets for my sharpshooters.
Turn back now, take your chances with the Slark, and I can promise
my girls won’t paint bull’s-eyes on your backs. I doubt the aliens
will give you the same courtesy if you keep heading in this
direction.”

“You would feed us to these bastards?” Zeke
shouted back without aid of a bullhorn. “Where’s your honor and
humanity?”

“My honor’s the only thing that made me
promise not to shoot you in the back,” Veronica replied. “As for my
humanity, I left it in the same place you left yours when you came
out here to kill us and murder our horses. Good luck, and don’t
even think of retreating in this direction.”

Unintelligible shouts came out of the cultist
formation. They were still a hundred yards off, but would come no
further. The makeshift army of a couple hundred blind men and women
armed with machine guns turned back, walking toward the flashing
strobe flares, with their useless, milky eyes illuminated in the
light they couldn’t see.

Fiona made her way toward Veronica who was
already on her way over to the car. The roaring engines of several
of Zeke’s hunter vehicles, formerly coming closer along old Gun
Club Road, turned away, fleeing for the desert. Fiona assumed
whatever hunters Zeke had retained at his side had no interest in
seeing what would come of Tombstone when Slark were added to the
turmoil. They would run, hope their cars had enough fuel to reach
another free city state, and wait to hear if Tombstone fell. Fiona
wasn’t certain of the reception she would receive from Veronica,
and so tensed before the blond commander of the Ravens reached her.
Veronica pulled Fiona into a warm embrace, holding her with
relieved affection.

“You are a wonder, my love,” Veronica
whispered into Fiona’s neck.

The compliment and the title felt strange as
if the words were ill at ease with each other considering the
source. Fiona returned the hug, but not the words.

“You’ve taken Gieo from me?” Fiona pulled
away from Veronica’s embrace, briefly gesturing to Gieo’s outfit,
borrowed from Stephanie.

“She came to us willingly,” Veronica
protested. “She wants to be one of us.”

“Didn’t you see the collar?” Fiona asked.
“It’s not up to her.”

Veronica folded her arms over her chest and
scoffed. “Did I miss something, or didn’t you just drive your car
into our protection? As far as I’m concerned, you never stopped
being one of us.”

Fiona clenched her teeth so tightly the
muscles in her jaw began to twitch. Veronica, for her part, seemed
aware of the gunfighter’s anger, but not remotely fazed by it. “It
isn’t up to you,” she finally said.

“Don’t you get it?” Veronica snapped, taking
a step to get right into Fiona’s face. “We win. Women survived, and
now we get to make the world right. Our leaders, our scientists,
our generals who sacrificed themselves to even the playing field
with the Slark were 90% men. The smart, capable, women survived
because those idiots didn’t trust us with that kind of power. Now
we’re the only ones left with intelligence enough to claim it. We’d
be no better than the moronic, bi-gendered Slark if we ignored that
advantage. Not all women have the strength and willingness to kill
that you have, and I won’t let them become human property of
regressed men simply because you don’t like my methods.”

“Even if that means making slaves of anyone
who doesn’t like our rules?”

“What the fuck do you want from me?” Veronica
said, her voice rising to a shout. “I didn’t come up with the idea,
I didn’t own slaves, hell, I never even took a pet, unlike you.
More importantly, we don’t even do that anymore. We’re new to
running shit and we had to be ruthless in taking control or we
would have ended up property again.”

Fiona suspected, but didn’t know for certain,
if the feeling of being property or less-than men was universal to
all women, but she knew she’d felt it and she knew Veronica had
too. Ruthless was a good word for what the Ravens were, but
ruthless also made sense for the things they’d had to accomplish
without protection of law or society. At one point, Fiona had
understood and agreed with what they were doing. Ideological
differences over slavery were kind of foolish to cling to when it
was already abolished and was also part of American and human
history as well, and she couldn’t very well walk away from those
things on principle.

“They tore it down…” Fiona muttered.

“…so we could built it back right,” Veronica
finished for her. It was the mantra of the Ravens, used to identify
one another in the dark during the firefights that would forge New
Vegas; it was truth, as the Black Queen had explained, but also
came to embody safety and the knowledge friends were near. Veronica
leaned forward, her lips nearly reaching Fiona’s before Gieo’s hand
could interject between them.

“Whoa, lips off my woman,” Gieo said, holding
her hand firmly as a wall in the middle of the kiss. Energy of a
strange, nervous quality filtered through the crowd. Some of the
Ravens giggled, some looked away, some took a step forward as if to
back their commander’s play should she lash out at the pilot, and
other simply stood, mouths agape, unable to believe Gieo’s
temerity.

For a strange, confused moment, Fiona didn’t
know who Gieo was talking about. Part of her immediately responded
in jealousy, assuming Gieo was calling Veronica her woman and
warning Fiona away. She didn’t fully realize what was meant until
Gieo wrapped her palm around Fiona’s face and pulled her attention
to look down at the pilot.

“Don’t…don’t kiss her,” Gieo said, tears
welling up in the corners of her eyes. “Don’t be with her…be with
me.”

Fiona traced her fingers along the edge of
the spiked collar around Gieo’s neck. When Gieo pulled her hand
away from Fiona’s mouth, she found her smiling. “I am with you,”
Fiona said.

They held each other close and walked away
under the scrutiny of dozens of stunned eyes.

Fiona leaned against the side of her dusty
car, watching Veronica sitting on the steps of the main entrance
with her shotgun draped across her lap. She had the same look that
mixed sorrow and rage in equal parts that she’d had the night Fiona
had betrayed her. The train Fiona had attacked all those years ago
was Veronica’s even if the cargo wasn’t. Fiona could lie to
herself, claim she didn’t know for sure if the slaves were
Veronica’s or not, but it wouldn’t do any good; she found out the
truth during the planning phase and it hadn’t changed her actions
one bit.

The sound of gunfire from the cultists and
zaps from Slark weapons held solid much of the night, only pushing
into the east, away from the high school, at the approach of dawn.
Maybe Zeke was better at organizing blind people to fire in the
same direction than Rawlins was, or maybe the Slark really were
frightened of blind people. Regardless, when the clatter of
machinegun fire finally dissipated just before daylight, the last
few pops of rifle reports sounded to be a quarter-mile farther away
than when the battle had started.

Gieo slept soundly in the passenger seat of
Fiona’s car, wrapped in a borrowed military blanket and the
security of knowing Fiona had stood in front of the entire assembly
of Ravens and chose her. Fiona glanced over her shoulder, through
the windshield to make sure Gieo was still asleep before making her
way across the quiet grounds of the high school to Veronica.

“I thought you would have forgiven me by
now,” Veronica said softly. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

“This isn’t about being angry with you,”
Fiona said. “I knew you weren’t a slaver…” The next words stuck in
her mouth, not wanting to be spoken for fear it’d open up an old
wound long since healed. “…I was afraid of you. That’s why I
threatened you not to follow; that’s why I left.”

“Afraid of me…why?”

“I was losing myself in you to the point
where I couldn’t even tell anymore where you started and I began,”
Fiona said with an icy edge to her voice. “You have a way of
colonizing more than just cities. You colonize people until they
think and act the way you want them to.” The look that flashed
across Veronica’s face told Fiona she’d never even considered this
side of herself. The vulnerable, lonely part of Veronica, left over
from before surfaced for a moment. Fiona knew Veronica was like
Gieo in so many ways, including the taking of a new name. In that
vulnerable moment, Veronica became Tanner Delacroix again, the
Baton Rouge tom-boy, named after her grandfather and raised as a
son by a single father and four older brothers who didn’t have the
time or inclination to understand the female gender. Fiona was the
only one Veronica had ever told about her past; she carried the
weight of the secret as a precious treasure.

“I never wanted to colonize you, or own you,
or…” Veronica trailed off, fighting back tears, visibly angry at
herself for their very existence. “I thought there would be time
for us to come back together. I didn’t think you’d find someone
else—didn’t think there was anyone in Tombstone you’d want.”

“I picked her up from an airship crash a
couple months ago,” Fiona explained. “Up until then, you would have
been right.”

“I guess I waited two months too long to come
back for you.” Veronica stood from the steps, slid two fresh shells
into the breach of her over-under shotgun, and snapped the barrels
back into place. In the rising sun of the earliest of dawns, she
returned to the Amazon goddess Fiona knew her to be. “If you wanted
me to, if it would have made a difference, I would have crawled for
you, from Vegas to Tombstone on my hands and knees for your
forgiveness.”