The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (26 page)

Fiona smirked and shook her head. “I never
liked you on your hands and knees.”

“Best for both of us then that I didn’t try.”
Veronica brushed past Fiona, rallying the Ravens around her to
begin the stretched-skirmisher formation into the desert to see who
had won the night and who was going to be cut down as the
victor.

Fiona woke Gieo with a kiss and a light
tickle of her ribs. The pilot came out of sleep with a faint smile
and bleary eyes meant only for Fiona. “The Ravens are heading out
to survey the field,” Fiona told her.

“I’ll come with you.” Gieo slipped from the
car, wrapping herself in Fiona’s denim jacket to keep out the early
morning chill.

Fiona held out Danny’s old rifle and the
bandolier of shells. “Take this,” she said. “You’ll need to be
armed.”

Gieo slipped the ammo belt over one shoulder
to settle it across her chest and took the offered rifle with great
reverence. “This is…”

“Danny’s.”

“Where is he?”

“Still dead, I would imagine.”

Fiona walked away to end the conversation,
forcing Gieo to jog a little to catch up. They fell in with the
Ravens’ formation near the officer cluster at the center of the
line, walking a few paces off from Veronica. As much as Fiona had
hated the idea of returning to the fold, she found the familiar
warmth of walking a battlefield with her sisters-in-arms compelling
and wonderful. She smiled to Gieo, who smiled back as if she
understood how special such camaraderie was.

They came upon the Slark bodies first.
Slowly, corpses of cultists and a few hunters found their way into
the mix, although the numbers were decidedly skewed toward more
Slark dead than human. More often than not, the Slark were shot in
the back, which lent some credence to the theory that they were
afraid of blind people. Fiona scanned the ground, hoping she would
be the one to find Zeke or Yahweh’s body, but neither appeared to
be among the dead.

The crawlers, three of the twenty-yard long
centipedes with gun platforms, had broken down in the midst of the
retreat. A few smoke trails rose off the vehicles indicating they
likely had suffered serious damage when the humans overtook them.
There were no living cultists in sight.

Zeke, splattered green and red with the blood
of his owns multiple wounds mixing with the shed blood of his
enemy, was busy about mopping up the last of the Slark with his
bare hands. He grabbed one of the few Slark left alive by the neck
and hurled it over one of the front legs of the nearest
crawler.

“You see this rock, you ugly bastard?” Zeke
shouted in the Slark’s face, spraying the lizard-man with angry
spittle. “You traveled a thousand light years just to get beat to
death with this rock!” Zeke smashed the rock into the Slark’s head
again and again, long after the twitching, scaly form had gone
slack. He dropped the rock and his most recent prey and began
searching the ground for another wounded Slark to finish off with
hands-on violence.

Fiona actually found a small kernel of pity
lodged in her heart for Zeke in that moment. He was alone, reduced
to the only emotion he had left, and fighting with rocks for lack
of any other weapons at hand. His pride was stripped away, leaving
him bare to the world. To add to the vulnerability, one of the
shoulder straps of his Slark-skin overalls had snapped at some
point in the fighting, likely cut by the same claws that had left
four bloody streaks across his shoulder, exposing one of his
nipples to the world. Veronica made her way calmly over to Zeke;
Fiona jogged to catch up.

“Where are the cultists? Where’s your
brother?” Veronica asked, leveling the muzzle of her shotgun at
Zeke’s protruding belly.

“They left when the battle turned against the
Slark,” Zeke said breathlessly. “I got the signal off though; your
Slark fuel is long gone.”

Veronica looked to Fiona who only shook her
head.

“Rawlins is dead,” Fiona said. “The depot is
safe.”

Zeke’s head dropped with the acceptance of
his grim fate and utter failure.

Fiona scanned the battlefield around them,
piecing together from the wounds the Slark had suffered that Zeke
had finished the job by himself, mostly with bare hands, battling
two dozen of the aliens when both sides had long since been
stricken unarmed. The Slark were right in calling humanity beasts;
Zeke may as well have been a grizzly bear in the midst of a
kindergarten class for all the fight the Slark were able to put up
against him without their precious technology. A strange sense of
pride came over Fiona in knowing Zeke’s triumph of strength was a
human triumph.

Veronica seemed to have other questions for
Zeke, but Fiona brushed past her, took Zeke’s face in her hands and
looked into his eyes, searching for some sort of explanation. “What
happened to you?” Fiona asked. “Where’d this rage come from?”

Zeke’s head became heavy in her hands as he
finally relaxed. “I was there, at the battle of St. Louis,” he
murmured. “My National Guard unit came in to reinforce the army
regulars. When we pinned the Slark against the Mississippi, they
took to eating prisoners. When their reinforcements came through
and surrounded us, we resorted to eating our own dead.” Zeke
stiffened as the memory passed through him. “Nothing I can do to
them will ever be enough.”

“What about your brother?” Fiona asked her
voice dropping to a soothing whisper.

“Bill’s my brother and all, but he doesn’t
have both oars in the water,” Zeke said. “He had his church and
followers long before the Slark showed up. He caught on every end
of the world theory there was for twenty years or so—I guess he
finally got his wish when
they
landed.”

“I wish I could offer you a warrior’s death,”
Veronica said, “but quick and painless will have to do.” Veronica
grasped Fiona’s shoulder to pull her away from Zeke.

Instead, Fiona stepped in front of Zeke,
shrugging off Veronica’s hand. “Look around you; look at what he’s
done,” Fiona said. “We took his town. We took everything he had but
the fight left in him. And even then he fought for the same goal we
all have. Let him go.”

The other gathered Ravens looked around in
much the same way Fiona had when she first came upon the scene.
They all came to the same conclusion about what Zeke had done in
the closing moments of the battle. They nodded their agreement with
a few even uttering whispered support of, “The Red Bishop is right”
and “Let him go.”

Reluctantly, Veronica lowered her gun. Fiona
released Zeke. The once merciless potentate of Tombstone scrambled
away with only his life and the clothes on his back to shield him
from the harsh world.

“That was a mistake,” Veronica hissed to
Fiona so softly only the two of them could hear.

“I owed him,” Fiona said. “I can’t fully
explain it and I have no idea why he did, but I know he shielded me
from the other hunters when I first came to Tombstone.”

“Be that as it may, if there are consequences
for this,” Veronica said, “they’ll be mine, not yours.”

A sharp stab of guilt struck Fiona
dead-center in the chest—she knew it too.

Chapter 17:
The squeaky wheel gets
greased.

Gieo settled
the head of the strap-on between Fiona’s drenched lips, pausing a
moment to admire the beautiful way in which she wrapped around the
red toy. Gieo grasped Fiona by the waist, and gently rolled her
hips forward to press the enormous red phallus into her. Standing
at the edge of the bed, with Fiona laying sideways across, her hips
nearly falling off the mattress, Gieo was at the perfect height to
do all sorts of naughty things to the lanky gunfighter. Of course,
as much as Gieo was enjoying her practice at wearing the giant toy,
Fiona seemed more than passing preoccupied. Gieo stopped her slow,
rolling thrusts and pinched Fiona on the upper thigh.

“What was that for?” Fiona snapped out of her
engrossing thoughts.

“You pull my hair sometimes when you fuck
me,” Gieo said. “I thought I’d try pinching you.”

“I thought you liked when I pulled your
hair.”

“I love it, but I don’t like when you’re a
million miles away when I’m trying to return the favor.”

Over the past month, since Zeke’s banishment
and the disappearance of the cultists, Gieo and Fiona were
averaging a minimum of three or four sexual encounters a day. Their
active social calendar also coincided with an active business
calendar. Elements of the Ravens’ Red Chess set took the train down
from Vegas to help instruct the remaining Tombstone hunters in
horsemanship and cavalry tactics with Fiona as their designated
leader. As more units became available, recon patrols increased to
track Slark movement and increase the halo of safety around the
city. Fiona began spending most of her time either on her horse, or
in her head worrying.

“I’m just a little overworked is all,” Fiona
said. “Don’t you feel that way sometimes?”

Gieo shrugged and shook her head.

“You wouldn’t, would you?” Fiona rolled her
eyes. Fiona might have called her a liar if Gieo didn’t make
everything look so damned effortless. She had a dozen projects to
juggle, a workload twice or more than anyone else’s, and never
turned down a chance to teach or offer advice when asked, which was
increasingly often. To add to the obscene amount of work Gieo was
doing in building an air force, finishing her motorcycle, creating
a power grid for the town, setting up a distillation processing
plant to use agricultural waste to create ethanol fuel, and a dozen
tinier side-projects, Gieo was also mastering the strap-on in ways
that not only left Fiona walking a little funny the next day, but
threatened to rival her own technique with a few more weeks of
practice.

Gieo pinched her thigh again. “Watch it,
lover,” Gieo said with a smirk. “From this position I can flip you
over and know exactly what is up your ass, because it’ll be me.”
Something sparked in Gieo’s mind and it immediately translated to
her face. She smiled coyly and began rubbing her hands over Fiona’s
stomach. “Actually, that sounds like fun…wanna try?”

“I have it on good authority it is unpleasant
and embarrassing,” Fiona said.

“That’s a shame.” Gieo stopped rubbing
Fiona’s stomach. She leaned back far enough to slip the strap-on
out of her and set about removing the harness. “Since you refuse to
enjoy sex and won’t cower under the threat of unpleasant and
embarrassing sodomy, dare I hope you’ll tell me what’s really wrong
if I simply ask?”

Fiona propped herself up on her elbows and
gave Gieo a long look-over with her eyes narrowed to sultry slits.
“You know, your breasts look amazing in this light…”

“You can lick them if you want…” Gieo stomped
her foot and shook her head. “Stop trying to distract me. What is
going on in that tangled mess of wires between your ears?” Gieo
finally slipped the strap-on off her hips and tossed it onto
Fiona’s stomach with a hollow thump and a tiny splat when the wet
head whapped against flat skin.

“I’m worried about Veronica,” Fiona said,
looking down at the huge red dong resting just north of her
bellybutton. “She was right about the consequences thing. If Zeke
is going to come back, he’s going to come back after her. I should
have let her kill him.”

“Baby, there’s no way Zeke survived out in
the desert with no supplies after fighting all night.”

“He’s too much of an asshole to die that
easily.” Fiona flopped back onto the bed and rested her hands above
her head, staring at the ceiling pensively. “I also can’t figure
out why Zeke shielded me when I first came to Tombstone. I wasn’t
even really sure he had until I said the words out loud and made
them real, but knowing now that he did, I have a powerful craving
to know why.”

“I’m about to finish my bike today,” Gieo
said. “I’ll go scour the desert for his corpse, haul it back here,
and you can interrogate it to your heart’s content.”

“How do you make it look so easy? Why aren’t
you tired and irritable like the rest of us?”

“Superior Asian genes, my bad-ass purple
hair, and the love of a crazy woman.”

“Blow me, Stacy.” Fiona absently lifted the
strap-on from her stomach and waggled it in Gieo’s direction.

A silence hung in the air where Fiona had
expected a giggle. She tossed aside the toy, pulled herself up into
a sitting position, and looked to Gieo with concern.

“Is that why you call Veronica by her real
name sometimes? Familiarity or control?” Gieo asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You call her Tanner,” Gieo said. “You don’t
seem to notice you’re doing it, but she lights up like Christmas
every time you do. It’s only when you think you two are alone, and
never more than once at a time, but I’ve heard you do it.”

“A little of both, I suppose,” Fiona said.
Denial would be pointless; Gieo was nearly impossible to lie to and
Fiona simply didn’t have the energy to even try. “It feels like a
special secret, knowing real names. Sometimes it just pops
out.”

“Bullshit,” Gieo growled. “With her, you use
it all sweet and tender. With me, you’re mocking me or making a
harsh point.” Gieo pulled on her modified cargo shorts with
elaborate tool belt functionality throughout, and began buttoning
up the blouse she’d pulled open, but left on, when they’d
started.