The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (34 page)

As the four mountain men neared, Gieo could
see they were unarmed, smiling, and looking as affable as could be.
Of course, they were all over six feet tall and brawny so it wasn’t
as though any of them would have to be armed to do her harm. They
smelled gamy and odd, not necessarily a bad smell, but something
peculiar and ancient, harkening back to the days when men ate only
the wild animals they could kill and wore the pelts of the
hunt.

“I’m McAdams, if you don’t remember,” the
blond man said. “Come on up to the lodge and I’ll introduce you
around.”

Gieo glanced to the undercoat the man wore
beneath a bear pelt, recognizing the insignia. “That would be Major
McAdams, wouldn’t it?” Gieo asked.

“Once upon a time, I suppose, but that part
of my life is over now.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Gieo said, this time
with a genuine smile.

After making it back to town without
incident, Fiona handed over the wounded to the town’s rebuilding
hospital and the cultist defectors to the Military Police division
of the Ravens. They would likely be questioned about information
that wouldn’t be valid or important in short order. Yahweh wouldn’t
stay put knowing the Ravens had his address, but there was likely
other, subtler bits of information the cultists could give in
exchange for amnesty and a place in the new society. The MPs would
know how to ask and know what was and wasn’t valuable; Fiona hadn’t
the temperament, training, or inclination to even try a cursory
investigation on the ride back despite the chattiness of the women
in the wagon.

The following day, Fiona walked through her
random duties without much focus or attention. Her head was in
something of a fog, wandering back and forth between missing Gieo
intensely, despite it being two days since her departure, and
worrying about what Yahweh might do now that his protection from
the Slark had faded and his stability in the alliance with Zeke was
long gone. To add to the concerns about old enemies resurfacing,
Cork’s patrols, which shouldn’t have found anything, found evidence
of Zeke being alive in the form of decapitated Slark on the border
between Tombstone’s region and what used to be Old Mexico. Further
complicating everything, Stephanie’s patrol to the south had hit
major resistance, indicating the Slark were well on their way to
flanking the southern border of Raven territory. Toward the end of
the day, with a head full of concerns, the weight of the world on
her shoulders, and a heart aching for someone she’d pushed away,
Fiona found herself on the roof of the saloon, looking to feel
closer to Gieo.

A distant whistle and chugging of steam power
drew her attention to the station across town. She wandered over to
the telescope still set up at the edge of the roof and sighted in
to see what was going on. Carolyn had arrived, the red banners of
the disembarking Ravens told as much, and with her were thousands
of army regulars in their desert camouflage, trucks, artillery,
teams of oxen to haul, and hundreds more horses. Fiona would have
to take a meeting at some point with the Red Queen who hated her
with good reason. The information Fiona had given to Veronica was
quickly turned into a plan that would only function if Gieo
succeeded in bringing back pilots, which was a glaring hole Carolyn
would no doubt point out.

Imagining that Gieo would not succeed set a
stone in the pit of Fiona’s stomach. Failure didn’t necessarily
mean death, but there were a whole lot more failing options with
mortal ends than ones without. Her bike could break down in the
desert leaving her stranded to die of thirst, or wreck and kill her
outright, or marauders, or kidnapping, or Slark, or any other
number of awful things. Fiona could kick herself for letting Gieo
leave alone or even leave at all.

“Something wrong, tall boss?” Ramen asked.
The little robot’s voice startled Fiona to the point of nearly
jumping out of her skin, although the fright showed through on the
surface as little more than a twitch of her gun hand.

“I’m worried about Gieo,” Fiona said, trying
to calm her thundering heart.

“I am too,” Ramen said, “but not for the same
reasons you are.”

“How’s that?”

“Gieo’s a talented survivor, more so even
than yourself,” Ramen said. “Think about what it must have taken
for her to live alone all these years while trying concurrently to
break the Slark line. Getting to and from Colorado in one piece
won’t be a problem if she puts her mind to the trip, but you’ve
given her some reasons to doubt.”

Fiona leaned against the low wall at the edge
of the roof and folded her arms over her chest. “Is this more robot
nonsense? What are you even talking about?”

Ramen fluttered up from his sitting position
and scuttled on his little crawler legs closer to Fiona. “You’re
the first real girlfriend she’s ever had,” Ramen explained. “She
may seem self-assured and confident in what she’s doing, but she
doesn’t really know the first thing about relationships before or
after the invasion. Begging your pardon, tall boss, but you’ve
really done her a disservice by not guiding her better.”

The tiny, brass and copper robot, who looked
a lot like a jumble of kitchenware welded together, was making all
kinds of wicked sense to Fiona. It was all crystal when Ramen laid
it out for her; Gieo’s mistakes, their communication issues, the
thunderously strange behavior exhibited in the relationship seemed
reasonable in the light of this being Gieo’s first and only real
relationship. People didn’t get to skip the awkward, clumsy,
ill-informed couplings of teenage years—they just got to postpone
them to later in life if they were unlucky, but like with all
inevitabilities, they had to happen. Fiona had known true
relationships, love, and even cohabitation within a commitment both
before and after the fall of humanity. It was absolutely
preposterous to expect Gieo to understand the intricacies of any of
it without a single real point of reference. The technical cheating
of being seduced by Veronica was completely comprehensible if Fiona
thought of Gieo as an innocent fifteen-year-old girl, which, in
relationship-experience terms, was what she was. Gieo, like all
inexperienced girls, could easily have her head spun by someone
attractive and worthwhile making her feel wanted and important;
Fiona could remember the feeling and the stupid things she’d done
to recapture it all the way through her teenage years and even, at
times, into her early twenties.

“I am so fucking stupid,” Fiona muttered.

“You believed she was brilliant in all
things,” Ramen said. “She goes out of her way to make people think
that of her. You can’t be blamed for believing what you both wanted
you to believe.” Ramen clattered over to Fiona, placing a little
clawed robot hand on her knee in a strangely reassuring gesture.
“What matters now is what you’re going to do to fix things. Be
solution oriented, as Gieo always says.”

Fiona looked down into the robot’s faintly
glowing eyes and smiled. “You’re right, and I’m going to start by
telling Carolyn that Gieo will succeed in bringing back pilots and
that we should prepare for Veronica’s plan as it stands.”

“Great, I think, but that’s not really what I
meant, tall boss…”

“I know, but it’s important nevertheless.”
Fiona glanced around the rooftop and came to the second part of her
plan in short order. “I want Gieo to move here officially, and not
on the roof, but in a real home, with me.”

“That’s more of what I was thinking, and I
can help you,” Ramen said with a happy little flutter of his
helicopter rotors.

Chapter 22:
Dreams of a melancholy
past.

Carolyn was the
voluptuous earth mother of the Red chess set when Fiona performed
her grand betrayal and lit-out for the free cities. The years had
done little to change this. She still wore the flowing sun skirts,
bare feet, and peasant blouses she always wore, still had the full
hips and chest of the strikingly fertile, and the bright orange
hair held in a thick braid down her back. Fiona didn’t know why she
thought a few years would make such a difference, but it clearly
hadn’t in more ways than one. Carolyn’s gold-flecked brown eyes
still smoldered when they landed on Fiona, and her smoky, rich
voice still cooled when she spoke of or to the gunfighter. The
chain of command didn’t require her to speak to Fiona, as she’d
said, and anything she had to hear she could hear from an equal in
Veronica.

Why the hell Carolyn had forgiven Veronica,
but not Fiona remained a mystery.

Fiona had taken her leave the evening when
Carolyn made it abundantly clear she need not be there for the
debriefing of the plan she and Veronica had devised on a target
Fiona had found. She didn’t argue, knew there would be no point in
it, and so retired to her room for an early rest. Despite her
physical exhaustion, sleep was difficult to find. Morning came as
though a blink of an eye was all the sleep she’d taken, but rather
than rising with the sun trying to force its way through her
shades, she decided the patrol roster could be ably handled by
Stephanie and Cork for the morning rides, which she wasn’t meant to
be a part of anyway, and she returned to sleep in hopes of catching
up on some much-needed rest.

The dream wasn’t a perfect recollection of
the past, mostly because Fiona knew she was dreaming, although not
in the controlled sort of way she might have liked. Bill’s Gamblin’
Hall in the middle of the Vegas strip was where the Ravens had set
up their earliest headquarters during the gang wars that would
eventually decide who controlled Las Vegas and eventually the
entire mountain west area. The Flamingo still had the shifting
advertisement on the front of the building for the Osmond’s live
show, which was one reason Fiona knew it to be a slightly-askew
dream. She remembered the advertisement from her trips to Vegas
before the invasion, but also remembered it never working quite
right after. Something had gone wrong with the billboard-faced
building after the electrical grid went down, and nobody was able
or cared to fix an advertisement for a show that no longer ran for
two singers who likely didn’t survive the invasion or the
aftermath.

The guards at the door, two women armed with
AK-47s, nodded to her as she entered the casino. The old west
decorations of Bill’s gaming floor were tempered by survival
restocking, moving the defunct gambling apparatuses into backrooms
to be disassembled for possible useful parts while concurrently
clearing floor space for ammunition, weapons, and foodstuffs. By
that point in the gang war, the Ravens controlled most of Vegas and
had already restored much of the electrical grid, although not to
its full-gaudy past, using the abundant solar panels and turbine
fields popular in the Nevada desert. Some whispered of taking back
the Hoover Dam, but that would be years in the making.

At the time of the dream’s recollection,
North Vegas was still a smoldering pit from where Nellis Air Force
Base had been wiped off the map and Southeastern Vegas in the
Henderson and Boulder City areas was still controlled by a
conglomeration of biker gangs known as the Winged Cobras, a
combination of the Hell’s Angels and another group Fiona guessed to
have been snake oriented. The writing was plain on the wall for all
to see; the Ravens had won the war for Vegas, collected the most
stragglers from the military bases in the area, and would
eventually rise to prominence with their chess set model of
leadership and willingness to profit from human trafficking.

The Red set still made their home in Bill’s
Gamblin’ Hall while the Whites moved to the Bellagio across the
street. The Black set, the true rulers of Las Vegas and the source
of all stability with the Black Queen Ekaterina made their home in
the black pyramid of the Luxor on the other end of the strip. The
rumors were Ekaterina had brought the model of the Ravens’
leadership over from the Russian Mafia, and that her father had
once been a crime boss in Moscow with plans to pass his empire on
to her, but Fiona didn’t care much for the rumors. What Fiona knew
about Ekaterina could fit comfortably in a thimble and that was how
she wanted to keep it; the Raven Queen was strong, smart, ruthless,
and ambitious—beyond those things, Fiona didn’t want to know what
had gone into forging a person like Ekaterina.

It wasn’t odd for Fiona to head to Carolyn’s
room. As a Red Rook at the time, she was given ample access to the
hierarchy, but her goal, her expressed purpose for being there, was
one that could have potentially cost everyone involved a great
deal. In the haze of her dream, Fiona couldn’t remember why this
tryst was so dangerous, but thrilled at the risqué sensation
restored by the memory. She knocked their secret knock on the
penthouse door: twice in the center, once on the frame, twice more
at hip level.