The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (4 page)

“Have you ever tried being nice to them? Most
are just regular people trying to make the best of things,” Gieo
said. “Can you even see in here with sunglasses on?”

“You don’t know them the way I do.”

“You don’t even know their names!” Gieo
exclaimed. “Did you know Eddie was a florist? Cutter was a mobile
locksmith for AAA. Mitch ran a landscaping company that specialized
in low water need vegetation. These people aren’t monsters.”

“They’re not the only ones here.” Fiona took
off her glasses to look Gieo directly in the eyes. “There are
plenty of dangerous people in Tombstone with life stories that
include prison, rape, and mental institutions.”

“Oh, your eyes really are blue,” Gieo said
with the most adorable little ‘oh’ sound on the front. “I love red
hair and blue eyes. With all the digital editing in magazines and
internet photos, I just assumed they changed your eyes to blue in
post.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Are you worried about me?” Gieo offered her
a demure smile that was all but a loaded gun pointed at Fiona’s
heart.

Fiona quickly put her sunglasses back on.
“This conversation is over.” Fiona spun on her heels and began
walking toward the bar.

“Does this mean we’re going to the wreck
site?” Gieo called after her.

“Fine,” Fiona said. “Finish with your line.
I’m going to go exchange the heads for fuel.” Fiona changed her
trajectory away from the stairs to head back to the repair station
to collect the two dusty Slark heads. They looked desiccated, more
than usual even for lizards; they’d likely been hauled out of traps
around some farmer’s land. Fiona detested the creeping sense that
she was taking charity for work she should have done herself. If
anyone in the bar shared in her humiliating take on the situation,
none of them voiced their opinion. In fact, the people milling
about the saloon were either paying attention to Gieo or
themselves.

Back on the street the hot, dry air,
remarkably fresh compared to the interior of the saloon, hit Fiona
like a moving wall. She ambled to her car and slid the heads onto
the brush-guard’s spikes. The heads, dry as mummified jerky, slid
onto the sharpened metal without an ounce of protest. The
heads-on-bumper-pikes system was Zeke’s idea. Fiona couldn’t
readily think of another way to indicate a Slark bounty had been
collected, and she didn’t particularly mind driving a car with the
heads of her kills lined up on the bumper in such a gruesome
fashion, so she’d never really questioned the logic of it. Settling
into the inferno of her car’s interior, she rolled down the windows
and rumbled through the dusty streets at a crawl with her kills on
full display. The car, like most hunter vehicles, had two speeds:
ludicrously fast and stopped. Driving through town required her to
leave the accelerator alone entirely while finessing the brake.

Zeke was the one with the Slark engine fuel,
the Midwestern contacts that kept the town fed, and controlled the
water supply through wells, so he decided what was valuable, which
was Slark heads. There were rumors, more than rumors really, that
Zeke ate the flesh of his kills. Fiona had knocked a Slark into a
fire at one point. The smell that resulted turned her stomach in
ways that even bad sushi and raw eggs couldn’t. If Zeke did eat the
green, alien meat of dead Slark, Fiona sincerely hoped he didn’t
cook it beforehand. She knew the man to have a sadistic streak and
a fiery grudge against the aliens, but she hadn’t the faintest idea
why. There were ample reasons for all of humanity to hate the
invaders, but Zeke seemed hell-bent on making them suffer.

The devil himself stood large next to his
modified El Camino at the fueling station. He beckoned Fiona over
to the front of the line when he saw her approach. She pulled in to
the slot of the converted old gas station that he motioned her
toward. Before she was even free of her car, he’d begun collecting
the heads from her spikes.

“You’re in a rare mood,” Fiona said.

“Bagged me eight today,” Zeke replied.
“Up-close and personal with a shotgun always elevates my mood.”

A few of Zeke’s pump jockeys set about the
work of fueling up, lubricating, and removing of grit for Fiona’s
car. Aside from the strange, glowing, yellow fuel salvaged from
Slark tankers, the hunting cars of Tombstone required ridiculous
amounts of lubricant for the turbines and daily scrubbing of sand
from the massive air intake filters. Fiona’s car, one of the
fastest and best balanced, required less than most, but it would
still strangle and seize up without the daily care of the pump
jockeys. She pulled a pack of Mentos from her jacket and tossed it
to one of the greasy, skinny teenagers working the pumps. The mints
were dried to solid little rocks, but she knew the orphaned
scarecrows that worked the fueling depot didn’t have teeth anymore
anyway and preferred candy they could suck on. The other pump
jockeys, greasy and non-descript, gathered around the one who had
accepted the tip to claim their share of the reward.

“I’ve got a proposition for you, Red,” Zeke
said, drawing Fiona’s attention back to him.

Propositions from most in Tombstone meant
sex, but Fiona knew Zeke didn’t have any interest in sex; he wanted
power and the only reason he wanted it was to cause more pain to
the Slark. Since she’d already brought him six heads, she doubted
his proposition would have much to do with the latter.

“I’m listening.” She leaned against her car
with her arms folded over her chest.

“The Hawkins House is getting too large
again,” Zeke said. “After the last culling, they’re also better
armed than before. I need someone with some skills at creeping
about to spike their methanol.”

“Poison doesn’t sound like your style,” Fiona
said.

“It’s not, but I’m not going to risk my men
against a bunch of half-blind crazies if I don’t have to.” Zeke
moseyed over to his El Camino, his Slark-skin overalls hissing with
every step. He reached into the bed and pulled out an old milk jug
with clear, cloudy liquid inside. “They don’t know about your
little pilot friend yet, but you can well imagine what they’ll say
when they find out about her.”

He had a point. The methanol drinking cult
had it in their minds that the devil was a woman. They already had
their wary, barely functioning eyes on Fiona as the one, and she’d
shot half a dozen of them before they stopped coming after her with
truncheons and knives. She didn’t really want to risk their
zealotry against Gieo, but poisoning them felt a touch too cowardly
for her taste.

“What are you offering?” Fiona asked, hoping
it was something easy to reject.

“A month of free fuel and cuts in line until
it needs to be done again.” Zeke held out the jug of poison and
shook it as if that would somehow make it more appealing.

“I’ll think about it.” Fiona pulled herself
from her leaned position against her car and walked back around to
the door.

“Offer’s got an expiration date on it,” Zeke
said.

“Don’t they all?” Fiona slid into her car and
slowly crept away from the fueling depot.

As far as she knew, the Hawkins House
cultists had existed somewhere in Texas before the Slark invasion,
but she figured they started drinking methanol as communion after.
They were a blight on the town, screaming dire prophecies in the
streets, stealing wood to smoke into methanol to drink, and
breeding like insane rabbits on the edge of town. The old church at
the end of Fitch Street, surrounded by trailers and mobile homes,
marked out their district, but they hardly kept to themselves. The
last time their numbers had grown too large, mostly through
conversion, Zeke had firebombed their camp with Molotovs. Fiona
doubted it would be so easy this time; however, she had no interest
in poisoning women and children, which would likely be a requisite
of the job. With a prize as good as the one offered, Zeke would
find someone to do it, and Fiona would be the primary beneficiary
of the act, but she wasn’t interested in Zeke’s dirty work.

Without anymore hunting to do, Fiona decided
it might not be the worst idea to actually take Gieo up on the trip
out into the desert for tech salvage. Judging from the pilot’s
skill with gizmos of all shapes and sizes, it stood to reason there
would be some pretty valuable goods if they got to the wreck before
another Slark recon team did.

Pulling around the front of the saloon off
old Freemont Street, the first thing she noticed was Gieo and Mitch
standing on the bed of a massive Chevy Kodiak C7000 flatbed. Where
Mitch had been hiding away such a monstrosity, Fiona wasn’t sure,
but now that the secret was out, it had attracted more than passing
attention. A mob of twenty or so people had swamped in the street
side of the truck and didn’t seem all that interested in letting
Mitch or Gieo get down. As Fiona crawled closer, her engine noise
caught the attention of the crowd.

“Methanol drinkers,” Fiona grumbled with
twenty pairs of milky, half-blind eyes turned toward her. They
still had their crudely drawn signs depicting her, which were as
artistically devoid and inaccurate as one might expect from a
mostly-blind cult of mental patients. They abandoned their shouting
match with Gieo and Mitch at the sight of the silver tornado that
was Fiona’s car and began advancing on her instead. She revved the
engine several times, threatening the spikes of her brush guard on
them, but being mostly blind, they paid the deadly cattle-catcher
only token attention. She let out the clutch just enough to make
the car jump forward about ten feet in a single lurch. The
cultist’s broke ranks and scattered from the street. Fiona wasn’t
entirely sure what might happen if she drove her car at full speed
through a crowd of twenty people, but she was fairly certain she
wouldn’t be able to eat for a week after.

Pulling up alongside the truck, she rolled
down her window and stuck her head out. “You two okay?”

“Yeah,” Mitch grumbled, “although they had
some choice words for Gieo.”

“If they come back around, I’ll put some
choice bullets in them,” Fiona said. “If you’re ready to roll, I’ll
lead you out.”

Mitch nodded once, grabbed the handle along
the truck’s side, and slung himself into the driver’s seat with
surprising agility. Gieo hopped out off the bed of the truck
instead and scampered around to the passenger side of Fiona’s car.
Before Fiona could protest, Gieo was in the passenger seat.

She leaned over, kissed Fiona softly on the
neck, and whispered against her ear, “Keep making a habit of saving
me and see what happens.”

Chapter 4:
Unreasonable
aspirations.

As they drove,
Gieo rested her left hand on the top of Fiona’s right thigh. The
positioning of the hand was a simple draping in a comfortable state
for both, but sans anything active or directed. Fiona’s mind kept
retuning to the drive earlier that day where Gieo’s hand had been a
lot more aggressive, and she wished it would be again.

“This cult, the methanol drinkers, how did
that happen?” Gieo asked, picking the most distasteful topic Fiona
could imagine to spoil the sexual tension.

“The Slark have a superstitious aversion for
blindness,” Fiona replied. “The Hawkins House was a cult from Texas
that took the natural defense mechanism people were trying with
methanol blindness and turned it into a religion with Methanol as
their holy communion. They imagine they’ll sweep away the Slark
with an army of the blind. I don’t know how they’ll know if they
succeeded or not since most of them can’t see more than a few,
blurry feet.”

“Leave it to Texans to turn stupidity into a
religion,” Gieo mused.

“Speaking of stupidity, how many times have
you been shot down?”

“Touché,” Gieo said. “I’ve mapped the Slark
defense line and now I’m trying to break it. Sure I crash, but each
crash teaches me something.”

“It teaches them something too—they are
smarter than us, after all.”

“Correction, they
were
smarter than
us.” Gieo pulled her hand from Fiona’s thigh to draw a little
diagram in the dust on the dashboard. “Their technology started
here, thousands of years ahead of ours, but that doesn’t mean
they’re smarter, just that they started developing earlier.” Gieo
drew out the Slark time line in the dust. “When our scientists
wiped out their mother ship and effectively caged them with the
bear that is humanity, we all leveled out. The best and the
brightest on both sides were killed, all the technology was dropped
to the same archaic point on both sides, and now it’s just a
question of who is going to recover faster.” Gieo swiped her hand
through the dust cutting both the shorter human line even shorter,
but also the Slark line to match. “We’re physically bigger,
stronger, and tougher, but we can’t win based solely on that. We
need to win the arms race and that means flying.”

A slow dawning overcame Fiona—Gieo was likely
the smartest person she’d ever met, and was probably the smartest
person left alive. This realization carried with it a strange,
inherent preciousness to Gieo’s life that Fiona found herself more
than a little territorial and protective of. If the pilot was
right, and humanity couldn’t brutalize their way to victory as Zeke
claimed, the world needed her more than a thousand Tombstones.