The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (8 page)

She sat at her telescope, observing the
comings and goings of the night denizens of Tombstone to deduce
their behaviors, rules, and purposes. After an hour or so, two
occurrences confirmed her suspicions that there was peyote mixed
into the alcohol. The first was an extreme nausea followed by
glimmering lights appearing where no glimmering lights should be.
Hallucinating was going to make any further observations she made
completely worthless, so she abandoned the telescope and laid back
out on the lawn chair to look up at the stars. Eventually, she
couldn’t really tell how long, the nausea subsided and the
hallucinations intensified.

The desert night, alone on the roof as Ramen
had long shut down to conserve battery power, was cold and
uncomfortable. Aside from the companionship of sharing a bed with
Fiona, there was the warmth of another body and a mattress beneath
her. She had a hammock and a sleeping bag somewhere in the tangled
mess of bartered items on the roof, but she doubted she could find
or operate either while tripping and drunk.

Fiona had seemed prickly and truculent, which
Gieo simply thought made her more interesting, but somehow adding
violent and dangerous to the mix didn’t do much to dampen Gieo’s
desire for the gunfighter. It was an odd notion, which she
attributed to the booze and drugs, that she would be able to get
past Fiona shooting people and hacking off their limbs. Of course,
her sexual frustration might have been partly to blame for the
crazy thoughts. She didn’t have a specific timeline in her head for
how long she would tease Fiona sexually before finally letting the
gunfighter tear her clothes off and ravish her, but she’d suspected
it was on the soon-ish side, at least, until Fiona went nuts.

Gieo pulled her tailed tuxedo jacket over her
like a blanket to hold out the chilly desert night. The bands of
color and light that had danced across the sky shifted and started
taking on shapes. Gieo watched with mild amusement, knowing they
weren’t really there on an intellectual level, but enjoying their
beauty in an animalistic aesthetic way. After shifting through a
few zodiac patterns, which Gieo didn’t really care for as it seemed
rather pedestrian to look up the stars and literally hallucinate
crabs, archers, twins, and fish, the patterns began taking on
familiar, human shapes—specifically, the shape of Fiona. Gieo was
altered enough, horny enough, and had already abandoned her sexual
plans with Fiona enough to go ahead and do some self-gratification
since she didn’t see anyone else satisfying her anytime soon. Her
hands made their way down her stomach. Pulling up the leather
pencil skirt wasn’t a reasonable plan, so she unzipped the side and
pressed her hands into the top as best she could. The writhing sky
image of Fiona matched her movements, swirling a little more than
Gieo might like, but still discernable in her shape and intent.

Gieo’s own fingers were like old friends who
hadn’t been by nearly enough in the past few months. She teased the
outside of her lips with soft fingers until she felt sufficiently
warmed and relaxed. The sky image of Fiona winked to her. Gieo
pressed down on her outer lips with both fingers, stroking up and
down until she was able to add a light pinch around her clit
between her knuckles. Using the middle finger of her other hand,
she rubbed the length of it down over the tip of her clit, letting
it curl into her at the end of each pass. She’d perfected the act
in high school to the point where she could do it anywhere, at
almost any state of dress or undress, and always achieve an orgasm.
It had been so long since she’d even touched herself, or had any
inspiration or desire to do so, that she was well past driving
herself crazy after only a few passes of her middle finger.
Moreover, the apparent teasing she’d been inflicting on Fiona had
taken its toll on her as well. Being quiet in such a moment would
have been difficult under the best of circumstances and was
downright unfeasible while drunk and drugged. The sky version of
Fiona told Gieo it was okay, nobody would mind, and so Gieo let her
body make the noises it felt like making, which included
unrestricted moans, whimpers, and gasps, all escaping her mouth in
visible, colored letters.

Her eyelids opened and closed of their own
accord, guided solely by her building pleasure. When they drifted
shut, the backs of her eyelids swirled distracting lights and
sounds, while she tried to focus on how amazing and necessary it
all felt. When her eyes fluttered open, she watched the sky Fiona
mirroring her actions. Even though the hallucination of the
gunfighter kept shifting and morphing, Gieo thought she was
beautiful, sexy, and desirable even though she had multiple arms,
stretched out shapes, and hair made of flaming snakes. Gieo
climaxed once, a shallow little tease that only made her thirstier.
She redoubled her efforts, sliding two fingers down to press deep
inside her while moving her wet middle finger to focus entirely on
her clit. The sky Fiona seemed pleased by this plan.

Gieo couldn’t be sure where sleep,
hallucinations, dreams, and waking thought delineated anymore. She
was fairly sure she was awake, fairly sure she was enjoying every
second with herself, and knew, at least in small part, that what
she saw in the sky wasn’t real. The hands manipulating her clit and
plunging fingers inside her became not hers; they were attached to
her arms, which were anchored on her shoulders, but the hands
themselves must have belonged to someone else. It made her feel a
little naughty, dirty, slutty even to have someone else’s hands
doing these things to her—no, not that they were doing them, but
that Gieo was enjoying it so much. Darkness swirled through the
images painted across the sky, spoiling the shifting pornographic
pictures. Gieo wished them back, but her will couldn’t repaint the
sky. In a flash of light, like morning coming on all at once, she
exploded in an orgasm of surprising strength coming up on her as a
creeping wave. With the sky white with light, she threw her head
back and screamed in primal delight. For a second, the peyote fled
from her mind. The small, quiet part that had known it all wasn’t
real, caught on an ingenious plan, rolled it around like a crab
exploring a mussel shell, and found it liked what was inside.

Waking up the next morning was a brutal
proposition. Gieo managed to muddle her way through the hunters’
cars starting and departing, returning to full sleep shortly after,
but when the sun climbed toward its apex, the heat and light became
almost unbearable, driving her from beneath her tuxedo coat, which
had shifted from blanket to veil at some point in the night or
early morning. She pulled her goggles over her eyes to block out
some of the light before peering out from beneath the cover of her
jacket. Ramen was busying himself in the junk piles again,
seemingly unaware she’d been sleeping on the roof.

Gieo stumbled from her lawn chair, finally
drawing Ramen’s attention.

“Hey, Boss,” Ramen chirped. “Had a hard
night?”

“Something like that.” Gieo fumbled through
the nearest pile of bottles until she found the jug of water she
was looking for. She spun off the cap and tilted it back, drinking
greedily until the warm, dusty-tasting water glugged entirely down
her throat. “Give me a hand setting up the hammock and a tent
around it.”

Ramen gave her a quizzical look, cocking his
saucer head to one side. “That doesn’t sound comfortable.”

“I don’t expect it will be,” Gieo said, “but
it’s necessary.”

The headache and stomach-churning vertigo
that accompanied Gieo’s hangover made sure she was helping Ramen
more than vice-versa. It was well into the afternoon, with evening
fast approaching, when they finally completed setting up Gieo’s new
bedroom. The canvas, military surplus supply tent around the
hammock actually felt homier than Gieo had expected. Her
self-satisfied inspection of her temporary quarters was cut short
by the sound of a tow-truck clanking up behind the saloon.

Rawlins stepped from the cab, and set to work
lowering the faded yellow and black 1970s Jeep Wagoneer. Gieo
placed two fingers in her mouth and let out a sharp whistle. She
waved when Rawlins looked up to find the source of the sound; he
didn’t wave back. She pulled her top hat on tight, and headed
downstairs to question him about the vehicle. She caught him just
as he was about to get back into his truck, door open, one foot on
the side-step.

“Hey, what’s with the Jeep?” she asked.

“It’s Jackson’s old rig,” Rawlins explained,
freezing in his half in, half out position on the side of the tow
truck. “By hunter law, it’s rightfully Fiona’s after she took his
hand.”

“Oh…how is Jackson?”

“He died in the night,” Rawlins said
dispassionately. “The man was half-starved to begin with and two
.44 magnum slugs didn’t do him any good. Lopping off his hand was
overkill if you ask me.”

“Will my reward for the methanol spiking job
work in this thing?” Gieo nodded in the direction of the Jeep.

“Sure, but it ain’t your reward.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re property of a hunter, which doesn’t
give you a hunter’s rights.” Rawlins finally stepped fully down
from the tow truck and closed the door behind him. “When you finish
the job, Fiona will have to collect for you.”

“Zeke didn’t mention anything about
that.”

“Why would he?” Rawlins spat on the dusty
ground. The spit quickly congealed into a dusty scab on the earth.
Gieo watched the spittle for a time, fuming mad. “She’s the one he
wanted to do the job in the first place and the one he wanted to
reward. Now that her property has signed up for the deal, she’s the
one who’ll default if it doesn’t get done.”

“That’s bullshit,” Gieo snarled. “I’m not
anyone’s property.”

Rawlins snorted and shook his head, folding
his brawny arms over his chest to complete the pose of disbelief.
“You belong to whoever claims you and is strong enough to keep you.
Laws around here only benefit hunters—everyone else is just paying
their way to keep from becoming property. If Fiona hadn’t laid
claim to you, someone else would’ve.”

“Fine, how do I stop being property?”

“Become a hunter,” Rawlins said with a
mocking chuckle, “but even then, you’ve still got to be able to
defend yourself from being claimed, and you don’t have it in you,
kid.” He turned her back on her, threw open the tow truck door, and
hauled his bulk into the cab. Before he closed the door, as a
parting shot, he said, “If you don’t like our laws, I’d get the
hell out of town before someone gets the drop on Fiona. You’d be
quite the prize for most around here—a fuck doll that can fix
tech.”

Gieo glared at him the entire slow drive
away, which didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. She hadn’t
really ever thought herself capable of killing someone, but she
definitely thought she could maim Rawlins if push came to shove,
and might just be mentally capable of crippling Zeke for tricking
her into making Fiona beholden for a job she didn’t want to do and
Gieo wasn’t really planning on taking seriously. Of course she knew
she wasn’t actually a physical match for either man, but she
thought it was an important step to get used to the idea of
violence.

She was smarter than them though, and her
drug trip from the night before had given her a deliciously devious
plan to complete the job. She’d just have to dodge Fiona until it
was done.