The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Read online

  “Probably never.” Fiona walked around Gieo, to claim the heads of the two Slark she’d shot. “Don’t even think of asking for half the bounties on these guys either.”

  “No, no, those are all yours.” Gieo nearly threw up when Fiona hacked off the triangular heads of the dead Slark. “I’ll just get my things and we can be on our way.”

  “Whatever,” Fiona said.

  The little pilot scampered past her back into the wreckage. Fiona wiped her blade clean with a scrap of cloth from one of the Slark and re-sheathed it. She finished mounting the other two heads, in much better condition than the first couple, on the spikes along the front of her bullet-shaped, silver car. Her hand instantly jumped to the butt of her gun when she heard the pilot shriek.

  “It’s broken!” Gieo stumbled back out of the airship crash with a cornucopia of devices cradled in her arms, discarding most of them as she went, finally filtering down to one specific machine, no bigger than a television remote, hemorrhaging copper wires.

  “What is it?” Fiona asked, hoping it wasn’t something useful she might later steal.

  “It’s a Sapphic Intimate-Encounter Reciprocity Concluder,” Gieo said glumly.

  “Um…okay…what does it do?”

  “Only let’s a lesbian couple know when they’re done having sex, duh,” Gieo said. “Without it, girl-girl sex could hypothetically go on indefinitely. I mean, how else would you know when you were done?”

  “Usually when everyone’s happy or my jaw starts hurting.”

  “You’ve clearly had better lovers than me.” Gieo tossed the broken device over her shoulder, searched the scattered items on the ground around her, and retrieved a leather tool-kit. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “You’re over it, just like that?”

  “Catastrophe breeds necessity, which is the mother of invention.” Gieo circled around to the passenger side of Fiona’s car and waited to be let in. “My entire airship just got blasted out of the sky—a little perspective here, please. Besides, I stayed up two hours this time—a personal best!”

  “You do this a lot?” Fiona slid into the driver seat and unlocked the passenger door.

  Gieo hopped in and situated herself on the hot, vinyl seat. “If you know a better way to test whether something will keep flying after being shot, I’d like to hear it.”

  With a whiplash inducing jolt, Fiona’s car spun back in the direction it had come and fired out in a straight line across the desert, leaving scorched earth and a smoke trail hundreds of yards long in its wake.

  “Is it always this loud?” Gieo shouted over the thundering of the car. “Is this a Slark fighter engine? Where did you get it? How did you make it compatible with a 2009 Allison transmission? Why does your car look like a Challenger fucked a Mustang? Can I take it apart? Why do you even have a passenger seat if you don’t want to talk to passengers?”

  “I didn’t have a compelling reason to take out the passenger seat until now,” Fiona grumbled.

  “Hey, I know you!” Gieo shouted, oblivious to the barb.

  “I’m sure you don’t…”

  “Yeah-huh, you’re Fiona Bishop,” Gieo said. “You’re the Victoria’s Secret model that stabbed the paparazzi guy in the mouth with a penknife at LAX. What did he even say to you?”

  “He wasn’t real paparazzi, just some freelancer, and I don’t remember what he said.”

  “Uh-huh, sure, are you still crazy? I read on Perez, back when there was an internet that you plead insanity.”

  “I was crazy back when the world fancied itself sane. Now that the world has gone insane, I like to think I’m just a little more colorful than most. Besides, that was all a long time ago.”

  “It wasn’t that long ago…like six years,” Gieo said. “I had the hugest crush on you in high school.” Fiona became uncomfortably aware that the purple-haired pilot was sliding closer, leaning over the edge of the center console. “I used to touch myself watching the Angel series video on your website. I got kicked out of a SAT prep program for writing inappropriate essays about you.”

  “What are you doing?” Fiona asked quickly.

  “Nothing, shut up, keep your eyes on the road, we’re going like a hundred or something.” Gieo’s hand found its way onto Fiona’s thigh, gripping the tight, muscular quad meaningfully. “I heard the model-turned-talk-show-host went all stalker over you and tried to break into your house. What was her name?”

  “Tyr...” Fiona squirmed when Gieo’s hand pressed into the crotch of her leather pants, cutting off the rest of her answer. “What if I’m not…”

  “…into girls? Into me? Whatever, it’s just a hand either way, right? Don’t look down or over and I’m whoever you want me to be.” Gieo’s deft fingers unbuttoned, unclasped, and unbuckled everything in her way with remarkable alacrity.

  “What are you?” Fiona muttered, feeling the soft, talented fingers make their way down the top of her unzipped pants.

  “I’m the last scientist on earth, the airship pilot extraordinaire, the three-time Junior Aerodynamic Expo of Laguna Beach winner, but you can call Gieo or ‘oh baby’.”

  The pilot was flippant, sarcastic, arrogant, unflappable, and most likely full of shit, but it had been so long since Fiona had let anyone even come within arms length of her, let alone touch her, that she thought she might go with it to pass the three hour drive back to Tombstone. Gieo’s fingers froze before touching anything of much interest. Fiona turned to find the pilot frowning.

  “What?”

  “You’re not wearing underwear.”

  “I never really liked underwear.”

  “But you were an underwear model.”

  “Is any of this a problem?”

  “No, I can pretend, I guess.”

  “Fuck off.” Fiona grabbed Gieo’s hand by the wrist, pulled it from her pants, and tossed it back to the pilot. “My reality doesn’t have to match up with your fantasy. The person you thought I was died years ago if she ever really existed at all.”

  Gieo laughed and bit her thumbnail around a coquettish grin. “Oh, I like you,” she said. “You’re prickly in some delightful ways.”

  “Whatever.” Fiona stomped the accelerator to the floor, rocketing the car up over 200 mph. The desert flew by in a blur. The thunder of the engine and the enormous, solid-form rubber tires roaring along the worn asphalt prevented any further conversation for the rest of the ride. Fiona backed off the throttle as they roared into the outer limits of Tombstone. A faded, wooden sign on the outskirts informed them they were entering the town “too tough to die” with a population of 1,500 badasses. The population and motto were original to the sign, but the “badasses” part had been added with a can of orange spray-paint. On the main thoroughfare, Fiona brought her muscle car to a dusty stop in front of the Slarkhead Saloon. She buckled her belts and zipped her pants, remaining in the car for an awkward moment after.

  “I should find a way to thank you for the ride,” Gieo said.

  Fiona rolled her eyes and stepped from the car. She’d barely closed the door when she heard a slow, sarcastic, clichéd clapping from across the street on the balcony of the town hall.

  “Only four heads,” the one man audience said through a chuckle. “Did you at least get a balloon ride, Red?” The man wore authority with a distinctive largeness. He wasn’t specifically muscular or particularly fat, but a mix of both that gave a brawny, powerful quality to him. He wore Slark-skin overalls without a shirt underneath. The gray, scales of Slark pelts were hardly the toughest looking leather on him as his weathered skin had long since turned into elephant hide from a lifetime in the desert. With a gray, handlebar moustache and eyes narrowed to slits from squinting into the Arizona sun his entire life, he had the look of a cunning land walrus, which was precisely how Fiona always pictured him, although she would never dare say so.

  “Zeke, I can’t help but notice your bumper is empty, clean even.” Fiona nodded in the direction of the modified El Camino parked acro
ss the street and the empty spikes on the front.

  “Mathematically speaking, four is infinity percent larger than zero,” Gieo said.

  “Technically, so is one,” Zeke said, the smile never leaving his face, “but fact remains, the quota to get fuel is six.”

  “Then I guess you better get hunting.” Fiona passed around the back of the car, taking Gieo by the arm to lead her into the saloon.

  “I’m surprised he knew enough math to understand that,” Gieo whispered.

  “He only looks dumb,” Fiona replied.

  The interior of the saloon reeked of unwashed human flesh, tobacco spit, cheap tequila, and burned food. A haze of dust and cigar smoke hung in the air of the vaulted ceilings, almost obscuring the walkway around the second floor in the dimly lit bar. Fiona’s boots thumped across the wooden floor, casting silence in their wake through the dozen or so dirty denizens occupying the handful of gaming tables turned into a restaurant dining area.

  “Who’s your friend there?” The bartender didn’t look up from the ancient newspaper he was reading.

  Gieo stepped right up to the bar, hopped onto an unoccupied stool, and stuck out her hand to be shaken. “Gieo—airship pilot, steam compression scientist, and mathematician extraordinaire, pleased to meet you.”

  “Scientist, huh?” The bartender let out a low, sarcastic whistle. “We don’t get many of those in here, what with them all getting wiped out by their own EMP pulses. Got any tech to trade?”

  “She had a device that let you know when you were done having sex,” Fiona said, “but it broke in the crash.”

  “Shit, Fiona, you’d need to start getting laid before you would need to know when to stop.” The bartender set down his paper and smiled to Fiona. A short, stocky man with a receding hairline of greased back black hair and matching, whisper thin moustache, he struck a far more jovial figure than might be expected of such a position in such a town.

  “Why would she have a hard time getting laid?” Gieo asked.

  “You aren’t from around here, are you?” the bartender asked. “Aside from the wagon train of prostitutes out of Juarez that rolls through once a week, she’s it for women in this town, and she’s made it abundantly clear to all the men that she’s only interested in the ladies. Female gunfighters tend to be rare and short-lived in the free cities.” The bartender pulled a bottle from below the bar and poured two shots, placing one in front of each woman. “What makes a good gunfighter is a lack of hesitation. Fast hands are important, but there’s always a hesitation in taking a life that can slow even the quickest draw when it comes to pulling the trigger. The less conscience a gunfighter has about killing, the faster they’ll be. Fiona here is the only one, male or female, I’ve ever met without even a fraction of a second’s worth of hesitation. Most women have too much to be any good at the killing trade.”

  “That’s sexist,” Gieo said.

  “I’ll be dipped, you’re right! I’ll make sure to turn myself in to the ACLU when they get back on their feet.” The bartender went back to reading his old newspaper.

  “Got a room for her?” Fiona asked.

  “Colorado hunting party in town,” the bartender said. “We’re booked to overflowing. I wouldn’t recommend leaving her to her own devices with that bunch around. They’ve been drinking hard and haven’t found enough Slark to vent on.”

  “Fine, she can stay with me.” Fiona downed her shot, took Gieo’s shot, and drank it too. “I need a nap before I go back out.”

  Fiona wandered away from the bar with little more than a grunt of acknowledgement from the bartender. Gieo fell in behind her, following her up the stairs, around the walkway, until they reached one of the largest rooms in the far, back corner. The room was once a slightly-modernized replica of old west accommodations for tourists, but had since become genuine accommodations of the post-apocalypse west when the tourist trap section of the town turned into the most functional after the Great Purge. Fiona flopped onto the bed, metal springs creaking in protest. Her long legs stretched out to hook the heels of her boots on the metal footboard. She slid her hat down until the brim rested across her face, blocking out the bright, afternoon sun flowing in through the two windows.

  “The train to Vegas comes through every two weeks,” Fiona said. “You can stay with me until then.”

  “What if I don’t want to leave?” Gieo took off her top hat, releasing the four braids of her purple hair to bounce around her head. She unbuttoned her jacket the rest of the way and tossed it aside as well.

  Fiona raised the brim of her hat with two fingers to expose one eye enough to watch what Gieo was doing. “Why would you want to stay around here?”

  “Shits and giggles.”

  “Fine, but you’ll have to earn your keep somehow.”

  “I’ve got a few skills…”

  “Good.” Fiona let the brim of her hat drop. “Let’s hope shutting up for an hour is one of them.”

  The two shots of tequila, combined with the warmth of the sun made sleep an easy proposition despite the presence of the flighty pilot, and soon Fiona was comfortably snoozing.

  Chapter 3: Thanks a truckload.

  Fiona awoke from her nap to find her room alarmingly empty. A strange sense of concern, odd in its very existence, settled over her at not seeing the diminutive pilot. She leapt from the bed, and, on her way to the door, checked her reflection in the dusty mirror above her vanity, which typically served as her casing reloading and cleaning station. She’d obviously looked in the mirror before, but this was the first time in years she’d actually used it to check her appearance. Her hand froze on the doorknob. She could hear Gieo’s voice through the thin walls. The pilot was chattering away with several people downstairs, talking tech, and seemingly having a good time of it.

  Fiona returned to the mirror. She’d slept in her hat and sunglasses, leaving large dents on the sides of her long, slender nose and a distinctive rim indentation in her hair. The reflection, familiar in its former unimportance, suddenly mocked her by showing the rust on the beauty she’d once prized. Before she fully understood what she was doing, she’d poured water in the basin from a pitcher, dipped a hand towel in it, and cleaned the grit from her face and neck. The shine came back to her diamond without a great deal of polish, and soon she was looking at the angularly beautiful face that had once adorned magazine and catalogue covers with her high cheek bones, delicately tapered jaw, and pert chin with a tiny cleft. Why she should care what the pilot thought of her, she couldn’t quite piece together, but she rationalized it by telling herself she needed a good face washing regardless.

  Armed with a clean face, she replaced her sunglasses over her eyes and headed downstairs. The bar was full, far fuller than Fiona could remember it ever being. Two dozen men were milling about in something of a loosely organized line. The bartender trundled amidst the clientele, carrying a serving tray in one hand and a sack in the other. The patrons took drinks from the tray and dropped payment into the sack; when the tray was empty or the sack full, the bartender headed back to the bar to reload one and unpack the other. Fiona leaned over the railing to find where the line ended. In the middle of three tables arranged around her, Gieo was seeing customers in a slapdash repair shop. Included in the pile of payments on one of the tables were two dusty Slark heads.

  Fiona made her way downstairs, catching the bartender by the arm as he passed. “What’s going on here?”

  “Gieo’s fixing tech,” the bartender said.

  “Yeah, I gathered that,” Fiona snarled. “Why is she fixing tech?”

  “Says she’s got a plan,” the bartender said with a shrug. “What do I care why? She’s got the bar full of happy, entertained, paying customers. Nobody breaking anything, everyone getting along, it’s a goddamn dream come true.” The bartender pulled away from Fiona to return to his customers.