The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Fiona strode over to Gieo’s station and slapped her palms against the table making the first four customers in line jump, but not drawing so much as a blink out of Gieo. “What are you doing?”

  “Making this pressure cooker pressurize and cook,” Gieo said as she popped open the thermostat to replace the spring.

  “I said I was taking a nap,” Fiona said.

  “Yep, did you sleep well?”

  “I mean, why did you come down here when I said I was taking a nap?”

  Gieo finally pulled her attention from the pressure cooker she was working on. At least, she pulled her eyes away, but Fiona noticed with a twinge of impressed surprise that the pilot’s hands were still working of their own accord. “That’s kind of a silly question,” Gieo said.

  “Why do you have Slark heads?” Fiona asked.

  “Eddie paid me to affix calculator solar panels on his iPod to make it run without batteries.”

  “Who the fuck is Eddie?” Fiona demanded, her voice becoming a little shrill.

  “You know, Eddie.” Gieo pointed to a grizzled, bearded man near the front windows with ear buds in his ears, listening to the newly solar-powered iPod. Eddie waved and Gieo waved back. Fiona vaguely recognized the man as someone she’d seen around town, but had never bothered asking his name. “He runs the hothouse farms on the outskirts. He wanted to listen to Miles Davis while he worked.”

  “But how…?”

  “Come on, we’re in Arizona,” Gieo said, returning her full attention to the pressure cooker in front of her. “Enough sun hits this state every day to run a fleet of battleships. I’m sure there’s more than enough to let a tomato farmer listen to some jazz during peak farming hours.”

  “That’s not what I…”

  “The Slark heads are for you, silly,” Gieo said. “You needed six to get fuel, so I got you the two you were short.”

  “I appreciate it, but I can…”

  “Don’t go thinking this makes us even.” Gieo turned her screwdriver on Fiona with an accusatory poke before immediately launching back into the work of repairing the cooker. “I’m still going to think of a way to make that up to you. But, in the mean time, since you don’t have to go out hunting again today, I thought we could take a ride with Mitch to the crash site. He said he has a truck and there’re a few things I could use off the dirigible.”

  “Who is Mitch?” Fiona asked, glad finally to get a full expression out.

  Gieo and the entire line of customers pointed to the bartender.

  “Seriously, you didn’t know his name? How long have you lived here?” Gieo asked.

  “A couple years, I guess.”

  “Manners aren’t your thing,” Gieo said with a low whistle.

  “Manners don’t count for much in Tombstone,” Fiona said defensively.

  “Here you are, Cutter.” Gieo pushed the finished pressure cooker to the mountain of a man covered in black leather and knives at the front of the line. “You’ll be enjoying your grandmother’s award winning goulash again in no time.”

  “Thank you, Gieo,” Cutter said. “I’ll bring a batch by tomorrow if you like.”

  “I would like that, and you’re welcome.” Gieo smiled to him. Cutter smiled back with a mouthful of gleaming golden teeth.

  “Can I borrow you for a minute?” Fiona grabbed Gieo by the hand and dragged her out from behind her tables. The line let out a collective groan as Fiona pulled the pilot to a more secluded corner. When they had managed the iota of privacy Fiona felt she needed, she leaned down far enough to whisper, “Are you crazy?”

  “Considering I’ve never stabbed a man in the mouth for asking a question that’s a hell of a thing for you to ask me,” Gieo said with a little giggle. “What color are your eyes under those glasses?”

  “These people are insane killers operating in a largely lawless town.”

  “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, glowi
ng, 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.”