“The legions of heaven cannot be moved by guns, will not bow to the puppets of the she-devil whore, and walk in the light of the Savior!” Yahweh held his arms out to his sides, tilting his head back until the orange parking cone he wore as a hat nearly fell off. Cultists, families mostly, staggered out into the streets, milky eyes staring blankly ahead as they tapped their way into the town with long canes and eerie singing voices rising to join in a rousing chorus of “Take My Life and Let it Be” with the cultists that had already gathered. The arrival of the hymn, which was haunting and creepy all on its own without being sung in a toneless chant by a mob of milky-eyed cultists, had an unsettling effect on the gathered hunters with the exception of Fiona.
She strode through the cluster with murderous intent. When she reached Yahweh, she grasped him by the back of the shirt, spun him around to face her, and brought the butt of her gun along his jaw, knocking two teeth from his mouth in a spray of blood. The cult leader crumpled to the ground like a heap of laundry.
“You want me so bad?” Fiona snarled, swinging a boot hard to kick the downed man directly in the ribs. “Here I am!”
Yahweh laughed an insidious, wheezing chuckle, dripping dark blood on the dusty street with every shake of his frail frame. He regained his feet slowly without help. Before righting his posture entirely, he sought out and retrieved the parking cone hat he’d lost. “The great eye in the sky has told us you are not the she-devil who will lead this town into temptation.” His voice took on a strangely powerful quality despite coming from such a desiccated old man. His finger, gnarled and twisted, shot out toward the front of the saloon to where Gieo stood, Fiona’s hat in one hand and her leash in the other. “She is the true devil incarnate who will be the downfall of humanity and the damnation of all lost souls. Give her to us now, let us cleanse her by fire, and the world will be saved from the devil’s treachery.”
Fiona let loose with a growl more feral and jungle cat than Gieo would have thought a person could even manage. She swung her long, shapely leg in a wicked arc, kicking Yahweh’s legs out from beneath him. The old man went airborne for what seemed like an eternity before landing flat on his back in the street. Two cultist men, armed with knives, lunged from the crowd, intent on grabbing Gieo. Fiona spun on her heels, leveled two, well-placed shots, and blew off one man’s right hand while striking the other in the lower back. She spun back around to point the barrel of her gun at Yahweh’s chest.
“You so much as look at her funny, and I’ll send you to meet the god you won’t shut up about,” Fiona snarled.
“That’s enough, Red,” Zeke shouted. The street went deadly calm, hunters nervously made eye contact with one another, clearly outnumbered by the cultist families who had come to join the men. The milky-eyed men, women, and children, who had formerly walked the streets singing, stood silent, stock-still, staring straight ahead as if gazing into another dimension. “Well, Bill, it looks like you have your answer,” Zeke said. “She doesn’t want to give up her pet to be barbequed even if it means saving the world. You may as well head home and see if you can find some chickens to grill up in her place.”
“He broke hunter law,” Fiona shrieked. “He threatened my property and tried to have his men take what is rightfully mine. His head belongs to me.”
“He’s not a hunter, Red. Hunter law doesn’t apply to him,” Zeke said.
“He’s less than a hunter, meaning I can do whatever he can’t stop me from doing!”
“You’ll die with your sins on your head.” Yahweh growled and slowly began to regain his feet, yet again. “You’re an unnatural abomination, disgusting in the Lord’s eyes, and only hell awaits you.”
“You didn’t want to kill him before,” Zeke snorted. “Why start now?”
Fiona, hand still shaking with rage, slipped her gun back into its holster. She loomed over the fallen cult leader, casting a long shadow over him. “I could have poisoned your entire fucked up society and shot anyone the poison didn’t do in,” Fiona said, her voice even and calm with a spooky edge of detachment. “You’re only alive right now because I felt sorry for you pathetic freaks. But my pity and patience is spent. Any of you cane-tappers cross my path, and I’ll end you all.”
Fiona turned and walked away. She grabbed her hat and the leash on the way past Gieo, leading the pilot back into the saloon. The street remained quiet for a time after Fiona had departed.
“We need to get you a weapon,” Fiona said.
They paused outside Fiona’s room. Gieo was visibly shaken and Fiona was still a fiddle string strung too tightly, threatening to snap and lash out violently at the slightest provocation. Gieo simultaneously wanted to soothe the gunfighter and wanted Fiona to comfort her; instead, she stood at the end of her leash trembling.
“I don’t want to shoot anyone,” Gieo whispered.
“I saw the giant gun pod we took from the crash site,” Fiona said. “You’ve clearly shot Slark before.”
“That’s different. Slark aren’t human. Isn’t there a difference for you to hunt them versus shooting humans?”
Fiona shrugged and shook her head. “Why would there be?”
“You frighten me sometimes,” Gieo said.
Fiona opened her mouth to respond, but the resumption of the haunting singing of hymns began again outside. They ran into Fiona’s room and made for the window. Down on the streets, walking slowly in clumps of a half-dozen or so, the entire Hawkins House cult spread through the town, clogging the streets with their aimless march.
“What are they doing?” Gieo asked.
“Seeing if I was bluffing,” Fiona replied.
Fiona stood at her window the rest of the day, watching the cultists marching around the streets, clogging any vehicular traffic, singing their dire hymns in eerily flat voices. The net effect on her was to make her antsy. Her skin was crawling with the need to be free, to rocket her car across the desert away from the blind masses. She’d seen a few other hunters walking the streets, unable to get their cars out either, and they looked as agitated as she felt.
“Rawlins is here,” Gieo said, poking her head into Fiona’s room.
Fiona pulled her attention away from the window. Rawlins would have word from Zeke and Zeke wouldn’t be happy that the cultists who were supposed to be poisoned and dead were wandering the streets, en masse, preventing anyone from participating in the town’s primary business of Slark hunting. Gieo blocked the door, the leash in her hand, held out for Fiona to take. The pilot’s face was unreadable and blank. Fiona took the leash and tried to force a smile.
“I’m sorry,” Gieo whispered.
“For what?”
“For the mess that’s outside,” she said. “If I hadn’t taken the job, Zeke would have found someone willing to actually poison them, and this shutdown wouldn’t have happened.”
Fiona sighed and ran her free hand gently down Gieo’s smooth cheek. “As big of a headache as this is, poisoning them would have gone too far, even by Tombstone standards,” she said, a great deal of the tension draining from her in finally saying what everyone should have been thinking. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you took the job.” Fiona pulled Gieo in close by the leash and kissed her full on the lips in a steamy embrace. Gieo’s thumbs looped through the front of Fiona’s gun belt and held her close. Their lips reluctantly parted and Gieo stepped aside to let Fiona past.
“This leash is driving me nuts,” Gieo whispered as Fiona led her toward the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” Fiona replied, “maybe we can get by with just the collar.”
Gieo closed the gap between them and gave Fiona’s butt a meaningful squeeze. “That’s not what I meant.”
Fiona found herself flushed and excited when she came to the meeting table with Rawlins. The cultist protest had been bad for the saloon’s business as most of the tables were empty, and the few patrons who had found their way to the watering hole spent most of their time at the windows. Rawlins was sitting at one of the ce
nter tables with his hands folded in front of him. Fiona sat across from him, guiding Gieo toward the chair to her right. Rather than sit in the chair, the pilot knelt at Fiona’s side and sat back on her feet expectantly. Fiona had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
“Zeke isn’t happy,” Rawlins said.
“Nobody is,” Fiona corrected him.
“The methanol drinker you shot in the back died.” Rawlins leaned his bulk back in the chair, trying to affect a casual posture; it looked a little forced to Fiona. “They’ve got him dressed up like a saint; they’re taking turns parading him around town like a goddamned beauty queen on tour. People are starting to say maybe you went too far.”
“Makes me wonder what they’ll say when I clear the streets with my car’s cattle catcher,” Fiona growled.
The comment, for all its pointed intent toward the cultists, actually seemed to make Rawlins uncomfortable as though it was leveled against him. A drip of sweat ran down his ruddy face.
“You don’t think we should take this seriously?”
“What makes you think I’m joking?” Fiona narrowed her eyes at him to let him know she saw him acting suspicious. She really wished she was a more conniving thinker in moments like this. She was a hammer, a gun, a battering ram, which had been problematic in a world that hadn’t cared for those traits in lingerie models, but had served her well after that world crumbled under the Slark invasion; on rare occasion, Tombstone abandoned its violent, straightforward tendencies to sit down and make a game of chess out of things. Fiona was at a distinct disadvantage when this happened.
Gieo tapped Fiona on the leg, and sat up far enough to whisper into the gunfighter’s ear, “He’s angling to have you give me up to the cultists for the sake of peace.” The assessment didn’t make sense; Zeke hated appeasement and never would suggest breaking hunter law, the laws he’d created, to coddle the cult he hated. Gieo divined the thoughtful look on Fiona’s face and shook her head slowly, mouthing the words, “Not Zeke.”
If Gieo’s hadn’t nuzzled under Fiona’s gun hand in a submissive, kittenish act, Fiona knew she would have jerked her pistol and blown Rawlins out the back of his chair. Her vision flashed over in red. The worthless cuss was here without orders, trying to guilt her into giving up Gieo, for his own, self-serving ends. Fiona wondered if Rawlins knew that Gieo was the only reason he hadn’t been shot dead in a blind rage.
“Mistress,” Gieo whispered in a demure voice, almost entirely uncharacteristic of her, “I can tell the secretary what I know of the Hawkins compound while you get a drink. He has no other business here.”
From a lifetime of being thrown out of bars and managed out of volatile situations by her agent, Fiona recognized when she was being cut off. Whether it was at a bar or a paparazzi-surrounded red carpet, she knew she had a redline and she wasn’t good for anything but violence when she passed over it. Somehow, the act of being pulled out of a situation she no longer could control herself in was a lot easier to take when it was done by Gieo in a loving voice; she’d never liked or appreciated it when bartenders or her agent did it. Fiona unhooked the leash, and slipped from the table without another word, storming to the bar intent on getting a proper buzz going.
Gieo pulled herself up from the floor and sat in Fiona’s vacated chair. Rawlins went from jangled nerves to angry disdain in the span of a blink. His eyes shot daggers across the table at the collared pilot taking the seat vacated by the woman he longed for; Gieo knew the level of jealousy and rage storming its way through Rawlins—she smiled sweetly and fingered the collar.
“I’m wondering what your boss might think if he knew you were here bartering with authority you don’t have to an end he wouldn’t want,” Gieo said. “I also wonder if you know exactly how close you came to dying just now.”
“Fiona wouldn’t shoot me,” Rawlins said through clenched teeth.
Gieo couldn’t tell if Rawlins meant she wouldn’t shoot him because she cared for him or wouldn’t shoot him because it was against a hunter law of some sort, regardless, it was obvious he fully believed the words, no matter how ludicrous Gieo knew them to be. It was interesting that Rawlins, who had apparently known Fiona for years, didn’t actually seem to know the first thing about her.
“You’re a poor judge of character, Officer Rawlins,” Gieo said. “But it doesn’t matter what you think. It only matters what you’ll do to keep me from telling Zeke what you tried to do here.”
“He wouldn’t believe…”
“…wouldn’t believe me? Because I’m not a hunter? I’ll give you that.” Gieo leaned forward across the table and produced a small, metal shard. It took a moment for Rawlins to recognize the device as a digital voice recorder. “Think he’d believe you?”
It was a bluff, the voice recorder not only hadn’t been on, but didn’t even work anymore. Gieo could tell from the way Rawlins’ face drained entirely of blood that he didn’t know that, and she didn’t have any visible tells that might have given away her bluff. Her poker face was apparently ten times better than his. She settled back into her chair, leaving the voice recorder on the table, just out of his reach.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, get out your notepad,” Gieo said. “You’re going to take down what I know of the Hawkins House defenses and then you’re going to use that information to do a little job for me.”
Chapter 9: With a little help from blackmail and lies.
After dinner, which was a little difficult to enjoy, what with all the disturbing singing of hymns by the passing clusters of blind people, Gieo and Fiona took a bottle of corn whiskey to the roof to see if they could settle themselves down.
Gieo sprawled on the lawn chair, in control of the bottle, while Fiona stalked the roof. Gieo considered it stalking as she was significantly more prowl than stroll in the way she moved. The whiskey bit like a rattlesnake, possessed the sickly yellow tint of stale urine, and had cost them some choice pieces of tech to acquire, but all things considered, it was a necessity to dull the irritation of the singing. Gieo downed a shot out of the bottom of her tin mug and poured herself another. Fiona, having made her way around most of the roof, finally came to the little army tent with Gieo’s hammock inside.
“You’re pretty well settled up here,” Fiona said, her voice taking on a sullen edge no matter how hard she tried to be breezy about it.
“Nothing like sleeping in the open air for…um…some health benefit, I’m sure.” Gieo downed the freshly poured shot and considered another. Nothing would be admissible in future relationship conversations if she could effectively blame anything stupid she said on corn whiskey.
Fiona seemed as eager to drop the topic as Gieo was to have it dropped. She continued walking on, becoming increasingly difficult to see in the gathering dark as she slid through Ramen’s filing system. She stopped when she finally reached Ramen’s resting place; he had shut down for the night to conserve battery power. The little robot, with his arms, legs, and twin propellers pulled in, looked a little like a trumpet mute, albeit a trumpet mute for some sort of jazz playing giant. It would have been hard for Fiona to believe anyone could build something so remarkable if she hadn’t seen it herself; of course, at one point, it would have been pretty hard to believe space lizards would make Los Angeles their new capital, but there they were.
“Jackson’s truck is out back,” Fiona said idly, glancing down to the Jeep in the ally below.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.” Gieo poured herself another shot. “Do you have plans for it, or do you mind if I break it down, use what I can, and part off the rest for profit?”
The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Page 9