The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  The audacious temerity of it aside, Fiona thought the question was just about the funniest damn thing she’d ever heard. Moreover, Rawlins’ slow, or absent really, response, left both gunfighter and pilot to wonder if it really was the former.

  “Fuck you,” Rawlins growled.

  “Answer her question,” Fiona said.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Rawlins finally turned, leveling his gaze directly on Fiona.

  “Why do you think?”

  Rawlins didn’t bother answering the question or waiting for one to his. He stormed back to the truck, got in, slammed the door, and tore away from the scene in a spray of dust and gravel. When the cloud of his departure slowly drifted away on the breeze, Gieo and Fiona were left to giggle at what they could only assume was his admittance to wishing for a collar of his own from the gunfighter.

  “Seriously though,” Fiona said when her laughter subsided, “what do you want that old thing for?”

  “Ah, an astute question from an eager student of science.” Gieo winked at her and tapped the Wagoneer with the socket wrench she’d lifted from her toolbox. “The power plant in Jackson’s old ride is from a Slark hover thingy. You know, the ones they used before they figured out how good human snipers were? It’s too small to really do much for this monstrosity, but it’ll be perfect for a motorcycle, especially after I reclaim another one of our forgotten technologies.”

  “Which technology is that?”

  “Internal combustion!” Gieo hopped off the footstool she’d been using to get into the Wagoneer’s engine compartment and knelt on the dusty ground in front of Fiona’s feet. She drew out a hasty diagram of a piston and cylinder in the sand with the handle of the socket wrench. “Basically, an internal combustion engine just harnesses the chemical kinetic energy of gas expansion, usually a small explosion, and transfers it to mechanical energy. The Slark engines use a similar technology, but work with torsion, like a jet engine. I’m going to combine what they know, with what we know, and make an engine that is steam-powered internal combustion powering a torsion turbine. Creating an ember that will flash-vaporize water using Slark fuel should make the engine 82% more efficient than anything on the planet. Think of it as a Harley-Davidson crossed with a steam engine made possible by Slark hardware and fuel.”

  “What about the boiler experiment with Mitch’s Kodiak?”

  “Complete failure, well, moderate failure anyway,” Gieo grumbled. “On dirigibles the ship became light enough to haul the extra weight by using the heated air to help float it. The truck has no such capacity, and thus drives at about a snail’s pace at peak efficiency. Call it a mathematically sound, but ultimately not physically viable plan. It’ll have to wait until I get the new engine type perfected, which means I need to get back to work.” Gieo hopped up and walked back to the Wagoneer. “I’m sorry; this must all be really boring.”

  Fiona leaned back against the saloon wall, her eyes wandering up the pilot’s legs as she tucked her upper body under the hood again. “Not in the slightest.”

  Chapter 10: The Ravens have landed!

  Fiona awoke with a realization kicking her in the head from the fading dream world she was leaving. She’d heard of people sorting out complex problems in their sleep to awaken with the answer, but she hadn’t actually experienced it until that morning. The payment, the thing Zeke was giving over to the cultists for the singing protests in the streets, was the precise thing he was claiming he would not give them now. Fiona’s instincts had been right all along. He’d set up Gieo to be caught so the cultists could have their female villain to burn. Zeke could have asked any of the hunters to do the job, but he’d come to her first and then sought out Gieo when Fiona turned him down. No wonder Yahweh was so agitated, and Fiona’s pummeling of him in the street couldn’t have helped.

  The urge to kill Zeke was nearly overwhelming. One saving grace of being a practiced hunter was the ability to assess and weigh a situation; she couldn’t beat Zeke in a fair fight and there was no way he would ever enter into a fair fight anyway. He was a thinker and she was a reactionary. No matter how fast she was, and she was damn fast, he would always be yards ahead of her because he knew how to plan and she only knew how to have fast hands.

  She would need Gieo to plan, to think, to figure out why Zeke was conspiring with the cultists, to discover what trump card Yahweh might have, and for…other things as well. Regardless of what Zeke threatened or said, Fiona had a bad feeling about Steve Olsen. The man was a high quality moron with a drinking problem, cowardly tendencies, and a history of terrible judgment; moreover, Yahweh most likely saw it as a debt unpaid and would be looking for someone to finish paying it since Zeke clearly wasn’t going to. Steve had thought enough of the idea to give Gieo over to the cultists to say it out loud in public, and there was no telling what he might try. Fiona made up her mind. She needed to kill Steve Olsen somewhere people would see her do it.

  Fiona was dressed and ready by the time Gieo came down from the roof to meet her for breakfast. The pilot had somewhat gleaned what Fiona was doing when she was working beneath the hood of the Wagoneer, and started wearing revealing clothing on her lower half when she worked on the motorcycle, which was all the time. The current day’s ensemble included skintight black leather pants that Fiona had never seen the pilot wear. She was also wearing the spiked leather collar, which she hadn’t taken off once that Fiona had seen since it had been buckled around her neck.

  “Hey, ready for cold mush and runny eggs?” Gieo asked with a little hop in her step.

  “After.” Fiona brushed passed her, gently grazing her hand over the pilot’s exposed shoulders to feel something pleasant before an unpleasant task. Gieo fell in behind her, a little perplexed, but not overly so as cryptic was something Fiona excelled at.

  “Is this going to be a long enough ‘after’ that I should go work on the bike a little before we eat?” Gieo asked as they descended the stairs.

  “No, I don’t imagine it’ll take that long.”

  The saloon bustled with a breakfast rush as it had the past few days. Hunters had found their way into the mix as most still couldn’t get their cars out of town without mowing down cultists to do so. The cultists started cycling their members, which thinned the ranks some, but still only allowed a few hunters from the outskirts to escape every day. The word was the lucky few to get to the desert were having a rough time with the Slark now that the numbers weren’t even; a few hunters hadn’t come back the day before, likely outnumbered and overwhelmed by would-be-prey.

  Fiona scanned the crowd for Steve Olsen’s trash bag coat. It wasn’t really fair to call it that. She knew it was a rain slicker of some kind, but the black plastic looked exactly like a garbage bag to her. When she finally found him at a table of hunters, she shouted above the raucous din of conversation, “Steve Olsen, you and I have business outside.” The room fell dead silent.

  “This doesn’t have to happen,” Steve objected. “Zeke told me how it was, and I’m fine with the explanation.”

  “I say it does.”

  “What has to happen?” Gieo whispered to Fiona.

  He couldn’t back down and save face, not now, not in front of so many others like them. She’d laid out a challenge on fertile grounds for insult, and his reputation depended upon accepting. What’s more, she could see in his face he was scared of her, and everyone could see on her face, the feeling wasn’t mutual.

  She began to get the adrenaline tingles in her fingers, ache in her stomach, and the pounding in her chest as her heart worked overtime to supply the fight response with blood enough to carry out the kill. Her senses sharpened as her brain sought to give her an edge by blocking out all but the most crucial information. Steve walked for the door; Fiona followed. Everyone in the room, save Gieo, knew what was about to happen, and they all gathered to watch the fight unfold.

  Standing opposite each other in the street, twenty yards apart or so, even the cultists gave them room, although t
hey couldn’t even see the spectacle born of the old west and revived by the hunter code. Gieo figured out what Fiona was planning far too late to even voice her concerns, never mind trying to talk Fiona out of it.

  Steve’s adrenaline response to the situation was clearly flight, rather than Fiona’s fight, and he tried one more time to talk down the redheaded huntress who could claim his head for a public slight against her ownership of the pilot. “You can walk away,” Steve hollered. A quake in his voice all but put the final nail in his coffin.

  “You can’t.”

  They drew with nothing more than a visual cue between them to the start. Fiona pulled first by a country mile, pivoted in her draw of the weapon to put her entire body in profile, presenting a sliver a of a target, partially obscured by the enormous gun at the end of her entirely extended arm. Steve’s gun made it to his hip, far behind Fiona’s draw, and he had to fire, knowing she had him sighted in with a much stronger position. His gun went off first, and Gieo’s heart leapt into her throat at seeing the powder blast come from his side an instant before she heard the increasingly familiar thunder of Fiona’s Colt Anaconda.

  Fiona was nearly six feet tall and couldn’t even break 130 while carrying her gun. Hitting her turned sideways was like trying to shoot a loose thread from a coat, and Steve wasn’t a good enough shot to do either even without the duress of the duel and Fiona getting the drop on him. His shot sailed wide, well wide, nearly hitting a collection of cultists behind and to Fiona’s left. Her shot struck home though, and planted a finger width hole in his upper chest and a grapefruit sized exit wound at the base of his neck on the back. Everything in his face said he was gone on to whatever comes next long before his slack body hit the ground.

  The high that followed, the endorphin rush of killing, and the satisfying secondary jolt of adrenaline that came with being shot at combined in a delicious hormonal cocktail in Fiona’s head. She hadn’t had time enough to enjoy the rush when she’d killed Jackson, as she was still half-blind with rage. Steve’s death she would savor along with the applause and respect granted by the collected peers and townspeople.

  “What’s mine can’t be offered to the likes of them…” Fiona pointed to the cultists on ‘them’ before continuing. “…by the likes of him.” She finished by leveling her gun once again at the downed form of Steve Olsen. She could see many of the other hunters nodding in the crowd, although nobody else seemed to share in the agreement.

  “The man had it coming,” Danny O’Brien spoke up from the assembled crowd. “We all heard him demand that we barter with what wasn’t his to offer. Got a preference on what we do with his goods, Red?”

  Fiona holstered her gun, and turned to scan the crowd, finally landing her gaze on Gieo. “Gift it all to my pet—just like Jackson’s rig,” Fiona said. “If the fools in this town keep it up at this pace, she’ll be a rich woman before summer is out.” Fiona walked to the stunned pilot, who looked less likely to vomit than she had after the Jackson incident, grasped her by the collar and pulled her in for a fierce kiss. Part of Fiona, a very large and growing part, rather liked shooting men for the favor of the purple-haired pilot.

  “Rawlins!” Zeke bellowed from his perch, finally making himself known in the conflict. “See to another transfer for Red.”

  The bike, which was burning through Gieo’s supplies quickly, both in items used to repair or build it, but also in barter for the things she needed but didn’t yet have, came together slowly, far slower than she might have liked. She had lost yet another morning of work and didn’t have much of an appetite, as she’d had to watch the woman she was quickly falling in love with challenge and gun down some random person on her behalf for completely unexplained reasons.

  Her hand had shaken so much while they tried to eat breakfast, that she eventually excused herself to go work on the bike. Predictably, her hand was shaking too much to work a jackhammer, let alone the delicate wiring needing to be done on the fuel injection system. She finally abandoned the project to sit in the front seat of the old Wagoneer, staring blankly ahead at the crack pattern in the windshield.

  By her final tally and conclusion, Tombstone was a thoroughly fucked up place.

  Ramen fluttered down from the roof to keep her company and help her on the bike, but stopped short when he noticed she wasn’t doing much working and didn’t seem in the mood for company. He skittered around to the passenger side of the Wagoneer where Gieo was sitting, and poked his upside-down Wok head around the open door.

  “You okay in there, Boss?”

  “Fiona shot another man.”

  “I saw,” he replied. “She’s fast.”

  “I don’t even know why she shot this one.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “No, but the answer isn’t going to make much sense anyway.”

  “She did tell you Tombstone was rough.”

  “Of the two dozen words she’s spoken to me, it’s funny that those were the ones I chose to ignore,” Gieo said with a little sniffle. “Are we making a mistake by being here?”

  Ramen clattered a little further out around the door to look Gieo dead on. “You were lonely, Boss. I think you needed a return to what passes for civilization regardless of the crash.”

  “Maybe,” Gieo murmured, “but I hardly think Tombstone was the smartest choice.”

  “If you think Vegas would be better, the train is supposed to arrive today.”

  Gieo perked up at the mention of the train. “It is, and it’s going to have the Lazy Ravens on it. Let’s go check it out.” She hopped out of the truck, nearly knocking Ramen over. She untied her leather apron, and did a quick check of her lace-lined corset and matching bowler hat.

  “Shouldn’t we wait and see if Fiona wants to come, Boss?”

  “She won’t, and it won’t matter,” Gieo said. “After today, I could walk the streets naked, spitting in people’s faces, and nobody would do anything but smile and wish me a good afternoon for fear she would come after them next. Now, let’s go meet some pimps and hoes.”

  The train was late, as it tended to be by all accounts. The schedule on the station wall indicated it had a window of several days, which was only narrowed down for this specific arrival based on the exciting nature of the cargo. Gieo found an honest-to-goodness shoe shine station, manned and stocked with everything, to get her black, leather riding boots polished for the occasion. The strange little man, with enormously thick glass goggles intended to correct a vision imbalance of epic proportions and only two little tufts of white above his ears for hair, asked only for a sock or stocking in payment. Gieo said she didn’t have a sock or stocking to spare. He countered with the offer to do both boots for free if she would step barefoot on his head and call him scum. As strange as the request was, Gieo didn’t really see the harm in it. She pulled off one of her riding boots, the little man laid down on the train platform, and she stepped on his head gently, and called him scum. He was giddy with excitement right up until she removed her foot, and then he immediately returned to a perfectly professional demeanor. He’d nearly finished shining her boots when the train finally rolled into the station with a billow of steam, smoke, and a strange undercurrent of dozens of mingled perfumes.

  Gieo stood from the shoe shine station, accidentally stepping on one of the bootblack’s hands in the process. He let out the same little trill of excitement he had when she’d tendered payment, and thanked her for the tip she hadn’t realized she was bestowing.

  In something of a haze, she walked toward the train, along with others who had come out to greet the Ravens, and waited at the front of the assembled dozen or so people, standing out starkly as both the only clean person in the bunch, but also because she was female and dressed entirely in form-fitted black clothing, which, she thought glumly, Fiona hadn’t even commented on.

  The Ravens departed the train more like peacocks, flamingos, or birds of paradise than something as provincial as a raven. They were all dressed like proper
saloon girls of the true old west with some strange elements of modern trappings in the mix like an occasional hula hoop, Rainbow Bright backpack, or Mickey Mouse ears. In a surprising twist that Gieo hadn’t remotely expected from Fiona’s description of them, she was shocked to find they were beautiful, refined, and not at all what one might expect from Las Vegas prostitutes of the new Old West. They also seemed to be coordinated in how they disembarked the train, walking out in a pattern that indicated some grander point of focus was still yet to come.