Once inside, Stephanie quickly slipped out of her outfit. The crisscross front lace chemise with attached garters and opera-length stockings came off with practiced grace. She unzipped her platform-heel go-go boots as well and held out the skimpy outfit for Gieo to take.
“I thought I could wear one of the uniform things,” Gieo said, eyeing the outfit with disdain.
“You’re not a Raven,” Stephanie said. “Uniforms are only for members.”
Gieo weighed the options of shooting cultists and hunters with the quad guns or dressing in prostitute wear—it was a close one, but she decided the chemise would be less traumatizing long term. She and Stephanie were exactly the same size and nearly identical dimensions, which was no doubt why Veronica had chosen her.
“Okay, fine.” Gieo unzipped her dress, realizing more than a few eyes around the makeshift dressing room immediately drew to her. The visual attention and knowing smiles only increased from the other, half-dressed women after Gieo had shimmied into the black, lace chemise, stockings, and boots. She was fairly certain her nipples were visible through the dainty material and her cotton panties had seemed a little bigger when they weren’t the primary thing covering her lower half.
“Do I need the collar too, do I?” Stephanie pointed at the spiked collar Gieo was still wearing.
“Not, that’s…something else.”
“Oh, I completely understand—I wore one for awhile too. You look great, by the way,” Stephanie said, her eyes finally smiling with her mouth. “Let’s go get that gun rolling!”
Back at the firing line and the truck, more eyes followed Gieo with more smiles and even a few snickers. Gieo pushed it out of her mind and focused on teaching Stephanie how to hook herself into the turret, which clasps went to which hooks on the clothes and how to use her feet to rotate the gyroscopes for elevation and lateral movement. Stephanie was a quick-study, picking up precise targeting movements with near mastery in just a few tries. Gieo surmised that Stephanie might have been lousy at blow-jobs when it came to big guns, but she was shaping up to be Annie Oakley when it came to firing them.
After Stephanie was fully situated, Gieo found Veronica at the top of the main entry steps at her makeshift command post. Veronica was the first to actually laugh at Gieo’s clothing; the infectious laughter quickly spread through the rest of her officers. Gieo felt like crawling out of her skin in embarrassment, and seriously considered storming off. As though reading the furious blush and antsy feet, Veronica quickly snagged Gieo’s hand and pulled her into the midst of the officers.
“I didn’t know whether or not Stephanie was going to haze you,” Veronica said. Her affectation, the polished southern belle minus the accent, had completely vanished as though it had never even existed. In her normal speaking tone, she actually sounded a little Creole or Cajun although drastically faded with time, distance, and willful effort. “I know it might not feel like it, but this is a sign of respect and interest.”
“Interest…?”
“Have you been getting smiles and friendly glances?” Veronica asked.
“Yes.”
“That means the ladies approve of Stephanie’s choice to invite you in,” Veronica said. “If your hazing wasn’t welcome, someone would have told you off by now. I promise, I really thought she would just give you one of our uniforms—she’s normally such a truculent little thing. Our sumptuary customs are a little backward from what you might think; you’re wearing the true uniform of the Ravens right now, and, I might add, you’re wearing it very well. You could change, if you wanted to, but I’d think of it as a personal favor if you didn’t right away.” Veronica gave Gieo’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Gieo’s embarrassment dissolved under the compliment. The officers smiled and nodded their agreement, only adding to her blush. She felt a strange sense of acceptance that she’d only really ever felt at science and math summer camps. Growing up, she was too much of a lesbian to fit in with other Orange County Asians, too Asian to fit in with other Orange County lesbians, too smart to fit in with the weirdos, and too weird to fit in with the braincases; such was the otherness created by her race, sexuality, eccentricities, and 200 IQ. She found acceptance at science and math summer camps for the extremely gifted. Most of the other outcasts there were just happy to be free of the oppression they lived under during the rest of the school year that they couldn’t care less that Gieo was a lesbian—they all had their own idiosyncrasies born out of their genius and her sexuality wasn’t even that odd by comparison. She’d counted on college to be the next chance she would have at recapturing that acceptance, but that was all six years and an alien invasion removed. Standing in the midst of so many beautiful, talented, intelligent women, it felt like the power structure that had once been so oppressive had been flipped on its head, leaving Gieo to stand on the top, finally able to see the sun.
“I’d like to be one of you,” Gieo said.
“Oh, sweetie,” Veronica said, “you were born one of us.” Veronica slipped her arm around Gieo’s shoulder and guided her over to a tall, brawny blond wearing a lab coat over her military fatigues. “This is Dr. Davidson, White Bishop and chief medical officer of our cell. I think you and her could help each other a lot. Dr. Davidson, this is Gieo, White Rook and air force commander.”
“Please, call me Silvia,” Dr. Davidson said, taking Gieo’s hand to shake it. “Let’s get started on some water purification systems, an electrical grid, and sterile areas for medical work. I could use a fellow egg-head to get this place up to speed.”
Gieo smiled up to the angular face of the tall doctor; it all sounded like heaven to her.
Fiona and Danny strolled the perimeter of the gas station turned Slark fueling depot for the tenth time as the sun faded in the west. He had his Winchester 30/30 across his shoulders with his wrists draped over opposite ends. She knew, like her classic pose of leaning against the wall, that the posture he was in afforded him almost an instantaneous jump of the rifle into firing position; she’d taught him well.
“So, are you in love with that Gieo girl?” Danny finally asked, breaking the silence they’d been walking in for the last hour.
“I don’t know,” Fiona said, “probably, although that hardly matters since I’ve been in love before and that didn’t exactly pan out.”
“Before was Veronica?”
“Yep.”
“You ever been in love with a man?”
“Nope.”
“Bad luck for me, I suppose.”
“You need a psychotic redhead in your life like you need a flesh-eating virus.”
“Must be the lack of options making me talk crazy.” Danny chuckled.
“Must be.”
“But man did I ever want you before the Slark invasion,” Danny said. “I used to spank it to your catalogues twice a day when I was in junior high.”
“That particular affliction seems to be going around,” Fiona said. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye—a little chaos tic caught her off guard. “Do you still think I’m beautiful?”
“You saved my life, kept me from slavery, and taught me a trade,” Danny said. “I’m going to think you’re beautiful when you’re old, toothless, and weather-beaten because yours was the first face I saw when I peeked out of that boxcar. You were standing on the hood of your car, under-lit by fire, hair blowing in the wind—best night of my life. I actually thought I’d died and gone to heaven seeing as there was no rational reason my fantasy woman should be dressed up like a samurai cowboy, saving my life.” Danny gave her a long look over out of the corner of his eyes and nodded. “Objectively speaking, yeah, you’re gorgeous.”
Scampering footsteps across open ground drew their attention to the gas station. In an instant Danny’s rifle was in his hands and Fiona’s Colt was out of its holster. They both relaxed when they saw the grease monkeys running over to them.
“Are you two here about Rawlins and the blind fuckers?” the lead grease monkey asked.
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br /> Fiona slipped her gun back into its holster and straightened her posture. She’d never actually heard one of the grease monkeys talk; it hadn’t even occurred to her that they could, but just chose not to. A sick, post-apocalypse, worst-case-scenario part of her had thought they’d had their tongues cut out or something.
“You guys talk?” Danny asked, indicating she wasn’t the only one.
“When we want to,” one of the others said.
“You’re two of the nice ones,” the leader said. “You never hit us, always gave us a tip, and never called us names just for doing what we had to, so we thought we’d give you a heads up that the Slark fuel’s about gone.”
“Yeah, we’ve pieced that together,” Danny said.
“Oh,” the leader looked crestfallen until something dawned on him. “Did you know that Zeke told Rawlins to come back here with his posse of methanol drinkers after the sun went down?”
“Told him to wait for the signal,” the one who had spoken earlier added. “That they’d know what to do if it came.”
“That gives us the when and who,” Danny said.
“Thanks,” Fiona said. “You’d boys best find another place to sleep tonight. If this goes sideways the fueling depot won’t be more than a black smudge on the world come morning.”
“Thanks, miss,” the leader said, “we’ll do that.”
As the grease monkeys jogged toward town, Fiona overheard one of the boys grumble, “I told you Zeke was going to kill us.”
The desert sky in the west was painted red, pink, and orange with the last of the sun falling below the horizon. Fiona glanced back to the gas station and turned a slow circle. The Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, or what was left of it anyway, would be the quickest way, but Rawlins was no fool. She pointed down 10th street, which bisected the highway creating the corner the depot sat on. It was seldom used and wouldn’t arouse any specific suspicion if methanol drinkers were seen on it.
“That’ll be where he comes from,” Fiona said. “If we camp out in the cluster of houses across the street, we should be able to pin them against the station, which’ll prevent them from using the fire bombs for fear of blowing it while they’re still in range.”
“Ambush hunting is just my style,” Danny said.
Getting positioned with good sightlines for shooting and good cover for being shot at didn’t take long at all, and soon Danny and Fiona had the gas station in their sights with the trap ready to be sprung. Dark came on slow, as it tends to in the dog days of summer, creeping across the sky with agonizing reluctance. More irritating still was the fact that Rawlins wasn’t remotely punctual. The air was already turning cold when he finally pulled into the station’s roundabout with ten armed cultists dangling off the back of his tow truck. Rawlins had it in his head that he and Fiona were heading for a bedroom at some point in their future and she had it in her head they were heading for a dust-up. Fiona grinned with grim satisfaction about the chance to finally prove him wrong and her right. Rawlins barked orders to his cultist minions who carried out the commands with all the stealth and accuracy of blind lunatics with brains burned by too much sun and years of wood-alcohol consumption.
“Do we wait for the signal?” Danny whispered to her.
“What’d be the point?” Fiona replied. “The sooner we clear them out, the sooner we can get out of here. Swing around to their right, using that fence as cover if they pinpoint our hiding hole.”
“You got it.”
Rawlins, the only one of the bunch with vision enough to know what good shooting sightlines were, kept himself mostly obscured from the street side of the station while most of the cultists milled about as though their blindness also prevented them from being seen. Fiona and Danny picked out their targets from the cultists wandering closest to their ambush position, and fired almost simultaneously. Even in the dark and open air, it was impossible to tell where the shots had come from. Two cultists dropped at the edge of the formation. The rest panicked and took to spraying every direction they could find in wild swings of their assault rifles.
In the ensuing chaos, Danny and Fiona took two more.
From his position, guarded by the hood of his truck on one side and the driver’s door on another, Rawlins picked out the position the second shots had come from. He shouted to redirect the cultists. The methanol drinkers, driven almost deaf by their errant firing, didn’t appear to hear Rawlins. Danny sprinted from cover before Fiona could grab him, picking his way along the fence line to flank their position when two of them stopped to reload. Rawlins finally got control of them in the moment of silence and redirected them to fire on Danny.
Fiona popped from her hiding spot and dropped the two who were drawing a bead on her partner. Rawlins was out from his truck with his pump shotgun in hand, making for Danny’s new position. Fiona shot at him, winging one of the cultists with the first shot and killing a second outright when Rawlins ducked behind him as a human shield. Fiona snapped down the front of her Colt to yank the spent shells. Loading new slugs from her bandolier belts took an eternity. She heard Rawlins’ shotgun report; she heard Danny’s Winchester return fire. She snapped her gun back together and looked up from her work of reloading just in time to see Rawlins catch Danny with a blast on the run. Danny stumbled a few steps and dropped into the dusty side yard of one of the houses.
Fiona burst from her cover, putting down the remaining two cultists with well-placed headshots. She stormed at Rawlins with her gun leading the way. He spun his shotgun on her, recognized who he was about to blast, hesitated one moment, one moment too many, and Fiona blew his trigger hand clean off at the wrist.
She covered the rest of the gap between them. He’d fallen to his back, abandoned the gun as valueless without the requisite two hands to operate it, and clutched feebly at the gushing stump that was once his hand. She stepped over him, leveling the massive barrel of the Colt Anaconda directly at his forehead.
“You hesitated,” Fiona said, her voice icy as death.
“I couldn’t shoot you,” Rawlins said. “I love you. I’ve loved you since I saw your picture in that catalogue.” Rawlins looked away from her. His face was loosing its color quickly as the life drained from him out of his destroyed wrist. “I always knew I’d be shot dead someday, but I never thought it would be you doing the shooting.”
“Because you’re a stupid fucker.” Fiona pulled the trigger, exploding the back of Rawlins’ head across the gas station tarmac.
She ran to where Danny went down. She hoped he had just been winged. He was a young man, twenty maybe, if anyone would be in good enough shape to bounce back, it would be him. When she saw his body still prone, the rifle just out of reach, her hopes changed to having just enough time left with him to say goodbye. She grasped his coat and rolled him gently onto his back. He was dead. The heavy shot had taken him directly in the heart. He was probably gone from his body long before he even hit the ground. Fiona sat hard on the long, dead grass stained with Danny’s blood and cried. She hadn’t cried since Vegas, hadn’t really allowed herself to, hadn’t really had a reason to, but with Danny gone, the last evidence that she’d ever done something good with her life, she couldn’t stop from crying. She cried until her throat hurt, until she hiccupped painfully. And even then, it didn’t feel like enough.
The sky lit up with blinding, white flares, not above the gas station or the outskirts where the old high school was, but right above the north end of town. The disorienting strobe flares held in the sky like balloons. They weren’t Zeke’s signal or something the cultists were using to enhance their lousy night vision. No, she hadn’t seen them since Barstow; they belonged to the Slark. She could already hear the clattering of their crawlers in the distance.
Fiona scooped up Danny’s rifle and ammo belt and ran for her car.
The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Page 18