Fiona actually found a small kernel of pity lodged in her heart for Zeke in that moment. He was alone, reduced to the only emotion he had left, and fighting with rocks for lack of any other weapons at hand. His pride was stripped away, leaving him bare to the world. To add to the vulnerability, one of the shoulder straps of his Slark-skin overalls had snapped at some point in the fighting, likely cut by the same claws that had left four bloody streaks across his shoulder, exposing one of his nipples to the world. Veronica made her way calmly over to Zeke; Fiona jogged to catch up.
“Where are the cultists? Where’s your brother?” Veronica asked, leveling the muzzle of her shotgun at Zeke’s protruding belly.
“They left when the battle turned against the Slark,” Zeke said breathlessly. “I got the signal off though; your Slark fuel is long gone.”
Veronica looked to Fiona who only shook her head.
“Rawlins is dead,” Fiona said. “The depot is safe.”
Zeke’s head dropped with the acceptance of his grim fate and utter failure.
Fiona scanned the battlefield around them, piecing together from the wounds the Slark had suffered that Zeke had finished the job by himself, mostly with bare hands, battling two dozen of the aliens when both sides had long since been stricken unarmed. The Slark were right in calling humanity beasts; Zeke may as well have been a grizzly bear in the midst of a kindergarten class for all the fight the Slark were able to put up against him without their precious technology. A strange sense of pride came over Fiona in knowing Zeke’s triumph of strength was a human triumph.
Veronica seemed to have other questions for Zeke, but Fiona brushed past her, took Zeke’s face in her hands and looked into his eyes, searching for some sort of explanation. “What happened to you?” Fiona asked. “Where’d this rage come from?”
Zeke’s head became heavy in her hands as he finally relaxed. “I was there, at the battle of St. Louis,” he murmured. “My National Guard unit came in to reinforce the army regulars. When we pinned the Slark against the Mississippi, they took to eating prisoners. When their reinforcements came through and surrounded us, we resorted to eating our own dead.” Zeke stiffened as the memory passed through him. “Nothing I can do to them will ever be enough.”
“What about your brother?” Fiona asked her voice dropping to a soothing whisper.
“Bill’s my brother and all, but he doesn’t have both oars in the water,” Zeke said. “He had his church and followers long before the Slark showed up. He caught on every end of the world theory there was for twenty years or so—I guess he finally got his wish when they landed.”
“I wish I could offer you a warrior’s death,” Veronica said, “but quick and painless will have to do.” Veronica grasped Fiona’s shoulder to pull her away from Zeke.
Instead, Fiona stepped in front of Zeke, shrugging off Veronica’s hand. “Look around you; look at what he’s done,” Fiona said. “We took his town. We took everything he had but the fight left in him. And even then he fought for the same goal we all have. Let him go.”
The other gathered Ravens looked around in much the same way Fiona had when she first came upon the scene. They all came to the same conclusion about what Zeke had done in the closing moments of the battle. They nodded their agreement with a few even uttering whispered support of, “The Red Bishop is right” and “Let him go.”
Reluctantly, Veronica lowered her gun. Fiona released Zeke. The once merciless potentate of Tombstone scrambled away with only his life and the clothes on his back to shield him from the harsh world.
“That was a mistake,” Veronica hissed to Fiona so softly only the two of them could hear.
“I owed him,” Fiona said. “I can’t fully explain it and I have no idea why he did, but I know he shielded me from the other hunters when I first came to Tombstone.”
“Be that as it may, if there are consequences for this,” Veronica said, “they’ll be mine, not yours.”
A sharp stab of guilt struck Fiona dead-center in the chest—she knew it too.
Chapter 17: The squeaky wheel gets greased.
Gieo settled the head of the strap-on between Fiona’s drenched lips, pausing a moment to admire the beautiful way in which she wrapped around the red toy. Gieo grasped Fiona by the waist, and gently rolled her hips forward to press the enormous red phallus into her. Standing at the edge of the bed, with Fiona laying sideways across, her hips nearly falling off the mattress, Gieo was at the perfect height to do all sorts of naughty things to the lanky gunfighter. Of course, as much as Gieo was enjoying her practice at wearing the giant toy, Fiona seemed more than passing preoccupied. Gieo stopped her slow, rolling thrusts and pinched Fiona on the upper thigh.
“What was that for?” Fiona snapped out of her engrossing thoughts.
“You pull my hair sometimes when you fuck me,” Gieo said. “I thought I’d try pinching you.”
“I thought you liked when I pulled your hair.”
“I love it, but I don’t like when you’re a million miles away when I’m trying to return the favor.”
Over the past month, since Zeke’s banishment and the disappearance of the cultists, Gieo and Fiona were averaging a minimum of three or four sexual encounters a day. Their active social calendar also coincided with an active business calendar. Elements of the Ravens’ Red Chess set took the train down from Vegas to help instruct the remaining Tombstone hunters in horsemanship and cavalry tactics with Fiona as their designated leader. As more units became available, recon patrols increased to track Slark movement and increase the halo of safety around the city. Fiona began spending most of her time either on her horse, or in her head worrying.
“I’m just a little overworked is all,” Fiona said. “Don’t you feel that way sometimes?”
Gieo shrugged and shook her head.
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Fiona rolled her eyes. Fiona might have called her a liar if Gieo didn’t make everything look so damned effortless. She had a dozen projects to juggle, a workload twice or more than anyone else’s, and never turned down a chance to teach or offer advice when asked, which was increasingly often. To add to the obscene amount of work Gieo was doing in building an air force, finishing her motorcycle, creating a power grid for the town, setting up a distillation processing plant to use agricultural waste to create ethanol fuel, and a dozen tinier side-projects, Gieo was also mastering the strap-on in ways that not only left Fiona walking a little funny the next day, but threatened to rival her own technique with a few more weeks of practice.
Gieo pinched her thigh again. “Watch it, lover,” Gieo said with a smirk. “From this position I can flip you over and know exactly what is up your ass, because it’ll be me.” Something sparked in Gieo’s mind and it immediately translated to her face. She smiled coyly and began rubbing her hands over Fiona’s stomach. “Actually, that sounds like fun…wanna try?”
“I have it on good authority it is unpleasant and embarrassing,” Fiona said.
“That’s a shame.” Gieo stopped rubbing Fiona’s stomach. She leaned back far enough to slip the strap-on out of her and set about removing the harness. “Since you refuse to enjoy sex and won’t cower under the threat of unpleasant and embarrassing sodomy, dare I hope you’ll tell me what’s really wrong if I simply ask?”
Fiona propped herself up on her elbows and gave Gieo a long look-over with her eyes narrowed to sultry slits. “You know, your breasts look amazing in this light…”
“You can lick them if you want…” Gieo stomped her foot and shook her head. “Stop trying to distract me. What is going on in that tangled mess of wires between your ears?” Gieo finally slipped the strap-on off her hips and tossed it onto Fiona’s stomach with a hollow thump and a tiny splat when the wet head whapped against flat skin.
“I’m worried about Veronica,” Fiona said, looking down at the huge red dong resting just north of her bellybutton. “She was right about the consequences thing. If Zeke is going to come back, he’s going to com
e back after her. I should have let her kill him.”
“Baby, there’s no way Zeke survived out in the desert with no supplies after fighting all night.”
“He’s too much of an asshole to die that easily.” Fiona flopped back onto the bed and rested her hands above her head, staring at the ceiling pensively. “I also can’t figure out why Zeke shielded me when I first came to Tombstone. I wasn’t even really sure he had until I said the words out loud and made them real, but knowing now that he did, I have a powerful craving to know why.”
“I’m about to finish my bike today,” Gieo said. “I’ll go scour the desert for his corpse, haul it back here, and you can interrogate it to your heart’s content.”
“How do you make it look so easy? Why aren’t you tired and irritable like the rest of us?”
“Superior Asian genes, my bad-ass purple hair, and the love of a crazy woman.”
“Blow me, Stacy.” Fiona absently lifted the strap-on from her stomach and waggled it in Gieo’s direction.
A silence hung in the air where Fiona had expected a giggle. She tossed aside the toy, pulled herself up into a sitting position, and looked to Gieo with concern.
“Is that why you call Veronica by her real name sometimes? Familiarity or control?” Gieo asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You call her Tanner,” Gieo said. “You don’t seem to notice you’re doing it, but she lights up like Christmas every time you do. It’s only when you think you two are alone, and never more than once at a time, but I’ve heard you do it.”
“A little of both, I suppose,” Fiona said. Denial would be pointless; Gieo was nearly impossible to lie to and Fiona simply didn’t have the energy to even try. “It feels like a special secret, knowing real names. Sometimes it just pops out.”
“Bullshit,” Gieo growled. “With her, you use it all sweet and tender. With me, you’re mocking me or making a harsh point.” Gieo pulled on her modified cargo shorts with elaborate tool belt functionality throughout, and began buttoning up the blouse she’d pulled open, but left on, when they’d started.
“That’s not fair.” Fiona hopped up and made to put an end to Gieo’s hurried re-clothing efforts. “When you told me to pick, in front of everyone, I picked you.” Fiona reached out to take Gieo’s shoulder. In a blur she was spun around by her arm, her legs kicked out from under her, landing face first on the bed with a little bounce and squeak. Gieo was immediately on top of her, pinning Fiona’s arm behind her back.
“When did I forget how to fight?” Fiona muttered.
“Veronica has been teaching me judo,” Gieo explained calmly.
“And this is how you chose to tell me?”
“This is how I’m getting the point across that you need to treat me better no matter how tired you are.”
Fiona couldn’t decide which was wounded worse in the exchange: her pride at being so easily flipped by her much smaller, formerly-helpless girlfriend or her relationship prowess in that Gieo not only thought Fiona hadn’t been treating her well, but that she also kind of agreed. Fiona didn’t want the apology to sound coerced, although she wasn’t sure how she would manage that considering Gieo pretty much had her helpless. “I’m sorry,” Fiona muttered into the blanket. “I will try not to let my work make me distant, I’ll stop calling Veronica by her real name, and I’ll only call you Stacy in the sweetest and loving ways.”
“And I get to try anal with you.”
“Giving or receiving?”
“Giving!”
“You’re going to have to go ahead and break my arm then.”
Gieo released Fiona and sighed. “Fine, I accept your apology without the last condition.”
Fiona sat up, rubbing her sore wrist, shoulder, and elbow in various alternating orders. “Why is that even in your head?”
“My natural and insatiable curiosity, I suppose. Hell, I made a robot who knows how to lie just to see if I could,” Gieo said with a little snort. “I get curious and have to know if I can do something.”
“Then wouldn’t it make more sense for you to be on the receiving end?”
“Forget that,” Gieo said. “It sounds unpleasant and embarrassing.”
They parted on friendlier terms than Gieo might have expected from the steep decline the conversation had taken. Fiona went off to the corral to see to the evening patrols, and Gieo headed up to the roof to sort the last few boxes she had of traded valuables, which she was eager to disperse and be rid of. Ramen, who was the only one Gieo could trust with the overseer position, guided the work on the three dirigibles being built in the old park. The park apparently had never had much grass, and the community buildings ringing it in on the one side had long since stood empty. As with most things nobody else saw value in, the Ravens repurposed it all and had the open expanse functioning as an airship dry-dock in short order.
Gieo sifted through the dusty milk crates with no real aim in mind. She was still a little sexually frustrated from the fight that derailed her thrice daily getting laid, and none of her projects had the intrigue to distract her. Cowboy boots on the roof drew her eager attention, only to dash it when they belonged to Veronica.
“The ships are coming along,” Veronica said. She was dressed in skin-tight black ropers, black cowboy boots with the jeans tucked in, a white tank-top, and a black Stetson. Her blond curls bouncing around her slender shoulders remained the only trapping that had once been her Madame Façade.
Gieo gave a non-committal shrug and returned to her sorting. She’d begun to figure out Veronica awhile back. Her colonization routine wrested power from whatever male hierarchy existed through the guise of sexual meekness and availability, which was why the Ravens had been so tarted-up in the first place, and then pulled the rug out as soon as they found their control. More than that, the fields of drugs were only partially grown for medicinal purposes. The remainder was spread among the handful of Tombstone men who had been vocal about the change in leadership. With the endless search for a dragon or Mary-Jane as their new goal and the Ravens as their only access, the vocal objections turned into hazy support. When the drugs could no longer be purchased through goods or coin, the five or six dozen men who had formerly despised the Ravens came willingly to know indentured servitude to pay for their fix. Gieo rightly suspected it would be a lifetime sentence, albeit one shortened by drug use and overwork.
“We still need pilots,” Veronica said, strolling toward Gieo in a meandering path.
“We’ll need to train them then,” Gieo said. “Start scouring your ranks for spatial awareness and math skills, and I’ll start writing the curriculum.”
“Fiona will find us a target long before we have trained pilots.” Veronica’s shadow, long in the lateness of the hour, cast over Gieo, stretching all the way to the edge of the roof.
“Since I can only fly one at a time, I’m not really sure what you want me to do about that.” Gieo stood up and turned to find herself only inches from Veronica. She smelled strongly of strawberry candy or lip gloss or shampoo or all of the above. Her wicked smirk, dazzling hazel eyes, and intimate proximity set Gieo’s head spinning a little.
“I was thinking of a recruitment flight,” Veronica whispered. “Juarez survived Mexico’s bout with disease to become a free city state. Of course, it could be brought into the Raven fold with a little show of military might.”
“Why not just run your prostitution and drug-ring scam on them?”
Veronica laughed and ran the backs of her fingertips down Gieo’s cheek. “There is no universal tool to work every problem,” she said. “If you can believe it, Juarez is even less civilized than Tombstone. They’ll bend, but not from manners or charm.”
The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Page 20