The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  The following day, Fiona walked through her random duties without much focus or attention. Her head was in something of a fog, wandering back and forth between missing Gieo intensely, despite it being two days since her departure, and worrying about what Yahweh might do now that his protection from the Slark had faded and his stability in the alliance with Zeke was long gone. To add to the concerns about old enemies resurfacing, Cork’s patrols, which shouldn’t have found anything, found evidence of Zeke being alive in the form of decapitated Slark on the border between Tombstone’s region and what used to be Old Mexico. Further complicating everything, Stephanie’s patrol to the south had hit major resistance, indicating the Slark were well on their way to flanking the southern border of Raven territory. Toward the end of the day, with a head full of concerns, the weight of the world on her shoulders, and a heart aching for someone she’d pushed away, Fiona found herself on the roof of the saloon, looking to feel closer to Gieo.

  A distant whistle and chugging of steam power drew her attention to the station across town. She wandered over to the telescope still set up at the edge of the roof and sighted in to see what was going on. Carolyn had arrived, the red banners of the disembarking Ravens told as much, and with her were thousands of army regulars in their desert camouflage, trucks, artillery, teams of oxen to haul, and hundreds more horses. Fiona would have to take a meeting at some point with the Red Queen who hated her with good reason. The information Fiona had given to Veronica was quickly turned into a plan that would only function if Gieo succeeded in bringing back pilots, which was a glaring hole Carolyn would no doubt point out.

  Imagining that Gieo would not succeed set a stone in the pit of Fiona’s stomach. Failure didn’t necessarily mean death, but there were a whole lot more failing options with mortal ends than ones without. Her bike could break down in the desert leaving her stranded to die of thirst, or wreck and kill her outright, or marauders, or kidnapping, or Slark, or any other number of awful things. Fiona could kick herself for letting Gieo leave alone or even leave at all.

  “Something wrong, tall boss?” Ramen asked. The little robot’s voice startled Fiona to the point of nearly jumping out of her skin, although the fright showed through on the surface as little more than a twitch of her gun hand.

  “I’m worried about Gieo,” Fiona said, trying to calm her thundering heart.

  “I am too,” Ramen said, “but not for the same reasons you are.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Gieo’s a talented survivor, more so even than yourself,” Ramen said. “Think about what it must have taken for her to live alone all these years while trying concurrently to break the Slark line. Getting to and from Colorado in one piece won’t be a problem if she puts her mind to the trip, but you’ve given her some reasons to doubt.”

  Fiona leaned against the low wall at the edge of the roof and folded her arms over her chest. “Is this more robot nonsense? What are you even talking about?”

  Ramen fluttered up from his sitting position and scuttled on his little crawler legs closer to Fiona. “You’re the first real girlfriend she’s ever had,” Ramen explained. “She may seem self-assured and confident in what she’s doing, but she doesn’t really know the first thing about relationships before or after the invasion. Begging your pardon, tall boss, but you’ve really done her a disservice by not guiding her better.”

  The tiny, brass and copper robot, who looked a lot like a jumble of kitchenware welded together, was making all kinds of wicked sense to Fiona. It was all crystal when Ramen laid it out for her; Gieo’s mistakes, their communication issues, the thunderously strange behavior exhibited in the relationship seemed reasonable in the light of this being Gieo’s first and only real relationship. People didn’t get to skip the awkward, clumsy, ill-informed couplings of teenage years—they just got to postpone them to later in life if they were unlucky, but like with all inevitabilities, they had to happen. Fiona had known true relationships, love, and even cohabitation within a commitment both before and after the fall of humanity. It was absolutely preposterous to expect Gieo to understand the intricacies of any of it without a single real point of reference. The technical cheating of being seduced by Veronica was completely comprehensible if Fiona thought of Gieo as an innocent fifteen-year-old girl, which, in relationship-experience terms, was what she was. Gieo, like all inexperienced girls, could easily have her head spun by someone attractive and worthwhile making her feel wanted and important; Fiona could remember the feeling and the stupid things she’d done to recapture it all the way through her teenage years and even, at times, into her early twenties.

  “I am so fucking stupid,” Fiona muttered.

  “You believed she was brilliant in all things,” Ramen said. “She goes out of her way to make people think that of her. You can’t be blamed for believing what you both wanted you to believe.” Ramen clattered over to Fiona, placing a little clawed robot hand on her knee in a strangely reassuring gesture. “What matters now is what you’re going to do to fix things. Be solution oriented, as Gieo always says.”

  Fiona looked down into the robot’s faintly glowing eyes and smiled. “You’re right, and I’m going to start by telling Carolyn that Gieo will succeed in bringing back pilots and that we should prepare for Veronica’s plan as it stands.”

  “Great, I think, but that’s not really what I meant, tall boss…”

  “I know, but it’s important nevertheless.” Fiona glanced around the rooftop and came to the second part of her plan in short order. “I want Gieo to move here officially, and not on the roof, but in a real home, with me.”

  “That’s more of what I was thinking, and I can help you,” Ramen said with a happy little flutter of his helicopter rotors.

  Chapter 22: Dreams of a melancholy past.

  Carolyn was the voluptuous earth mother of the Red chess set when Fiona performed her grand betrayal and lit-out for the free cities. The years had done little to change this. She still wore the flowing sun skirts, bare feet, and peasant blouses she always wore, still had the full hips and chest of the strikingly fertile, and the bright orange hair held in a thick braid down her back. Fiona didn’t know why she thought a few years would make such a difference, but it clearly hadn’t in more ways than one. Carolyn’s gold-flecked brown eyes still smoldered when they landed on Fiona, and her smoky, rich voice still cooled when she spoke of or to the gunfighter. The chain of command didn’t require her to speak to Fiona, as she’d said, and anything she had to hear she could hear from an equal in Veronica.

  Why the hell Carolyn had forgiven Veronica, but not Fiona remained a mystery.

  Fiona had taken her leave the evening when Carolyn made it abundantly clear she need not be there for the debriefing of the plan she and Veronica had devised on a target Fiona had found. She didn’t argue, knew there would be no point in it, and so retired to her room for an early rest. Despite her physical exhaustion, sleep was difficult to find. Morning came as though a blink of an eye was all the sleep she’d taken, but rather than rising with the sun trying to force its way through her shades, she decided the patrol roster could be ably handled by Stephanie and Cork for the morning rides, which she wasn’t meant to be a part of anyway, and she returned to sleep in hopes of catching up on some much-needed rest.

  The dream wasn’t a perfect recollection of the past, mostly because Fiona knew she was dreaming, although not in the controlled sort of way she might have liked. Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall in the middle of the Vegas strip was where the Ravens had set up their earliest headquarters during the gang wars that would eventually decide who controlled Las Vegas and eventually the entire mountain west area. The Flamingo still had the shifting advertisement on the front of the building for the Osmond’s live show, which was one reason Fiona knew it to be a slightly-askew dream. She remembered the advertisement from her trips to Vegas before the invasion, but also remembered it never working quite right after. Something had gone wrong with the billboard-faced building a
fter the electrical grid went down, and nobody was able or cared to fix an advertisement for a show that no longer ran for two singers who likely didn’t survive the invasion or the aftermath.

  The guards at the door, two women armed with AK-47s, nodded to her as she entered the casino. The old west decorations of Bill’s gaming floor were tempered by survival restocking, moving the defunct gambling apparatuses into backrooms to be disassembled for possible useful parts while concurrently clearing floor space for ammunition, weapons, and foodstuffs. By that point in the gang war, the Ravens controlled most of Vegas and had already restored much of the electrical grid, although not to its full-gaudy past, using the abundant solar panels and turbine fields popular in the Nevada desert. Some whispered of taking back the Hoover Dam, but that would be years in the making.

  At the time of the dream’s recollection, North Vegas was still a smoldering pit from where Nellis Air Force Base had been wiped off the map and Southeastern Vegas in the Henderson and Boulder City areas was still controlled by a conglomeration of biker gangs known as the Winged Cobras, a combination of the Hell’s Angels and another group Fiona guessed to have been snake oriented. The writing was plain on the wall for all to see; the Ravens had won the war for Vegas, collected the most stragglers from the military bases in the area, and would eventually rise to prominence with their chess set model of leadership and willingness to profit from human trafficking.

  The Red set still made their home in Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall while the Whites moved to the Bellagio across the street. The Black set, the true rulers of Las Vegas and the source of all stability with the Black Queen Ekaterina made their home in the black pyramid of the Luxor on the other end of the strip. The rumors were Ekaterina had brought the model of the Ravens’ leadership over from the Russian Mafia, and that her father had once been a crime boss in Moscow with plans to pass his empire on to her, but Fiona didn’t care much for the rumors. What Fiona knew about Ekaterina could fit comfortably in a thimble and that was how she wanted to keep it; the Raven Queen was strong, smart, ruthless, and ambitious—beyond those things, Fiona didn’t want to know what had gone into forging a person like Ekaterina.

  It wasn’t odd for Fiona to head to Carolyn’s room. As a Red Rook at the time, she was given ample access to the hierarchy, but her goal, her expressed purpose for being there, was one that could have potentially cost everyone involved a great deal. In the haze of her dream, Fiona couldn’t remember why this tryst was so dangerous, but thrilled at the risqué sensation restored by the memory. She knocked their secret knock on the penthouse door: twice in the center, once on the frame, twice more at hip level.

  Carolyn opened the door, grasped Fiona by the front of her t-shirt and pulled her inside. The Red Queen was beautiful, matronly, and fertile looking in all the best ways. She was what Fiona imagined a pornographic version of Mother Nature might look like, although she assumed the pornographic part existed strictly because Carolyn did mostly pornographic things when they were alone together. Carolyn pressed her sumptuous body against Fiona’s letting her feel the warm, soft curves, the excited heaving of her breasts as she breathed heavily with anticipation. How this idealized version of motherly and womanly had come to be the head of the chess set meant for war and blood, Fiona could never understand, but the incongruity of her position with her appearance hadn’t once prevented Carolyn from displaying dazzling competence as the Queen of Battle.

  Fiona kissed her, wrapping her hand through the thick braid at the back of her head to control the depth of the kiss. Carolyn responded by grasping Fiona’s ass roughly with both hands, pulling her in closer to grind lewdly against the gunfighter’s leather-clad legs. They were about the same height, although Fiona peaked at forty or fifty pounds lighter than Carolyn at her lithest, and the Red Queen used this advantage to full effect. Fiona was lifted through the kiss by the hands on her ass, and she allowed herself to pull up from the ground, wrapping her long legs comfortably around the shelf of Carolyn’s ample hips on the narrows before they taped into her slender waist. Fiona kept her upper body bent enough to hold the kiss while Carolyn walked her across the room to the bed, depositing her on the tangle of sheets and blankets in an unceremonious flop.

  Many of the other girls and even a few of the male soldiers collected by the Ravens viewed Carolyn as the great mother, the heart and soul of the organization, the maternal influence watching over them. This was made all the more real as Carolyn had a son, a stoic little boy named Frankie after the author of his mother’s favorite book, who all but worshipped the greatness of his mother, while coming to represent the power of the Red Queen to not only survive but effectively raise offspring in the aftermath of the invasion. But Fiona saw Carolyn in no such light as her own mother had long since soured her on the entire concept of what maternalism was. Instead, Fiona saw in her something greatly sexual and womanly, which were traits mostly ignored by the others. This ability to see her maternalism as inherently sexy endeared Fiona quickly to the Red Queen. Only one other, a fellow malcontent without a solid reference for mothers, saw things the same way as Fiona, but in the heat of the moment in the recalled dream, Fiona couldn’t bothered to even think of this other’s name.

  Standing above Fiona at the foot of the bed, Carolyn slipped her billowing blouse off over her head slowly, revealing her mountainous breasts held pertly in a satiny cream-colored bra. She had the type of breasts Fiona imagined would look grandiose regardless of the garment or position. Her skin, which had formerly been white with a dappling of freckles, had tanned to a deep bronze, as had most people’s out in the desert, leaving her with an exotic glow in juxtaposition to her bright orange hair. Fiona slid to the edge of the bed to sit with her legs spread around the standing Carolyn. She wrapped her arms around Carolyn’s hips, pulled her close, and kissed hotly across her soft stomach, up onto her breasts, burying her face in the warm luscious mounds. This was what Fiona remembered most about Carolyn and what made the dream such a heartbreaking reminder of something she’d lost and might never have again; the warmth and comfort she derived from pressing her cheeks into Carolyn’s chest was an act so pure and honest she always felt cleansed after doing so.

  Carolyn parted before Fiona was ready, lifted one of her legs to plant her foot on the outside of Fiona’s hip, and slowly pulled up the hem of her beige sun skirt. Fiona immediately shifted her focus to the curvaceous leg beside her, kissing along Carolyn’s inner knee, up her inner thigh, along the smoothest, softest skin as the leg’s width grew, until she could see, smell, and almost taste the bright red fire between Carolyn’s legs. Carolyn hated underwear, wore it only when absolutely necessary, and seemed to thrill at the ease of access it granted. Fiona pressed her face into the orange curls, seeking out the soft, wet folds of her lips just beneath. Carolyn’s strong fingers interlaced into Fiona’s hair, her hips rolled and writhed at the instant attention, and her breathing sped from anticipatory panting to eager gasping. Fiona licked, suckled, and tongued under the direction of Carolyn’s hands in her hair until her face glistened and shone with the dew of her lover’s pleasure. Carolyn’s orgasms were shallow, rapid things, like bunnies jumping across the surface of her skin, and could go on as long as Fiona could manage or Carolyn could stand. In this case, Fiona felt the dream diverge again from reality. Her younger self, in truth, had quit long before Carolyn had wished it, but in the dream, Fiona had pressed on until Carolyn could no longer endure the mounting, tingling pleasure. In both cases, Carolyn ended up thrown onto the bed, with Fiona crawling up her to share a kiss. Carolyn loved the taste of herself on Fiona’s lips, wrote poems about the shared intimacy of the act, and always demanded passionate making out after Fiona had gone down on her.

  Fiona obliged with a long, deep, adoring kiss, pressing her tongue and lips against Carolyn’s more with the goal of passing on the slippery wetness to her than an actual kiss. When Carolyn had tasted all the interior of Fiona’s mouth had to offer, she licked at her chin, nose, and cheeks to to
ngue off the rest.

  With their kiss shared, Carolyn laid back, her eyes shining with the afterglow of true satisfaction, her lips pink and wet from the aggressive kiss, and her skin flushed red across her cheeks and nose. Staring at the ceiling over Fiona’s right shoulder, she said the words Fiona had struggled for years to forget. “I love you in ways I could never love her.”

  Fiona awoke with an angry jolt, sitting straight up in bed. She was aroused by the dream and her heart was racing, but it was all crushed under the weight of what she’d finally remembered. She was the problem. Wherever she went, she was the problem.