The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (11 page)

“Okay, right, good idea,” Fiona said, getting
a little enthusiasm off of Gieo’s infectious mood.

Gieo walked a few paces behind Fiona, with
plenty of slack in the leash, as they made their way down into the
saloon, through the main hall where all eyes were on them, and then
out onto the thoroughfare. Gieo, who had planned on every level to
act the subservient piece of property, actually strutted, head held
high, almost preening with pride in being collared by Fiona. This
seemed to confuse the other hunters more than anything; they
watched the couple with slack jaws and some, quite-literally
scratched their heads.

Out on the street in front of Zeke’s
community center, Fiona let out a sharp whistle. Slow, as if the
morning held twice as many hours, Zeke ambled out of the dark
interior to stand on the balcony. He glanced down to the duo with a
little snort of amusement. Rawlins emerged from the front door of
the building, directly beneath Zeke, leaning heavily against the
door frame with a contemptuous glare leveled at Gieo and the leash.
His angry eyes, tantrum-red face, and twitching jaw muscles were
irrelevant to her—they both knew their position in relation to
Fiona, and she knew he wished he was in her place, even if it meant
being at the end of a leash.

“They’re bugging out over there, but I don’t
see any of them dropping,” Zeke growled. “The job was to thin the
heard, not stir it up.”

“The job was to spike their supply,” Fiona
corrected him, “and that’s been done.”

“We’ll see if something comes of it.” Zeke
shrugged and snorted. “You’re keeping your pet on a leash now?”

“Your houseboy mentioned there might be some
question as to who she belongs to,” Fiona said. “I didn’t want to
leave you shorthanded, but I also didn’t want to leave any doubt in
his mind.”

Zeke stomped twice on the wooden slats of the
balcony, dropping a shower of dust and sand across Rawlins. “You
clear, down there?”

“Crystal, sir,” Rawlins growled through
clenched teeth.

“That’s settled,” Zeke grunted. He shifted
his posture to lean his impressive bulk against the railing, which
strained to contain him on the balcony. “Matter of the job is still
on the table though. I can’t pay you full price for a job
half-done, but I don’t expect there’d be much point in having you
try the same trick twice. No cuts and half a week’s ration of
fuel.”

“Two weeks,” Fiona said, “and my pet will
debrief your secretary on the defenses she saw inside the
compound.”

“Done. Good doing business with you, Red.”
Zeke turned to head back into the building, barking back over his
shoulder as he ambled inside, “Rawlins, get your ass over to the
saloon this evening with a notepad to take down what the pilot
saw.”

Fiona’s and Gieo’s eyes both tracked down to
Rawlins; they both gave him a haughty smirk before turning on their
heels to head back into the saloon. Gieo walked a little closer to
Fiona on the way up the steps, close enough to pass a whisper
between them. Her heart had leapt into her throat at being called
‘pet’, and the act of being led around by the willowy gunfighter
with the perfect ass had set a fire between her legs that she had
to have an answer for.

“Take me to your room,” Gieo whispered.

“I’m holding the leash here,” Fiona replied,
her eyes never wavering from straight ahead. “I heard you screaming
my name the other night.” Gieo’s cheeks flashed bright red in
embarrassment. She fell back a few more paces, almost to the end of
her slack. Fiona gave a light tug on the leash to pull her back in
step. “It’s not nice to have that much fun thinking about a person
without inviting them to join.”

Gieo could have died of embarrassment at that
moment. She hadn’t realized she was screaming, let alone anything
as specific as Fiona’s name. The crushingly mortified feeling
lifted when Fiona turned left at the top of the stairs and led Gieo
toward the bedroom.

Chapter 8:
Cultists gone wild.

They were barely
in the room with the door closed behind Gieo when Fiona walked her
way up the leash, hand over hand, pulling Gieo in close. Her
fingers made for the buckle on the collar, but Gieo shook her head.
“Leave it on,” she whispered.

Fiona moved on quickly from the instruction
to let the collar alone, opting to kiss Gieo with a fierce
intensity that made the pilot’s knees weak. They staggered across
the floor, refusing to break the kiss, groping each other with
fumbling hands made clumsy by pent-up desire. Gieo finally got to
grasp, fondle, and squeeze Fiona’s behind in the tight jeans,
reveling in the steely muscle of the thin-framed gunfighter. Fiona
sat on the edge of the bed and dropped the handle loop of the leash
over one of the posts on the footboard to get it out of the way.
Gieo responded by flicking Fiona’s hat off her head; she ran her
fingers through the gunfighter’s bright red hair, ruffling it out
of the tamped down shape the hat had left.

Fiona’s hands found their way up the back of
Gieo’s skirt, searching through the ruffles for the pilot’s slender
legs. Gieo batted away Fiona’s hands and pushed the gunfighter back
onto the bed. She hopped onto Fiona’s waist, straddling her
awkwardly at the edge. The pilot’s talented fingers snaked their
way up the bottom of Fiona’s shirt, tickling her abs, intent on
finally undressing the gunfighter.

A peculiar sound, one Gieo hadn’t heard in
ages, and didn’t really recognize at first, echoed across the town.
The rhythmic thrumming noise increased in intensity until it
captured Fiona’s attention. The gunfighter’s eyes went wide, and
she struggled to extricate herself from the many ruffled folds of
Gieo’s skirt. When Gieo finally placed the noise as a didgeridoo,
she couldn’t for the life of her think of a reason why someone
would be playing one of the strange aboriginal instruments, or why
Fiona would care so much.

Fiona raced to the window, took once glance
down at the street, and sprinted for the door. Gieo grabbed the
gunfighter’s hat and started to follow before the leash, still
attached to the footboard, yanked her back. She pulled the end of
the leash free from the post and gave chase. The gunfighter, with
her head start and long-legged strides, was already down the stairs
and at the door of the saloon, gun in hand, sunglasses slipped on
to conceal her eyes.

“You’re awful far from home, Bill,” Zeke
bellowed from his perch across the street. He’d always used Yahweh
Hawkins’s given name, although, to Fiona’s knowledge, he was the
only one who did, and she had no idea how he knew it.

The didgeridoo never ceased playing, but was
soon drowned out by several hunters’ vehicles returning from all
directions. When Gieo finally caught up to Fiona, she found herself
pushed back away from the door by Fiona’s free hand, barely able to
see out the front doors of the saloon to the street beyond where it
looked as though the entire Hawkins House cult had gathered to
speak with Zeke.

“This town’s wickedness has spilled over onto
the sacrosanct ground of our sanctuary,” Yahweh shouted back.
“Demons have visited us in the night, assaulting the faithful and
implicating you. The Lord our Father demands the blood of the
she-devils who have vexed Tombstone for far too long. You will give
them to us or feel the Lord’s holy wrath.”

“You’ll get nothing and like it,” Zeke
bellowed. “I never took orders from any man and I’m not about to
start with some blind old Jesus freak. Clear the street or I’ll
have my hunters clear it for you.”

Fiona glanced around to the numbers of the
returned hunters, judged the situation to have shifted toward
favorable, and stepped through the saloon doors to stand on the
plank sidewalk in front. She kicked the nearest cultist off the
edge of the sidewalk with a cowboy boot between the shoulder
blades. The wiry man she’d punted landed face-first in the dusty
street with an audible grunt. The kicked man’s two mates rushed
Fiona. The first received a backhand from the long, heavy barrel of
her Colt Anaconda, and the second stopped short when the same
barrel was brought into pointed contact with the center of his
forehead. Even the mostly blind man could see the massive blast
door of the .44 magnum at point blank range; he held his hands up
in surrender and backed away. Other hunters crept into position on
rooftops and doorways around the gathered cultists, no less violent
in their shepherding of the blind people into a single clump.

“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.