The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  She was smarter than them though, and her drug trip from the night before had given her a deliciously devious plan to complete the job. She’d just have to dodge Fiona until it was done.

  The black, spandex cat suit had actually been a cat costume for Halloween at one point, which was precisely why Gieo still had a fluffy black tail following her around. She suspected the cat suit might be overkill considering the guards looking for her were likely night blind in addition to being mostly blind all the time, but it also didn’t have a lot, aside from the tail, that might get caught on wire traps, which she suspected would make up the majority of the House of Hawkins compound defenses. She’d stuffed enough cotton into the jug in her backpack to prevent it from sloshing, even at a dead run. As stealth went, she was pretty well equipped. Despite the fact that it was an insanely stereotypical thing for a cute Asian girl to do, Gieo put on the accompanying kitty-ear headband to match the rest of the suit. It’s not like anybody would see her if she did things right, and she liked wearing the ears, although she would never admit that to anyone out loud.

  For all the threats leveled against the Hawkins House cult, their primary defense appeared to be their overall creepiness; Gieo had studied them carefully and had found half a dozen ways into the compound without the slightest difficulty. She crept under the barbed wire fence on the eastern slope, using a couple snapped branches off a sagebrush bush to hold up the bottom wire. She proceeded at a slow, low to the ground crawl, keeping a careful ear and eye out for rattlesnakes. Instead, her hand struck something metal, partially buried in the dusty ground. Suspiciously, she brushed away some of the dirt to find a coyote trap. Rather than jamming a stick into it to disarm it, she carefully flipped the trap over to point the pressure plate toward the ground so the jaws would close wrong-side down if stepped on. Her slow crawl revealed three more traps on her path; she flipped these over as well.

  In the heart of the compound, she snuck between two scuttled school busses. Only a dozen or so paces in, something caught on the tips of her kitty ears, nearly pulling the headband off. She stopped, looked up, but couldn’t see anything. Reaching up, she felt around until she found a tightly strung strand of piano wire across the gap at the perfect height to clothesline/garrote a full grown man. She had to hand it to them, for crazy blind people, they sure had a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Skulking her way through the maze of vehicles being used as apartments, she found several more of the piano wires, including a few strung much lower intended to trip intruders. The neck-height wires weren’t a problem even if she had to run back the same way, but the trip wires needed to be dealt with. She hadn’t brought wire cutters, something she was quickly regretting, but she had brought glow-sticks. She cracked, shook, and placed one of the glowing green tubes at the mounting point of the wire, faintly illuminating the length of each trip-line.

  The vehicles turned into apartments gave way to open ground, a lot of open ground, at the center of the compound. She would have to cover sixty feet or so to reach the old Dodge acting as the mucky-muck’s personal methanol stash. She took several calming breaths and scanned the area for any movement that might indicate a guard. The waxing moon lit the compound just enough to give vague outlines of where people were. She waited for her gap and made a mad dash for the middle ring of the inner-sanctum. One ring of benches away from the target pickup, she skittered to a stop, seeing a seated old man on one of the old park benches lined up like church pews. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, she crouched as low to the ground as possible, and prayed he wouldn’t see her.

  The man cocked his head to her side, listening intently for the sounds she’d made when she’d slid to a stop. When no further noise followed, he glanced over to where she was crouched, his milky old eyes clearly unable to make out much in the low light.

  “Oh, good evening, Miss Kitty,” he said.

  Gieo’s heart leapt into her throat.

  “Are you out on your nightly hunt?” he asked.

  Gieo made her best ‘meow’ noise and began rubbing her side along the bench like a cat. The old man squinted to make out what she was doing, and seemed satisfied that the fuzzy black figure was close enough to cat size and shape.

  “I won’t frighten away your prey then,” the old man said. Under great protest from his arthritic joints, the old man managed to pull himself from the bench and tottered back up toward the main church, tapping with a knotted cane.

  Gieo struggled not to burst into nervous laughter. After regaining her composure, she skulked on hands and knees the rest of the way to the Dodge pickup, careful to still look like a cat to any mostly-blind passerby. She slipped easily under the propped up truck. Little remained of the inner-workings of the vehicle. A garden hose ran from the gas cap along where the pipe had rusted through, and into a hastily cut gap in the gas tank. Gieo carefully unzipped her backpack. The sound of the zipper was deafening in the silence of the compound. Once the bag was open, she waited with bated breath for any noise that might indicate she’d been heard. When she was certain she’d gone undetected, she slid the jug between the leaf-springs, unscrewed the cap, and slid the hose from the methanol-filled gas tank into the jug instead. With her work done, she carefully zipped up her backpack and slipped out from beneath the pickup on the opposite side from which she’d come.

  She turned to flee and immediately bumped right into a soft, warm wall. Rebounding back a little, she glanced up to what she’d run into, and ended up looking right into the face of Yahweh Hawkins himself.

  “Ay shibal!” she cursed in Korean.

  “Demon speech from a half-cat, half-woman succubus!” Hawkins shouted in alarm. Wild eyed with a matching wild, wiry gray beard and head of hair, he looked more like a garden variety homeless man than a high priest of a holy order, but Gieo knew, from watching the video feeds that he was revered to a godlike level within the cult. His startled utterance immediately jumped the entire compound to attention, and she heard the tapping of dozens canes closing in on her from all sides. The old cult patriarch lifted his hands to make a grab for her, which she easily ducked under. Slipping around behind him, she swung her foot up between his legs as hard as she could, feeling the satisfying thump of his testicles against the top of her shin. Yahweh Hawkins dropped like a groaning scarecrow cut from its posts.

  “Shibal nom, Geseki,” Gieo hissed at him. “Blinding children in the name of your made up god…you’re lucky I didn’t kill you like Zeke wanted.” With that, she ran. There were subtler, less testicle-crushing and obvious ways to implicate Zeke in what was about to happen to the cult, but she didn’t have time for any of those anymore, and there was a very slim chance, she hoped, that Hawkins might believe Zeke was summoning demons to attack him, which would be a fantastic and hilarious accusation for the despotic mayor to have to address.

  Gieo split between two guards, who barely saw her racing past, on her way through the gap between busses that she’d come through. They altered course and gave chase, but she was already down the corridor, leaping over the lighted trip-lines and passing beneath the neck-cutters. At the far end of the bus, she spotted a man’s shadow illuminated across the path she wanted to take through the overturned traps, waiting in ambush for her. She almost giggled at the blind-man’s blunder; just because he couldn’t see his own shadow didn’t mean she couldn’t. She ducked into a baseball slide at the end of the corridor, easily passing under a cane swung at head height. As she was scrambling to her feet on the other side, she heard something metallic snap closed and felt an enormous tugging weight on the back of her suit. She glanced back to find her fluffy kitty tail, dusty from the slide, caught in a smaller trap that she hadn’t overturned. She grabbed the tail and trap and yanked, pulling the mounting stake from the ground. Reasonably free, she resumed her run for the gap in the fence that she’d entered through, jangling the trap from her tail as she ran.

  She ducked under the barbed wire propped up by sticks and wriggled most of the way through before the tr
ap, still dangling from her tail, knocked out both the twigs, snapping the wire down on the backs of her thighs. She felt the barbs press against her skin, embedding themselves in the spandex, but not in her yet. She knew, if she struggled, she ran the risk of tetanus or worse, but the panic began to rise when she heard the tapping canes closing in on her. She tried to roll to her side, tried to restore the sticks holding up the wire, but to no avail. Failing that, she tried to pry the trap from her tail or break the tail off to extricate her from the trap, but the trap’s teeth had bitten firmly into the wire running down the center of the tail, making it no easier to remove than the barbwire. She’d nearly given up on any option other than blindly thrashing her way free when she heard Ramen’s whirring chopper blades.

  “She’s over here, tall boss,” she heard him call. His head lamps flashed over her in friendly yellow light, illuminating her prone form pinned beneath the fence.

  Before she could explain how happy she was to see him, the night exploded in thunder claps and muzzle flashes. Fiona stormed in behind Ramen, gun arm extended, firing the hand-cannon back into the compound. The massive slugs whirred three feet above Gieo’s head, sounding like angry hornets flying faster than the speed of sound. Screaming and bodies falling followed, but Gieo couldn’t get her head around far enough to see how many of the cultists Fiona had shot. The remaining cane-tapping guards fled back into the relative safety of the vehicle cluster.

  Ramen, using one of his omni-tool hands, quickly cut away both the barbed wire and the tail just above the trap, effectively freeing Gieo from the fence. Gieo scrambled to her feet and immediately ran to Fiona. She had intended on saying something witty, possibly flirty, and then kissing the lanky gunfighter, but she never got the chance.

  Fiona slid her pistol back in its holster before Gieo got to her. She grabbed the pilot by the arm and roughly shoved her in the direction of the road where Fiona’s car was still idling with the driver side door open. When Gieo was past her, Fiona gave the pilot a hard kick in the behind.

  “Get in the fucking car, reckless bitch,” Fiona growled.

  Chapter 7: Collared and collected-on.

  The drive back to town took a looping, crawling course around the outskirts, keeping the engine low enough not to be easily heard or seen, so as not to let anyone know a hunter was involved in the sabotage of the Hawkins House. Gieo could tell from the white knuckles of Fiona’s hand at the top of the steering wheel that she wasn’t happy.

  “Do you know what they would have done to you if they’d caught you?” Fiona finally spoke.

  “Rape, torture, blinding, attempted conversion to their wacky ways,” Gieo replied. “I knew the risks; I’m not stupid.”

  “Not stupid, but plenty reckless,” Fiona snarled. The car nosed its way back into town finally, stalking through the empty streets like a prowling jungle cat. “How could you just poison people like that?”

  “You don’t really believe I used the poison, do you?”

  Fiona looked over to Gieo for the first time since they’d left the compound. She could see true concern and hurt on the pilot’s face. “No, but that’ll piss off Zeke and make collecting on the bargain impossible.”

  “Not like I could collect anyway.” Gieo flopped back into the seat in a huff and stared out the window up into the night sky. “Apparently, I’m your property.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Rawlins.”

  “That asshole,” Fiona grumbled.

  “Asshole or not, is it true?”

  They pulled up in front of the saloon. Fiona took the car out gear and slowly wound down the engine. The hot metal of car ticked lightly as it cooled in the chilly desert night. They sat listening to the pings that interrupted the silence between them for a time before Fiona finally spoke. “In a sense, it is, but it’s not what I want or believe.”

  “Great,” Gieo grumbled. “So if I’m going to stay in this town, should I just wear a dog collar with your name on it to avoid confusion?”

  “We could get you a leash too,” Fiona chided. “It’ll at least keep you from running off to do dangerous things without backup.”

  “Fuck you.” Gieo made to open the door to escape the car, but the gunfighter grabbed her arm and pulled her back in.

  “I’m sorry,” Fiona said hastily. “I thought we were joking around.”

  Something strange and slightly unsettling occurred to Gieo in the moment after. It was a reprehensible thought on the surface, and one her pride immediately wanted to reject, but the taboo, twisted nature of it appealed to her on a sexual level in something of an upsetting way, while the practicality of it would solve a lot of the problems she’d created that night by not actually honoring the deal.

  “Actually, that’s a good idea,” she said.

  Fiona released Gieo’s arm and gave her a perplexed look. “Wait…what is?”

  “A leash and a collar, especially in public.”

  “Is this another sexual control thing?”

  “No,” Gieo lied. She knew it was a lie, but it was one she wanted to tell herself as well, at least, for the moment. The thought of being collared and led about on a leash by Fiona disgusted and thrilled her in confusing ways she wasn’t remotely ready to discuss. “It’ll show you’ve taken control of your property. Once the Hawkins House has their inevitable freak out and blames Zeke, it’ll look like this was your plan all along.”

  Fiona had to admit, if people thought Gieo could do whatever she wanted, it would make them both vulnerable; it was a clever ruse, and one that would solve a lot of problems, but certainly not a serious suggestion Fiona could have put forth. “What did you do tonight? Ramen only told me you had a clever crab plan.”

  Gieo laughed. “I think I was still a little high when I told him. Anyway, I left Yahweh Hawkins with sore testicles and a distinct impression Zeke was summoning cat demons to fuck with him.”

  “But what about the poison?”

  “Come up to the roof tomorrow and you can watch.”

  “Are you going to come to bed tonight?” Fiona asked in a small, nervous voice, so unlike the steely gunfighter tone she used in public.

  “I still have some things I need to finish,” Gieo replied. “I’ll see you in the morning though.” She leaned across the center console and kissed Fiona gently on the lips. “Thank you, yet again, for the timely rescue.”

  “Just my luck,” Fiona whispered into the kiss. “The first woman I meet that I’m afraid to lose and she’s reckless and crazy. This isn’t doing my fear of abandonment issues any favors.”

  Gieo found her fingers playing with the collar of Fiona’s denim jacket of their own volition. “I’m not going anywhere,” Gieo said, although she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it. “Plus, soon you’ll be able to find me at the end of a leash.” She’d intended it as a joke, but it passed her lips sounding earnest; moreover, her body reacted lustily to both the words she spoke and the mental picture they created. Gieo practically leapt from the car and ran for the front of the saloon, hoping Fiona didn’t notice her nipples suddenly jumping to attention through the black, spandex cat suit.

  The tent, sleeping bag, and hammock, along with the lack of peyote in her system, made sleeping on the roof almost a fun little excursion. Ramen, who had found his own way home after the debacle, awoke with the sunrise and decided to wake Gieo at the same time. She owed him for the heroic part he’d played in her rescue, and so didn’t hold a grudge for waking her before her usual 9 AM start time.

  “That was quite the night, eh, boss?” Ramen added a few excited clicks from his rotors to punctuate the comment.

  “Exciting to say the least, but it’s a shame Fiona had to shoot a few cultists in the process; it would have gone over a whole lot more smoothly without a body count for them to parade around.” Gieo rifled half-heartedly through the crates of her acquired goods with her left hand while sipping her morning tea with her right. Things were organized for usefulness, which didn’t have a filing
for leash and collar.

  “Oh, she didn’t shoot them,” Ramen corrected her. “She fired above them. They screamed because they couldn’t see her. And then they dove onto the ground and covered their heads. I knew she was going to do it and the gun still scared me; I can’t imagine what the mostly-blind weirdos must have thought.”