The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Even with the massive shocks she’d fitted to the bike’s frame, the constant vibrations of the engine and the road combined with the motorcycle’s impressive girth to set an ache to her hips and thighs, along with a numb behind. The crumbled remains of Deming, already washed away by the desert and neglect, left little hint of how to get to New Mexico 26. Gieo slowed the bike, against its protests, and wound her way through the ghostly streets until she finally found the general direction of northeast. The empty buildings, abandoned houses, and sandblasted remains of cars were chilling up close, and made her nervous wondering if one of the countless broken windows might hold a sniper waiting for just such an opportunity. Piloting across the desert was easier, and less lonely with Ramen in accompaniment; driving across the barren landscape was unnerving and far scarier than the prospect of having her airship shot out from underneath her.

  Deming passed without incident though and she found what she believed, by compass navigation, to be NM 26. The road itself was difficult to discern from the surrounding desert, which had crept across the asphalt to reclaim the land. In more than a few stretches the only hint she had that she was even on the right track was the narrow corridor where sagebrush wasn’t growing and the occasional milepost marker. On the open road, she found the motorcycle’s engine, almost entirely air cooled, required a fairly high speed to keep from overheating. Her slowed search through Deming had apparently come dangerously close to swamping the bike. She had another change of highway to do at Hatch, and she wasn’t eager to find out if her motorcycle was going to heat spike if she couldn’t find her way to Interstate 25 in a timely fashion.

  Hatch, which should have held the same nothingness of Deming, not only wasn’t in ruins it was actually thriving to some degree. Plants flourished, trees provided shade, the roads were maintained, and people gawked at Gieo as she slowed her bike to pass through. A few of the Hatchians even waved. Aside from her motorcycle, the rest of the town appeared to be functioning just fine with horse traffic, even forcing her to dodge around a few buggies in the road. She desperately wanted to stop and see how they had managed to exist in the desert, but couldn’t risk overheating her bike only to find out they weren’t as friendly as the town made appearances to be.

  After crossing a couple bridges over a few dirty canals, which explained the town’s ability to flourish, Gieo noticed her motorcycle was beginning to struggle with overheating. A slow drain of water on the system exited via steam runoff valves into cooling coils which would eventually require time to let the steam condense back into water, which could take hours in the desert heat, or she could refill from the water supply she carried with her. If she was being honest with herself, the bike wasn’t the only thing getting too hot and needing a drink.

  Once on Interstate 25, the bike calmed a bit, slowly dropping off its temperature as the constant flow of air let the massive engine breathe easier. There was a reservoir nearby, although Gieo hadn’t the faintest notion of how she might get down to it, or if it indeed had any water left. The other option was to continue on to Truth or Consequences and see if they had water and a shady place to rest. As far as symbolic destinations went, she thought Truth or Consequences was about as perfect of a location as there could be. She’d told the truth to Fiona and had no idea how dire the consequences were going to be, but, like the town, she decided she may as well roll the dice and see.

  By the time she reached Truth or Consequences she was starving, boiling in the saddle, and fairly certain her legs, hips, and ass would never again know full sensation. The city itself, which stood somewhere between Deming and Hatch in condition, contained a few scarecrows of people far more afraid of the sound of the Slark engine in her bike than she was of them. She was clearly human, but none of the people in the decrepit buildings seemed to want to know anything else about her. She slowed briefly, enough to get her bearings, and then pushed the bike, which by that point was bellowing steam and making awful noises, toward the Elephant Butte reservoir. The weather-beaten signs guided her in reasonably short order to the state park landing. Water was harder to find with the dam effectively reduced to rubble by who knows what. Gieo brought the bike to a stop beneath a massive picnic table enclosure that had somehow survived the years. The water would be a short walk over open enough ground for her to see back up to her bike if necessary.

  Lowering the bike’s pod legs to hold it in place required manual cranking as not enough water remained in the system to even run the hydraulics. Out of the saddle, everything in her body screamed at the change of position. Her lower back ached, her legs felt like jelly, and her butt was numb beyond anything she could have imagined. She unhooked the two brass reservoirs on the sides of the bike and began her slow trek down to the water. Without a functional dam to hold the reservoir, much of the lake had leaked out, leaving her to walk a fair distance over sun-baked lakebed before finally reaching the water. Along the way she passed the bleached remains of trees, rocks, and even giant skeletons of great catfish two or three feet in length, picked clean by scavengers and left to turn to dust in the desert sun. Gieo peeled off her helmet, scarf, goggles, and boots to stand with her feet in the cool water, leaning down occasionally to splash handfuls of the lake over her head, face, and neck. The afternoon sun caught on the water’s surface, creating shimmering patterns over the bluer than blue lake.

  When she’d brought her internal temperature down enough for comfort, she shielded her eyes from the sun to gaze out over the beauty of the lake, not natural specifically considering it was a man-made reservoir, but natural enough. She felt like a pioneer or explorer, two feelings she’d never considered the value of but suddenly really enjoyed. If she had one wish, it would be that Fiona could share the feelings with her. Of course, she would need two wishes to transport Fiona there and also grant her forgiveness.

  Gieo settled her goggles back over her eyes, slung her helmet and scarf over one shoulder and set to refilling the bike’s water tanks. The great brass canisters were ludicrously heavy when filled, and Gieo found the hike back up the hill a good deal harder than the one down. To add to the difficulty, the numbness that had gripped her lower body retreated like the waters of the lake, only to leave her with profoundly inflamed muscles not used to the type or vigor of the exercise of riding such a massive motorcycle over such long distances. Nearly to the bike, with most of her cooling-off work entirely undone by the hike back out of the lakebed, she spotted movement under the awning. She dropped the canisters beneath a hickory tree without a second thought and slid the Winchester from her back.

  Her heart thundered in her ears with every step as she crept up toward the awning. She levered a shell into the chamber with slow, deliberate movements as not to be heard, and made a wide arc around the shaded area to flank whatever was investigating her bike. Deer, she prayed for it to be deer, or maybe a coyote, or even a feral dog. Or if it had to be humanoid, let it be a Slark, she could shoot a Slark. Her heart sank when she stepped onto the cement area holding the two dozen picnic tables. It was a human. A man to be specific or, at least, what was left of one. His tattered rags and jumbled collection of worn containers like fanny-packs and makeshift satchels, spoke of a scavenger’s life on the edge of ruin. Gieo stepped from the cover of the picnic tables and held the rifle out not in a threatening manner, but sideways to show she didn’t have intention of shooting him.

  “Hello there,” Gieo said.

  The man leapt nearly out of his skin, and more than clear of the bike. The sharp, wild look to his eyes told her he wasn’t a methanol drinker, but nor was he in possession of a complete deck of mental cards. He backed off, mumbling under his breath, words meant only for himself, at a pace Gieo couldn’t have kept up with even if he spoke loud enough and directly to her.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Gieo said, “but I can’t let you strip my bike either.” She dropped her voice to the most soothing tone she could manage. Noting, with some surprise, that she sounded a little like a TV anchor when
she tried to be calming.

  The man showed no outward understanding of what she was saying; his conversation with himself completely engrossed him. He was backing away as she slowly walked forward, and his posture didn’t seem particularly threatening. He walked with something of a limp in his right leg, and repeatedly brought withered, leathery hands up to his scraggly beard to pick at something she couldn’t quite make out. As she got a better look at him, she realized he was a hair above a skeleton in girth, possibly thirty or seventy years old from how sun-beaten and hard time had been on him. More than anything she just wanted to help him, feed him, give him water, or something reasonable to wear. She’d never seen anyone so downtrodden and frayed; it all cut right to her nurturing, altruistic instincts and triggered them all.

  “What’s your name?” Gieo asked. “Do you have a name? Mine’s Gieo.”

  The slow walking and talking act brought her to within reach of her bike and put him off the edge of the picnic table area, standing just inside the shadow cast by the awning in the late afternoon sun. His conversation with himself continued, unabated by anything she said, without the slightest sign of becoming intelligible.

  “Are you hungry? Thirsty? I have some food with me if you’d like,” Gieo said.

  The man’s conversation with himself came to an abrupt end, and his hands, the gnarled, skeletal claws that they were, shot down to one of his many belts, and quickly drew a battered old 9 mm pistol. She swung the rifle out of the non-threatening pose and brought it to her shoulder. Every tendon in the man’s gun arm, visible beneath his overly tanned skin, tensed to pull the trigger. The world slowed, Gieo fired first, the rifle bucked in her arms, and a modest wound opened on the right side of the man’s chest with a spray of blood and gore blasting out the back across the hardscrabble ground behind. He crumpled like so much old newspaper, never dropping his gun, but never firing it either.

  Gieo was practically panting in the brief aftermath. A few birds, flushed by the sound of rifle fire, scattered from the tree she’d dropped the canisters under. She flicked the lever action and slowly crept between the remains of picnic tables to find the downed man. His feet came into view first, still and dirty, then his skinny legs clothed only in rags, then his stomach and chest, working furiously at shallow, agonizing breaths. He was talking to himself again, although much slower now, but still unintelligible, struggling to form the words amidst his strained breathing. Before she could even reach him, his shallow, labored breathing came to a slow, whimpering end with a frothy bubbling of blood exiting the hole in his chest.

  Gieo’s trembling hands set aside the rifle, leaning it against the post of the awning. She sat down hard on the edge of the cement, gripped her knees to her chest, and cried. A strange feeling, something long forgotten and buried, came rushing back. It contained guilt, which made sense, and of course shame, which was appropriate, but also something else, something she’d thought she would never feel again after feeling it her first time. She was fifteen when she’d experienced it, with a boy, the only boy she’d ever been with, at aerospace camp, when she was still trying desperately to prove to herself and everyone else that she wasn’t gay—she’d lost her virginity to him. His name was Daniel Bae, and he too had been trying to prove he wasn’t gay. In the embarrassing, painful, and humiliating act between them, they both managed to verify to themselves and each other, unequivocally, that they were both indeed homosexual. The loss of her virginity and its accompanying innocence was a horrible, aching loss for a fifteen-year-old girl, and she’d only consoled herself in her purity’s passing with the firm understanding that she would never have to experience it again.

  Staring at the lifeless body of the man she’d shot, the loss of an innocence she didn’t even know she had crushed her anew.

  The foolish, impetuous, and scientifically motivated part of her brain demanded that she inspect the man’s weapon to prove to herself that it was either him or her, that necessity, like in that dormitory room with Daniel Bae, had forced her actions. She pried the weapon from the man’s limp hand only to find the gun was all but fused together from time, grit, and neglect. She couldn’t force the slide back or even pull the rusted clip out, never mind the fact that the trigger had broken off at some point. He could have no more shot her with his extended finger than that gun. Like before, when she felt forced into unbidden action, she’d made a mistake and lost her innocence to yet another man, but this one wouldn’t be better off for the discovery.

  Part of her wanted to know who he was. Part of her wanted to give him a proper burial. Part of her wanted to shrug it off as an aspect of survival in the new world as so many others around her seemed able to do. But these parts were not to be listened to. She dropped the pistol next to the body. She slipped her rifle into its holster along her back; it wasn’t Danny’s anymore—he was dead and she’d killed with it. That rifle belonged to her as much as she belonged to it. With the refilled tanks refitted to the bike, she left the reservoir in her rearview mirror, knowing she left a part of herself there when she did.

  Chapter 20: Yahweh sightings and things to come.

  Fiona didn’t need to be told what she was looking at. At the edge of Drexel Heights, in what used to be the collection of single-story buildings and mobile homes of Mission Valley at the southern end of Tucson, the methanol drinking cult of the Hawkins House had made its new home. Through the scope of the high-powered hunting rifle borrowed from one of her riders, she estimated their numbers to still be close to a hundred. It was difficult to make out from the distance, but she suspected she saw Yahweh walking among them.

  “What do you want to do?” Claudia asked.

  Fiona handed back her Marlin 270. Claudia was petite, roughly the size and dimensions of Gieo, but French-Canadian to the very core with big, round, blue eyes, pale skin, and naturally curly black hair held back in a ponytail. As adorable as she was singing French love ballads on stage during burlesque shows, Fiona knew her to be a crack shot with the black-stock Marlin and a talented tracker of the open desert. As a number two for her patrols, Fiona felt fortunate to have Claudia.

  “I can’t justify the losses we might take or the bullets we’d burn wiping them out,” Fiona said.

  “They’re in our way, no?” Claudia shouldered the rifle and looked down the low bluff across the sage and Joshua trees as though she were plotting attack patterns and cover.

  “They are, but they’re not dangerous this far from Tombstone and they’re not going anywhere.” Fiona slid back down the other side of the bluff to where the rest of her riders waited in a holding pattern. Claudia reluctantly followed. “Carolyn is bringing in two thousand army regulars. If these cultists need to be moved, the Red Queen will move them. It’s enough right now to know where and how many there are.”

  “Your patience surprises me, Commander,” Claudia said with a coquettish smirk. She adjusted her black, CSOR beret with the maple leaf and dagger insignia. “From what I had heard of you, restraint was not your forte.”

  Fiona had her doubts about Claudia actually being a former Canadian Special Operations Regiment commando, but there was little doubt she knew enough about explosives and small arms to fake it. The beret fit her perfectly too, which lent some credibility to the story. She was right about Fiona’s restraint though—it wasn’t something she’d shown in the past.

  “From what I heard, Canada didn’t allow women in combat,” Fiona replied, bringing a light chuckle from the riders near enough to overhear the jibe.

  “Perhaps not, but this has been remedied since, no?” Claudia slung her rifle over her shoulder and vaulted into the saddle of her horse like a sprightly pixie sniper. “If you must know, I am the daughter of a commando.”

  “Your father is still alive then?”

  “This I cannot say, but I would be surprised to find he is not. What of your own father? Did he die in the invasion of Los Angeles as so many did?”

  “I sure hope so,” Fiona said, bringing another, more
nervous chuckle from her gathered riders.

  “Then for your sake, I hope he did,” Claudia said with a little smile and a wink. “It would seem we have other patrol concerns more pressing at the moment, Commander.” She nodded to a dust trail across the open desert to the south.

  Fiona led her column out in that direction, over a second rise, close enough for Claudia to get a good look at what was kicking up the desert floor. Sighted in through her scope, Claudia let out a low whistle. “You will call me a liar when I tell you what I see,” Claudia said. “A Slark patrol is chasing two wagons driven by methanol drinkers.”