The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

by Cassandra Duffy

  Taking a deep, calming breath, she rushed out to her left, finding the next cover on the run. She slid in behind a large crate of what looked to be metal bric-a-brac. Again, bullets pelted the salvaged Slark technology harmlessly. A few shots from the ridge found their mark on the freshly exposed targets. The cultists, aggravated to stupidity by the snipers on the ridge, foolishly turned their attention to firing wildly into the waning sun. Fiona spun out from the left side of her new cover, walked with her gun-hand extended, sighting down the length of her arm as each shot presented itself. From the perfect flanking position, she was able to roll up their line, felling five more before her gun clicked empty and the cultists swung their attention back to her. She ducked around the edge of the crawler’s leading leg as the bullets whirred past her on either side.

  Reloading the second time was far more difficult than the first as the gun was heating up under constant use and her fingers were growing tingly from the adrenaline of combat. She completed the task in what felt like an eternity, but was likely less than thirty seconds. Fire from the ridge hadn’t remotely run out of targets when she resumed her onslaught. Two cultists burst from around the leading edge of the crawler in the vein hope of catching her off guard. She shot both down mid-stride with the second in line gripping the trigger of his assault rifle to spray bullets across the ground as he stumbled through his final few steps.

  If what they were doing could be called a plan, it relied entirely on the cultists remaining on the defensive. Fiona readied herself to make another rush, but emerged from her cover into the teeth of a counterattack from the cultists. She fired instinctively, killing the first two in line. The third of a dozen or more making a charge on her position had a pistol. She heard the pops, felt the agonizingly sharp stabs of bullets biting into the flesh of her right thigh. A shot from the ridge cut her attacker down, but the damage had been done. She stumbled, bouncing off the side of the Slark crawler. She tried to cover her own retreat, but the pain and shock of being shot staggered her aim and her remaining two shots sailed off into the open desert to land miles from their intended targets. She was clicking on empty chambers when she managed to drag herself into the alcove created by the crawler leg’s mechanisms.

  She dropped her steaming gun into the collected silt to clutch at her wounded leg with both hands. When the clutching failed and she pulled back only bloody palms from the free-flowing wounds, she changed her tactic to a tourniquet hastily constructed from the leather strap of her satchel. Tightening the strap carried with it an agonizing ache almost on par with the original gunshot wounds, but stemmed the flow. She retrieved her gun from where she’d carelessly tossed it, blowing the silt out of the barrel with quaking lips. Reloading this time was a colossal task with trembling fingers made slick from the blood smeared across them.

  Rearmed, she steeled herself for the monumental pain awaiting her when she tried to regain her feet. As prepared as she thought she’d made herself, getting up onto her good leg nearly threw her back to the ground. Standing on her remaining shaky leg, she felt like throwing up from the pain. Without the aid of adrenaline and endorphins, she knew she would have ended up right back on the ground; even still, her stance was a tenuous position.

  The cultists pressed their advantage, rushing to the edge of the gap when they had regrouped enough for another charge. Fiona felled the first, winged the second only to have him finished off by a blast from the ridge. The third managed to get off a few wild shots before being taken down by a hale of bullets from Fiona and the snipers. Bullets bounced around inside the narrow metal alcove, nipping twice at the free edges of Fiona’s denim jacket, but never finding her flesh. No answer she’d managed to pull from Hawkins was worth the shit-storm she’d managed to kick up in the aftermath; regretting her impetuous stupidity was something she’d once excelled at, but increasingly loathed.

  She hobbled for the entrance knowing full-well she was a dead woman if she remained trapped in the single-entrance alcove. She burst, or at least as much of a burst as she could manage on her gimpy leg, from the alcove with her gun blazing. Adrenaline shot through her with the first bullets biting at the sand around her feet. She found targets, fired, missed some, hit others, and continued limping on throughout. She was almost back to the buried crawler leg when she felt something wet, hard, and hot thump her on the left shoulder. She spun under the impact and went down on her right side. Her gun tumbled from her hand, lost in the effort to catch herself. It took a moment to realize from the tatters of her jacket and shirt what had happened. She’d taken a reasonably close blast of birdshot on her left side. If the fool had bothered to load his shotgun with any grade higher, he likely would have dissolved her from the waist up. As it was, the pellets meant to fell small game birds hurt like hell, but were all likely reasonably close to the surface.

  Fiona crawled to cover using her right arm and left leg, leaving her wounded right leg to drag behind her while clutching her numb left arm against her chest. Sniper fire continued from the ridge, but accompanying it was the sound of hoof beats thundering across the shale with the clatter of carbines. The remaining cultists, of which there were very few, scattered only to be cut down by the three riders.

  The world began to go fuzzy around the edges. She was fairly certain Cork had taken up her defense. She heard him say her name. She felt the empty shells from his MP-5 falling on her like rain. The world refused to come back into focus and she fell into darkness against her will.

  Gieo passed through Albuquerque with only a pause for lunch and a short meeting with Alondra. Knowing the roads she would travel and the capacity of the bike, she had little doubt she could make the trip in one day if she kept her speed up. She asked Alondra to show the pilots from Colorado every courtesy as pilots of the Ravens and military men when they passed through. Alondra assured her it would be done. As a parting comment, Gieo mentioned the possibility of moving the fledgling air force to Albuquerque in the not too distant future, but Alondra said it was far likelier they would find themselves in Las Vegas. The cryptic statement, spoken without leaving the door open for further inquiry, left Gieo with questions Veronica likely wouldn’t answer, but Fiona might if they were on speaking terms upon her return.

  Passing Truth and Consequences took everything in her not to turn off to drive down to the reservoir. She wanted to know if the body was still there, reasoned she might have enough time to bury him properly, or at the very least investigate further to find out who the man might have been. Her handlebars never wavered as she rocketed past the ruins of the town. The scavengers would have had their way with him by then and even if they hadn’t she had no tools to dig with nor did she think it truly mattered who he was. Knowing and burying wouldn’t bring anyone peace and so she rode.

  The day wore on and her body rebelled against the riding. She stopped but once to refill the tanks from the jugs she brought with her and only when the bike was already at its coolest, cutting the rest time down. The desert sunset painted the sky pink and gold as the day slipped away into dusk. Bats, eager to feed on the nightly insects, took flight even before the red orb of the sun had fully passed beneath the horizon in the west. Gieo pulled into Tombstone with the lone goal of lying down for several hours with none of her limbs anywhere near each other.

  The town was a kicked hornet’s nest with none of the hoopla intended for her return. The scout from one of Fiona’s rides—Gieo recognized her as Claudia—spoke animatedly to Veronica, who looked like the spigot for her blood had been left to drain. Gieo lowered the pod on her bike in the middle of the street near the makeshift airfield in the park, and nudged her way through the crowd to where Veronica was standing. From the murmurs among the gathered Ravens, Gieo pieced together that Fiona had found the remains of the Hawkins House along with a newly discovered giant Slark crawler. As Gieo pushed her way into the inner circles, the stories about Fiona’s condition became graver.

  “Cork says she’s as stable as he can make her but that she shoul
dn’t be moved by horse,” Claudia was finishing her report to Veronica when Gieo came within earshot. “If she’d just told us what she was planning we could have…”

  “You couldn’t have done anything differently and she couldn’t have told you what she herself didn’t know,” Veronica cut her off. “She probably didn’t even know what she was going to do until after she’d done it.”

  “She calls them chaos tics,” Gieo said, adding the only piece of information she had to the conversation. “What happened?”

  “She’s been shot,” Veronica said. “We’re preparing a truck to go get her with the Slark fuel we have left. Hopefully they can refuel at the crawler when they…”

  “Forget that.” Gieo was already past Veronica and on her way into the makeshift airfield. The smallest of the dirigibles was functional for flight but still unarmed. “Ramen!” she shouted. The mechanical fluttered off the saloon roof and whirred down to her side. “Get the Little Monster ready to fly.”

  “You don’t even know where she is,” Veronica said, following to protest.

  “That’s why I’m taking her with me.” Gieo jerked her thumb in Claudia’s direction. “We can be there and back before you even get a truck to her.”

  “How many can you take with you?” Veronica asked.

  “What? I don’t know, ten maybe, but we need the room to carry her back.” Gieo walked briskly around the airship stoking the furnace while Ramen filled the water and fuel ports.

  “You’re not bringing them back,” Veronica said. “They’ll stay behind to secure the wreck site for our use until we can get a salvage team out to it.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Gieo said. “Petites only and no heavy weapons or machinery though. We need to save on weight for fuel and speed.”

  Veronica turned to organize her team as quickly as possible. Gieo nearly collided with Claudia when she made to remove several of the armor plates from the starboard side.

  “I am sorry,” Claudia said. “I tried to protect her.”

  It seemed a strange concept to Gieo that Fiona might need protection, yet not strange in the slightest that Fiona would make it obscenely difficult for someone to do so; the incongruity was at once comfortingly familiar and rather depressing.

  “Veronica is probably right,” Gieo said. “If she wanted to be protected, she wouldn’t have gone out of her way to make it difficult. Apologize by helping me get her back.”

  “Then we will fly to her like avenging angels!” Claudia said with infectious glee.

  Gieo replied with a weak smile before returning to the armor plating. She couldn’t be sure if she’d need it or not. She vaguely knew where the antiaircraft defenses were, but didn’t know where she was going yet. Regardless of the destination, the cargo was worth the attempt and she wouldn’t bother slowing enough to offer a good target until she was safely back in Tombstone with Fiona.

  Chapter 24: The first flight of length with a landing.

  Hooked into the Little Monster as it steamed across the twilight of the desert sky, Gieo couldn’t bring herself to tell the eleven passengers that she hadn’t really ever landed an airship after a lengthy flight. If there was good news in that dire track-record, it was the fact that she had walked away from every crash landing thus far.

  Claudia’s directions were toward the south, which was another mixed bag. Gieo didn’t really know if the Slark had antiaircraft batteries in Old Mexico, but she also didn’t think they would after comparing her own map to the one Veronica was using. It made sense that the defensive line was to the west as it appeared to be the direction of the border between humanity and Slark.

  Without weapons or armor, the Little Monster made good time. Pre-invasion blimps had a top speed of around fifty miles per-hour; Gieo’s dirigibles didn’t have to bow to the FFA and ran on steam powered engines burning Slark fuel. Her sleeker, smaller airships cranked across the sky with more alacrity than anything Goodyear or MetLife could manage. At a top speed of close to seventy, the Little Monster zipped through the encroaching darkness followed by a thrumming whirr and a vapor trail from the steam engines.

  “Your ships breathe like living things,” Claudia shouted to be heard over the engine bellows.

  “Ramen thinks so too, which I always thought was weird since it’s actually a lot closer to a flying train.” Gieo shifted forward in the harnesses holding her in the glass ball at the front of the cockpit to keep her field of vision clear on the ground below her. A smart antiaircraft battery would wait until she was past to fire on her knowing evasive maneuvers wouldn’t be able to begin until after the first shell was fired if they did.

  “What do you keep looking for?” Claudia asked. “We are still a ways from the target zone.”

  “Don’t tell the others, but I tend to get shot down a lot,” Gieo said.

  “How much is a lot?”

  “I think the last time I had a flight that didn’t end in a crash was on Jet Blue.”

  “What do we do if we are shot down?”

  “Learn to fly by flapping your arms, I suppose,” Gieo said. “The safety measures for this ship haven’t even been built yet, let alone installed.”

  “You are my kind of crazy,” Claudia said. “Cork said he would set fires so we will know him in the dark. Watch for those.”

  No sooner had Claudia said the words than Ramen’s voice buzzed through from his perch atop the front nose of the dirigible. His words came through the ship’s telecom with a crackle. “I can see a ring of fire burning a few miles ahead, boss.”

  “Let’s bring her in,” Gieo yelled into the cone microphone above her head. She downshifted the great gears of the propeller engines resulting in a rumble and shudder running down the length of the ship. Adjusting the angle of the wings, the drag along the top guided the narrow vessel down toward the ground in a shallow dive. Their airspeed dipped to match a landing approach in the vicinity of the technical specs of what Gieo thought would be a good landing speed for a ship she’d designed but had never landed.

  The ship banked into a half-orbit over the downed Slark crawler to let Gieo pick the landing zone she liked best. The shale flat offered plenty of flat and smooth to set down the dirigible. She pulled back hard on the two main levers guiding the wings, bringing the airship to a jerking stop above the landing zone she’d selected. Spinning two wheels on either side of her feet with the peddle handles on the valves, she lowered the landing struts. Steam hissed from the release valves along the sides of the cockpit as the blimp lowered slowly to the ground in a remarkably smooth landing. As soon as the Little Monster had settled onto its six extended legs, the Ravens threw open the two doors on the sides and poured out.

  It took Gieo a few moments to lock down the blimp in its landed position and more than a few moments to unhook from the various straps, clips, and gadgets required of the pilot. She slipped out of the hatch on the bottom of the pilot’s bubble, landing on shaky legs. She hadn’t realized exactly how adrenaline-inducing a landing was; getting that jolt of excited energy made sense during a crash, but seemed out of place for a textbook perfect settling of the blimp.

  She raced to catch up with Claudia. Three men were already carrying a makeshift stretcher toward the airship. The urgency in their steps spoke of time not having run out. Gieo met them halfway. Fiona was battered, her face was pale, but she was awake and alive. Gieo ran to her side and took her outstretched hand.

  “You came for me,” Fiona said.

  “I figured this would be the only way you’d be glad to see me again,” Gieo said, struggling to hold back the joyful tears of stress and relief.

  “I was being stupid,” Fiona said cryptically.

  Cork held Gieo back as the other two men loaded Fiona into the belly of the dirigible. “She’s lost a lot of blood,” he said. “If she goes into shock now it’ll be the end of her.”

  “Got it, don’t scare her,” Gieo said. She took another step to leave, but Cork pulled her back again.

  “Give
her this back.” He held out Fiona’s Colt to Gieo, handle first.

  Gieo took the gun and slipped into her own belt. Something about the way the old ranger said the words and offered the pistol told Gieo it was an important gesture for her to even be given the gun. She threw an arm around his narrow shoulder and hugged him close.

  “This is all going to be okay,” Gieo said. She didn’t know why she said it. The words didn’t offer her any cold comfort, and she doubted the old lawman needed her reassurance. Still, she needed to hear her own voice, devoid of confidence as it was, saying the important words as a matter of superstition.