The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head by Cassandra Duffy Page B

Fiona for a moment and
nodded with something akin to grim respect. “I’ll have Rawlins
deliver Jackson’s car by sundown tomorrow. I believe he has two
heads on his grill; that’ll settle you up for the week.” Zeke
disappeared back into the dark recesses of the city hall as the sun
began to set.
     
    Gieo wiped her mouth with the back of her
hand when she was quite certain she’d thrown up all she had in her.
With a stabilizing hand on the fender of Fiona’s car, she looked up
at the gunfighter as though seeing her for the first time. Fiona
seemed contemplative, almost melancholy.
     
    “It’s been almost two years since someone
tried to steal from me,” Fiona said, barely above a whisper. “I’ve
gone soft because of you and people know it.”
     
    “That was soft?” Gieo asked.
     
    “If you weren’t here, I would have cut his
head off and dragged his body through town behind my car as a
message to the other hunters.” Fiona brushed past Gieo on her way
back into the saloon, sending one final remark over her shoulder
before stepping through the double doors. “Welcome to the real
Tombstone, Stacy.”

Chapter 6: Aggravated mischief.
    Gieo returned to
her rooftop perch with a head full of concerns and a stomach full
of butterflies. She’d had a serious lapse in judgment, an
unpleasant mistake with potentially catastrophic consequences. How
she saw Fiona made a drastic transformation after seeing her gun
down a man, whose name they both knew, with the cannon she kept on
her hip and then dismember him according to some draconian code of
the fucked up post-apocalyptic, new Old West using a sword she kept
on her back. Even for the new world order, this was bizarre. Fiona
was absolutely right when she claimed Gieo didn’t know her.
Whatever remained of the fashion model, traumatized girl, and
probable cocaine addict had been completely burned out by the
desert sun, replaced by a hardened gunfighter with psychotic
tendencies.
     
    Gieo took failure well though; her parents
had pretty much insisted on it. Failures and lapses in judgment
were opportunities to learn, change, grow, and come back with a
better plan. She needed data, information, and a removed
perspective to formulate new thoughts and opinions.
     
    Firstly, she had to stop sleeping in Fiona’s
bed. Whatever else was going on between them, the sexual teasing
she was giving the gunfighter might have added to the volatility.
Besides, when the fun of sexually topping Fiona wore off, the
charade always left Gieo with a ridiculous case of the hornies that
she hadn’t remotely started to deal with yet.
     
    Secondly, she would need to learn a lot more
about the town, which would be easily accomplished with a telescope
and time spent observing. She set up a low-power telescope she’d
acquired in a trade with someone for something—she really couldn’t
remember how she’d come by it as more and more stuff kept coming in
and going out. It was easily fixed by repositioning the internal
mirrors, but she hadn’t figured out what to do with it until that
point. From her perch on the front edge of the hotel, using the
telescope, she could see much of the town as no building was taller
than a couple stories.
     
    Thirdly, and lastly, she needed a stiff drink
to get the image of Fiona cutting off Jackson’s arm out of her
head. Unlike most survivors of the Slark invasion, Gieo hadn’t
really seen or encountered much violence. Her parents had done a
masterful job of shielding her, which she had to offer up a
whispered prayer to whoever was listening to thank them. They’d
died, just like most people’s parents, in one of the many gas
attacks the Slark made on relocation colonies set too close to the
frontlines. But even this was without violence as the gas simply
put people into a sleep they didn’t wake up from. Gieo dipped into
one of the jugs of cactus white-lightning with the goal in mind of
taking the shake out of her hand. Drinking the clear liquid