The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head Read Online Free PDF

to the wreck before
another Slark recon team did.
     
    Pulling around the front of the saloon off
old Freemont Street, the first thing she noticed was Gieo and Mitch
standing on the bed of a massive Chevy Kodiak C7000 flatbed. Where
Mitch had been hiding away such a monstrosity, Fiona wasn’t sure,
but now that the secret was out, it had attracted more than passing
attention. A mob of twenty or so people had swamped in the street
side of the truck and didn’t seem all that interested in letting
Mitch or Gieo get down. As Fiona crawled closer, her engine noise
caught the attention of the crowd.
     
    “Methanol drinkers,” Fiona grumbled with
twenty pairs of milky, half-blind eyes turned toward her. They
still had their crudely drawn signs depicting her, which were as
artistically devoid and inaccurate as one might expect from a
mostly-blind cult of mental patients. They abandoned their shouting
match with Gieo and Mitch at the sight of the silver tornado that
was Fiona’s car and began advancing on her instead. She revved the
engine several times, threatening the spikes of her brush guard on
them, but being mostly blind, they paid the deadly cattle-catcher
only token attention. She let out the clutch just enough to make
the car jump forward about ten feet in a single lurch. The
cultist’s broke ranks and scattered from the street. Fiona wasn’t
entirely sure what might happen if she drove her car at full speed
through a crowd of twenty people, but she was fairly certain she
wouldn’t be able to eat for a week after.
     
    Pulling up alongside the truck, she rolled
down her window and stuck her head out. “You two okay?”
     
    “Yeah,” Mitch grumbled, “although they had
some choice words for Gieo.”
     
    “If they come back around, I’ll put some
choice bullets in them,” Fiona said. “If you’re ready to roll, I’ll
lead you out.”
     
    Mitch nodded once, grabbed the handle along
the truck’s side, and slung himself into the driver’s seat with
surprising agility. Gieo hopped out off the bed of the truck
instead and scampered around to the passenger side of Fiona’s car.
Before Fiona could protest, Gieo was in the passenger seat.
     
    She leaned over, kissed Fiona softly on the
neck, and whispered against her ear, “Keep making a habit of saving
me and see what happens.”

Chapter 4: Unreasonable
aspirations.
    As they drove,
Gieo rested her left hand on the top of Fiona’s right thigh. The
positioning of the hand was a simple draping in a comfortable state
for both, but sans anything active or directed. Fiona’s mind kept
retuning to the drive earlier that day where Gieo’s hand had been a
lot more aggressive, and she wished it would be again.
     
    “This cult, the methanol drinkers, how did
that happen?” Gieo asked, picking the most distasteful topic Fiona
could imagine to spoil the sexual tension.
     
    “The Slark have a superstitious aversion for
blindness,” Fiona replied. “The Hawkins House was a cult from Texas
that took the natural defense mechanism people were trying with
methanol blindness and turned it into a religion with Methanol as
their holy communion. They imagine they’ll sweep away the Slark
with an army of the blind. I don’t know how they’ll know if they
succeeded or not since most of them can’t see more than a few,
blurry feet.”
     
    “Leave it to Texans to turn stupidity into a
religion,” Gieo mused.
     
    “Speaking of stupidity, how many times have
you been shot down?”
     
    “Touché,” Gieo said. “I’ve mapped the Slark
defense line and now I’m trying to break it. Sure I crash, but each
crash teaches me something.”
     
    “It teaches them something too—they are
smarter than us, after all.”
     
    “Correction, they were smarter than
us.” Gieo pulled her hand from Fiona’s thigh to draw a little
diagram in the dust on the dashboard. “Their technology started
here, thousands of years ahead of ours, but that doesn’t mean
they’re smarter,