Every night, Rodeo has some wickedly vivid dreams. Usually they're weird and don't make any sense to him. Sometimes there are shotguns that blast off heads in a puff of smoke. Sometimes he's riding through the wasteland on his lean black Harley, but then she turns into an alligator and eats him alive. Sometimes he's trying to get his Mama to puke up a bottle of pills, only she's got six heads and he can't get to all of 'em in time. Sometimes he's swimming in the Cumberland and he can breathe underwater.
And then sometimes there are girls like this one.
It's not a thing he lets himself think about often when he's awake. But sometimes it'll show up in his dreams-- a beautiful bright dime in a world full of dull pennies, a girl with dark hair and a live wire for a mind. For a second, when Rodeo's watching Lita rip her flannel open, he wonders if this is one of those dreams. It seems surreal enough that it could be. He's having an out of body experience looking at her in that tank top and he's sure that from here on out, when he dreams of his dime, she's gonna have black coffee eyes and a kit full of scalpels.
She throws the flannel and then comes in close. It's almost enough to drive him completely to distraction, but he still manages to unstick his trigger finger and shoot down a couple of shufflers that are closing in.
"You look better without it," he says, glancing down at her as she grabs a hold of his shirt and starts reaching into his pocket. He's smirking despite the fact that they might just die here today, because he's pretty damn positive they won't and even if they do at least he can go down knowin' the last thing he laid eyes on was this damn fine woman. As she digs into his pocket and makes her joke, Rodeo finds his smirk cracking to a full-on laugh, one she can feel rumble in his chest under the hand she has on his shirt. This could, admittedly, really easily be a ploy. Rodeo wouldn't put it past himself to try something like this. And if he had meant to set this up, he'd be congratulating himself for it. He really didn't plan this, though.
But he might be congratulating himself anyway.
"Here I was, thinkin' you'd be impressed by my ingenuity," Rodeo says. He strains to balance Wheeler on his shoulder while his hand lets go of the man long enough to grab Lita by the arm, pulling her in closer as he reaches his gun across to fire at a runner breaking through the crowd a few feet away from her.
Then she grabs the keys and she's on the move. Rodeo does the same, and despite the enjoyment he'd taken from that moment, it doesn't distract him from what needs to be done. When Lita unlocks the car, Rodeo yanks the door to the trunk open and starts to unburden himself of his dead friend's weight. Just as he's about to toss Wheeler down, a shuffler grabs hold of Wheeler's arm, lifting it up to take a bite. Wheeler might be dead, but Rodeo still feels a protective rage well up in him, and he grits his teeth and throws his elbow back to smash it into the geek's putrid face. He finishes depositing Wheeler in the trunk and slams the door shut, rushing back to Lita's side. On the way there he ejects Crow Jane's empty clip and snatches a full spare from his pocket, shoving it into the gun just in time to shoot a crawler skittering over the top of his truck towards Lita.
"Let's blow this shithole, baby," Rodeo growls, hooking his arm around Lita to keep her close as they head to the door of her Jeep. "I'll tell ya, I'll be mentioning this in my Yelp review. This barbecue is shit. I didn't figure it was gonna be us on the menu."