Night had fallen but Bonner drove on, the single beam of his headlight darting out to split the darkness before him. He was out of the lake now, cutting across Michigan. He was making slow time—old Highway 94 had been crushed and pounded into an uneven surface of holes and rusty gaps where the old metal supports still showed. Great slabs of broken overpass lay on the roadbed, littering it like concrete icebergs. The sound of his engine could be heard deep in the night—but there was no one there to hear it. To his left were the old cities, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Lansing, jagged against the night sky.

Back in the Outriding days there had been people living there. First they had cowered in the rubble, like animals, living on what they could scavenge from in and amongst the ruins. There were still burn victims around then—they died. Gradually, some of the survivors went crazy from fear of attack or fear of starvation or fear of the hell of a radiation storm.

Those terrible silent clouds were gone now, blown by the winds to some other part of the earth.

People went crazy then because they didn't know what further horrors the new world held for them. It was fear of the unknown, fear of what was out there that killed most of them.

Hard to believe, but once the burn victims were gone and those who were going to go crazy had lost their minds, the ones that remained, the hardiest survivors, began to rebuild. Slowly, life had been reborn. Men stopped living in their caves and burrows and they began to adapt, to fit their lives to their new world. They built shelters, they planted what crops they could, but they still lacked the courage to walk over the hill, to trail down the road to see what lay just over the horizon.

That was when the Outriders had been born.

Bonner muscled his car off the road and killed the engine and the light. The sudden black silence enshrouded him. He sat behind the wheel and listened to the tick and creak of the cooling engine. Slowly, he got out from behind the wheel and stretched.

He built a fire and started to heat a can of stew he had brought with him. He ate it quickly, out of the can, then rolled himself in the old blanket he kept under the seat. When Bonner closed his eyes he could see the shaft of light from his headlamp and the gray ribbon of road before him as if the image had been burnt with a fine wire into the inside of his eyelids.

The Outriders. Leather had been one. So had Seth.

And Carey, Glover, Pershing . . . What did Carey call himself now? The Prince. Prince of the Snowstates . . .

Bonner had been the first. The first to get an old Dodge motor running well enough to venture out into the world. He had travelled, cautiously at first, through the continent, finding groups of survivors—not many but enough to convince him that his work was worth doing. Slowly he began linking the bands together, building a network, trading information for supplies. Others had joined him. Leather came riding out of the dawn one morning and said he had been all the way to New York.

Gradually people had come to trust the Outriders, they were the closest thing to heroes the new world had. Bonner began to coax the survivors out of their little enclaves—they were like nervous puppies—trying to get the bands to join together, to unite, to rebuild. It wouldn't be the old America, but it would have been a land that might have been free of fear and that would have been a good enough start for Bonner.

Leather changed all that. He liked being an Outrider. He liked the praise, he liked that look in people's eyes when he rolled into town, he liked the power. Bring the country together, fix it so anyone could set out on the road if they wanted to, and he would lose all that. He couldn't afford to sacrifice his position to an idea. It was Leather who first figured out that information was power and he could use it to his own ends.

He began building a gang. Every town had its bad element, just the way it had always been. Maybe there were more now, after the bomb, Bonner couldn't say. Leather recruited the bullies and rowdies, the swaggerers and the mean minded ... He bribed them with the liquor and gas and food he found and with dreams, telling them that he would make them powerful men in this new land. They would build a new country with Leather as leader and them as the first citizens. They bought it—a few of them are still alive, but most are dead, sacrificed to Leather's ambition or killed when they challenged his power.

They had been brutal, right from the start. Bonner would never forget the time he rode into some no-account town in Delaware where there had once been a band of survivors. They had been a prosperous little group, raising enough to eat, more than enough in fact. They sold the surplus for gasoline and farming implements they couldn't make themselves. They had neat little houses, each one had a garden—it was almost normal life. When Bonner passed through every man, woman and child was dead. Leather and his gang were sure they had money or liquor and ammunition and they didn't care whom they had to kill to find it. There wasn't anything there, of course, but they killed everyone anyway. Everyone, that is, except Dara.

When he got there he found her practicing to kill Leather. Dara had found a shotgun and a case of shells and she was teaching herself to use it. She was standing in a parking lot—Bonner could still see the green grass growing up between the cracks in the asphalt—crying hot tears of hate. She slammed two shells into the breech, chose her target through her tears and blasted away. She had damn near blown Bonner's head off . . .

Her first words to him after he had convinced her that he wasn't part of Leather's pack were: "I'm going to find him and I'm going to kill him ..."

Dara had become the last Outrider. There were times over the next few months when Bonner would sneak a sideways glance at Dara as they bucketed along the sketchy highways and he would always see the same look in her cool blue eyes. She never stopped hating for a moment, not even when she fell in love with him. Hate drove her, hate sustained her, it was food and drink, air and water, the element she lived in.

Her disease had become Bonner's compulsion. He travelled with her and he would see to it that she got her wish. He had to go along, because more than dealing death to Leather he wanted to make sure that Dara lived. He had failed—or so he thought—on both counts.

They found Leather in New York. He and his gang had taken over one of the old luxury hotels—the building must have been two hundred years old—that overlooked the wild tangle of vegetation that once had been a gigantic park. They had found themselves a whole cellar full of wine and they were going to drink it all. Other men, better men, would have had a little for themselves and kept the rest to barter. But Leather didn't believe in barter. If you were Leather you took what you needed.

Bonner knifed the two drunks that were supposed to be guarding the entrance to the wine cellar. They were so stupefied with wine that they never felt the blades slice into their hearts.

Leather had been slumped over a table. He was sitting in a cracked gold chair—it looked like a throne—that he had dragged down from one of the old cobwebbed ballrooms. He had just stared dumbly at Dara when she raised her shotgun. Something stopped her before she pulled the trigger. For one tense second Bonner was afraid she had lost her nerve. But she hadn't. She lowered the gun, handed it to Bonner and strode up to Leatherman. His drunken, bloodshot eyes followed her across the dank cellar. She grabbed a bottled and smashed it then raised it high above her head, paused a second to marshal her strength and then slashed his face, whipping the jagged green glass along his cheek. His eye popped like a fried egg.

His screams tore through the room, rousing his drunk soldiers. Bullets started flying, spitting into the row upon row of glass bottles. Glass ricocheted. Bonner scooped up Dara and ran with her. Hours later she said: "I had him, and I lost him ..." She worked her hands into tight fists and Bonner knew that her quest was not finished.

They had headed for Chicago. Halfway there, not far from where Bonner was now, he awoke to find her gone. She had headed back. Her work was not done.

Carey defected about that time and founded the Snows. Berger grabbed the Hots, both of them welding together organizations like those Leather had in the area he was now calling the Slavestates. Almost at once, a war between all three had broken out, trapping the innocent in a whirling vortex of fire and blood. But no side was stronger than the other; there had been stalemate after a few hot months of fighting . . . The greatest casualty was Bonner's dream. And Dara. Bonner heard she had been killed and he had grieved. He sighed. It was all a history of a time no one would ever write, that no one would ever read

Bonner closed his eyes, slept for an hour or two then hit the road again. He turned south to look for an oasis and he passed the spot where he had last seen her. He could never pass it by without falling prey to suffocating memories. They haunted him through the rest of the lonely day.

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