by Richard Harding

    Copyright 1984 by Robert Tine

First Mass Market Printing: November, 1984

The Hotstates. The Hots, the smugglers and the raiders up in Chicago, the last open city. called them. The Hotstates were a few thousand square miles of the old United States, the lower half of the new continent. There were vast deserts in the west, swamps in the south, and mountains in the east. North of the mountains there was a wide swath of dead ground that marked the border with Leather's slavestates. The Hots were cut in half by a great, wide river that flooded and dried up and overran its banks as it pleased. It had some long screwy Indian name that no one could even remember.

The Hotstates were the personal property of Berger. Not a nice guy, they all said around the bar at Dorca's when his name came up. But nice? Who was nice anymore? If you chose nice as your watchword in life you didn't live long. Or you became some other man's slave. Just as Leather had the Stormers, Berger had the Devils. Not nice guys either, they said at Dorca's.

They talked a lot at Dorca's. Long, meaningless wrangles about who was tougher, Stormers or Devils or Snowmen from the old north west. They talked about the different raiding gangs, who was chickenshit, who was a hard bring down, which ones would stab you in the back for a set of worn old tires. Sometimes, when they knew for sure that he was on the road, they might mention Bonner. Not a nice guy either, someone would whisper. But fair, someone would put in with a look over his shoulder to make sure that Bonner's good buddy Dorca had heard that no one was speaking ill of Bonner, the Outrider.

Over the years Bonner had acquired an almost mythical significance in the minds of the Chicago crew of riders, raiders, crazies, and freaks, the bloodthirsty businessmen who made a living stealing from their better organized neighbors. It looked to them as if Bonner could walk into fire and not smell of smoke when he came out. He tangled with The Leatherman himself and hurt him bad. He had clobbered Devils and Snowmen and the few dumb raiders that thought they had what it took to take Bonner down. But only the dumb and the desperate tried that. You messed with Bonner and you died. It was a simple rule of life, like drinking from a pool of rad-water meant death. Pull a trigger at The Outrider and you had only seconds—if you were unlucky a minute or two—of life left to you. They said that even the rats stayed out of his tumbledown house a few blocks from Dorca's.

"The man can't be brung down," someone would say, "it just ain't a possibility. ..."

Sometimes Dorca would hear the whispered conversation and he would slam the bar, his bar, with the hefty leg of a pool table that he used to keep order in his joint. Then he would announce why Bonner couldn't be sliced.

"He's smart!" the tank-sized tavern keeper would bellow. "He's smart! He thinks! He even knows how to read!" Dorca would pause dramatically then pick out a raider, pointing with a finger as thick as a big toe. "And you ain't. You're dumb. You think 'cause you got a gun you can take anybody. Well one day you gonna get your mangy ass sliced into a few pieces. But Bonner is gonna die old and peaceable. . . ."

Everyone agreed that that was probably true. . . .

Bonner was jammed against the overhanging rock a few hundred feet from the waterhole. He had pushed himself into the few inches of shade that the outcrop of giant boulders threw onto the dry brown earth. He didn't want to be seen. The road was somewhere behind him and he could hear the loud voices of the Devils, who, like Bonner, had stopped to get some of the evil-smelling, sticky brown water from the dent in the parched earth. They had found his shark-shaped war wagon packed all over with bloody flanks of beef. The meat was his haul and he was bound for Chicago, battling time and the hot sun, trying to get the precious bloody carcasses home before the heat turned them into a putrid mass of rotting flesh. Bonner had paid for that meat. He had paid for it in the current coin: hours of tracking, blood, bullets, danger. It was his and no Devils were going to rob him of it.

But first he had to concentrate on staying alive. He listened to the shouts of the Devils. They were happy: happy they had come upon some almost fresh food, and happy they had found the car of the raider who had brought it.

"He's gotta be here. Gotta," someone shouted.

"Kill and eat," yelled a happy voice. The Devils made it sound as if they were his two favorite activities. Probably. Though, thought Bonner, rape was probably right up there too.

There was a clatter of heavy boots on loose stones as the Devils fanned out, heading down the slope to the shallow water hole. Bonner pushed himself further against the rock and felt the warmth of the sun-heated stone. He wondered where the Mean Brothers were. The last he had seen of the giant twins they were slopping around in the water. When the Devils had pulled in Bonner had run for the cover of the rocks and lost sight of the Meanies. Bonner wasn't worried about them. If the two mute giants were scared of something Bonner had never seen it. His eyes swept the area in search of them. They were so huge they were pretty hard to hide. Then he saw them and smiled.

The Devils had climbed over the slope that Bonner hid against. They were spread out now in front of the Outrider. Eight. Eight of them wandered towards the water that glittered in front of them.

"He's here somewhere," yelled one, "I can smell him."

There they were a long line of armed men with their backs to him. Bonner silently cursed himself for casually leaving his vicious automatic rifle on the seat of his car. One of these days he was going to get sliced for making a stupid little slip like that, no matter what they said at Dorca's.

He was armed, of course. On one hip he carried his ancient Hi Standard Automatic and his three long, black-handled throwing knives glittered menacingly on the other. Bonner was a master of the silent kill. The thought of Bonner's knives had haunted the frenzied dreams of Stormers, Snowmen, and Devils.

The Hi Standard carried a ten shot clip and it was an excellent rapid fire weapon which in the right hands made sure that the tenth shot was as accurate as the first. If the Devils did nothing more than scatter when the first blood flowed then the huge automatic in Bonner's steady hands would be enough to cut down all eight. It would even leave him the unheard of luxury of two extra shots. But no man just lies there and lets another man kill him—unless he is a fool or a saint. The Devils were neither. The squad leader was carrying an M-16 and if he was any good he would have cut Bonner in half before The Outrider had dropped only six of his fellow Devils. The Devils stared around them. The sun was right over Bonner's shoulder so the outcrop was thrown into a deep vat of shadows.

"Swimmin'!" shouted a Devil and dashed towards the water, casting aside his rifle and the dirty bright orange shirt, the semiofficial uniform of the soldiers of the Hotstates. Caught up in their brother-thug's enthusiasm two other Devils took off after him, breaking the ragged rank in which they walked.

"Doobie!" screamed the squad leader. "We gotta get the man first!"

Ignoring him Doobie shouted: "Last on in is a rotten URK—"

As he splashed into the water what appeared to be two half-submerged boulders baking in the sun grew long hairy arms and caught the three Devils around their filthy necks.

Bonner saw the Mean Brothers go into action and acted himself. Like three steel hornets the knives left Bonner's side. One after another each razor-sharp, blood-lusting blade found and bit Devil flesh. The first neatly pierced the fat roll of flesh on the back of the neck of the squad leader, the knife splitted the throat and carried on splitting the man's prominent Adam's apple. He retched a clot of blood, the wad of gore shooting from his astonished mouth like a bright red liquid bullet. He fell.

The two Devils on either side of him had a second or two to observe their leader dying. Then they took a knife each between the shoulder blades, spine center. Their nervous systems stretched to accommodate the killing injury, then failed, shorting out as they died.

As the first point of the first blade met skin the first hot .22 bullet traveled through the arid morning, screaming unerringly through the air at a Devil. Bonner had figured that the man's brain would register danger before his mind deciphered the impulses. The brain would announce: Someone is shooting. Get down asshole! and the big Devil's body would be on its way to the ground before the rest of him knew which way it was headed. But that brain hadn't figured that the sudden steel-jacketed death that threatened out of nowhere was controlled by Bonner. He aimed where he figured the Devil was going, not where he was when the trigger was pulled.

The first .22 slug jammed into the man's mouth making a confused and bloody hash of jawbone, teeth, and tongue before finding a deadly, warm, permanent, cozy home in the soft pink flab of the brain that had been ordering the two hundred forty pound body around a moment before.

The three Devils that had wanted to play in the water were now dying in it. The Mean Brothers, those silent bear-men had risen from the shallows like monsters and caught the playful Devils as if they were children. One Mean had grabbed two and the other had to content himself with one. The three Devils had never been so surprised in their lives and, if the Mean Brothers performed at even half their usual form, they would never be so startled again.

With a grip as strong as steel one of the Mean Brother's hands closed around the throat of the first Devil, the one the squad leader called Doobie. In a single grab his throat closed and cracked; the other arm of the Mean Brother whipped out from his hairy side and clothes lined the second Devil. The man dropped to his knees in the shallow water holding his bruised neck and gagging. The stepping stone-sized foot of the Mean Brother slammed down on his head pushing the Devil's face down into the murky water. All of the cable-strong muscles in the Mean's leg locked holding the Devil's neck under the water. The terror-driven legs of the drowning Devil scissored in the water, the fingers on his hands arced into claws and raked long scratches down the Mean's legs, gouging out long swordlike gouts of flesh from the hairy shin.

The Mean ignored the minor injury and turned his attention to the Devil writhing under the firm grasp that clamped on his neck. He lifted the Devil by the neck and held him up, the man's toes dippling and dabbling just on the surface of the water. The Mean's huge body had become a flesh-and-blood gallows hanging the man from the noose of his left hand. The Devil's face turned red, then blue, then black. Then dead, saliva and spittle spurting from his unnaturally red lips. The Mean let him drop. He raised his foot and the drowned Devil bobbed to the surface like a toy boat.

His brother had gotten rid of his victim with a single huge-fisted blow that had dislodged the Devil's jawbone, driving that sharp shaft of bone up into his brain. The sudden and radical alteration of the man's large features made him look like an old man who had lost his teeth.

Bonner had dropped the other two Devils with unerringly placed slugs. One had torn through a body, twisting up the guts of the deceased like a fork sucking up noodles. It spun round and round until the man's insides were a confused and bloody paste. He gouted blood onto the warm ground, his eyes wide and staring at the white—but quickly darkening—sky. The nerves of his shattered, numb body pulsed in alarm then, like snuffed candles, went out.

The other had taken a clean shot to the head. He died instantly, or almost instantly. He had time to shout: "Mama!" His death came to him like a clock that had been smashed.

The Mean Brothers looked around then, hands on hips, the bodies of their enemies bobbing around them like dead ducks. The brothers looked like hungry kids who couldn't quite believe that all the food was gone. They looked around them hoping that a Devil or two was lurking somewhere. Exactly who the Devils were they didn't know—they were Bonner's enemies and that was good enough for them. If their man wanted them dead then they didn't deserve to live. If more Devils walked the shattered continent then the Mean Brothers figured that it was their duty to find them and kill them. If Bonner wanted them to, of course. He said that they were to live then they lived. The Mean Brothers lived only for Bonner. It was reason enough. They owed him a debt that they could never pay.

Bonner emerged from the shadows. "Sorry, Meanies. That's it. No more. All dead." Bonner walked from body to body retrieving his knives. The Mean Brothers stood in the water, disgusted. They had only bagged three between the two of them. Hardly worth it. They looked enviously at the Boss who had managed six on his own.

"Sorry," yelled Bonner.

The Means shrugged.

Bonner yanked a blade from the lifeless body of the Devil leader. He squatted down and wiped the shaft on the orange shirt. He smiled at the Mean Brothers. In this crazy post-bomb world, he thought, there was no freakier creature than a Mean Brother. Sometimes he wished they could talk so he could know who they were, where they came from. He had found them on the prison island in New York. He had freed them from the Stormers and in return they had dedicated their lives to him. The way he figured it the Means had repaid their debt a thousand times over. Most men would not have bothered to thank him. They stuck by his side. He looked at the dead

Devils in the water. He was glad that the Mean Brothers were on his side. "Hungry?" said Bonner.

The Means nodded. Killing gave them an appetite. "Well," said Bonner, "let's cut off some steaks and eat."

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