One Mean Brother built a fire and the other tore ham-sized steaks off the bloody flank of one of the carcasses draped over the back of Bonner's car.

Bonner himself waded into the water hole and pulled the bodies of the Mean Brothers' victims to shore. To leave them floating in the pool meant poisoning it, and water was too scarce in that part of the world to waste. Suddenly Bonner stopped, still ankle deep in the water. Maybe it would be better. Would it be better, he wondered, to leave the corpses where they fell? Let the hot sun beat down on them, heat the gases within and bloat them until they swelled and burst. Then let the rotting, toxic juices flow from the stinking bodies into the already brackish water. Let them invest the evil liquid with the potential to kill. In his mind's eye Bonner saw, with grim pleasure a band of bloodstained, thirsty Devils or Stormers falling upon the water hole and drinking until their bellies were full.

Then, as the hours passed the creep of death would slide over them: a sharp cramp—they would think they had drank too much; then nausea—it would just be the beginning of a pain-wracked death somewhere down the road. One less. Maybe two, maybe twenty fewer evil death dealers—all because Bonner had left the dead bodies of men like them in the waterhole. He wouldn't have to waste good bullets. He wouldn't have to listen to their screams. . . .

But then he thought of the flip side of the question. What if there was one runaway. A single lone slave who had made the desperate break for freedom. And what if he was out of water, wandering in the desert, death knocking at the door. Then he would see the waterhole and life would surge through him—with a taste of that water he would be able to find the strength to make it to freedom. If Bonner poisoned the water he would drink it and die. ...

Bonner decided it would be better to save the one escapee from tyranny even if it meant letting the squads of evil men live too. Those men he would have to kill personally. Let the innocent live. He would do the dirty work that had to be done to dispatch the rest.

He pulled the bodies up the slope and left them. Some sort of desert creature would feast on those bodies. Let those sharp animal teeth gnaw those bodies down to the bone. Let the hot sun bleach them white.

A fire was crackling and the blue-red desert night was coming on. Bonner wanted to eat and then get his powerful machine and its precious cargo back onto the road. The roads in the desert were straight and clear. Mounted on the hard nose of his chariot was a powerful spotlight. With it Bonner could cleave the dark of the desert night into two gigantic black blocks. He could make Chicago by morning and get rid of the meat before it turned bad. There were plenty of riders in Chi who would pay a whole raid's worth of money—slates they called them—for a taste of almost fresh beef. The Mean Brothers wouldn't care if he wanted to drive on. They would put up with the bucketing of the car and the roar of the engine. If Bonner knew the Mean Brothers they would fall asleep as if they were in feather beds.

One of the Means had stuck the steaks on the end of pointed sticks and he was grilling the sizzling hunks of meat over the fire. The other brother gestured to Bonner. Come, he was saying, come sit down. Sit with us.

They liked it when Bonner joined them. He would talk to them; about the Outriding days, when men didn't try to kill each other; before the Slavestates, the Hotstates, the Snowstates—before men like Leather and the others. Sometimes, though, during those dark nights he would grow very silent and the Mean Brothers knew he was thinking of Dara. The woman Bon-ner loved and had been forced to kill.

"Wait," said Bonner to the Meanie's urging that he join them around the fire. Before he lost the light he wanted to go through the saddlebags on the broken down old bikes that the Devils rode. The squad leader's bike was the best of a bad bunch. It was an old Kawasaki missing both fenders. The fuel tank was scratched and dented, the kneepads long gone, and the saddle was torn in places and patched in others. The ignition was just a mass of frayed wires that the rider would touch together to start the thing up. It was plain to Bonner, though, that there wasn't much life left in the machine—the battery was corroded and leaked acid down onto the clutch. Once the electrics went on these bikes they were as good as useless although some skilled mechanics like Lucky could convert them to a kick start. It was an expensive operation.

The decrepitating motorcyle was a good example of a prime rule of life in the post-bomb world. Simpler is better. The delicate electronics and intricate machinery that powered the old world were as good as useless in the new world. Keep things simple and you survived—maybe. The Devil squad leader would have found himself with a couple of hundred pounds of unstartable bike on his hands when his wiring finally went. A rider with a brutish old kick start Harley or Triumph could go on riding until someone killed him.

The saddlebags yielded little: a faded Hertz Number One Club (number one what, Bonner wondered) road map with the impassible roads and the rad-water lakes marked in grimy grease pencil. A pair of riding gloves split at the fingers. A nicked and scarred handgun, it looked like a .38, the barrel wound round with a double length of rusty wire. Bonner wouldn't have pulled the trigger if his life had depended on it. Plainly he had run into one of Berger's skag battalions. They were the bully boys that Berger used to keep the slaves in line and for other all brawn-no-brains duties—escort, torture, guarding something or somebody. The other half of Berger's army was a little better. He divided his men into two sections: skag and silk. The silks were better trained and better equipped. The skags hated the silks and tried to outdo their betters in ferocity. The silks hated the skags and did their best to ignore them. Neither type of crew was the sort you would want to meet in a dark alley.

The saddlebags of the other bikes yielded little as well. A gray hunk of bread, some ammunition, a heavy coat, a bed roll alive with lice . . . typical skag.

It was in the last bag that he found something that made his blood run cold. It made him glad, suddenly, that out there in the darkness lay the bodies of the eight Devils. It was a gun. A tiny little pea shooter of a rifle. A kid's gun . . . Carved into the stock, a cheap sliver of wood as thin as a teenage girl's shoulder blade were three words. The carving was crude but the pride in the words was writ large:

BOBBY. HIS GUN.

Bonner stared at the writing. He knew the gun. He knew the hand, the young hand that had carved his name there.

No, thought Bonner. It can't be.

The Mean Brothers sensed Bonner's sudden change of mood. They watched him for a moment. He was staring at the gun. They got up from the fire and padded to his side and gently took the gun from him. They looked at it, then at each other and shrugged. The little rifle and the carving on it meant nothing to them. But it plainly meant something to Bonner. He straightened up, tall against the night sky. He retrieved the gun from the Mean Brother.

"Look," he said gesturing towards the cooling meat, "you better eat that while we're moving."

The Means nodded. An interrupted dinner was a small price to pay for Bonner's companionship and friendship.

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