Bonner slid behind the wheel of his road master and simultaneously hit the starter and the spotlight. A great valley of white light appeared in front of the car, like a shining road to paradise; but Bonner wasn't fooled. He knew that there was no paradise in this dirty world. That shimmering bright highway was merely the path to a thousand miles of death and blood. It was the road the Outrider always traveled. A thoroughfare of vengeance.

He pushed his vehicle out onto the cracked roadway and hit top speed in seconds. The throaty roar opened up from the twin upswept exhaust pipes, echoing through the blue-black night. The huge Mean Brothers were packed into the back of the bullet car, resting against a bloody side of beef, munching happily on their steaks. Above their heads like a black halo arched the roll bar of the machine. Anchored to it, nose down, was Bonner's major piece of artillery, a worn old .50-caliber machine gun. He used it rarely, but when he did his enemies fell in hordes.

The car was simple: engine, gun, fuel tank, and room enough for some cargo. It had been built for Bonner by Lucky, the best mechanic on the continent. It got Bonner where he wanted to go and it got him there fast. It could outrun anything on those dangerous roads—but Bonner didn't use it for running much.

He was on the road now, eating up the miles. The Outrider stared into the bright valley carved by his spotlight. As always, he wondered what the broken white line down the middle of the road meant. . . . Then he drifted into thoughts of his own.

BOBBY. HIS GUN.

There was a place . . . Bonner gripped the wheel tighter in rage. It was the only sign he gave of the fury that was building within him.

There was a place ... A place a couple of days' ride away, a place to the east of the point Bonner was at then, a place far from the desert. A few riders knew about it and they kept it secret. They called it by a special, funny name. . . .

BOBBY. HIS GUN.

The place was called Almost Normal. Someone had put a sign on the road on the outskirts of the village: ALMOST NORMAL. USA. USA. Bonner liked that.

Bobby was a kid, a boy of fourteen, maybe fifteen. His father was called Charlie. He was a big, strong, happy man. He was the richest man Bonner knew. Richer than Leatherman and Berger with all their gold and gas and girls and slaves. Richer than Bonner who could measure his wealth in power and the fear other men held him in. Charlie had Bobby and Bobby's mother, a gentle woman called Martha, and a daughter Emily. They were a family, one of eighty or ninety who lived in Almost Normal. They had a life they enjoyed living. It was a life that, as the name of the town put it, was almost normal.

Almost Normal was up in some smoky mountains in the space between the Hotstates and the Slavestates. If those two powers knew the tiny hamlet was there they didn't seem to care. Almost Normal was too small, too far away to bother with. It was hard to get F to, it was poor. Who cares?

No, it wasn't rich and it wasn't big but it had something that the rest of the continent, maybe the rest of the world, didn't have. It was free. It was peaceful. The men didn't carry guns, except to hunt. They weren't violent, they didn't have to be.

And there were kids. Children. New life. Boys and girls who knew no other world than the placid life of Almost Normal. The boys hunted with their fathers and grew strong. The girls learned skills from their mothers and were pretty and gentle and, in their own way, as strong as their menfolk. Bonner had read once about a race of people called Americans who held as their heroes some hardy types called pioneers.

When Bonner thought of pioneers he thought of the people of Almost Normal.

Almost Normal might have been the past as Bonner read about it but he hoped, he wished, that it could be the future too. There was a seductive quality about the little town that he found almost irresistible. When he was at his lowest he would go there and drink in the sustaining atmosphere of peace and harmony. Sometimes he could hardly pull himself away to rejoin the harsh, brutal world that he lived in.

"Stay with us," Charlie had said the last time Bonner passed through. "Give up the violent life. We'll find you a wife. Live here with us. You'll have a home. ..."

A home. The words flashed through Bonner's mind with the ferocity of one of his killing blades. The idea of having a home was almost unimaginable. He had four broken rooms in the ruins in Chicago. Four old rooms that caught the sound of the late night brawls at Dorcas; screams as the streetworkers took someone down with a rusty knife or a bullet. Home, where there was always someone's fresh corpse outside the door. That was home.

Martha had joined her husband to plead with him. "Stay here with us. We could help you. You could help us. The kids love you . . . Stay."

Reflected in the blinding light Bonner could see Martha's face, strong and gentle.

But something had drawn Bonner back to the road, to. the violent life he hated. It had become a drug, this need to ride, to kill, to blindly avenge. It was his work, his mission, his calling. To settle down in Almost Normal would have been a betrayal, a violation of his impassioned oath, the one he had made on the graves and memories of his dead friends and the thousand of innocents he did not know who had^lied or who were enslaved. He could not stop. He had promised Dara.

Bobby was just a kid. Bonner had taught him how to shoot. And he had taught him how to write. Bonner asked him once which skill he valued most. "I need them both," the kid had said. BOBBY. HIS GUN.

Now his gun with his writing on it had turned up in the saddlebag of a skag-Devil's clapped out MC. Bonner hoped fervently that some intricate system of barter had carried the .22 far away from Bobby and Almost Normal. Maybe Bobby had traded it with a rider for a better gun and in turn maybe that rider passed it on to someone else and so on until it ended up with the dead Devil. Maybe . . .

But Bonner doubted it. Somehow he knew that a terrible force had swept down on that peaceful community and torn it apart. The real world, the real future had caught up with Almost Normal. Bonner knew that the world would not see its like again.

Those who ruined that tiny island of peace and calm were dead men. The Outrider decreed it.

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