Almost Normal was gone and in its place stood a dark, silent skeleton—the last remains of a village that had died a sudden and painful death. The savagery that had visited Almost Normal seemed to have done more than swept away the hamlet and its inhabitants, it seemed to have altered the ground on which it stood. Had Bonner not known where Almost Normal had lain he would have driven right past it. Now it looked like nothing more than one of a million other rubble villages that were scattered all over the continent.

Even when Almost Normal had been a place of the living it hadn't been much to look at. The whole town was a couple of streets each a few hundred yards long. Fronted on each street were a few rows of neat, simple houses each sitting in the middle of its own tidy garden. In the center of the village had been a tall, wide-branched tree. Somehow that tree, pre-bomb by centuries, came to be the heart of the town. It was there that the whole town would meet. They came there on warm summer evenings, a simple communal social event to talk or to hear one of the older men tell stories of times that none of them could remember. It was beneath those all embracing limbs that the town was governed: where they decided how the food and the work was to be divided. Somehow that tree made them all feel safe, protected, at home.

Bonner could remember nights when he had sat there with them, the whole village hushed as he told them of the world beyond their borders. They could never quite believe his tales of war and tyranny and disaster. Men were not as bad as Bonner painted them, they thought. They learned that he had spoken the unvarnished truth.

It was not until he saw the tree that Bonner finally admitted to himself that he was in fact in Almost Normal.

As he approached the tree. the branches seemed to come alive. It was as if a sudden and strong wind had come up out of nowhere and was now whistling through those thick branches. All at once it seemed that the wind was blowing huge black leaves into the sky. But the day was still.

Then he saw. Vultures, disturbed by the roar of his engine were temporarily forsaking the vast and bloody feast hanging in the branches. Suspended in the tree limbs were the stiff and mutilated bodies of a dozen people. As the vultures took to the sky wheeling, watching until it was safe to land and eat again, a score of rat's heads appeared from tattered fleshy holes in the corpses looking out to see what all the fuss was about.

It was impossible to say who the bodies had been or even which were men and which were women. The birds and the rats had ripped and torn until the corpses were bloody tattered scarecrows. The soft parts had gone first: eyes, cheeks, genitals . . . Then they went for the bellies and the chests. Bonner turned away.

The Mean Brothers looked very grave. Unable to speak they had somehow developed a sense that could filter emotion almost from the air. Almost Normal was as still as death, but in the aura of the dead village the mute giants could feel the terrible disturbance of sudden, screaming death. The evil that had been done there would mark and stain the earth. The tree would die of it—and even if the world reestablished itself as a place of peace and harmony that spot where Almost Normal stood would always be barren of life and feeling.

The town had been torched. Systematically each of the frail wooden houses had been burnt to the ground. There were few signposts that pointed to the basic definition of the old houses—an arch here. a charred piece of porch there—but mostly the houses were piles of cold, dead, black cinder.

Stretched as an anguished last clutch at life a charred hand had thrust itself from the burnt rubble. The baking heat of the burning building had gnarled and twisted the bone of the arm. Something had been gnawing at the blackened fingertips. The bones showed gray against the black ash. Whose hand had that been? A mother's, a soft hand that smoothed a child's brow? A husband's who had clasped his wife's hand on a summer night under the tree . . .

Bonner stopped the car and got out. Cinders crackled under his feet and he walked slowly to the charred ruins of the house that had been Martha and Charlie's home. There was no sign that the people who lived there might still be alive.

From the corner of his eye he saw movement. The automatic whipped from his pocket and blasted, A vulture exploded in a puff of feathers and blood. The body with a stomach full of rotting human flesh thudded to the ground. The sound of the shot raised the cloud of birds that had resettled on their lofty banquet. Bonner raised his gun and was about to blast the birds, fat and lethargic as they were with their picnic. But he stopped himself. The bullets were for men.

A sleek gray family of rats bustled by as if they were late for an appointment.

Bonner was no stranger to death, but the complete, savage destruction of Almost Normal shook him to the core of his soul. He felt his body filling with liquid hate. It was hotter, stronger, and more bitter than the foulest of the brews served up at Dorca's.

A single word, a single thought pulsed through the Outrider's brain:

Who?

Who did this? Who fell upon this peaceful place and destroyed it? Bonner did not care if there was a "why." There was no why. There could be no reason by which anyone could justify doing this. Evil like this could not be explained. When—and the day would come and soon too—when Bonner had found the evildoers, when he had them in the sights of his weapon he would hear no reasons, no excuses. He would pull the trigger, he would destroy them without a second thought. They had had their fun. Their actions were history now—no words could erase their sins. Now they had to pay the price. Bonner had already added up the bill, a simple calculation: They must pay with their lives.

But first he had to find them. He noticed that the ground was deeply furrowed with the tire marks of dozens of vehicles, cycles, and cars. But that told him little. It could have been Stormers or Devils or Raiders. There were dozens of murdering bands roaming the ruined roads and any one of them could have done this. Raiders might have burned the town, but Bonner, knowing how the Raiders worked, doubted it. A burned town would produce no more so they could not come back and steal again. Raiders killed but they wouldn't kill everybody. Someone had to be left behind to build up the town again. Besides, Almost Normal was too far off the beaten track for Raiders.

Stormers killed everything that moved. And for no good reason. So did Devils.

Then it struck Bonner. There were very few bodies. There were the bodies in the tree and the single charred corpse. Almost Normal had a couple of hundred people. . . .

"Meanie, do me a favor and get your shovel," asked Bonner of the Mean Brother. When they bothered to use weapons the Mean Brothers used a shovel and an axe respectively.

The Mean returned with the shovel and Bonner took it from him and began to dig in the charred ruins of the house nearest him. He used the spade to turn over the rubble, searching the burnt wood methodically searching for the remains of the villagers. He moved from house to house and indeed found some bodies. A man here, a woman there. He stopped dead for a few minutes to recover from the shock of finding a baby's burnt body.

After an hour of digging Bonner leaned on the shovel. He wiped his brow and wondered if he should feel happy or sad for the residents of Almost Normal. Not many of them had died, their bodies were nowhere to be found. That only meant one thing. Slavers. They had been carried off by one of the slave raiding parties. It had been a large one, it would have to have been to carry off the men, women, and children of Almost Normal. That meant Stormers or Devils. Bonner knew how they treated their captives. If they took fifty and twenty made it to market they considered that they had done a pretty fine job of driving. Percentages of dead were sometimes much higher. Sometimes they would take fifty and fifty would die. ...

Bonner looked around him and wondered if he should feel happy for the survivors. Now he had to find them and fast, before they all died on the road.

"Come on. Means," he said. "Time to go."

The Mean Brothers took their places in the car, glad to be leaving this place.

Bonner started up the engine and the vultures swirled into the sky again. He drove down the hill slowly, his heart heavy. Almost Normal was really almost normal now—because normality was measured not in peace and happiness but in war, death, and pain. Finally the little community was in step with the rest of the dying world.

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