Bonner's eight-cylinder, steel-and-iron, machine-gun-equipped car slapped down onto the packed mud of the dry lake bed that made up one of the natural defenses of the open city of Chicago. He sat low in his seat, his body controlling the car with a minimum of effort. He went through the big gears faultlessly. The Mean Brothers sat perched behind him, their hairy bodies hitting the wind square on.

Bonner had to laugh when he saw them in his machine. A few of the riders in Chi-town traveled with dogs. The dogs stuck their heads into the windstream just the way the Mean Brothers did. They were happy. On the road. Blood of their enemies in the air.

Usually, Bonner turned his big car east and headed inbound for the Slavestates or cut south for the Hots. Experienced riders knew that there wasn't much to pick up in the Snowstates that lay due west of Chicago.

And beyond that, few men could say. Crossing the mountains was no one's idea of a good time. There was a fear among the riders that once you got over the mountains you'd never find your way back. Bon-ner knew that wasn't true—although he hadn't been too far west in years. There were a few dozen ways through the craggy peaks that barred men from the western shore of the country. Some were more dangerous than others, some took longer. Some you had to get to by crossing the desert, others had their approaches blocked by hundreds of square miles of forest. For some you had to cross back.

Bonner didn't know which pass he was going to take yet. He didn't know because the choice wasn't up to him. He wanted Roy to lead him to the Rich Man—the West Coast was a big place and he didn't want to waste time crawling around out there looking for the man who had his friend. He wanted Roy to show him the way. And he wanted him to get there fast. And the best way to get a man moving fast was

to get him scared . . .

Bonner was ten or fifteen miles out on the lake bed when he slowed down. The Mean Brothers looked disappointed.

"We don't want to run right over them, do we?" asked Bonner.

The Mean Brothers shrugged, as if to say, "Why not?"

He drove slowly and his mind settled on his hatred for the men he was chasing. They had Seth and that was bad enough. But they had hurt the girl and that was worse. Seth knew the risks of riding in that violent land, but the girl . . .

The girl was different. The girl didn't go out on the road with a gun and a plan to take another man's haul. She didn't fix an enemy in the sights of her gun and laugh when she saw the body jump with the impact of the bullet.

They had used her to get to him. They had hurt her—a whole band of big strong men against one woman. One woman with a shotgun, he thought, reminding himself of the few corpses that littered his rooms, but they had no call hurting her that way. . . . Men had used a woman to get to Bonner before. A lot of those men were dead now. One, Leatherman, lived on. But Bonner would get him. He had promised himself that. He had promised poor dead Starling. He promised Dara. Bonner always kept a promise. . . .

Bonner put a little more pressure on the gas pedal of his machine and it leaped forward, seeming to grab the road. The car itself seemed as anxious for the highway, for the road to the fight, as the Mean Brothers.

One of the Mean Brothers tapped Bonner on the shoulder.

"I see 'em. Means," said Bonner.

Looking forward over the long prow of his car, in the heat shimmer thrown by the engine, he could see a few little black dots on the lake bed ahead of him. That was Roy and his gang. Bonner, in spite of himself, had caught up with them. They must have got off to a late start. They were probably delayed by the time they spent raping the girl. . . .

Bonner stopped his car and stood up on the driver's seat. He looked into the sun and watched his foes drive away. Too early, he decided, too early ...

Buggy, one of Roy's new recruits, had a fine, stripped-down, pre-Bomb Honda automobile. It was his pride and joy. He had cut the roof and the trunk off of it and taken the back seat out, leaving just the driver's seat and the dash. He bucketed along on the road with the rest of his crew, glad to be riding, glad to be heading west, glad of all the money he was going to make. Then he stopped being glad. Clipped to the windshield of his car was a mirror, the exact function of which had been debated for hours in Dorca's. After much discussion. Buggy had decided that the mirror was there so the old driver of the car could look behind him.

"You know," he said, "he wanted to look behind him in case some fuck with a gun was gaining on him."

For no good reason, Buggy glanced into the mirror. Far behind him he could see some fuck with a gun. Only it wasn't any fuck. The fuck was Bonner. . . .

Buggy slammed his fist into the horn in the middle of his steering wheel—his Honda had all the extras. He stood on the brakes at the same time. His tires dug into the lake bed and he skidded to a halt.

Roy and the rest of his men were a half mile on before they realized that they had lost the sixty riders they had recruited.

Roy and his men turned in a big circle and came back to where the Chicago riders were stopped. Each one of the men was looking back on the road.

"What's the problem, friends?" said Roy, trying to keep his temper under control.

"How come he's following us?" said Buggy pointing at the speck on the horizon.

Roy creased his eyes against the sun. "Who is it?"

"It's Bonner, you dumb fuck. Jeez. I hope you didn't piss the man off 'cause if you did then you can include me out of this little Sunday school."

"Piss him off? Piss him off! He damn near broke my arm! Besides, what the hell are you worried about? There are sixty-three of us and there's only one of him."

"Man, you was bom yesterday . . ." someone observed.

"Fine fucking collection of riders I got," said Roy in disgust. "There is only one of him. . . ."

"Now you tell me, Roy," said someone, "Bonner got a quarrel with you?"

"No."

"He ain't following you to kill you?"

Roy kicked some dust at his feet. "Nope."

"Then we'll ride. . . ."

They all started up their various weird vehicles and took off.

Bonner watched them ride on and wished it was nightfall.

They had left the lake bed and were camped in the rubble of a big old town that history had long since forgotten the name of. The riders were beginning to appreciate the advantages of riding for the Rich Man. Roy had produced something approaching real food from the dented, rusty trunk of the automobile one of his men drove. There were beans and rice and some peppers that burned the tongues of the riders. They ate well that night and they drank well too because Roy had a couple of flagons of raw alcohol.

"It's bad," wheezed one of the riders, after taking a sip, "but it's better than Dorca's shit."

They were camped in the middle of the road, all of them gathered around the fire, passing the bottles from hand to hand.

"Hey Roy, you always eat this good out west?"

"Most of the time you eat better, friend," said Roy.

"I'm gonna like it," said a rider called Paulie. Then the fatal mixture of the beans, the hot sauce, and the liquor conspired to make him erupt in a deafening fart. "Sorry," he said, red-faced.

"Don't sit too close to the fire, Paulie," said Morty, a rider with a reputation for wit.

The gales of laughter reached Bonner who was parked a few hundred yards down the road. There was a hill between him and the encamped riders. He was waiting for them to go to sleep. He sat behind the wheel staring into the darkness, planning the quick, hot raid that lay over the rise.

He listened to the laughter, the shouts, the snatches of "Feelings" that one of the number remembered. While he sat waiting he thought how much he hated the world as it was then. . . .

Gradually the fire died down and so did the conversation that went on around it. By the time the moon was at its highest the camp was silent.

"Okay Mean Brothers," said Bonner. "Listen up. . ."

The Mean Brothers put their heads close to Bonner's. "We're going into them, now. I'm not gonna do any fighting."

One of the Mean Brothers shook his head. None?

"Nope. I'm just gonna drive. And we aren't going to stop either. I'm gonna make one pass through the camp and then we're gonna keep on going. You hang over the side of the car and what you can get is all you get. Got it?"

One of the Mean Brothers slapped the head of his axe in his huge palm. He got it.

Bonner fired up his machine and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. As he crested the hill he hit the switch on the steering column that turned on the single powerful spotlight mounted on the nose of his deadly machine.

The powerful white light washed down the road and lit up the bundles of riders who were sleeping next to their machines. The eight cylinders of Bonner's car roared in the still night air. A couple of Roy's men, the ones that hadn't hit the bottle that hard, were already on their feet staring in bewilderment at the huge white eye that was slicing through the night toward them.

When Bonner was a - hundred or so yards from them, everybody was awake and a few of them were struggling for their weapons.

With a sickening thud, Bonner's car hit a rider who had been standing in the middle of the road. The iron prow of the machine caught him and tossed him high in the air. The front axle cracked his knees, crushing them to a bony mass of blood and skin. The force of his fall onto the hard blacktop cracked his skull and drove the bones of his pelvis up into his guts.

A few confused shots rang out.

Bonner went straight through the crowd and a few other riders felt the sting of death as delivered by the rushing tons of metal he drove.

The Mean Brothers meanwhile were standing up, braced against the rollbar of the car, their powerful, muscles arms windmilling with their crude weapons. Each time the axe or shovel swung it cut down a rider.

One of the Mean Brothers cast aside his weapon— the shovel—and reached over the side of the car and grabbed a screaming rider in his tight grasp. The man's neck nestled in the crook of the Mean's arm and the Mean held him firmly as Bonner's car ploughed down the road. When Bonner was past the camp the Mean Brother lifted the man up into the night sky and smacked him as hard as he could with his brick-hard fist. Then he let go and the man fell mangled and bleeding to the ground.

They were well past the camp now. The other Mean Brother was carefully examining the head that he had swept off a body with his axe. It belonged to no one he knew, so he tossed it over the side of the car like a piece of rotten fruit.

One of the Mean Brothers tapped Bonner on the shoulder and pointed back down the road. He wanted to go back for another taste. That twenty-second engagement was only an hors d'oeuvre, it had merely whetted his appetite.

"That's all for tonight, Meanie," said Bonner.

The Mean Brother slapped one huge fist into another. Dang!

Bonner drove another mile and pulled over, parking in the middle of what must have been the living room of someone's house once. A blown-out TV set stood in a corner and a rat-infested couch faced it.

Bonner shut down the engine and listened. The whole gang of riders was on the move. They were cutting through the night hoping to catch him or outrun him by morning.

They kicked up a hell of a racket as they streamed by him. They screamed down the road. But none of them looked to their left to see Bonner hidden in the rubble of the old house.

After they all passed Bonner climbed out of his car and stretched. The Mean Brothers got out, too. One of them kicked the sofa a couple of times to scatter the rats and then lay down on it. He was asleep in a matter of seconds.

His brother wandered over to the broken wall and sat on it. He would take the first watch. Bonner ambled around the bombed-out house. It was like a thousand others he had been in. In a bedroom, next to a rat-eaten old bed was a mildewed stack of magazines. People, it was called. He peered at the faded cover. BROOKE'S BACK! proclaimed the block letters. "The first lady of the American stage makes a triumphant return to Broadway. ..." The pages were stuck together so Bonner couldn't find out who Brooke was, what a stage was, or what in hell Broadway was.

It was then that he heard another pack of engines riding on the road. It was coming from the direction that he had just traveled. . . .

He whipped the shotgun from the leather sling on his back and crouched down next to the wall. The sleeping Mean Brother was awake and ready . . .

Bonner waited, tense. Then, as the seconds passed and the engines grew louder, the note of their engines clearer, he relaxed. When they were almost upon him, he stepped out into the road and waved the riders to a halt.

It was Clara and the Sisters. "Where the hell you bin, Bonner?" the amazon demanded, "we been chasin' your ass since this morning."

"And why is that?" Bonner smiled.

"Cause Dorca told us what that scumbag did to that pretty little piece you got."

"And we don't like it when men beat up on a woman," snarled a Sister-rider called Debbie.

"Me neither," said Bonner.

"Then you just got yourselves a whole bunch of riding friends," said Clara.

"Welcome ladies, welcome," said Bonner. He was glad to see them. Roy would be child's play—he could take them, one at a time, all by himself. But he had a feeling that when he got over the mountains, then he was gonna need some friends. That would be when the real fighting started.

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