Bonner stood in the darkness and listened while the night rang with the sounds of engines starting and gabbling voices. Roy's riders were saddling up as fast as their trembling fingers could find the ignition. A minute or two later they had roared off down the road, headed, they thought, for the mountains and salvation.

Roy ordered them to form themselves in patrols and head out into the darkness and find Bonner. But not one of his men, not even the two remaining followers he had brought with him in the first place, listened to him. As he stood in the whirling cloud of bikes and cars, brandishing his revolver, he called on them, as he put it, to "halt."

"Go halt yourself, asshole," Buggy had said as he bombed away from the campsite.

Finally, Roy admitted to himself that his men were not going to "halt" so he jumped into his car and took off after them.

Clara let her arm holding Miss Colt drop to her side. It had been she that had fired the single shot that had taken down Smitty.

"I don't like this, Bonner," she said disgustedly. "That is one skaggy bunch of riders there. We could move in, you, me, the Sisters and take them down if we were blindfolded. This one or two or six at a time is, well it's a little fuckin' tedious, you know what I'm saying?"

The Mean Brothers that were standing next to him nodded vigorously. They agreed with Clara.

"I know," said Bonner, "but I want to get to the Coast right behind them. It's gotta be that this Roy is headed right for wherever the Rich Man is. If we can be a little patient now we'll get them and the Rich Man too."

"I don't give a shit about the Rich Man. I want to kill the shits what crapped your sweet girl around. Then I want to go back to Chi-town."

"Look," said Bonner, "you know I can handle them alone. If you don't want the whole fight then you can head back now." It was about as close to overt anger as The Outrider ever got.

The Mean Brothers shook their giant heads from side to side. Bad idea, .they were saying, bad idea. They liked the Sisters.

"Ooooh, Mister Bonner is pissed off," taunted Clara. "We are in trouble."

Bonner smiled in spite of himself. "I am pissed off," he said.

"That's the first time I've ever heard you admit to being human," said Clara.

"Well, keep it to yourself," laughed Bonner.

"No problem," said Clara. "No one would believe me if I told them."

The Mean Brothers shook their heads from side to side. No ma'am, they wouldn't.

The next morning, a smoky gray day that was only a few hours old and already it smelled dirty. The Sisters, the Mean Brothers, and Bonner were about to move out when Sheila, a small blond woman who rode a Harley Pan Head that weighed three times what she did walked up to Bonner.

"You know you're pretty cute."

"I heard," said Bonner.

"Sheila," barked a Sister named Belle, "you get away from him or I'll tie your tits together."

"Gotta run," smiled Sheila.

Bonner shook his head and laughed, then moved out onto the road.

Before the sun was too high, Clara kicked her bike forward a few miles an hour and pulled in next to Bonner.

"Hey Bonner," she yelled, "how rich do you figure the Rich Man is?"

"Ever been over the mountains?" Bonner shouted over the combined roar of their engines.

"Nope."

"Let's just say that it's worth the trip."

Clara smiled under her goggles. "I was hoping you would say something like that."

Bonner shot a quick glance over his shoulder.

There were seventeen sisters including Clara. They were spread out on the road behind him each astride their big bikes. Bonner had always felt that he owed Clara and the Sisters something of a debt. Not too long before he had led them and a few others directly into Leatherman's capital city. Not too many of the Sisters had come out of that encounter alive.

The Sisters that were bombing down the road behind him were new, tough recruits that Clara had dug up all over the place. They might have been new to the Sisters, but they weren't new to the road. Any band of riders led by Clara was going to be a formidable force.

Clara was the undisputed leader. Her second-in-command was Belle, a tall, muscular woman who was good with any kind of weapon, but her favorite form of warfare was close quarters with a length of lead pipe she had picked up somewhere. It dangled from her belt, ready for action.

Sheila, her friend, carried a gun like everybody else, but when it came to working a wire, there was no one better. She was a slim young thing with a whip-hard body. If she caught you round the neck with the slim piece of copper wire she kept wound around one of her little hands, she'd cut your throat before you knew there was someone behind you. She could flex every muscle in her body and concentrate all the force she could put out into that twist of wire.

Debbie was one of the Sisters that had gone into the Cap with Bonner. She was a shotgun fan. Bonner had seen a wave of blood and guts from some poor Stormer wash over Debbie, staining her brown hair red, but it didn't seem to bother her any. She was always ready to do some "reaping" as she put it.

The others were new to Bonner. He was looking forward to seeing them perform.

It wasn't long before he got the chance.

Like the other states, the Snows were divided into private fiefdoms that were responsible for a certain area. These small areas were responsible for squeezing as much produce out of the land and as much work out of their slaves as possible. The more they produced the more they sent on to Carey—but they could also keep more for themselves.

In the Slavestates the abuse of the slaves and the collection of their labors was left to unpleasant characters called Tax-men. Carey, having a slightly more imaginative turn of mind than Leatherman had divided his lands into Dukedoms. Bonner and the Sisters were just on the edge of the domain of a character called Duke Strauss. A couple of stragglers from the supply train who had wandered into his castle told him about getting sliced up. They didn't know their attacker's name and they didn't really care.

Neither did Duke Strauss.

"Fok," he said when he heard the story told by a bleeding Snowman.

Duke Strauss's Snowmen stood around, watching their leader and fingering their weapons.

"Carey ain't gonna like this when he hears it." The rest of the Snowmen nodded. And, thought Duke, he isn't going be too nice to me when he finds out that it happened on my land.

"Hey," shouted a Snowman, "let's go get the fucks."

"Good idea." said Duke Strauss.

The Snowmen blasted out of the weed-grown parking lot of the building that Strauss called his "castle." It was an old roadside office building that had once been made of copper-glass. That had been shattered and broken here and there and some particularly strong creeper had snaked its way through the building. It had reached the room and curled around the sign that once lit up: OMNITRON COMPUTER CORP.

They hit the road and took off. Roy was long gone. Duke and his men were headed for a head-on confrontation with the Outrider and the Sisters.

Bonner and the Sisters were spread out on a big cracked expanse of eight-lane. They had just come out of one of those long, long curves that the old highway builders seemed so fond of working into their designs. They were headed for a cloverleaf intersection, one of the few Bonner knew that still stood in its entirety.

When Bonner looked back on it later he would figure that he should have been ready for the ambush.

They were under the bridge when the first bullets started zipping off the broken roadway. Bonner ducked and hit the brakes. A couple of the Sisters overshot him then put their big bikes into controlled skids and came back.

The Sisters, like Bonner, didn't run from a fight.

Out of the comer of his eye, Bonner saw a female body topple off a bike. It was little blond Sheila. Belle wasn't going to like that . . .

Bonner had turned his car on the skid and was facing a horde of Snowmen who were coming down the ramps. There were a lot of them and not a helluva lot of cover. The Mean Brothers were off and running before the big car came to a halt. The Sisters fanned out around Bonner, diving into ditches beside the road or ducking behind a few wrecked cars that littered the highway.

They were outnumbered and trapped. It was time for some big medicine.

Bonner stood up in the well of his car, stripped the canvas cover off the big fifty cal that was bolted to the rollbar of his death wagon, clipped in the auto-feed and started blasting.

Up to that point Duke Strauss thought things were going pretty well. The rider force he had encountered was small, so tiny, in fact that he was seriously considering killing the Snowman whose column had gotten sliced for lying to him about the size of the force that had taken him down.

Then Duke noticed that the force he was fighting seemed to be made of women. Once he realized that he decided he was definitely going to cut that cowardly Snowman's throat.

Then that fucking maniac climbed up on his machine and that big chattergun started cutting his Snowmen into little pieces. That just ruined the Duke's day . . .

"Somebody kill that fuck," he screamed as he felt an ounce or two of hot lead split the air uncomfortably close to his cheek.

But the wicked steel tube that Bonner directed at the Snowmen crouched on the overpass chawed great hunks of ancient concrete out of the bridgework, forcing them to choose between keeping their heads down or losing them to Bonner's murderous fire.

"Kill him yourself," shrieked someone.

"1 heard that," growled Duke. He squatted down a little longer and then said, "Okay, I will."

The Outrider's cannon chopped at a little more of the bridge and he changed his mind.

"I'll do it," said the Snowman next to him, suddenly feeling heroic.

"You do," said Duke, "and I'll give you twenty slates."

"You gotta bet."

The Snowman hunkered down at the base of the wall for a second, gathering his courage and looking at his weapon. It was an old H&R rimfire rifle and he figured he was pretty good with it.

Suddenly the firing stopped and he figured this was his chance. The guy with the big gun was obviously changing belts on his machine gun.

The Snowman whipped up and a couple of big shells tore his head off and sent it bouncing into the road.

Bonner wasn't reloading. He had stopped firing because there wasn't anything to shoot at. Why waste ammunition?

"Fuck," said Duke, "this sonovabitch is bleeding all over me."

He glanced down at the gore-slick headless corpse next to him. He was secretly glad that he wouldn't have to pay out the slates he had promised.

"Okay," he said to the crouching line of Snowmen next to him. "We can't sit here all fucking day . . ."

"So what do you suggest?"

"All at once, we stand up and start blasting. On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three." Duke heaved himself up, looked over the parapet, caught a quick glimpse of Bonner, and started to duck down again. Then it struck him that the other Snowmen were still crouched under the cover of the low stone ! wall on the bridge top.

That made him mad. He pulled up his rifle, caught Bonner in his sights . . . and then found that the rifle had been pulled from his hand and tossed over the side of the bridge. Clinging to the opposite side of the wall were the Mean Brothers. One hairy arm caught him by the neck and pulled him over. The Mean Brother's powerful fist held Duke by the collar of his shirt. The Mean Brother's other hand was engaged in hanging onto the narrow rail.

Duke dangled at the end of his frayed shirt collar. Then his great weight tore the old piece of fabric free. He dropped the twenty-five feet to the smashed-up road, bounced on the roof of rusty junked car, and fell to the road. He cracked his head painfully as he hit.

"Where'd the Duke go?" asked the Snowman who had been next to him on the bridge.

"He was here a minute ago."

Through his pain, the Duke looked up into Belle's very mean eyes. She had sprinted under the bridge and was now standing over the fallen Duke.

"What's your name?" growled Belle. She was annoyed. Someone had shot Sheila off her bike. Sheila looked like she was going to be okay, but it was the thought that counted.

"Duke," said Duke.

"Duke meet dyke," said Belle and slapped him on the side of the head with her lead pipe. A few more blows and she had softened his skull. A few more heavy strikes with the brain-encrusted length of metal and she had beaten his head to a jelly.

The Mean Brothers left their precarious perch, the little ledge of the other side of the bridge parapet, and jumped up onto the wall proper. They stood there for a microsecond, allowing the Snowmen to take a good look at them before they started slashing this way and that with their crude iron weapons.

"Holy shit," said a Snowman.

The heavy axe that one of the Mean Brothers carried described its first murderous arc through the air and caught an Snowman just under the chin. The thick blade split the chin wide and cleaved the jawbone and tongue in two neat, dangling pieces.

Hot, red blood, thick like the sugar syrup that Dorca would kill for, gushed up through the terrible wound and coursed down the shaft of the axe. The Mean Brother rocked the dead Snowman back and forth on the end of the axe, trying to free his weapon from the tangle of bone and flesh that used to be the lower half of the Snowman's face.

The other Mean Brother was busy. He had decked a couple of Snowmen with the flat of his shovel, squashing ears against thick skulls. He had gotten tired of that, and was now using the sharp edge of the implement to chop down a few of his enemies.

A Snowman scrabbled away from the two behemoths and brought his gun up to eye level. He looked down the barrel at the Mean Brother with the shovel and squeezed off a round. The bullet flattened itself against the wide side of the shovel. It would have torn the weapon from the hands of another man. But the shovel remained rock-steady in the Mean Brother's hand.

The Snowman was about to shoot again when he found his hand and gun caught in an invisible web. Something pulled his arm and shooter back towards his face.

It was Sheila and her garrote. "Pick on someone your own fuckin' size," she screamed in his ear. She had the wood-handled strangler around his neck and her tiny body seemed to grow in size as she twisted the wire tight. The gun was caught between the wire and the man's throat so the fine thread didn't cut into his skin in the usual manner of Sheila's slayings. But the gun did.

The lump of metal caught around the hapless Snowman's throat and crushed it.

Bonner and Clara were working their way up the overpass. Miss Colt spoke with authority a couple of times, throwing dead Snowmen around like confetti. A bullet tore into a Snowman crouched down on the roadway. It hit him in the mouth. The bullet drove a big brown molar out of its socket. The enamel-tipped missile found a new home in the eye of the Snowman next to him.

Bonner's Steyr wired a vengeful message of death to a couple of Snowmen who had taken cover beneath three dead bodies of their fellows. The Outrider tore some strips of flesh off the men with unerring accuracy. While his gun was occupied on them, a Snowman made a break for it, hoping to get to the far side of the bridge before anyone noticed.

Bonner noticed. His hands dropped to his knives and two blades streaked through the morning sunlight. The first caught the fleeing Snowman mid-back. The second, more carefully aimed, chunked into his neck. He died instantly, his legs seeming to turn to rubber as he fell.

There was just sporadic fighting going on around the cloverleaf now, as the other Sisters mopped up the remaining Snowmen.

Clara looked around her and the broken bodies of her enemies. "That," she said to Bonner, "was refreshing."

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