On the other side of the mountain a medium-sized force of Stormers camped, unwillingly. They were from the dirty side of the Continent, where there was a continuous band of broken-down cities running almost the length of their lands. They liked the grimy, dirty landscape. It was home.

Out here in the mountains things were different. They had run into a bunch of slaves who didn't even know who Leatherman was. What Leatherman wanted to send them way the hell out here for was known only to their squad leader, Joe. And he wasn't saying.

"I don't like it out here," said a Stormer named Lionel. He looked up at the mountains and the pine forests. "Everything is too . . . everything is too . . . you know, clean." He shivered as if the words made him dirty.

Lionel was not the most popular guy in the Stormer troop. It was his supply truck that had gone over a bump and dropped all the pieces of hardware in the differential all over the highway. If it had just been a rider's vehicle they would have just junked the damn thing and kept going. But the supply truck—that was a different story.

He had picked up as many pieces of the gears that had fallen out of his truck that he could find. He thought he had most of them but it was going to take a little time before he knew for sure. If he was missing a part he was going to have to go and see if he could pry something approaching the right thing out of one of the junked wrecks that lay by the roadside.

Joe's Stormers were a cut above the usual Stormer squad. There were a lot of them and they were tough, some of the toughest of Leatherman's Stormtroopers. True, they weren't Radleps, but they were good and mean and they could kill without thinking twice about it.

Lionel slid under his truck and listened to his brother Stormers gripe about the stop.

"I'll show them," he thought, "I'll tell 'em I need a part and get Joe to gimme it outa one of their fucking machines."

It was then that he noticed a scuffed pair of boots that stopped next to his truck. Lionel could see the tip of the man's rifle as it pointed towards the ground.

"How long, Lionel?"

"Hard to say, boss."

A thin dollop of old oil fell out of the gaping wound in the truck's undercarriage and turned Lionel's forehead black. Some of the viscous fluid dribbled down his cheek and got in his mouth.

"Pah!" he spat a wad onto the under chassis. "Keep at it, Lionel. We need the truck." "Yes, boss. Will do . . ."

Duffy got as close as he wanted. He could move with such stealth that no man could find him, even if he was looking for him. But the Stormers weren't looking for a man dressed in animal skins carrying a seven-foot rifle.

Bonner and the Sisters were coming down the hill free-wheel, silently coursing down the steep mountain highway. They weren't moving that fast, but they figured by the time they were ready to fire-up the back-kick from the gears wouldn't slow them down enough to cut their momentum that much.

But first it was up to Duffy to work a little of his black magic. He was about a half a mile off and if you were listening for it, you might be able to hear the shot. But nobody was listening.

A Stormer was washing his feet in the mountain stream. He was a few hundred yards off from the rest.

What, thought Duffy, are you doing on my mountain? He squeezed the trigger. The big gun cracked and bucked and the top of the Stormer's head seemed to jump straight up from his body. Leaking blood and brain, the Stormer toppled into the stream. Duffy made a mental note to pull him out later. The man's putrifying body would contaminate the stream and that offended Duffy.

Nobody in the group of Stormers noticed that they were one less.

Two Stormers sat in the dark shade of a blue pine. They would have been hard to see, unless the man looking for them was Duffy.

Two shots, he thought. He pulled the trigger and hit one. While the other was still looking at his companion jump as the bullet struck him, a second slug tore the Stormer's eye out, coursed through his brain and buried itself in the pine tree that he had been leaning against. The sap from the tree and the blood from his head mingled in his hair. His smashed eye slid down the front of his face.

A Stormer was sitting inside the truck that Lionel was working on. The Stormer was sleeping under the canvas-covered payload of the truck. But the truck was between the sun and Duffy. The Stormer was very nicely outlined against the gray-green canvas.

The fabric flounced a little as the bullet tore through it and shattered the sleeping man's spine, just at the point where it met the neck. He woke up, found himself to be paralyzed and died. He slumped over on top of the provisions that were stacked in the back of the truck.

The heavy vehicle rocked with the weight of his fall. The slight rocking motion jiggled a piece loose from the excavations that Lionel was performing under the truck.

"For Christ's sake!" he shouted in exasperation.

No one noticed the spots of blood on the canvas.

Duffy took a bead on a Stormer who was quietly sitting in the bushes, his pants around his ankles. The man had rested his elbow on his knee and was thinking about cars or women or liquor when a bullet slapped into his chest. He went over, showing his ass to the sky before he died . . .

Duffy scanned the camp. The rest of the Stormers were sitting in groups shooting the breeze, pausing occasionally to give hell to someone called Lionel. There weren't too many he could take without arousing suspicion. One thing that Duffy did notice was that they were a relaxed bunch of boys. A lot of them weren't close to their guns, no sentry had been posted.

Duffy chose four Stormers at four widely different points in the camp. If he couldn't kill them all, he might as well get them all as confused as he could. He looked at the four he had chosen and decided their time had come.

As the four lives ended, the effect was almost comical. Men who had been talking to men who were alive not one second ago, just stared dumbly. No one had heard a shot. It was as if they all had heart attacks at the same time.

After the few seconds' shock wore off, there was a general scramble for weapons. Duffy picked off three more in the melee. The Stormers looked at the three who fell, mouths opened.

"What the hell is going on?" demanded Joe of no one in particular.

"Beats the hell out of me," said his second, a man called Glenn.

"Someone's shooting at us," observed a Stormer brilliantly.

"Yeah, but where?"

Duffy could see an eyebrow of a Stormer, so he shot it off.

"There he is!" screamed Glenn.

"He's in fucking Philadelphia!" bellowed Joe.

"I'll kill him!" yelped a Stormer jumping up from behind his car.

Duffy dropped him with ease.

"Come out and fight like a man," shouted a hard guy.

Bonner and the Sisters breezed by Duffy. "Thanks, Duff," he called, "Keep up the good work."

Duffy nodded.

Then, like thunder on the plains, the engines of Bonner and the Sisters burst into life. Bonner slammed his big machine into gear, the front reared up for a second, like a bucking stallion. The cylinders started pounding and Bonner took a bead on the Stormers. This was the kind of killing he had a stomach for. Killing Stormers. Killing any member of Leatherman's evil empire. A man killed that afternoon, thousands of miles away from Leather's seat of power was still a blow against the greatest evil Bonner could conceive of.

The shark-shaped prow of the death machine was pointed straight at them and the double exhaust pipes that swept up behind The Outrider's head seemed to give voice to his hate. They opened up in a loud, vengeance-filled roar that seemed to fill the sunny afternoon.

It was a reflex action that forced the Stormers to stand up to look at the riders that were bearing down on them to deal hot, quick, painful death. As they stood though, some tasted the silent sting of Duffy, still resting his gun on the rocks. Suddenly he had his pick of targets. His eagle eyes sighted them and his gun cut them down.

Bonner slammed his machine into high gear and he pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car jumped forward, almost as if it was trying to catch up with the bullets that Bonner sent streaming ahead of it with his vicious little automatic.

The Mean Brothers stuck their heads into the wind, their eyes alight with delight at the forthcoming fight. They seemed to be urging Bonner to go faster, to get there, to start fighting . . .

Bonner cut into the scattered cars on the road and sprayed a knot of Stormers with withering fire. His shotgun joined the the Steyr. He held the talkative little gun braced against one arm and the taciturn shotgun in the other. Together they offered a deadly counterpoint to each other. The twin barrels of the shotgun spat red death in every direction. He broke the weapon over his knee, reloaded and fired again.

He could feel that almost divine hate creep over him. The hot, intoxicating essense of revenge swept through his brain, wreathing it in a gossamer cloud of sweet, killing power. At times like this the special force that the other riders knew about, the potency that set Bonner apart from the rest of men, took over. He felt alive—he could see clearer than the other man, he could move faster, he could act, react, and anticipate without thought. When this extraordinary might seized him it seemed that he was unstoppable.

It was all that hate, all that desired vengeance, all that yearning for justice that he kept bottled up inside of him that gave him this power. It was like the unobstructable flow of liquid fiery rock from a volcano, a searing heat that burned deep within him.

A Stormer, his hand full of handgun, took careful aim at Bonner's back. He meticulously sighted the spot between his shoulder blades ... but before he could fire Bonner whipped around and the shotgun in his hand barked.

The man used to have a chest. Now he had a bloody mass of garbage. How the fuck did he do that? he thought as he died.

One of the Mean Brothers had caught a Stormer. The man had pointed his revolver at the man-giant but before he could fire, the Mean Brother had grabbed his hand and torn the gun from it. The Mean Brothers disdained to use guns, so instead of shooting the man with the gun, he made him eat it.

He pried the man's mouth open as wide as he could and jammed the three-pound gun into it. The man gagged and tears came to his eyes. The Mean Brother even obliged him by helping him chew it. He seized his victim's head in his hands and crunched the Stormer's jaws down on the unyielding metal. His teeth splintered and drove sharp shards of bone into the man's tender gums.

The man's eyes were open wide in pain, his voice screeching higher than he ever thought it could. He looked over his nose at the four inches of handle that protruded from his mouth. The Mean hit the stock with the heel of his hand and drove the whole iron down the man's tortured throat, tearing the voice box out of the neck wall. Then he walked away to find other diversions in the crowd.

Clara was riding on the back of a Stormer. She had dug two knives into his back and was holding onto them while the man roared and stomped like a bull trying to throw her off. She dug the long-bladed knives this way and that, the metal shafts sliding this way and that, causing untold damage to his insides. Finally, maddened with pain and close to death, he dropped to his knees and Clara slipped off.

"That wasn't much of a ride, ya prick," she bawled. Belle was walking amongst the combatants, slapping back and forth with her pipe, the way a child whips the heads off daisies.

Sheila had her own method of attack. She had put her garrotte away and chose to fight this encounter with nothing more than a long-bladed knife. She still approached from behind, though. She reached between a Stormer's legs and grabbed his balls in her strong, small hand. More often than not, the Stormer, quite discomforted, looked down to see what had gotten hold of his private parts. It was just about then that Sheila sliced down at the exposed neck.

The knife went point first through the delicate bone at the base of the skull. Death was instantaneous. She noted that the things she had her hands full of at the moment of death tended to shrivel and retract.

One didn't, though. She found her hand suddenly quite full. "Hey, big boy," she said, "are there any more at home like you—'' her victim slumped to the ground. "—like you were?" she said disappointedly. All the while Duffy lay propped against his rock silently dropping Stormers who were fighting as hard as they could to stay alive.

Joe had the best record of any of them. He took down two Sisters before being dropped by Duffy.

Sister Debbie had jumped up onto Bonner's car and was chopping through the Stormers with a big fifty cal. A couple of them turned on her. A shot went wide, but it got her attention and she turned the big gun on them. The bullets tossed them around as if they were balls of yarn being played with by a car.

The Stormers were falling back to the head of the column. They were clustered around the cars and trucks that made up the the leaders of the mechanized unit. There they were going to make their stand and, if they could regroup strongly enough, the chances were good that their superior numbers would shift the tide of the battle in their favor.

That was the theory anyway. It might have worked had not one of the less smart Stormers climbed into the back of a truck and let fly at Debbie. The slug hit her on the right side of her body, lacerating her breast until it was attached to her body by only a fine thread of skin. Debbie was very proud of her breasts and dying without one of them—and she knew she would surely die—hardly seemed fair. With the strength that remained to her she tore the Stormer in the truck to pieces with the machine gun. And hit one of the twenty drums of gasoline used to keep the column moving.

The blast knocked everyone to the ground, except the Mean Brothers that is, and there seemed to be a moment's truce while the combatants watched a dozen Stormers fry in a bath of burning gasoline.

Duffy kept on firing though, and brought death to a few of his enemies that hadn't yet fallen back to the shelter of their vehicles.

Bonner hated the screams, the sizzling fat sound, the smell, when men got fire on them. He could taste it for days after . . .

The fight seemed to go out of the Stormers after that. The Mean Brothers wandered around trying to grab them and challenge them. A few fell to their knees and begged for mercy. The Mean Brothers shrugged and killed them as quickly as possible, usually with a blow of their steel fists. That they considered pretty merciful.

A couple kept firing so Bonner shot them.

One of them threw aside his gun and said, "Aww-ww, just kill me." Duffy couldn't hear what he said, but he got the drift.

The Sisters took a lot of casualties this time. Seven out of seventeen. Clara looked over the bodies, pausing to look lovingly at Debbie and then wandered over to Bonner.

She wiped a tear from her eye. "We don't seem to have too much luck when we hook up with you, Bonner."

"I'm sorry. Sister Clara."

She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket that she had looted out of a department of Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. "Hardly your fault," she said.

Duffy ambled up and stood off to one side looking at the carnage that he had helped make.

"You did good, Duffy," said Bonner.

Duffy nodded and folded his arms. "Need bullets."

"There's got to be some here."

"Need salt, too."

"Help yourself."

Duffy nodded again and went to look for the bullets and salt.

Lionel had not moved since the battle had begun. He lay very still under the truck telling himself he would lie there until they went away. He didn't care if it was in an hour, tomorrow, next week, or if they decided to plant crops and wait till they came up. He was going to lie under that truck.

"Still don't know why there are Stormers out here," said Bonner.

Lionel shook his head back and forth on the oily ground. He didn't know either. Oil continued to drool onto his face. That was fine. He didn't care. Just go away. . . .

He heard them clattering around for a while and even felt them climb into his truck and unload it. Fine, he thought, just take it all ...

"Got everything we can carry?" asked Clara.

Oh please, please . . . thought Lionel.

"Think so," said Bonner.

Whoopee! thought Lionel.

"Got your salt. Duff? And your bullets?"

Duffy must have nodded because the next thing Lionel heard was the sound of a dozen bikes and cars firing up and moving off.

He lay for an hour or so then crawled out from under the truck. The battle scene was appalling, but not as appalling to Lionel as the lone figure of Duffy standing there, stock still leaning against his rifle.

"Thought I saw someone talking to the truck earlier."

"Ohhh man," said Lionel, "don't kill me."

Duffy looked at him for a second. "Not gonna. Just get off my mountain."

"Yessir, you bet." Lionel started marching down the road, turning every so often, to call back to Duffy, "See, I'm going. I'm getting off this mountain as fast as I can."

By early evening, Lionel figured he was going to die anyway. He had nothing to eat and no weapon. He didn't know where the hell he was . . .

"Trouble is," he said to the evening stars, "it's gonna take forever for me to die . . ."

He walked a little further and then found that his prophecy was not true. Roy and his riders came along not long after dusk. They killed him because they were scared by Gaucho getting killed like that, more scared by the battlefield they had passed and so they were in an awful bad mood.

Killing Lionel made them feel better.

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