Bonner was following Beck's truck into the scarlet light cast by a blood-red sun rising in a wash of clear blue sky. The Mean Brothers dozed in the rear of Bonner's car, a savage, eight-cylinder, wedge-shaped vehicle. It was fast, it was powerful; it bit the road, the full-throated roar of the upswept twin exhausts sounded like the bellowing of a wild beast in the cool morning. The car seemed to be a mechanical extension of the man who controlled it: the car was fast, the car was deadly . . . like its driver.

Ahead of him, the rusty truck bounced and growled along the broken freeway. Over the bellowing of his own engine, Bonner could hear the occasional heavy clank as the gas drums in the payload of the truck ahead of him knocked against one another. There was a good load of merchandise in there and Bonner was anxious to see it safely home to Chicago. Beck was already working out the profits from the raid. He licked his lips, laughed, and took his hands off the wheel of the truck long enough to rub them together in a gesture of delighted greed.

"Five, six thousand slates," he shouted over the roar of the truck engine, "five or six thousand, easy."

Bonner couldn't quite fathom this obsession with money. All the riders had it: if they came upon a load of something really valuable, like gas or ammunition, fresh food or a good batch of the old canned kind, they traded some for other commodities, then, as quick as possible, they converted it all to the rough-edge, irregular gold pieces that served as the currency of the shattered continent.

Some riders, like Beck, had huge stores of these pieces of slate stashed all over the place. There were gold hounds—they made the slates out of pre-bomb gold: rings, chains, bracelets—who were just crazy about the stuff. They spent their whole lives looking for it. Men fought for it, they died for it. They took unimaginable risks for gold.

And it was useless.

You couldn't eat it. You couldn't power your machine with it. You couldn't defend yourself with it. What was the point?

Bonner had asked Beck about it once. They had been sitting in Dorca's, the riotous bar in Chicago where the riders of the Open City hung out.

Beck had looked at Bonner as if he had suddenly lost his mind.

"Whaddya mean? 'Why do I go for slates?' What kinda asshole question is that?"

Bonner rephrased his question. "What good are slates? Why would, you rather have money than a barrel of gas? Or a side of beef?"

Beck had stared at Bonner as if he couldn't believe his ears. Then he took a deep slug of Dorca's foul brew as if to fortify himself against his friend's obvious stupidity.

"Jeez, Bonner. You gotta have slates. With slates you can buy shit."

"Yeah, but it's stuff that you bring in, sell, and then buy back. Explain that to me."

"Look." Beck reached into the pocket of the tattered blue jeans he wore. He pulled out a slate. "See this? I can show this slate piece to that little honey over there—" He gestured towards one of the young hookers than leaned against the wall. There were always plenty of working girls in Dorca's.

"All I gotta do is give this to her and I got her. Fun for the whole fucking night." The big man leered. "In fact, I just might do that, too. Yo, honey!" he shouted.

A pretty girl detached herself from the throng and sidled over to Beck. The giant licked his lips and looked hard at the full-breasted young woman who draped herself over his shoulder like a heavy coat.

"How you keeping warm tonight, honey?" His huge paw slipped the slate down the front of her low-cut leather shift.

"I think I found a big man to heat me up," she said with a phony fuck-me leer on her face.

Beck turned back to Bonner. "See, slates come in handy."

"Okay," said Bonner, "I'll give you that one but you have more than you'll ever need."

Beck looked at his newly purchased companion. "The hell I do!"

"I meant slates," said Bonner.

"No way, man. You gotta have slates. You can't buy pussy with a side of beef."

"Never mind," said Bonner wearily.

So they were going to push their rigs back to Chi-town and get themselves knee-deep in slates. Bonner shrugged behind the wheel. Men and money— they went together. There was no way you could convince them that they didn't need it. It was some age-old drive, some ancient force that drew men to wealth. Bonner yawned. What the hell did he care, anyway?

In the next few seconds, thoughts of wealth and man's desire for gold were subsumed to the greater need of staying alive.

Something—Bonner wasn't sure exactly what— exploded in the rear right hand side of Beck's truck. A thunderous blast split the morning, a sheet of flame flooded out onto the highway. There was the sound of grinding metal as the rear axle, the smooth tires, and the differential of the truck scattered onto the road. The ass end of the truck dropped down and threw up a sheet of sparks.

A couple of barrels of gas toppled off the pay load, split open, and ignited. Bonner had been following close and fast—too close and too fast, he now realized—and had no time to go around the widening pool of fire. There was no time to stop, either. He stamped his foot down hard on the gas pedal and shot through the flaming curtain. The sudden lurch of speed tore a hole in the flames. For a second the air seemed to be on fire. The heat snatched at the pounding motor and at Bonner and the Mean Brothers as if trying to hold them back, as if trying to drag them down into the inferno.

Then they were out of it. Cool air washed over them. Bonner took a deep breath of the invigorating air and swerved his machine crazily around the truck which lay in a burning heap in the middle of the road.

Bonner gunned the engine up onto the side of the road and then slammed on the brakes, stopping the bellowing machine behind a tall heap of boulders. Before the car had halted, the Mean Brothers had swung over the side and were climbing the rocky verge with an agility surprising in men so big. Bonner, his evil little Steyr machine pistol carried lightly in his powerful hands, scrambled after them.

The three men peeped cautiously over the top of the outcropping of rock. No sudden rip of bullets greeted their heads. Bonner uncoiled himself slowly and surveyed the scene. About fifty yards behind him the wreck of the truck continued to bum. Bright orange flames and dirty, oily smoke clawed into the ky. The smell of burning gasoline was mixed with the sizzling, appetizing sweet smell of baked apples. The cloth burned merrily. There was no sign of Beck.

Bonner and the Mean Brothers slid down to the road bed, keeping low. The nose of the Steyr fanned back and forth, as if it could sense the presence of the man or men who had blown away half of their little convoy. Bonner felt every sense tingle. When danger was close, when there was a threat, when it was him against an unseen assailant, his reflexes were whip-fast, his hearing acute; his eyes flicked over every feature of the dull landscape, searching.

Nothing.

Bonner clambered on a wrecked car that was junked by the side of the road and looked over the far side of the road. The spot from which the attack had come. He felt that there had only been one ambusher. Had there been more than it would have been relatively easy to pour some hot lead down on the road and take down him and the Mean Brothers. But after the initial strike there had been nothing. A meaningless hit-and-run. Nothing gained.

Except Beck was dead.

Bonner walked slowly over to the burning truck and tried to peer into the hellish flames. The cab was turned over. The plastic of the steering wheel had melted, the glass of the windshield had shattered. The tattered upholstery was burning down to the red-hot springs. If Beck's body was burning in there, too, Bonner couldn't see it.

Above the crackle of the flames Bonner heard, very far off, a powerful motorcycle kicked into life. There were a couple of revs and then the machine took off.

Bonner whipped around. Sonofabitch. That was him. He had fled away from the scene on foot to his machine stashed somewhere. Bonner shook his head, mad at himself. He had screwed up.

"See!" yelled a voice, "you didn-'t follow through, you stupid fuck."

Bonner smiled. Beck was trailing through the trash at the side of the road. "You didn't, either."

"I did more than you, asshole. As soon as I lost the ass on this mother I was out of the cab and looking for him. / knew enough to go looking for his transport."

"You didn't find it."

"Fuck you, man. My leg's broke."

Bonner looked. Beck was trailing one of his oak-thick legs behind him. There was a tear in his pants a foot long. There was a bloody, red, raw scrape running from knee to thigh.

Beck leaned against the junked car and prodded his skin. "I am in some kind of pain ..."

"Did you see him?"

"I sorta got a look at him. Young guy, tall. Moves like a three-foot greased shit. Who the fuck was he? He think he owns this fuckin' road or what? I mean, shit. We got our haul blowed out from under us, my bike was in the back. Man, that pisses me off. Know what I'm saying?"

"I hear you. Makes no sense."

Beck forgot his leg as the enormousness of his loss hit him. "Man! How often do you get a good haul that easy? 1 mean we stood to make a shitload. I'm all for a rider trying to take another rider's haul away from him. Hell, I done it myself a few times. But shit, just to blow up a couple of guys and then fuck off like that, that is just plain no fuckin' fun."

Bonner wasn't listening. He was wondering what the man had used to make a couple of big bangs like that. If he could figure that out then he would go a long way towards figuring out who had rattlesnaked them. A man's weapon was a signature in the new world.

"Beck," Bonner interrupted suddenly, "how many blasts did you feel?"

"What?"

"There was one. The one that blew out your undercarriage. Were there anymore?"

"Who fucking knows? Maybe there was another before the gas went."

"Yeah," said Bonner, "there were two. What do you figure it was? Dynamite?"

"I dunno." Beck rubbed his leg and went back to complaining about having lost his more or less honest day's work. "Call me a philosopher if you want to, man, but I'm gonna tell you something I figured out about this world. I said it before, I'll say it again and it makes a lot of sense to me, man: There are an awful lot of assholes in this world. Know what I mean? And they make it twice rest of us." He fell silent with the air of a man who has said his piece.

"You got any trouble with Crazy Nick?" asked Bonner.

"Crazy Nick Blastoid? Nawwww. Him 'n me, we're good buddies, besides that wunt him I saw. Why you ask?"

" 'Cause he's the only rider I can think of who uses dynamite all the time."

"Could have been a plate."

Plate bombs were a lethal and unstable form of homemade bomb much favored by the dumber riders.

Bonner shook his head. "If it was a plate, the Mean Brothers and me would have gotten a face full of nuts and bolts." Plates were powerful fragmentation bombs, scrap metal packed around as much explosive power as you could get in. A deadly sandwich—and a very effective weapon. Effective, that is, if it didn't go off in your hand. Plates were spring-activated and could go off if you hit a bad bump in the road. There were a lot of bad bumps on the roads these days.

"He coulda mined the road."

"Yeah," said Bonner, "he could have. But why?"

Beck shrugged. "Beats the shit out of me. I'll tell you, though, Bonner, as soon as we figure out who did it, I am personally gonna tear his guts out."

He tested his considerable weight on his leg. He winced.

"Broken?"

"Yeah. This is not my fuckin' day."

Web Site Contents (Unless Mentioned Otherwise) ©2012 By Atlan Formularies, Post Office Box 95, Alpena, Arkansas 72611-0095
Phone: 870-437-2999 - Fax: Out of Order -  Email: Addresses

[ Back ] [ Home ] [ Up ] [ Next ]