The drunk that Dorca had been in the process of bouncing when Bonner, Beck, and Starling happened along, a more or less normal rider named Swayne, awoke in the alley a day or two after being expelled from Dorca's bar. He did not feel good. His head felt as if it had been stepped on as, in fact, it had been. A drunk had lumbered out of the bar and inadvertently placed his boot on Swayne's ear.

"Oooh, shit man, sorry!" the drunk had mumbled. He got no response from Swayne, so, just for the hell of it, he took a leak on the comatose rider and staggered off into the night giggling.

Shortly after coming to, Swyane did notice that he smelled bad. In addition, his tongue, rubbed raw by Dorca's worst brew, stuck to the roof of his mouth. His mouth, overall, felt as if a small furred animal had been nesting in it for some days. That had not happened, but a couple of fearless rats had eaten the collar off Swayne's denim jacket.

Swayne felt like shit, but it was no surprise. He was used to waking up feeling this way. He staggered to his feet and blinked in the bright sunlight. He stretched, yawned, belched, farted, and decided it was time to meet the day. He pushed his way through the door of Dorca's, conveniently located directly across the street.

He slumped down on a barstool. The rider next to him moved a seat away.

"Nothing personal," the man mumbled. "Amie man, give me a little pick-me-up," said Swayne. Swayne slugged back the drink and felt better immediately.

"Ahhhhhhh," he said. "Now, that's more like it."

" 'Nother?" asked Amie. i "Won't say no," said Swayne.

Amie poured. "Say, Amie, was I in here last night?"

"Night before." "Did I happen to say where I left my rig?"

"Nope."

"Dang," said Swayne.

Swayne left the bar, puked once—felt better—and then applied himself to the business of finding his riding machine. It was a good piece of machinery, a great hunk of Buick (Cadillac engine—it didn't quite fit, but that was okay) so he knew that he probably parked it carefully. It was not the kind of thing that a man would want to lose.

He searched his memory, went a few places, but failed to locate it. He knew it hadn't been stolen: you couldn't expect to steal a rider's means of transport without taking the precaution of killing the rider that went with it. Plainly Swayne was still alive, so it must be around there someplace. He found it parked under the sagging ruins of the elevated railway tracks that could be found all over the city.

He took his place on the ratty seat, checked his weapons, shotgun, handgun, and then started the engine up.

"Work," he muttered, "I hate it."

He was heading out. He had decided a couple of days earlier that with harvest going on in the Slavestates he might head that way and take a little look-see. Maybe there was a badly defended convoy or slave village he could ambush and loot. It was worth a look around, anyway.

It was a nice fall morning when the wheels of his Buick touched down on the dry, hard-packed dirt of the lake bed. No one quite knew where the lake had gone. The pan in which an enormous body of water once lay stretched away to the horizon, a brown shimmer in the clear fall-moming sunlight. Somehow the Bomb had changed things around so much that the lake had ceased to exist. You could still dig down a couple of yards and find water, but it was brown and brackish. It was said that far to the north there was some water in the lake bed. Not much, but something.

All the lakes were more or less dead. That suited the riders well. The dry lake beds made great roads and, with Lake Michigan gone, the citizens of Chicago could see a force coming miles before it got there.

Swayne pulled up out of the lake bed near the ruins of Grand Rapids, then cut south. He was making for Trash Alley, the smokey, narrow entrance to the Slavestates. He never made it.

He had been on the road about seven hours and was getting a little sick of driving. He had a little more of the Michigan peninsula to cover. Once he was into Ohio he decided he would take a break. Like a lot of riders he carried a little bottle of Dorca's brew with him. Swayne swore it sharpened his driving skills.

The road into the ruins of Toledo was a bad one.

After the eighth time that Swayne bounced through a pothole so deep he was afraid he had broken an axle, he pulled over and killed the engine. He grabbed the straw-covered flask from the back seat and got out of his car to stretch his legs.

With the bottle in the crook of his arm he walked a hundred yards or so, sat down in the middle of the wide highway, and pulled out the stopper. The first belt from the bottle sent a gut-wrenching shudder through his body. The second made him feel fine. With the third big mouthful he wondered if he had done the right thing. That drink was strong. So strong that he was sure he heard a deep, deep, rumbling in his ears.

At first he thought it was his stomach. He hadn't eaten all day. He listened closely to his gut and found that it was as quiet as a sleeping baby. He looked at the bottle.

"Weird," he said, forcing down another belt.

The hot blast of alcohol didn't chase the rumbling from his ears. The noise wasn't coming from him. It was in the air, around him somewhere. He stood up and began walking again. With the passage of every second the noise got a little bit louder. He looked up the road a bit and decided that he would walk to the top of the hill, a distance of fifty yards or so. With one more swig to fortify him he strode purposefully to the summit of the blacktopped rise. He crested the hill and found himself staring down the road, a gentle decline into the beginnings of the urban sprawl that led into Toledo. Swayne's keen eyes ran over the landscape spread before him: old steel mills, a shopping center, a trailer park, a Sears long since stripped bare. Then he saw it.

"Holy shit," he remarked. He stared a second longer. "Hee-oly shiiit."

It was the largest body of men he had ever seen gathered in one place. And they were coming his way. They stretched back to the horizon. Thousands of them, thousands. There were men on bikes, cars as big as his Buick, every seat taken, trucks with men; there were horse-drawn wagons, jeeps, motorcycles . . . And, in the center of that moving mass were three enormous . . . things. He didn't know what the hell they were. With all of those men around them, they looked like bananas carried by a swarming legion of ants.

"Stormers," he said. They came from the east.

Who else could they have been?

In the twenty seconds it took for a very scared Swayne to run back to his automobile, he decided—after careful thought—to head south.

He squeezed every ounce of power from his big

old engine as he pushed south for Dayton. He was running and he didn't stop until he hit a gas oasis in a nameless rubble town in southern Ohio. There he gassed up and hit the road again. Nightfall found him camped on the Ohio river.

Swayne figured himself to have had a very narrow

escape. The size of the force he had seen on the road scared him more deeply than he cared to admit. It was only after he had eaten what little rotten food he had brought with him, taken a couple of real deep belts from his bottle, and settled himself on the lumpy back seat of his car, a spring poking him in the back, that he really reflected on what he had seen.

It was bigger than a convoy. About twenty, maybe thirty times the size. And, more tellingly, it was outside the Slavestates. Way outside.

Swayne couldn't say exactly what it meant, but he knew one thing; Someone was gonna get sliced. And get sliced good.

He dreamt dreams that were filled with marching men and violent death. The dreams seemed so real that even after he woke up he could still hear the growl of engines in his ear.

"Man," he remarked to the chill interior of his car. "I am a bundle of fuckin' nerves." He shook his head to drive the sound of big, powerful engines from his ears.

But they didn't go away. In fact, not only did they not recede from his sleep-filled brain, they got louder. He sat up and examined the day that was dawning.

He didn't like what he saw.

Coming up the road towards him, crossing the river on the broken-down old bridge, was another column of men.

"I have died," he said, believing every word he said, "and I have gone to hell. No doubt about it."

His first impulse was to dive into the front seat and pound that old, cold engine until it started up and beat it the hell out of there. But the nearest vehicle, a truck with a mean-looking Silk Devil behind the wheel, was less than two hundred yards away.

Swayne was no fool. He knew that to run now was to die. He rolled onto the floor of his car and pulled his blankets over him. His only hope was to lie there hoping that the passing force thought that his car was a wreck and that there was no one inside. Right then Swayne had one wish in life: to be somewhere else. And if he couldn't have that he wanted to know for a fact that Berger gave all his Devils, Silk and Skag, plenty of blankets to keep them warm at night. He didn't want some hard guy, seeing a bundle of blankets in the back of a junked wreck, decide to help himself to the thin fabric that stood between Swayne and discovery.

It seemed to take two hours for the column to pass by. Swayne uncovered a single eye and stared through the broken window of the passenger door. He watched a never-ending stream of trucks and bikes pass by that little square. Grim-faced men, who knew how many, with guns headed north.

While he lay there, his present terror breaking the record for the most scared he had ever been, set only the day before, Swayne decided that he knew what was going on: Berger and Leatherman were at war; the Slaves versus the Hots. May the dirtiest fighter win. They had obviously agreed on some neutral territory on which to duke it out.

No one noticed the Buick. Wrecks by the side of the road were the most common sight a man could see on the big C. More common than a dead man.

Eventually, they moved on. Swayne gave them a good half an hour before he peeped out from beneath his blankets.

"That," he said to the mouth of his jug, "was close."

He decided that he would head west. Maybe there were more Devils on the road following the main party. He congratulated himself on having thought of that. It made a lot of sense and Swayne liked to think of himself as a sensible guy.

He was a day and a half from the Ohio-Kentucky border when he heard that terrible sound again. He was parked by the side of the road, his ass hanging over a fallen log, taking a shit when he heard the sound of a lot of powerful engines in his ears. He peeked out from behind the bushes and saw, coming from the west, a huge party of riders.

Swayne sat down on his log again with tears in his eyes.

"Oh man," he said, "not again."

He hitched up his pants very quickly, buckling his belt as he ran for his car. Snowmen. Just what he needed.

"Goddam!" he cried as he turned over the engine of his car. "I am going home."

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