He slipped off his bike and rooted around in his saddle bag for a plate bomb. It was a simple device. Two metal dishes-someone had found thousands of them at the old prison in Joliet-held together with stiff metal bands. Packed inside, around the explosive charge, were nuts and bolts and jagged pieces of metal, which scattered when the powder was detonated. The idea was that the force of the bomb hitting the ground would trip the spring inside which would set the whole damn thing off. That was the theory, anyway... Sometimes a bump in the road would trigger it and kill the rider and anyone else in the neighborhood. A lot of guys wouldn't travel with men carrying plates.
Coldchip hefted the weight of the bomb in his hands. He only had one, so it had to count. He took a deep breath and curved his arm around it like a discus thrower. Summoning up all his strength, he reared back and let fly.
Bonner hit the gas and roared up the side of the ridge, passing the plate bomb in midair. He left the depression in the lake just as the plate bomb claimed it. It exploded, a blinding blast perforating the already torn bodies that Bonner had left behind him.
It seemed to Coldchip that Bonner applied the brakes to his car while he was still airborne. The car hit ground and skidded to a halt. Coldchip looked at Bonner, sitting there behind the wheel, his Winchester pointed right at him. Coldchip cowered behind his crates of soup.
"Bonner, fer Chrissake... Please!"
Bonner pumped two shells into the cases, sending gouts of soup skyward. Coldchip grunted and sagged to the ground, falling into a sticky pool of soup, his blood swirling into it.
Coldchip died almost instantly. "You were right, man," said Bonner, "you should have stayed home."
Bonner put the car in gear and drove off. The sooner he found Leather, killed him, and got this damned price off his head the less trouble he would have. He hit speed again and watched the horizon, the old eastern lakeshore becoming more distinct as he ate up the miles.
Chapter 4
Night had fallen but Bonner drove on, the single beam of his headlight darting out to split the darkness before him. He was out of the lake now, cutting across Michigan. He was making slow time-old Highway 94 had been crushed and pounded into an uneven surface of holes and rusty gaps where the old metal supports still showed. Great slabs of broken overpass lay on the roadbed, littering it like concrete icebergs. The sound of his engine could be heard deep in the night-but there was no one there to hear it. To his left were the old cities, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Lansing, jagged against the night sky.
Back in the Outriding days there had been people living there. First they had cowered in the rubble, like animals, living on what they could scavenge from in and amongst the ruins. There were still burn victims around then-they died. Gradually, some of the survivors went crazy from fear of attack or fear of starvation or fear of the hell of a radiation storm. Those terrible silent clouds were gone now, blown by the winds to some other part of the earth.
People went crazy then because they didn't know what further horrors the new world held for them. It was fear of the unknown, fear of what was out there that killed most of them.
Hard to believe, but once the burn victims were gone and those who were going to go crazy had lost their minds, the ones that remained, the hardiest survivors, began to rebuild. Slowly, life had been reborn. Men stopped living in their caves and burrows and they began to adapt, to fit their lives to their new world. They built shelters, they planted what crops they could, but they still lacked the courage to walk over the hill, to trail down the road to see what lay just over the horizon.
That was when the Outriders had been born.
Bonner muscled his car off the road and killed the engine and the light. The sudden black silence enshrouded him. He sat behind the wheel and listened to the tick and creak of the cooling engine. Slowly, he got out from behind the wheel and stretched.
He built a fire and started to heat a can of stew he had brought with him. He ate it quickly, out of the can, then rolled himself in the old blanket he kept under the seat. When Bonner closed his eyes he could see the shaft of light from his headlamp and the gray ribbon of road before him as if the image had been burnt with a fine wire into the inside of his eyelids.
The Outriders. Leather had been one. So had Seth. And Carey, Glover, Pershing... What did Carey call himself now? The Prince. Prince of the Snowstates...
Bonner had been the first. The first to get an old Dodge motor running well enough to venture out into the world. He had travelled, cautiously at first, through the continent, finding groups of survivors-not many but enough to convince him that his work was worth doing. Slowly he began linking the bands together, building a network, trading information for supplies. Others had joined him. Leather came riding out of the dawn one morning and said he had been all the way to New York.
Gradually people had come to trust the Outriders, they were the closest thing to heroes the new world had. Bonner began to coax the survivors out of their little enclaves-they were like nervous puppies-trying to get the bands to join together, to unite, to rebuild. It wouldn't be the old America, but it would have been a land that might have been free of fear and that would have been a good enough start for Bonner.
Leather changed all that. He liked being an Outrider. He liked the praise, he liked that look in people's eyes when he rolled into town, he liked the power. Bring the country together, fix it so anyone could set out on the road if they wanted to, and he would lose all that. He couldn't afford to sacrifice his position to an idea. It was Leather who first figured out that information was power and he could use it to his own ends.
He began building a gang. Every town had its bad element, just the way it had always been. Maybe there were more now, after the bomb, Bonner couldn't say. Leather recruited the bullies and rowdies, the swaggerers and the mean minded... He bribed them with the liquor and gas and food he found and with dreams, telling them that he would make them powerful men in this new land. They would build a new country with Leather as leader and them as the first citizens. They bought it-a few of them are still alive, but most are dead, sacrificed to Leather's ambition or killed when they challenged his power.
They had been brutal, right from the start. Bonner would never forget the time he rode into some no-account town in Delaware where there had once been a band of survivors. They had been a prosperous little group, raising enough to eat, more than enough in fact. They sold the surplus for gasoline and farming implements they couldn't make themselves. They had neat little houses, each one had a garden-it was almost normal life. When Bonner passed through every man, woman and child was dead. Leather and his gang were sure they had money or liquor and ammunition and they didn't care whom they had to kill to find it. There wasn't anything there, of course, but they killed everyone anyway. Everyone, that is, except Dara.
When he got there he found her practicing to kill Leather. Dara had found a shotgun and a case of shells and she was teaching herself to use it. She was standing in a parking lot-Bonner could still see the green grass growing up between the cracks in the asphalt-crying hot tears of hate. She slammed two shells into the breech, chose her target through her tears and blasted away. She had damn near blown Bonner's head off...
Her first words to him after he had convinced her that he wasn't part of Leather's pack were: "I'm going to find him and I'm going to kill him..."
Dara had become the last Outrider. There were times over the next few months when Bonner would sneak a sideways glance at Dara as they bucketed along the sketchy highways and he would always see the same look in her cool blue eyes. She never stopped hating for a moment, not even when she fell in love with him. Hate drove her, hate sustained her, it was food and drink, air and water, the element she lived in.
Her disease had become Bonner's compulsion. He travelled with her and he would see to it that she got her wish. He had to go along, because more than dealing death to Leather he wanted to make sure that Dara lived. He had failed-or so he thought-on both counts.
They found Leather in New York. He and his gang had taken over one of the old luxury hotels-the building must have been two hundred years old-that overlooked the wild tangle of vegetation that once had been a gigantic park. They had found themselves a whole cellar full of wine and they were going to drink it all. Other men, better men, would have had a little for themselves and kept the rest to barter. But Leather didn't believe in barter. If you were Leather you took what you needed.
Bonner knifed the two drunks that were supposed to be guarding the entrance to the wine cellar. They were so stupefied with wine that they never felt the blades slice into their hearts.
Leather had been slumped over a table. He was sitting in a cracked gold chair-it looked like a throne-that he had dragged down from one of the old cobwebbed ballrooms. He had just stared dumbly at Dara when she raised her shotgun. Something stopped her before she pulled the trigger. For one tense second Bonner was afraid she had lost her nerve. But she hadn't. She lowered the gun, handed it to Bonner and strode up to Leatherman. His drunken, bloodshot eyes followed her across the dank cellar. She grabbed a bottled and smashed it then raised it high above her head, paused a second to marshal her strength and then slashed his face, whipping the jagged green glass along his cheek. His eye popped like a fried egg.
His screams tore through the room, rousing his drunk soldiers. Bullets started flying, spitting into the row upon row of glass bottles. Glass ricocheted. Bonner scooped up Dara and ran with her. Hours later she said: "I had him, and I lost him..." She worked her hands into tight fists and Bonner knew that her quest was not finished.
They had headed for Chicago. Halfway there, not far from where Bonner was now, he awoke to find her gone. She had headed back. Her work was not done.
Carey defected about that time and founded the Snows. Berger grabbed the Hots, both of them welding together organizations like those Leather had in the area he was now calling the Slavestates. Almost at once, a war between all three had broken out, trapping the innocent in a whirling vortex of fire and blood. But no side was stronger than the other; there had been stalemate after a few hot months of fighting... The greatest casualty was Bonner's dream. And Dara. Bonner heard she had been killed and he had grieved. He sighed. It was all a history of a time no one would ever write, that no one would ever read
Bonner closed his eyes, slept for an hour or two then hit the road again. He turned south to look for an oasis and he passed the spot where he had last seen her. He could never pass it by without falling prey to suffocating memories. They haunted him through the rest of the lonely day.
Chapter 5
It was not far past dawn, but the heat of the morning was already cutting into Bonner's shoulders. Absently, he ran a hand through his hair. It felt hot and brittle, dirty with sweat and the sun. Somewhere he would have to find himself some water and wash. He imagined dousing his body with cool water in a stream somewhere, cleansing himself of heat and fatigue, the way crazy old Preacher said he could do the same thing to sin.
The bomb had blown away everything. Even sin. Nothing was a sin anymore-unless you counted getting yourself taken down or robbed of something you had killed to own yourself. That was always Dara's problem, Bonner thought, she lived in a new bad world but she carried the baggage of the old bad world with her.
She wanted to kill Leather because she thought him evil. She had decided that he didn't deserve to live-as if being robbed of life in this time was some terrible forfeit-he had to be punished. As far as she was concerned he was like the rad that ruined the water and turned the soil and air into gray death, useless, evil...
Bonner wanted Leather dead because he was an enemy. For a couple of hundred miles, two days of hard travelling, Bonner had listened to his engine and held one thought in his mind: nothing personal, Leather, nothing personal...
He saw himself standing behind the chattering fifty calibre, cutting Leather's big body into pieces with a long, hot spray of shells: nothing personal...
He saw all three of his blades scything hilt deep into Leather's paunch: nothing personal...
He heard the contemptuous snort of the Winchester and saw the shells slamming into Leather's scarred face, stripping away the flesh, laying bare the bone:
nothing personal...
He could feel his hands closing around Leather's muscled throat, feel the collapse of the delicate traceries of bone and cartilage under his fingertips: nothing personal...
Bonner was staring out over the hood, his grip on the wheel growing stronger until, with a start, he brought himself back to the hot morning.
He was about forty miles from Detroit, or rather, what had once been Detroit, and was running out of gas. A ways up the highway he would get to the oasis. He wondered if anyone had found his cache. Why not? he wondered. It was there, all you had to do was look for it. If someone took what he needed and moved on, that was fine by him. If they got any ideas that the vast underground pool of fuel belonged to them, then they were buying trouble. Deep in the back of Bonner's brain there came a feeling that he had known before: he was sick of killing-he chased the thought from his mind. To stop killing was to die. What was wrong with that? a voice asked. Bonner couldn't answer that one.
By the time the sun reached its zenith, Bonner was driving through the broken streets of the town that held the fuel reserve. He had never paused long enough in the rains to find out the name of the place. To Bonner and Seth and a few of the others who knew the secrets of the town it was just called the oasis. It was one of the many strung out along the roads.
Bonner stopped in front of an expanse of gray paving that fronted the street. The few foundation stones of the old office and the place where the pumps had been could still be seen. A metal plug about a foot across was set into the concrete. Bonner levered it up and peered within. The heady smell of gasoline rushed up to his nostrils. A faint shimmer dappled the liquid below him and he could see that there was plenty left. Quickly, he began lowering the bucket that lay by the plug into the gloom. Within the hour he had filled his tank and was ready to head on.
Before starting the engine, though, he paused, his head cocked into the wind like an animal listening for danger. On the edge of a breeze, Bonner could hear an approaching engine. It was the high whine of a tough little motor plainly working its guts out. Bon-ner smiled. He knew the sound and was a good friend of the driver.
A few minutes later, Starling, mounted on that crazy looking tricycle of his, hove into view. The two big fat tires that capped the rear axle made the vehicle look like it could climb a cliff face. Starling bounced down the street looking like a fanner on a tractor. He grinned out from between the two huge tires.
"Well, damn me," he yelled over the howl of his engine, "Mr. Bonner himself."
"Hey, Starling," Bonner called back, "what brings you here?"
"You know me, always looking. Always looking for love." He shut down the engine and slid from the saddle. He grasped Bonner's hand. "Sure am glad to see you. I ain't had a friendly word with no one in many a day. Penn's crawling with Stormers. They shot at my ass for about a hundred miles."
"I saw Coldchip. He said the same thing."
Starling's face split in a wide grin. "Coldchip. No shit. How's he doing?"
"Not so good."
"Oh," said Starling, "did you... ?"
"Yes," said Bonner, " 'fraid so."
Starling set about busying himself with his car. He was a tall, wiry man, his face burnt dark brown by the sun. He was as strong as a bull and as fast as a whip. He carried a gun, of course, but his preferred weapon was a bow and arrow. He made his own steel shafts with tips that packed an ounce or so of explosive powder. Bonner hated the sound of one of those little terrors hitting a man's body. Their effect was devastating.
"Damn," said Starling. "I would have thought that Coldchip had more sense than that."
"I think it was a spur of the moment decision. He didn't think about what he was doing."
"Don't feel b
ad, Bonner. Ain't your fault."
Bonner shrugged.
Starling was filling the big tank of his cycle. The morning air was thick with gas fumes.
"One of these days all this shit is going to run out."
"It'll all be gone some day."
"Us too. Even you, Bonner."
"Even me."
"So which way you headed?"
"I'm inbound." ù
"You know what I heard?"
"Yeah," said Bonner, "you heard that Leather has put a price on my head. Ten thousand gold slates, right?"
"That's right. How did you know?"
Bonner smiled grimly. "How did I know. Remember Hatchet?''
"Yeah," said Starling, "I remember Hatchet. What a second rate piece of shit he was."
"Well," said Bonner, "Leather sent Hatchet to tell me." "Leather sent Hatchet? He sent Hatchet to bring you down? And Hatchet went? Jeez, what a fool."
Richard Harding - Outrider 1, Premier Volume Page 3
