The bus station building housed Lucky, and Lucky was the best mechanic in Chicago. He was a stunted, pale little man with a shattered kneecap that made his leg stick out to one side. He walked awkwardly, dragging his leg behind him. Between his extremely, pale coloring and his odd crabbed walk, he looked like some sort of peculiar creature that had grown used to being underground. The duty of looking after Bonner's car fell to Lucky.

"No finer machine on the continent," he would say proudly. The car was an exquisite creation, all of it the work of Lucky. Lucky was to engines what the Armorer was to weapons.

The car stood in an old bus bay, and it looked tense, anxious, as it seemed to set its fat, smooth tires down onto the broken, prebomb roads.

The vehicle was mostly engine. The area from front axle to steering column was taken up by a long, rectangular straight-eight Lycoming marine engine. Lucky had salvaged it from the rotting hulk of a speedboat he found on the bed of what had once been Lake Michigan. The big block of engine looked like a coffin nestled in a rat's nest of electrical cable and cooling hoses.

The big engine was mounted on an all-pipe chassis that Lucky had assembled on his own, double welding the heavy metal together to make sure it would support the combined weight of the heavy engine and the mammoth fuel tank. Gas was hard to find everywhere but it was harder to find on the road than anywhere else, and every rider tried to carry enough to see him through his journey. But it was always a trade-off: the more gas you carried the more weight you carried, and the more weight you carried the more gas you had to bum to carry it. Lucky had done some rudimentary calculations and decided that Bonner could carry fifty gals no problem.

A graceful rollbar swept over the driver's head, a hard metal arch that would protect Bonner if he should ever have the ill luck to actually tip his vehicle over.

Mounted on that bar was a .50-caliber machine gun, a piece of heavy artillery that Bonner could use like a pro and which had gotten him out of a jam more than once.

"She's the fastest, she's the meanest, she's the toughest, the best little machine riding the roads today," boasted Lucky, "and you still treat her like shit," he finished disgustedly.

"The lady and I have an understanding," said Bonner with a smile. Lucky was always giving Bonner hell about his mistreatment of the iron warhorse.

"Yeah? What understanding?" Like the Armorer, Lucky was sure that no one could ever understand his art the way he did. The cars were always his babies and mistreating them was a sin of the gravest kind. Of course, again like the Armorer, there was probably no sin that Lucky couldn't forgive Bonner, the man he always called the boss.

"She takes me where I want to go," said Bonner, "and I promise that I'll return her to her daddy Lucky."

"Good thing too," said Lucky.

Bonner slid behind the wheel and hit the starter. The big engine boomed into life. Lucky smiled happily. The blast of that powerful engine, the throaty roar from its twin exhaust pipes, was the sweetest music in the world to him. He could have listened to it foi hours without tiring of it.

Bonner slid the car into gear, but before he could take off. Lucky shouted a question: "Where you going?"

"Slavestates."

"Again? What for?"

Bonner thought about that for a second. He was going, not for gas, not for poor dead Cooker's promised land, he was going to find Leather and his evil forces and this time . . . this time . . . "Gas," he said.

"Good," said Lucky, "there's not a hell of a lot of the stuff around these days."

Bonner tossed a wave in the direction of the little mechanic and then hit the gas, screaming down the ramp. The loud exhaust from the twin pipes just behind Bonner's shoulders blared their internal-combustion life into the enclosed space.

The car and driver burst out into the daylight. Waiting at the base of the ramp was Starling. He was mounted on a huge red panhead Harley Davidson, a piece of loot he had won from a fearful squad of Radleps that he and Bonner had encountered and destroyed during their raid into the Slavestates. It was a couple of yards of pure power and obviously had once been the prized possession of some long-forgotten biker who had eaten up the miles on his proud steed.

Standing next to the hard, wiry rider were two men, their giant forms casting long shadows in the morning sun.

Bonner stopped short, the screech of brakes sending shivers down the spine of Lucky, who watched from the upper stories of the bus station.

"Watch them brakes, boss," shouted Lucky.

"Hey," said Bonner, smiling broadly, "the Mean Brothers."

The Mean Brothers lumbered over to Bonner and tried to crush him in a bear hug. "That's okay, Means," said Bonner, "good to see you too."

The Brothers were identical twins, both great bears of men, each covered with hair matted like fur. They were mutes so no one knew their names, if indeed, they had names at all. Bonner had sprung them from a Leatherman prison on Prison Island in New York—he hadn't planned to, but that was the way things worked out—and now the Mean Brothers were his friends for life. You could see it in their eyes: they would never forget Bonner's kindness, they would never betray him, they would cheerfully die for him. They would follow him into the jaws of hell if he would lead them there. If you became the Mean Brothers' friend, they would never let you down. If you became their enemy, they would not rest until they brought you down.

The Mean Brothers' weapons were an ax and a shovel, the implements having been presents from Bonner. Prior to that they had been able to do a large amount of damage using only the great strength of their hands. Despite the chill they were clad in their usual clothing, shorts and leather sandals. It was as if they relied on their luxuriant body hair to keep them warm.

"I thought they might want to come along," said Starling. "You want to come along. Mean Brothers?"

The Mean Brothers nodded vigorously.

"See, they want to go. There must be a few Stormers left they ain't killed yet."

At the mention of the Stormers the Mean Brothers' huge faces darkened.

"I have a feeling they would hold it against us if we didn't take them with us," said Bonner.

"Yeah, and it would be our bringdown," said Starling.

One of the Mean Brothers shook his head vigorously. No, he was saying, it was Bonner's decision. They would never try to hurt him.

"Just kidding. Mean Brother," said Starling. "We was just having a little fun."

The Mean Brother shrugged as if to say: "Some joke."

"Think they'll be warm enough?" asked Bonner.

Starling slipped his scooter into gear. "Hey, they look worried to you?"

"No."

"They look sick to you?"

"Nope."

"Then?"

"Okay, Mean Brothers, let's go." The two giants jumped aboard, settling down on the big exposed fuel tank.

"Hit it, Starling," said Bonner.

The tall, thin, deadly rider gave the Outrider the thumbs-up and released his brake, bouncing down the cracked Chicago streets.

They navigated their way through what had once been downtown and swung out onto the once-fashionable and rich Lake Shore Drive. There they could see the rising morning sun sweeping gold and pink light out onto the brown, dead lake bed. There lay the main east-west road into Chicago. There was no other way in and the citizens of Chi liked it that way. No one would ever be able to bring a force of any size across the vast expanse of emptiness without being seen. That way the whole city avoided a sudden raid from the feudal states.

The Slaves, the Hots, the Snows hated Chicago. It was an open city, a place where men who refused to submit to the boot of another man found their refuge. If they had their way, the heads of the States would have wiped out the men of Chicago, but they knew that to take on Chicago meant losing most of their best men for little return. Chicago was the town that you went to if you thought you were tough enough to make it on your own, to live by your wits and your gun.

Once in a while a runaway slave from the feudal states would wander into Chicago. The feeling among those who lived in the city was that once you made it that far you deserved to live, so if Stormers or Devils or Lightnings came looking for you, every gun in Chi-town would be turned against your enemies. If a member of the town decided that he didn't like your face or your talk—well, that was personal, between you and him and may the toughest, or the dirtiest, fighter win.

Bonner and Starling's wheels hit the hard-packed lake bed and began to consume the miles voraciously. No one knew what happened to the lake. The bomb had removed it somehow. Bonner always thought he would loved to have seen that much water right there in the middle of the continent. It must have been an amazing sight. They pointed their noses for the east and Bonner couldn't suppress the strength of the joy he felt. He wanted another shot at Leather, he wanted to hit the road again, he wanted the activity, the nerve-tingling duel with death. He looked into the sun and felt the cold wind whip around his neck. It was the kind of day that demanded that a man get in his car and go—to see what was out there, to see how many more of his foes he could vanquish.

Seth's big steam locomotive eased out of the yards where the vast old Chicago station had stood. Acres upon acres of rusting rails glistened in the morning sun, blood red where the icy rays of the sun hit the centuries-old corrosion. He stood on the foot plate and peered ahead of him. There were numerous switches on the line that he had to throw before he could make his way out of the Chicago yards. He worked his mind over them as if he was solving a giant complex puzzle.

He set the train on a slow throttle and then jumped down from the engine. He raced a few paces ahead of the slow-moving behemoth, grabbed the heavy weighted lever of the switch, and threw it effortlessly. He stood by the side of the rail and waited for his train to catch up with him, like a dutiful pet. He stepped lightly onto the vehicle and tugged on the throttle. The engine picked up speed and curved over the track he had set for it. Behind him stood the giant coal car that he filled himself in the dangerous, hateful firelands. The firelands were Seth's domain. . . .

Behind the coal car were three tanker cars that he had coupled onto his engine the night before. They would be the first carriers of the gas out of the promised land. It wasn't much, but it was more gas -than Chicago had seen around in one place in a long time.

Seth pushed the throttle up a bit more and the train picked up more speed. He jumped down from the cab again and swung another switch open.

"East," he said aloud, as he jumped back onto the foot plate. He felt Bonner's sense of elation. A crisp morning, the open rails, a mission, an adventure, a prize ... He clutched his little M3 machine gun—it was always slung over his shoulder—to his side and did a little dance on the foot plate.

"East," he said again, happy, and yanked on the whistle. The long, ghostly howl echoed out over the railyards and beyond, into the sleeping broken city.

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