That low blast from Seth's train whistle rolled across the city like smoke gently bouncing off the broken walls of a thousand dead buildings and awoke two people.

The girl opened her eyes in the empty apartment and looked at the bright sunlight passing through the cracked windows of the skylight. Tears flowed from her eyes onto the pillow and she felt the place in the bed where her man's body had lain an hour before. Gone again, she thought. Would this be the time he wouldn't return. She drove the thought from her mind and cheered herself up with a single thought:

Bonner was the Outrider, and the Outrider didn't fall.

* * *

Savage snorted in his sleep and the snort awakened him. A second blast from the whistle pulled him to full awareness. "Whassat?" he said aloud.

He swung out of bed and wandered into another room. Spread out on the floor, in a tangle of blankets and sheets, lay Savage's lieutenant, one of the big raider's best riders. Savage led the largest group of raiders in Chicago. He had under his command a force of about forty men with guns and bikes, and Savage made sure that his crew lived up to their leader's name. Most men felt that Savage's raiders were no better than Stormers.

Savage kicked the man awake. "What?" said the man.

"Franklin," ordered Savage, "get up."

"Wha'for?"

"Cause I want to talk to you."

"Jeez, boss."

Savage kicked him again. "Get up when I tell you to."

Franklin hiked himself up on his thin elbows. "Okay, okay, I'm all ears." He could feel the unwelcome morning aftereffects of a night at Dorca's swirling around his brain.

"I heard that crazy nigger's whistle blow."

Franklin looked at Savage as if he was crazy. "You woke me up to tell me that?" Was Savage finally losing it, he wondered.

"Don't sass me, Franklin," said Savage threateningly.

Franklin thought a moment and figured that the boss was probably giving him some pretty good advice. "Sorry, boss."

"That's better. So where's he going?"

"Seth? He's inbound for who knows where, him, Starling, Bonner."

"I thought Bonner didn't ride this time of year."

"So this time he is," said Franklin patiently. "You know what Bonner's like. He makes his own rules."

"He's riding with Starling, right?"

"Yeah."

"And he has Seth tailing him in that thing of his?"

"Yeah."

"Then it's big."

Bonner never did anything small, thought Franklin. He hoped that the boss wasn't thinking of going after them. Franklin just wasn't in the mood for a firefight in the cold—though a firefight with Bonner would certainly warm things up in a hurry. Franklin was settled in for the winter,

Franklin thumped the pillow, as if he was about to lie down again. "How can you be sure its so big?"

Savage kicked the pillow out from beneath his subordinate's head. "Because I'm smart. Round up the riders."

"Awwww, boss . . ."

It took awhile to round up Savage's band from the lodgings and brothels in the ruined city; most were, like Franklin, nursing heavyweight hangovers, and the loud rumbling of the two-score bikes and cars hurt a lot of heads. Street workers watched the force assemble from the shadows and wondered where the hell Savage and his crew were headed. The raiding season was just about over. Anything of value in the feudal states had already been shipped to the various capitals.

Like a single, many-headed steel beast the raiders hit the road, thundering, down on the lake bed and heading east.

Savage was on the lead bike. He figured that Bonner and Starling had a few hours on them. No problem, he thought. He just wanted to get close enough to follow them a ways, to find out what was so big that it brought Starling and Bonner out onto the road so late in the season. It had to be a hell of a prize and Savage wanted it, whatever it was.

Savage held up his hand and the two riders just behind him moved up alongside him. One was Franklin.

"Frankie," bellowed Savage, "slow the boys down a little. I don't want Bonner to hear so many bikes on his ass."

Franklin nodded. "Check," he said, and drifted back to slow the column down.

Savage turned to the man on his left. "Scotty, I want you to take four or five men out and scout out ahead of us. Take off man, catch up with Bonner. Keep him in sight, keep him close, but don't try to take him. When you got him, send one of the boys back. Got it?"

The man nodded.

"Then hit it."

Five bikes and a man mounted on a cycle/sidecar combination took off ahead of the column. In a matter of seconds, they were just dots on the horizon. Savage settled back in the padded saddle of his bike. He congratulated himself. He was a smart man.

The main force rode on another hour, throwing up a huge column of dust from the brown lake bed. Then they started seeing trouble signs. Suddenly, up ahead on the horizon, Savage saw a lump, something spread out on the ground. Smoke seemed to rise from it.

The raider force closed on it and when they were a couple of hundred yards from their target they could see that it was one of their scouts. His body—what was left of it—lay next to his burning bike. Flame had danced from the exploded fuel tank over the chassis of the bike, scorching the paint and catching the tires, which belched black, acrid smoke into the clear blue sky.

The scout's shattered body was sprawled on the lake bed. The upper half of his torso seemed to have disappeared. Bits and pieces of the man were scattered in a wide bloody circle around him. The man's waist and legs were still a single unit, and entrails spilled out from the top of his pants like the stuffing from an old sofa.

"Stupid motherfuckers," said Savage. "I told them not to try and take the man down."

Franklin looked out toward the horizon, following the tire tracks with his eyes. "They went after him."

"Then they are dead men."

"Hey Savage," called out one of the raiders, "who fucked Mickey so bad."

"Starling," said Savage, "and those lousy arrows of his." He gave the signal and the column moved out.

At various points along the road they found more bloody milestones. A couple of the raiders had been blown to pieces like their brother on the road behind them. A couple had been shot—big divots of flesh had been chewed out of their bodies by the sharp bite of Bonner's .50-caliber.

"How many is that?"

"Five," said Franklin.

"You don't think Whiskey would be stupid enough to try and take them hisself?"

"No one is that dumb."

The column moved on, expecting at any moment to find the bloody remains of Whiskey on the road. Then they saw on the road ahead of them a bike, still standing, bumping down the track toward them. It was coming on very slowly.

"That's Whiskey," said Franklin.

"He's been hit," said Savage. The raider was slumped over the handlebars of his bike, moving toward them very slowly. The column met the broken biker and saw that blood seemed to drip from him like dew. His face was flat against the big headlight and the only reason the bike stayed erect was because it was a three-wheeler. If he had been riding a two-wheeled machine, he never would have made it. A raider jumped from his own steed and grabbed the handbrake on the crossbar and stopped the bike just in front of Savage.

"Another one dead," said Savage.

The raider that had stopped the bike reached down to kill the engine. Just as he bent over, Savage noticed that the handlebars had been tied together and jammed so that the bike would point back along the road. Whiskey hadn't done that, Savage thought, Bonner had.

"Wait," he shouted.

But it was too late. As soon as the raider turned off the big engine, the connection was made. The bike, layered with explosives, detonated. The boom was deafening and the pans of the bike blown asunder by the force of the blast scythed through the mingling raiders with a ferocious flash of death. The raider who had stopped the bike vanished in a metal storm of forks and spokes. The next-closest person to the death machine was poor Savage. ... A piece of the old Harley's frame caught him mid-gut and he doubled over it, as if trying to stop the twisted metal from burrowing into his big body. The pain of the cut tore an impassioned scream from his throat.

A dozen other raiders went down when the bike went up. Some were killed instantly, others lay groaning on the packed cold earth, their staring shocked eyes watching as their lifeblood pumped out onto the hungry dirt.

Franklin was spared. He couldn't believe his good fortune. Around him lay the dead or dying members of Savage's once-proud force. Those still alive, perhaps twenty of them, couldn't believe that their numbers had been taken apart without even having seen the enemy.

They looked to Franklin as the new leader. "So what the fuck do we do now?" asked one raider.

Franklin wiped his hand through his hair. The boss was dead and half—more than half—his force was gone.

"I say fuck it," said Franklin. "Let's go home."

"Good idea," said one of the raiders. They slowly turned around and left their dead for the snows and the cold. They headed back to Chi with Franklin leading the way. He wondered if the boss had even thought of the chance of his getting killed when he kicked Franklin awake that morning. Probably not. But now he was dead. Stupid fuck.

"I knew this was a bad idea," said Franklin into the wind.

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