by Richard Harding

    Copyright 1985 by Robert Tine

First Mass Market Printing: July, 1985

Whiskey didn't like the dark. He dried his palms on the stock of his heavy shotgun, shifted the big shooter from one hand to another, stamped his feet, and coughed. The night was still and quiet and cold. The only sounds were the snores like waterfalls and the farts like pistol shots that issued from the seven or eight Stormers who were sleeping around the dying fire.

"Fuckin' hate late watch," mumbled Whiskey sleepily. His would be the last watch of the night. He would stand sentinel over the patrol and convoy until first light, then he would wander around the camp kicking his brother Stormers awake. They would eat something and then they would hit the road. Just another one of Leatherman's tax convoys, hitting the food outposts up in the northeastern quarter of the Slavestates.

Leather-man had it all worked out. His entire country, the old Eastern Seaboard of the continent that had once been the United States of America, was divided into sections. Each section was commanded by a Tax General. Tax Generals—TGs—were, in Whiskey's experience, fat, greedy, soft living fucks who were only interested in squeezing their territories dry. The more food, gas, ammo, slaves each sector provided, the more the TG got to keep for himself. Of course, most of the good stuff went to Leather and he gave it to the Radleps to keep him in power.

The Tax Generals relied on Tax Men, very mean guys who were actually on hand in the Tax Section. They were the guys who got the slave fanners to grow food, they rounded up anything of value they could find in the land left wasted by the Bomb. Stormtrooper convoys like the cheese-cutting, wood-sawing band of hard guys that Whiskey was guarding, went around from Tax Man to Tax Man a couple of times a year, picked up what they could, and ferried it back to the Cap, Leatherman's capital city.

They had just finished their run, had picked up their last load. Now it was straight for the Cap and get rid of the stuff. They were far out on the edge of Leatherman's empire and there was no telling who they might run into. The road riders who hung out in Chicago were not above hijacking a tax convoy, stealing everything and, if they got the chance, killing everybody guarding it.

The smugglers and the raiders knew when the convoys moved—Leather might be powerful but not even he could change the rhythm of planting and harvest—and Whiskey was sure that the roads were alive with men who wanted his stuff and wanted him dead. It was a pretty good convoy, too. A truckload of gas in dented old drums that the Tax Man in Springfield had found someplace, a lot of apples from the fruit trees in the western part of the state— Whiskey could smell the sweet scent of the fruit wafting over from the trucks. Someone in the Cap would make cider out of them. There was some moth-eaten cloth, bales of it—much better quality than the homemade stuff the slaves turned out. Good shit, all of it. If the convoy got back to the Cap intact then they would all get a share. Not nearly enough, Whiskey thought, for risking his neck out here on the road, but that was the way of this crazy, violent world. It was that or being a slave or being dead. You made your choice, you took your chances.

He leaned his gun against the rusty running board of one of the trucks and patted his pockets for a DT, a coarse tobacco cigar that tore your throat out as if you were smoking a mouthful of fish hooks.

A black shadow moved noiselessly off to his left.

Whiskey found one of the shitty sulfur matches that some city slaves made in a factory in the old State Department building. About twice a year there was a huge explosion there, blowing the slaves to smithereens. Naturally, it wasn't work that any of the unfortunates cared for and they didn't work too well or hard, knowing that at any moment they could be a sheet of sticky, burning flesh. The match flared in the darkness and then went out.

"Mutha ..." muttered Whiskey. If he had been an observant man, in that second of flame he would have seen Bonner's cold eyes glittering in the gloom.

He found another match, struck it and it held a flame long enough for him to light his Dog Turd. He sucked the sharp smoke into his lungs, filling them like balloons with the gray-brown smoke. The tough leather thong that came whispering through the night closed around his neck and pulled the tower of muscle and flesh closed like a string bag.

"Ack," barked Whiskey.

The smoke swirled around inside his lungs, burning the delicate, soft membrane deep inside the dying tough guy. Out of the comer of Whiskey's rapidly fogging over eyes he saw the Outrider's strong right arm and felt Bonner shift sharply to his right, twisting the cord till it cut into Whiskey's neck. Bonner had turned around completely and levered the Storm-er's body onto his back. Whiskey's body weight fought against the the noose. It was that struggle for survival that finally welded his windpipe shut. The force of the sagging poundage effectively hung Whiskey on the Outrider's strong back. He flipped the Stormer over his head, the cords snapping the spinal cord, and he hit the ground. There was a faint "pop" as the vertebrae at the top of the spine went.

Bonner unwrapped his strangler from Whiskey's throat and a little smoke trailed out of the dead Stormer's slack mouth. It was all over in a matter of seconds.

Bonner was joined by the Mean Brothers and Beck. The three men were the largest human beings that Bonner had ever seen. Bonner wasn't quite the seven-foot-plus of the Mean Brothers and Beck and he didn't carry around three or so hundred pounds, but taken together, the four men that looked down at the peacefully sleeping Stormers were the most dangerous men on the continent.

"Kick ass time," whispered Beck.

The Mean Brothers—giant, twin mutes devoted to Bonner—nodded agreement.

Bonner shrugged. He fought, he killed—he fought harder and smarter and killed without emotion—but warfare and death were not games to him the way they were to his companions. The Stormers—they were dead: all that was required was the technicality of killing them—would be taken down with ease. That, to Bonner, was too much like murder.

Bonner shrugged again. Who was he trying to fool? It was all murder. But the men he was about to murder were Stormers. Killers. They deserved the fate the Outrider had decided for them.

Beck was less philosophical. He strode over to a sleeping Stormer and kicked him gently in the ribs.

"Fuck off, Whiskey man," muttered the Stormer. "It ain't light yet."

"You never gonna see the sun come up again, sonny," said Beck. He reached down and grabbed the warm bundle of Stormer and caught the man's shoulders in his giant paws.

The Stormer's sleep-befuddled brain took a second or two to figure out exactly what it was that was happening. The first thing it noticed was that the Stormer had been picked up bodily and hoisted high in the air. The shift in perspective was sudden and odd. He looked down from eight feet at the circle of his companions, a couple roused from sleep by his scream. Then, as if he weighed nothing more than a pillow, Beck hurled the Stormer against the rusty steel sides of a pick-up truck that stood just outside the camp. The entire complement of Stormers was roused by the dull bell-like tones of the Stormer's head donging against hard metal. The Stormer collapsed in a heap by the rear tire of the truck.

The brain telegraphed a message to any part of the body that would listen: "Someone is trying to kill you . . ."

The Stormer's brain got it right. Beck pulled out a heavy old handgun slung low on his massive thigh and, almost offhandedly, fired. The big homemade slug splattered the Stormer's brains all over the worn rear tire of the truck. That done. Beck forgot his victim and turned to the fray that was beginning to heat up.

Bonner, to the Mean Brothers' intense disappointment, could see no reason for prolonging the slaughter. The Outrider had brought his murderous little stuttergun to bear, the short stock jammed tight against the coiled muscles of Bonner's stomach. The needle snout of the light automatic was spewing hot death at a group of Stormers trying to rise up out of the tangled mess of their bedclothes.

Voices shrieked as bullets peppered their bodies. Eyes started wide, blood shot from tortured mouths. Bodies fell heavily, broken and dying. The job was done in one area of the circle, so, without emotion, Bonner turned his attention to another section.

But the Mean Brothers had beaten him to it. With their immense strength and crude weapons—a shovel and an axe respectively—the big Means were chopping through a couple of Stormers like farmers ploughing their fields. One Mean, the one with the axe, had placed his giant foot squarely on the recumbent form of a Stormer and was busy hacking a bloody, jagged hole in his victim's barrel chest. The hard guy's arms flailed and his strong legs kicked, but the weight of the Mean Brother and the unalloyed viciousness of the attack rendered him helpless. Blood-washed chips of rib flew up from the Stormer's chest, a living fountain of blood and bone.

The other Mean Brother was busy tunneling his shovel head into the depths of another Stormer's big overhanging belly. The fat man screamed as the sharp point of the shovel sliced through a few inches of soft flab. The sudden, cool pain of the tool made the man lumber to his feet screaming hysterically. The long shaft of the shovel bobbed and jumped in its jelly foundation but it was hard-fixed enough in the man's insides for his lurch to tear the handle momentarily out of the Mean Brother's grasp.

The fat Stormer looked with astonished eyes down at the wobbling pole in his guts and then looked at the Mean.

"You fuck!" he screamed and pushed the Mean Brother.

A steel-hard arm whipped out from the Mean Brother's side and caught the end of the shovel. He held the enraged (and dying) Stormer at bay; the man's big fist scythed through the air unable to reach the Mean Brother. The Mean smiled pleasantly and then yanked the shovel out of his victim, pulling a good measure of guts with it.

The spit-driving obscenities crackling on the Stormer's blubbering lips dissolved abruptly into a slathering, unintelligible mass of grunts and groans. He toppled into a slimy pool of his own insides.

Beck, to his immense surprise, had been hit by a bullet. It had grazed the edge of his hard skull sending a sheet of blood cascading down over his ear. The slight pain and the great humiliation annoyed him no end. He had shot down his attacker with a carefully placed pair of bullets in each of the Stormer's thighs. Now he was tearing the man's throat out with the half a yard of serrated blade that always hung from his belt. He hacked and sawed and chopped in a warm waterfall of blood then, satisfied that the man had died and had done so painfully and with a terrible terror in his heart, Beck stood upright. He tore a strip off a blanket and held it against his bleeding head.

"Goddam!" he muttered.

The battle was over. Bonner stood off to one side, looking cool and unruffled and clean as usual. The Mean Brothers wandered around looking like kids wondering if there was any more left. Beck dripped with blood from head to toe. Some was his, the rest belonged to the mangled Stormer at his feet.

"Hey, Bonner," Beck demanded, "know any of these guys?"

"A couple."

"They anybody?"

"Naw."

"Figures," grunted Beck. The Stormers hadn't put up much of a fight.

The four Stormer trucks yielded a pretty good haul. The Mean Brothers, their balloon-sized cheeks filled with chomped-up apples, dragged out a drum of gas and topped up the tank on Bonner's war wagon that was stashed in the brush a few hundred yards from the campsite.

"Don't put none in mine, Meanies," ordered Beck. To Bonner he said, "I guess I'm gonna push one of these rigs back to Chi-town, right?"

"That's the plan," said Bonner.

The two men fell to unloading two trucks and putting its cargo in the third. Beck could move one of the barrels of gas single-handed. Bonner couldn't and Beck laughed at him, the dried blood on his face and neck cracking off in flakes like mud.

"What a pussy!" Beck hoisted a dented drum onto shoulders as broad as a stretch of highway. "Man, how did you stay alive so long?"

"Skill," said Bonner, shifting a bale of cloth.

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