(from a story by Kathy Keegan)

The sky had that heavy brown colouration that warned of a south wind, and the smell of dust was already on the air. Shutters were going up, mallets were beating a tattoo across Windrage as the word of warning rushed about: a storm was on its way in. Fear was as tangible as the icy wind.

The aged Katana superbike coughed and gargled as Bodie kicked it to life and knocked back the sidestand. He swung it around in a wide arc and took it across the road that arched over the hill above the town. The bike had seen better days. Then again, hadn't everyone and everything? It was still going, and that was a miracle. Most machines were breaking down badly and horses were as common on the road now as they had been two centuries ago.

Below the hill, Windrage nestled in a cleft, protected from the worst of the elements. From his vantage point, Bodie saw a hundred grey slate roofs and belching chimneys, and he knew every one of them individually. Morley the baker; Sawyer the gravedigger; Ashmole the teacher; Fawcett the electrician; Daley the doctor; Bradley the mechanic. Windrage boasted the best of everything, and its people were damned lucky.

The majority of the frontier towns were new and raw, with few more comforts than those enjoyed by the nomads who meandered from Lansdowne to Salisbury and back again twice a year, between late spring and early autumn. But ironically, Windrage's very wealth of people, services and safety, made the town a natural target for every biker tribe, every time the wind turned. The sky would begin to darken with airborne dust left over from what scientists termed 'the event,' and what ordinary people thought of as Armageddon, and the lookouts would be alert, weapons were cleaned and loaded. It was a matter of survival.

A north-west wind spelled clearer skies and peace. A south-east wind spelled nothing but trouble. Bodie's back gave him a stab of pain but he ignored it. It wasn't genuine discomfort, just phantom pangs, what Doc Daley called 'sympathetic pain.' Every time Bodie saw a brown sky he remembered that day, four painful months before, and the healed wound hurt.

The Katana gurgled down the road. The 1000cc motor missed and hiccupped, sounding more and more like old plumbing. He would have to get that seen to. It could be dangerous--it could be lethal--to get caught in the open on a machine that died on him. The Stone Angels were not in the business of handing out mercy, especially to men whom they despised. And they despised Bodie.

Occupational hazard, he told himself as he turned the big bike into Windrage and pulled it onto the centre stand just outside the lockup. The wind was whirling in the street now. Mini-tornadoes, or 'dust-devils,' got up and danced to and fro before they spontaneously dispelled. The sky was getting steadily darker, browner. No doubt about it, that was a south-east storm on its way in. Bodie's whole body shuddered.

"Hey, Officer Bodie!"

It was Mick Bradley, the mechanic who worked nights to keep Windrage's machines running. He was an olive-skinned little man with heavy eyebrows and a nervous manner. He reminded Bodie of a terminally worried ferret, but he was clever with machines. He had a way of diagnosing their ailments just by listening to them, the way a good doctor knew almost instinctively what was wrong with a patient. Bodie liked him.

He waved. "Yeah, I see the weather. You know if Fawcett's got the radio working yet?"

"You got to be kidding," Bradley scoffed. "There's no parts. You get him the parts, he'll make it work."

"Scavenging isn't my job," Bodie said acidly.

"And no bugger else is going to go out hunting for bits and pieces. Not in this." Bradley jerked his thumb at the dark sky. "A rider shot over from Yonderland...we've got trouble coming, Bodie."

Bodie groaned. "What kind?" he asked resignedly, though he could guess.

"Nomad bikers. A whole tribe." Bradley fidgeted. "Look, mate, I'd love to help you out, but--"

"But you've got responsibilities, I know." Bodie looked sourly at the sky. "This rider from Yonderland, where is he, when did he get in?"

"About an hour ago. He's in the pub." Bradley coughed as the wind spun an eddy of dust into his face. "Give it three hours, and there won't be much on the road. This could be a hard blow. Could last for days." Bradley pushed his hands into his pockets. "Maybe the bikers won't get here before it hits."

"You mean, maybe they'll descend like buzzards on someone else's town, and pick its bones clean instead?" Bodie gave Bradley a relentless look.

"Well, why not?" Bradley demanded belligerently. "We copped it last time--and you took half a shotgun blast in the back! You want to go up against 'em again?" He laughed, a short, humourless bark. "Christ, Bodie, not even you could be as bastard-mad as that!"

With those words he hurried away towards his house and workshop, a little way down the street. Bodie watched him duck inside and then, cursing and swearing every yard of the way, he manhandled his bike into the lean-to shed which had been tacked on the side of the lockup.

The jail was empty. No one had been imprisoned since Molly Parker's boy had got into a fight with Mayor Morley's lad, and beat him senseless, two months before. They had both been drinking most of the night. The White Lightning issuing from Ma Hancock's still these days was more potent than last year. Bodie would have to have a word with the publican, Josh Kelly, about watering it down, before Windrage's young bucks started ripping each other to bits.

The shed was dark and smelt of oil and grease. Bodie slammed the wooden door and padlocked it, then stepped out into the street and hurried toward the pub. Several townsmen doffed their hats to him, which was a nice gesture, but they wore worried, anxious faces and were quick to duck out of the way before he could perhaps petition for their help.

Representing law and order in this town bought Bodie a good deal of prestige and respect. But the downside to this was that when trouble blew up he was expected to get out there and earn their respect. And that was sometimes easier said than done.

The Earl of Aberdeen was stone-built and Josh Kelly had lately replaced the roof with the heaviest slate shingles he could get. He was out on the street with a mallet and bag of nails, hammering the shutters down. With them secured, the pub would withstand the storm better than any other place in Windrage. A large percentage of the townspeople would make for The Earl--and Kelly wore a wide smile, because he was going to do spectacular business during the next few days.

"Good day, Officer," he said through a mouthful of nails as Bodie approached. "You'll be wanting the rider from Yonderland, I suppose?"

"The thought occurred to me," Bodie said tersely. "Where would I find him?"

"Upstairs, taking a bath." Kelly spat out the nails and dropped his mallet. With both hands he smoothed down his huge white canvas apron.

"You know the man?" Bodie always believed in being prepared, and was not above paying for what information he could get. As a pub keeper, Kelly was frequently a rich mine of scuttlebutt.

"I...do, at that," Kelly admitted. He ran his fingers through his sparse greying-blond hair and bit his lip hesitantly for a second. "It's Ray Doyle. I'd swear to it, Bodie."

The name aroused a shiver along Bodie's spine. "You're positive about that? I mean, dead certain? You've seen him before, in the flesh?"

For himself, he had only ever seen the 'wanted' posters. Not that Doyle was wanted in Windrage, but in Seaview and Summertown he had put himself thoroughly on the wrong side of the Provincial Law, and if he ever set foot in those towns, he stood a good chance of not leaving them alive.

Provincial justice was arbitrary. What was a crime in one town was perfectly legal in another. It was easy to break the law, and some frontier settlements had a ruthless code of punishment that could make even Bodie shudder.

"I saw him, one time," Kelly said, hushed.

"Fighting?" Bodie was sceptical. It would take incredible luck to see Ray Doyle in action...then again, it would take incredible luck to bring Doyle to Windrage.

Kelly wore a bemused face. "I saw him blow a hole in a man, and I swear I didn't even see him get the gun out of his holster. He's got the strangest style. Did you ever know Roy Dreyfuss?"

"The loud-mouthed moonshine hustler from Summertown?" Bodie's brows rose. "I heard he got himself shot."

"He did." Kelly nodded towards an upstairs room, over the bar. "Was Ray Doyle that shot him, and I saw it done. Mind you, forty people in the street saw Dreyfuss hassle Doyle, give him a hard time and force him into it. Any local Summertown bloke would have backed off and let Dreyfuss have his own way, but Doyle was a stranger. Dug his toes in and didn't budge." Kelly patted his chest. "He uses a shoulder holster, left side."

That astonished Bodie. "That's got to be the slowest draw in the book!"

"Not the way Doyle draws that gun. I never saw anything faster, and I've seen some real professionals in my time. I've been on the frontier nearly ten years, got up here before Windrage even existed." Kelly snatched up his mallet and nails as the wind started to swirl again. "If I don't get this done we'll all regret it, Bodie."

Bodie watched him for a minute as Kelly attacked the shutters once more, and then he stepped into The Earl of Aberdeen's dark, humid interior. You could never trust the electricity, especially in a storm, so the bar boys and girls were hanging up two score hissing, glowing oil lamps, which gave the place a cheerful, almost festive aspect. With the shutters sealed the storm could rage around the building. Inside, music, gambling, beer and Ma's White Lightning would keep out the cold and pass the time.

The temperature always dropped like a stone when the sky turned brown, but conditions were better than they had been a few years before. One terrible year, when Bodie was twelve, the temperature never rose much above freezing from spring to autumn, and when winter struck it dropped to twenty below. Thousands of people died. When the late, cold spring arrived, the greatest problem was working out a way to bury the winter's victims in ground that had frozen as hard as iron.

The same memories haunted everyone over twenty years of age. Only the kids, born since 'the event,' had no memory of the world of yesteryear. But even those who, like Bodie , were adolescents or young adults when it happened, were not completely sure of what they had seen, lived through and survived....

He was eleven, just starting to think about getting out of school and working his way into a career, when suddenly the TV and radio broadcasts were filled with stories about something in the sky. Bodie was from an ordinary family, there were no scientists in the house. His parents were, by their own admission, poorly educated and neither of them knew what in the name of God the BBC representatives were talking about when they broadcast, over and over, that an object was coming.

Asteroid, comet, meteorite--what was the difference? Words like 'Tunguska' and 'antimatter' and 'nuclear winter' only confused simple people even more, and long before it hit, they stopped listening and started praying.

Bodie had the vividest memories of his mother, kneeling in the cupboard under the stairs with a rosary, a cross and a framed print of Saint Peter. But all his life she had been hiding under the stairs and praying every time there was a thunderstorm. As a boy, Bodie never questioned it, as if it was the proper thing to do when God grew furious and made the sky blacken and rumble.

At school, the teachers didn't want to alarm their pupils and not much was said about the comet. They called it Rodgers, and soon it began to take on a personality. Comet Rodgers was depicted in cartoons, and lampooned. Anything to defuse public panic before thinking people began to ask questions which might cause the establishment public embarrassment.

Behind the scenes, scientists were trying to predict where it would impact with the earth, and how bad the effects would be, but all this was a mile beyond Bodie's understanding. He asked his parents what was happening, but his mother was too busy praying and his father didn't understand enough himself to be able to explain it.

He asked his teacher, and Mrs Roaks told him there was a chunk of ice that was going to fall to earth and make a bit of a mess. She looked pale faced and smudged as she explained this, but at eleven Bodie didn't notice the woman's pallor or frayed nerves. With his mind set at rest he cut out the cartoons of Comet Rodgers, and laughed with his friends.

The laughter stopped one day in August when the event, the impact, took place. The hurricanes, earthquakes and tidal waves were engraved into Bodie's mind, like the brown-black sky that for years afterwards loomed over the whole country, perhaps the whole planet. And the ice-cold of the winter that started and never stopped.

The temperature plunged in six hours from a lovely August afternoon to a sub-zero evening. Houses were flattened by the quakes, all areas within ten miles of the coast were under eight feet of seawater. Bodie had been on his way home from school, on the bus, on the hill road. He was one of the fortunate ones.

When the blinding light flooded the sky, the bus driver roared at the kids to get onto the floor of the bus and put their arms over their heads. The hurricane that followed the sky-flare tipped the vehicle over on its side, but after that it was a cocoon of safety--probably the safest place to be.

When the hurricane had passed by, they kicked out the back windows and looked down off the hill to watch as the buildings tumbled in ruins. Houses, shops, blocks of flats, folded up like cardboard boxes.

Somewhere down there, in amongst all that wreckage and ruin, was Bodie's home. His mother would have been under the stairs, but God and Saint Peter wouldn't have protected her. Bodie was numb. His mind was not functioning. He stood in a herd with the other school children, watching, blank with shock, as the bus driver somehow fixed his shortwave and called for help.

The air was a jumble of radio signals. Everyone with a CB was pleading, begging for help, and only limited help was available. But forty kids under fifteen, marooned in a wrecked bus, drew assistance fast. A helicopter beat in from the south, and that night, Bodie was in a Salvation Army shelter, in a cellar under a collapsed building. He had soup, and a blanket of his own, stencilled with his name, and his child's mind realised the truth.

This was the new way of things. This was where the old world ended and the new began. In a month, they found his sole surviving relative, his Aunt Grace, but the lady was not young and like so many others she had been blinded by the sun-bright flare that burned up the sky. Bodie never questioned this. It was the way things were. He and his Aunt were the wards of the Citizen's Council, and life began again....

The howling of the gale around The Earl's steel-beam eaves brought back the fifteen year old memories, but Bodie discarded them fast. It was unhealthy to dwell. In the early days, when the winter went on and on, the people who brooded were the ones who put a gun to their head and blew their brains out--or worse, someone else's brains.

The trick was to focus on the present and wait. After a few minutes of suffocating blankness the memories would fade again, shuffle themselves back into the pigeon-holes of the past, like a well organised and obedient filing system.

He concentrated on the wooden floor under his feet as he walked through the bar room towards the stairs. Those stairs were carpeted, but the scarlet axminster was threadbare. Mice had [been] chewing on it. Vermin always survived. It was said--and Bodie believed it--that in the end the cockroaches would inherit the earth.

A maid was working on The Earl's second floor, polishing the mirrors and wiping the banisters. She smiled at him as he approached, fluttered her eyelashes. He returned the smile and ignored the coy invitation.

"Hello, Tina. You're in the best place today. Listen to that wind!"

"Do I have a choice?" She pretended to stuff her fingers into her ears to get away from the sound. "What can I do for you, Officer?"

"Which room is Doyle in?"

Her eyes widened. "For him? Nothing but the best! Room 7, what else?"

Room 7 had a bath, a view of the street, a hearth, a double bed, and the walls had just been painted. Bodie should have known publican Kelly would put Ray Doyle in that room. Where else would you accommodate the gunfighter? As if there was the subliminal impression that if Doyle was angered he was be likely to pepper the place with .45 calibre ironmongery before he got back on his bike and rode out.

Not that Doyle--or anyone else--would be going anywhere for a considerable while. The temperature was plummeting. The icy winds from Europe seemed colder than ever when the sky darkened with dust. The weather cycles had never been the same since the event.

Just a week before, when the radio was working, Bodie had listened to a pop-science broadcast from the BBC. Specialists were predicting that the high-atmospheric turbulence was beginning to settle at last. The dust was coming down, too, which ought to make the temperature return to a more normal level. Winter would be shorter, summer would be longer. Crops might even be grown in the open again.

Wonders would never cease and pigs might fly, but Bodie was prepared to wait and see, and be astonished. Anything had to be better than a man freezing his arse off nine months in the year. The BBC Boffins swore, by 2055, ten years down the track, the climate would be 'almost normal.' Whatever that meant. Bodie remembered childhood days, being warm under a blue sky, and seeing parks girdled by trees--natural trees, well grown, not anaemic saplings nurtured under glass.

He banished the memories again, determinedly, as he came to the door of the best room at The Earl, and applied his knuckles. The smart rap-rap rhythm was answered by a voice from within, and before he entered, Bodie examined his appearance in the long mirror opposite the door.

He looked much the same as always. Tall, broad, with his dark hair cropped fairly short for convenience's sake. He was wearing a battered leather jacket, scuffed biker's boots, blue jeans, tee shirt. It was almost the uniform of his trade. Out here on the frontier, so far from the stinking wreckage of the city, you dressed in clothes that would take the pace, hold together under rough handling, and to hell with elegance.

After a while, leather and blue jeans started to gain a style all their own. The feel of blue denim and the smell of leather, especially if it was well-worn, were evocative. Bodie knew people, men and women, who could turn on just at the sight or smell of jeans or leather or both. The mystique they aroused.

"Yeah, come in," called the voice from room 7.

Doyle.

The name made Bodie catch his breath. Ray Doyle was notorious in several towns along the frontier. He was not wanted in Windrage, but maybe it was only a matter of time. Over in Buckstead, an associate of Bodie's, old Matt Hayes, had tacked up a poster that promised he personally would pay a small fortune to get his hands on Doyle. The gunfighter had shot his brother after a gambling session that went tragically wrong. The trouble was, Sonny Hayes was an infamous cheat. Everyone knew he dealt off the bottom and kept half a dozen aces up both sleeves, so no one was likely to hand Doyle over.

Unless Hayes hired himself a bounty hunter, Bodie thought with his hand on the doorknob. Bounty men were so unscrupulous, they would hunt down an angel and hand him to the devil to get the fee. Hayes was offering a gallon of real scotch whisky, twenty gallons of genuine high-octane petrol--not the home distilled, chicken-shit, methane-banger brew that Bodie had been running the Katana on for the last two years--plus six sticks of gelignite and a hundred yards of detonator cord. For that kind of bounty, a lot of men would have a crack at Doyle.

Not being a fool, Doyle must be well aware of his precarious position, and he would be wary, every second of every day. New town, old haunt, it made no difference. The frontier was full of nomads, loners and tribes. Every one of them was hungry for a quick fortune.

Carefully, Bodie opened the door, showed his face and both his empty hands...and just as he had expected, he walked into the room to find himself looking straight down the black steel barrel of a .45 calibre magnum Smith and Wesson. Doyle's patented trademark.

The man was in the bath. The tub was parked in the middle of the room, and a dozen buckets stood beside it. When he was finished, The Earl's bellboys would troop up to bail it out. Green eyes flicked over Bodie from head to foot...red-brown curls were dripping slightly around his neck...pale, perfect skin was almost iridescent in the lamplight.

God, Bodie thought as he shut the door--the first thought that raced unbidden through his mind--the man was beautiful. And dangerous. That was the second thought. He held his hands well out from his sides as the door clicked to. He was armed. Only a fool went around unarmed, and fools were so short-lived they were scarce and getting more so. Bodie wore his holster at his right side, with the butt of a sawn-off pump-action shotgun protruding

It was not a gunfighter's weapon, and he never pretended to belong to Doyle's precarious trade. But what no one knew was that he had another gun, a .38 calibre revolver, tucked into his belt under his jacket, and an even smaller two-shot .60 calibre 'Derry' pistol thrust in the outside of his right boot.

"Who the hell are you?" Doyle demanded. "I was expecting the boy with my dinner!"

"My name's Bodie." He raised his hands as the gunfighter's weapon followed him across the room. "Provincial Officer Bodie."

"Ah." Doyle pursed his lips, but the magnum did not waver. "And you want...?"

"A word," Bodie assured him. "They said you rode over with a message from Yonderland."

"I did." Doyle settled back in the tub. Hot water sloshed around him in a fascinating wave pattern. Bath oil slicked the surface. He propped his feet on the end of the bath. "You've got trouble coming, Officer."

"That much, I got from Kelly," Bodie said drily, folding his arms. "What kind?"

"Nomad bikers," Doyle told him. "Trash on wheels. The Stone Angels are riding this way. They'll be here some time tonight, before the storm hits."

Bodie groaned deeply. "Oh, Christ, that's all I need."

"What you need," Doyle said acidly, "is a small army. I saw the Stons a week ago. There's seventeen of the buggers. They were up in Davetown...or, what's left of Davetown after they finished busting it up." He set the gun aside but didn't take his eyes off Bodie as he soaped hischest. "Get your men together, Officer. A few hours' warning is all you're going to get before Erasmus Clay and the rest of the shite-hawks are all over you like a rash."

"My men?" Bodie echoed. "What men?"

"You action squad, deputies, constables, tin soldiers, whatever," Doyle said indifferently.

Bodie laughed shortly, not a sound of humour. "You're looking at 'em."

The green eyes widened. "You mean, you're it?"

"Got it in one." Bodie rubbed his face hard. "Once upon a time, and not that long ago, there were three of us, and we could raise another four vigilantes from the town. The Stone Angels were here four months ago...Bill and Vince were shot dead. I took half a shotgun blast in the back and almost didn't make it myself. Now, no one will lift a finger to help and if I tell you the truth, I can't blame them." He sagged against the wall beside the sealed shutter.

The man in the bath was silent for a full minute, and then he said slowly, soberly, "The Stones are going to rip into this place like wild dogs into fresh meat. If I were you, Officer Bodie, I'd get out and start running, right now."

"Would you? You don't know a hell of a lot about local law," Bodie said darkly.

"Illuminate me," Doyle invited as he sluiced suds off his chest.

"Well, to begin with, there's nowhere to run to," Bodie told him. "There's only Hancock's Farm between here and Yonderland, and the road's impassable in the dark. It's a mass of craters. Put a wheel in any one of them, and you're off. Be lucky if you didn't break a leg as well as the bike. And then, when I took this job on, I signed a piece of paper. If I walk out and leave Windrage, I'll be as wanted here as you are in half a dozen towns along the frontier."

Doyle's brows arched. "You got a problem," he observed. "Wanted if you walk out, dead if you stay put." He stood, water cascading off him, and reached for a towel, but he didn't attempt to cover himself with it, and Bodie had the opportunity to look his fill while Doyle patted his shoulders and chest.

He was a little above average height, and surprisingly slender. He had that lean, hungry look that comes from running and keeping one eye open, watching over your shoulder. In many towns he was not safe, and Matt Hayes' wanted posters could appear anywhere, any time. His shoulders were wide, his legs were hard, the thighs long and smooth. His belly was flat, his arms round with hard young muscle. And his genitals drew Bodie's eyes the way magnets draw iron filings.

Nature had been generous. Doyle's balls were large, tucked up tight and firm, and his cock was long, thick even while it was at rest, golden and smooth. He was cut, which was Bodie's preference, and the very look of him made Bodie's mouth water. It had been a long, long time between drinks.

But Doyle was talking again, and Bodie forced himself to listen. "I said," the man barked, "come to the point--state your business or get out!"

A tingle kindled in Bodie's belly. "You're a gunfighter," he mused.

"You've heard me," Doyle said in a curious mix of the famous and the cynical.

"Everybody's heard of you," Bodie snapped. "Question is, do you ever hire out that gun of yours?" As he spoke, his eyes were drawn irresistibly to Doyle's cock, and damn, he saw it stir with a life of its own. Now, that was interesting. Did Doyle ever hire out that particular gun?

The man's remarkable eyes narrowed and Doyle stepped out of the bath. He tucked the towel about his waist and stood, hands on hips, regarding Bodie suspiciously. "Say what you mean."

"I never met a man yet who couldn't use a fortune," Bodie said brashly. "If you were for hire--"

Doyle's wide grin took him by surprise. Damn, but the man had dimples, and a cheeky, boyish smile that was insufferably cute. Bodie kicked himself hard and forced his mind back to the subject, but everything about Ray Doyle only reminded him of how long it had been since he had enjoyed that particular pleasure. Windrage was a small community, and there just wasn't anyone here whom he wanted enough to get involved in a permanent relationship.

"You want to hire me," Doyle said, eyes sparkling. "You want to wind me up like a toy soldier, and point me at the Stone Angels."

"For a fee," Bodie added. His mind raced, because he was fully expecting Doyle's next question.

"Okay, hot-shot, what are you offering?"

"Four-stroke fuel, twelve gauge cartridges, apricot brandy, good quality smoking grass, two phials of medicinal morphine--surgical quality, pure stuff, no rubbish--and a box of brand new needles, still in the wrappers."

"Phew." Doyle whistled. "Where the hell did you get your hands on that stuff?"

"Bit from here, bit from there. Even I get paid occasionally," Bodie said drily. "Well? You fancy the deal?"

For some minutes Doyle seriously considered it. He wandered about the room, sketchily drying himself, and came to rest in front of the hearth. He leaned both hands on the mantelpiece in the warm draught of the fire and looked into the mirror, meeting Bodie's eyes in the reflection.

"No," he said quietly. "Your offer's good, I'm not saying you're offering me junk, but...no. Sixteen of them, plus Erasmus Clay, on the rampage, and just you and me between them and this town? No way, man, I don't go for the odds." He threw down the towel and started to sort his clothes.

The black leather jacket and blue jeans drew Bodie's eyes. Both had seen better days. Doyle had been on the road a long time, and he had no chance of stopping. The longer he stayed in one place, the better the chance was that a bounty hunter would pick up Hayes' contact, and--

Bodie's heart squeezed, and his mind raced again. "All right, I'll up the ante," he offered. What did he have to lose? What did anyone have left to lose?

"Oh, yeah? What else have you got to offer?" Doyle was in his shorts, and had one leg in his jeans.

He was off balance when Bodie deliberately drew the sawn-off shotgun from the holster which he wore strapped to his right thigh. The sound of the hammer cocking made Doyle whirl.

"I can offer you your freedom," Bodie suggested.

Doyle looked from his face to the shotgun and back. "You bloody bastard."

"Call me what you like," Bodie said indifferently. "It's my survival, and the survival of this town I'm fighting for, and there's an old saying. Nice guys don't win ball games." He looked deliberately at Doyle's well-packed crotch as he said that. "Now, Officer Matt Hayes is one of my friends. I could hand you to him and collect the bounty on you. But I won't, if you accept the contract. You said your gun was for hire. I'm buying."

"Bastard," Doyle said between clenched teeth.

"You said that already," Bodie observed.

"What," Doyle demanded, "is to stop me waiting till the first time your back is turned and then putting a bullet in you and just walking out of here?"

"Two things," Bodie said cheerfully. "One, you're stuck here, the same as we all are. Listen to that wind. It's sub-zero out there. The Stone Angels will be here ahead of the full blow, and the storm'll leave before they do. You can't walk out before the whole show's over...and if you put a bullet in me, sunshine, you'll be wanted in Windrage too. Shoot me now, and you won't be able to hide the body for long enough to make it out of here without your name and your face being connected with my death. And then you really are dead in the water. You've never killed a Provincial Officer before. Take my advice, and don't. You wouldn't live the month out. Every bounty hunter on the frontier would be after you."

The gunfighter's eyes were ice-green, cold as a glacier, cutting as diamond. Bodie could almost hear his mind ticking over as he thought it through. And then reluctant, wry humour replaced the anger in Doyle's mercurial face, and the dimples were back.

"Damn you, Bodie," he said as he reached for his shirt. "You're a cunning old sod."

"Not so much of the old," Bodie said drily. "I'm probably younger than you are."

"Figure of speech." Doyle pushed his arms into the white shirt and tucked its tails into his jeans.

"You'll do it?" Bodie asked, and held his breath.

"You don't exactly leave me much choice," Doyle said ruefully. "I'll take your commission. Two conditions."

"Name them." Bodie let down the hammers on the shotgun and put it away. He had Doyle now. He was sure of that.

"You pay me a decent fee for the contract."

"You can have the four-stroke fuel and the brandy," Bodie offered. "Good enough?"

"Fair enough," Doyle agreed. "That stuff's like liquid gold. I've been running my bike on distilled chicken-shit so long, it's forgotten what petrol fumes smell like."

"And the second condition?" Bodie wondered as Doyle pushed his feet into battered biker's boots and stamped them.

Doyle swung on him, eyes wide, compelling. Dangerous. "I want you," he said, a tiger-husky purr.

Every nerve along Bodie's spine came to life as he wondered if he had correctly understood what Doyle had said. "I don't..."

"Oh, yes, you do. You know exactly what I mean." Doyle prowled around him, looking him up and down as he went. "Nobody--nobody--pulls a gun on me like that without paying the price for it."

"The price?" Bodie echoed as his heart thundered.

"Most men who pull a gun on me die for it," Doyle said in a husky, steely purr. He lifted his shoulder holster from the back of a chair and put it on. He took the magnum from the table beside the bath and slid it into the holster. "Now, I'm not going to kill you--"

"Magnanimous of you," Bodie said acidly.

Doyle looked sultrily at him. "You're a lot like me. You're a survivor, and your back's up against a wall. When a man finds himself painted in a comer, he does dumb-arsed things. Like trying to put the frighteners on me. I know why you did it, and the reason you're not picking your teeth out of the carpet right now, Provincial Officer Bodie, is that I reckon I'd probably have done the same thing, if I was in your place."

"Well, uh, I suppose..." Bodie said windedly.

"So I'll have you," Doyle told him roughly. "When all this is over, when Clay and the rest of that nomad biker trash are finished, it's you and me, Bodie. And you'll give me what I want."

"What...?" Bodie could hardly breathe for the beat of his heart on his ribs. "What do you want? I mean, exactly?"

Doyle's teeth bared in a smile, wolven now, neither boyish nor cheeky. "Your arse, sunshine," he growled. "Don't tell me you don't want me. You couldn't take your bloody eyes off me when you walked in here. There's been a hard-on in your pants since I stood up in that bath. "

Heat suffused Bodie's cheeks. He'd been half-aware of his erection since he first set eyes on Doyle. It was one of those stubborn, tenacious erections that refused to go away, and the longer he was around Doyle, the harder it was getting.

"I cannot tell a lie," he said banteringly, hoping he could defuse the explosive situation with a little well-placed humour.

"And I've wanted you about the same length of time," Doyle told him. With his flat palm he stroked the leather of Bodie's jacket, fondled his denim-packed backside. "Leather and blue jeans are just my style."

"So I notice." Bodie cocked a glance at the gunfighter's own clothes. His heart had begun to slow a little. "You don't talk like a frontiersman."

"Don't I?" Doyle turned abruptly and plucked a comb out of his bag, which stood by the bath. "What do I talk like?"

"Cityboy," Bodie guessed. "You haven't been up here long. You...." Now he was guessing, and prayed Doyle would not take exception. "You're not on the run, are you?"

The comb had been working through the luxurious red-brown curls. At Bodie's words, it stopped. "What kind of idiot would I be," Doyle said lightly, "to make that confession to an officer of the law?"

Bodie only shrugged. "City law doesn't carry any weight on the frontier. Windrage law doesn't hold good by the time you get over the hills to Yonderland. Every place makes its own rules and regs. Whatever they want you for elsewhere doesn't mean diddly to me, Doyle."

"In that case," Doyle said drily, "mind your own damned business." But he looked over his shoulder at Bodie and winked teasingly. "You're a fool," he accused.

The remark caught Bodie unawares. "Why do you say that?"

"Knowing who I am, and pulling a gun on me." Doyle clacked his tongue. "I've killed men for less than that."

"Not provincial legal-eagles. For killing men like Matt Hayes and myself, every bounty hunter on the frontier would band together and hunt you down. It would be a matter of survival."

"Point." Doyle tossed the comb back into his bag. "Besides, you may not like to believe it, Officer, but I'm not a criminal. I've never killed any man wantonly. Every time I use that gun, there's a bloody good reason, and I've done nothing I'm ashamed of. Mind you, a lot of these half-arsed county-mounties like Hayes would never see it my way, so I keep moving." He paused there, looking thoughtfully at Bodie, who was literally mesmerised by the monologue. Then Doyle stirred and settled his jacket about his shoulders, concealing the weapon. "I'm hungry. Get me something to eat while I look this job over and see if I can make a silk purse out of this particular swine's ear...or any other part of its anatomy!"

He was at the door when Bodie gathered his wits and said, "Thank you. Your help is appreciated."

Doyle turned back for a moment. "Thanks are unnecessary. I expect to be well-paid, Bodie--I'm only in this for the fee. And since it's essential that both of us survive for me to collect, I'll have to keep you alive. You're as snug as a bug in a rug till all this is over." He smiled, half teasing, half grim. "And then, Provincial Officer Bodie, you answer to me."

"Ray Doyle's law, is it?" Bodie said tartly, but he was disinclined to mock. Doyle was under his skin, itching there like glass powder.

Incredibly, one of those green eyes winked at him before Doyle was gone without another word. Bodie took a deep breath, let it out slowly and took stock of his situation. He was, in the same instant, the luckiest and the most unlucky man in Windrage. Not one of the townsmen would stand with him, and Erasmus Clay would only have to set eyes on him to see red. On the road, the biker chief would have been miles out of touch with the news, but soon enough he would know the truth.

His aim had been a fraction off, or the goddess of luck had frowned on him. A dozen pellets of heavy gauge deer shot had peppered Bodie, ripped his back wide open, and when he went down on his face, Clay was sure he was dead. Bodie shivered as he heard again that bellow of raucous laughter from the bottom of the biker's lungs before he kicked the big Triumph to life and wound the throttle out. Ten bikes roared away with him, sounding like a swarm of furious hornets receding into the distance.

In four months Bodie's body had repaired itself and he was ready to fight again, but with Bill and Vince buried, the Stone Angels stronger than ever and Erasmus Clay on the warpath, his chances of coming through the confrontation alive had stood at nil, until Ray Doyle rode into Windrage.

The storm had really begun to lash now. The eaves were lifting, the shutters banging. Josh Kelly had finished hammering, The Earl was closed up tighter than a spinster's corsets. The fires were on, the boilers in the basement were coming up to pressure and the hot water pipes had just started to gurgle. Soon the air temperature would rise, the smell of food would waft from the kitchen and Ma's White Lightning would be flowing free.

The Earl was the place to be. Anyone in the county knew that, and so did the biker trash. They would make for the pub like homing pigeons, belly up to the bar, cut a deck of cards and take charge of the place as if they owned it, to the terror and panic of the townspeople.

It had happened before. Bodie had the scars to prove it, and a quicksilver thread of fear stitched through him as he looked around Doyle's room and took note of the man's possessions.

His pack was open on the end of the bed, and Bodie saw the typical kit. Tea, sugar, a billycan; two matched magnums and an automatic with spare magazines; canned food, matches, gunoil; a set of knives and whetstones; ammunition boxes, tools, oilcan; a thick wad of tissues, surgical tape, latex gloves, iodine; spare spark plugs, points and puncture repair gear, condoms, lubricant and a few sex toys; soap, shampoo, toothbrush and straight razor; thermal blankets and pillow; decent quality smoking grass, half a bottle of whisky; three pairs of bluejeans, a carefully wrapped pair of good quality, hand-made boots, half a dozen shirts, shorts and socks, a fine suede jacket carefully sealed in a plastic bag; a length of rope, a pair of chrome steel handcuffs, a .303 rifle with a 70x 'scope.

The whole lot was rolled in an oilskin, and would tie down across the back of his bike. Doyle travelled light, but a man's gear told the careful observer a lot about him. Doyle was fastidious. He was clean, and he had good quality clothes, carefully packed. He looked after the bike himself, was his own cook, he liked sex, and he liked it safe; and the hardest dope he carried was mild quality grass. Bodie approved.

Satisfied, he left the room and followed the sound of voices back to the bar. The women were shouting, and the high-pitched sound of their protests assured Bodie of one thing: they had heard the news. The Stone Angels would be in by evening, and they were not safe here. Then again, neither were the bar boys. Clay's motley crew were partial to anything young and pretty, gender was irrelevant.

He swung down the stairs and stood for some moments in the shadows, watching Kelly trying to bribe the girls to stay. They had too much sense, thank God. Kelly was offering better pay, but what was a bottle of vodka, a dozen cans of kippers and a box of chocolate against the imminent threat of pack rape?

Big Dolly Flynn--taller than Kelly by a hand's span--grabbed him by the lapels and almost lifted him off his feet. "Listen, you thick-headed little runt, I'll say it for the fifth time: me and my girls and boys are leaving! If you've got some idea we're staying here and playing the cheese in the mousetrap, you're wrong! You want us to stay and keep that trash sweet?" Dolly dropped Kelly like a hot coal. "Not bloody likely. My kids may be whores, but they're not lunatics. What's the matter with you--don't you know the difference between a roll in the sack for laughs and a fee, and getting gang-banged on the ground?"

"He knows the diff, Dolly," Doyle's voice said quietly, "but he's scared. Aren't you, Kelly?"

The publican's face was white as a sheet. "Yes, Mr Doyle. Scared shitless, sir. Christ, sir, you should have seen what they did to my place last time! That was only four months ago, and it took a week to put it right. They killed four people while they were here."

"Counting two of your officers?" Doyle stepped closer to the bar and came into Bodie's line of sight.

"No, sir," Kelly admitted. "Six, counting them."

Doyle had seen Bodie on the stairs. A flick of his eyes acknowledged Bodie's presence, but he spoke to Kelly. "Why don't you count Bill and Vince among the dead?"

"Well," Kelly said awkwardly, "they were officers."

"They were men," Doyle rasped.

"They were officers," Dolly Flynn said in her enormous voice, which issued from an enormous body. Corseted into an hour-glass figure and dressed in white leathers, she was Doyle's height, and probably twice his weight. "It was their job to kick the biker trash right out of Windrage," she boomed at him. "And if they died--that's all part of their contract too."

"I see." Doyle folded his arms on his chest. "It's no wonder you can't find anyone to take the job."

"There's Bodie," Kelly said falteringly.

"Oh, yes, Bodie." Doyle regarded the group at the bar with a real, marrow-deep misanthropic look. "All on his own, all one of him, going to go out and surround seventeen of them. And when he's dead, what'll the rest of you do?"

"Well..." Kelly began, and stopped.

"You'll run, if you can," Doyle said cynically. "And some of you will make it out, and some won't. A few of you'll get caught and the Stones will eat you for breakfast. That little entertainment will buy the other runners a bit of time. A few of them will blunder out into the storm and either freeze to death in the cold or suffocate in the dust."

The whole crowd--thirty people, barmen, Dolly's boys and girls from the adjacent bordello, patrons--were stunned into silence. Bodie thought he could have heard a pin drop as Doyle turned on them, rebuked them, and because of who he was, what he was, they were compelled to listen.

"You're gutless," he told them. "If you stood together you could mop the floor with the biker trash, but every one of you is only interested in saving his own hide, and to hell with everybody else. The I'm-in-the-lifeboat mentality. You're pathetic."

He turned toward Bodie, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans and lifted his chin. "You want to take the Stones? It can be done. But you do it my way, Bodie, or your rabble can look out for itself, and I'll take my chances on the road back to Yonderland. By the time the tribe gets done with this place, there'll be no one left alive to tell the tale of what happened here."

For a full half minute the dead silence continued, and then the crowd erupted. Doyle was surrounded but he ignored them all, intent on Bodie. With a slow, measured tread, Bodie descended the stairs and physically pulled the assembly apart.

"I'm listening," he told Doyle.

The gunfighter shouldered his way through Dolly's hustlers. "They'll make for this place. It's safe, it's warm and it's got plenty of booze. There's only two doors, one front and one back. The windows are shuttered, the shutters are nailed down, they won't get out that way fast enough."

"Get out?" Bodie echoed. "What makes you think they'll be trying to get out?"

Doyle gave him a withering look. "With half of them dead, the other half will run. Or try to. Any way you look at it, it's going to be bloody, but if we're quick, the blood'll be theirs, not ours."

"There's going to be shooting?" Kelly said sharply.

"In here?" Dolly demanded.

"Get your kids out," Doyle said without even looking at them. "I don't want bystanders either getting caught in the crossfire or being grabbed as hostages." He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "Back door. Be on the safe side and block it. Park a truck across it if you have to. Keep the fish in the barrel."

"What about the stairs," Bodie warned. "You could end up fighting room to room."

"Not with you on the landing with a twelve bore," Doyle said coldly. "They'll try to run that way, and they run straight into a flak curtain. Put them down. You could get three or four that way."

Bodie swallowed. "Back premises? Same applies."

"Block their escape route." Doyle swung on Kelly. "You'll have to stand on your hind legs for once in your life. Wait till they get in here, and then cut off that passage. What have you got that'll block it?"

Mouth flapping, Kelly seemed blank for a moment, before he forced his brain into gear and said, "Freezer chest. Big, solid, heavy, on wheels. Tall as me, wide as the passage. I can dump down a couple of sacks of oats and corn to chock the wheels when it's in place, so they can't put it out of the way."

"It'll do," Doyle agreed. "Check those wheels for squeaks, and turn the lamps off in that passage. They might still see what you're doing, but if you're quick, by the time they do see, it'll be too late."

"Front door," Bodie prompted. "You'll look after that? >From which position?"

"Behind the bar. It's the best cover in here, solid teak, by the looks of it. Bulletproof."

"Does Erasmus Clay know your face?" Dolly Flynn asked, narrow eyed and shrewd.

Now, Doyle sighed. "Yeah, love, I'm afraid he does. And he thinks he's got a score to settle with me, so I can tell you now, it's going to be quick. I won't have to pick a fight, Bodie, leave that to Clay. He's been itching to have a go at me for a year."

"With reason?" Bodie asked piercingly.

Doyle accorded him a glare. "I put a bullet in one of his outriders, in Summertown. And before you ask why--it's none of your damned business." He stalked away, headed for the stairs and his room, and was half way up before he turned back to the stunned crowd. "Kelly, oil your wheels and block the back door, park something over it. Get these chicken hustlers out of here, and the rest of you...either get out, go home, or else keep your eye on Erasmus Clay. When he sees my face, he'll fight the fuse. Get down on the floor, get behind something. If you move before it's over and you get your heads shot off, don't try blaming anyone but yourselves."

He marched up the stairs like a drill sergeant on parade, leaving Kelly, Flynn and the others gaping like stranded fish. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Kelly whispered.

"Consider yourselves duly warned," Bodie said drily.

The woman grasped him by the arm, her long, blood-red fingernails digging into his leather. "Sounds like you've let him take charge of this town!"

"The town? No." Bodie withdrew from her grasp and stepped away. "But, take charge of this place, this evening, this tribe of nomad trash--sure, and he's welcome to it."

"But it's your job!" Dolly roared.

"Like Bill and Vince?" Bodie's lip curled. "Wrong, lady. It's my job to keep you people safe, but I can't do it on my own and there's not one of you will help me. Is there?" He glared at Bradley, Sawyer, Ashmole: the mechanic, the gravedigger, the teacher. One by one, they shook their heads shamefacedly and backed away, as if they could hide behind their fellows. "Then, how else do you think this is going to be done?" Bodie demanded. "It's catch or kill. And I can't catch them single-handed. Christ, even the addition of Ray Doyle only makes two pairs of hands!"

"So it's kill," Kelly said breathlessly.

"You want the Stones alive?" Bodie rapped at him.

"No, but--"

"Then stop being sanctimonious," Bodie scoffed. "You didn't turn a hair when Bill and Vince were killed. Luck of the draw, you said. It was their job. Same applies to Erasmus Clay's mob of jackasses." He looked for Sawyer and glared at him. "Better see you have plenty of body bags."

Without waiting for them to protest, tired of them, wearied of their timidity and their bloody-minded hypocrisy, he took the stairs two at a time. The air was warmer now. The hot water pipes had stopped gurgling, which meant they were full. Fuel enough to run the boilers for a week was stored in the basement, and The Earl could keep going on food and booze for that long.

In the doorway of Doyle's room, he paused and mutely watched the gunfighter making his own preparations. On the bed lay his four handguns: the magnum from his holster, the spares he kept in his pack, and a 9mm Baretta automatic. He was checking each one, and loading them. In all, the magnums gave him eighteen shots, and the automatic gave him fifteen, plus one up the spout. Thirty-four rounds were at his disposal without the necessity to reload.

He knew Bodie was there but did not look at him even when Bodie cleared his throat and said, "Thirty-four shots. Sixteen of them. Will it be enough?"

"I find that remark highly insulting," Doyle said acidly.

Bodie stepped into the room and shut the door. The bath was still full, the water gone cold and greasy. "Doyle, I want you to know, I'm grateful. I need you tonight. And I'm ready to pay the fee we agreed. All of it."

"Oh, yeah?" Doyle gave him a sultry look. "Well, I intend to collect, Bodie, all of it, so it's a good thing you're ready to pay the piper."

"You'd force me, if I wasn't ready?" Bodie asked quietly.

"I'd seduce you, dummy," Doyle rasped. "I'm not a rapist. I've never been a rapist!"

Something in the way he said that made Bodie's skin prickle. He cocked his head at Doyle, watched the fine, artist's fingers working with the guns, so deft and sure. How many thousands of times had Doyle done this? "You want to tell me about it?" he prompted.

"Tell you about what?" Doyle angled a glance at him as he loaded a spare magazine for the automatic.

"What started you in this trade?" Bodie nodded at the guns. "Why you erupted like a Roman candle when I asked if you'd force me, if I wasn't willing."

A sigh of exasperation hissed between Doyle's teeth and he slammed the magazine down onto the pillow. "Jesus, you love to pry! What's the inquisition in aid of? It's none of your fucking business!"

"I know it's not," Bodie admitted. "But I'm interested."

"Why?" Doyle demanded. His eyes were sharp as cut glass.

"Because you fascinate me," Bodie admitted. He could always try telling the truth, if all else was failing--and it was. Honesty was rarely the best policy, but as an eleventh hour stand he would give it a crack. "I fancy you. You won't have to seduce me, much less force me. I'd be happy to go to bed with you if you bought me a drink and propositioned me. And you interest me. The mystique, the charisma, the enigma. My God, the gunfighter! I've seen snapshots of you on wanted posters in three or four towns along the frontier. Makes me wonder who you are, what makes you tick, what got you into this. How you stay alive, when a legion of bounty hunters must be after you."

At last, letting go his anger, Doyle sighed and relaxed. He sat against the brass bedhead and closed his eyes to slits as he studied Bodie. "There are. That's why I shot Erasmus Clay's outrider. The man was trying to take me. That reward put up by Matt Hayes is enough to tempt a saint."

"I see." Bodie leaned on the door and let his eyes rove over Doyle's slender, whipcord-strong body. "And the time before? You shot Hayes' brother."

"Sonny Hayes was dealing jacks off the bottom and aces out of both cuffs," Doyle said drily. "I told him to stop and he pulled a gun on me. Nobody waves a .38 cop special in my face! And for your information, Officer, I shot three others between Hayes and Clay's man."

"With good reason," Bodie guessed.

"There's always good reason. I'm not a murderer. Whether you believe it or not," Doyle said tiredly.

Bodie hesitated as he watched Doyle, his face, his body language, the way he used his hands. Most of what a man had to say, he said with his eyes and his hands, the way he sat or stood, the way he held his head and shoulders. "I believe you," Bodie said slowly.

The green eyes widened. "You do?"

"I like to think I'm a good judge of men." Bodie took off his jacket as the room began to grow oppressively warm. "How long have you been on the road?"

"You mean, how long since I picked up a gun?"

"Same difference."

"Not quite." Doyle hoisted himself off the bed and returned to his work. "I picked up a gun for the first time when I was seven years old. My father was a gunsmith, that's where I learned what I knew. But I didn't put a bullet in anyone till four years ago. And you can believe or disbelieve as you see fit, I don't particularly give a toss, but it was self-defence."

Fascination piqued, and Bodie took a step nearer. In the soft yellow lamplight Doyle was gorgeous. The animal magnetism he exuded caught Bodie fast. "You killed a man in self-defence and had to get out of there?" he guessed.

"Something like that." Doyle snapped the magazine into the automatic and tried the fit of it in the holster.

It was not the same shape as the magnum, and did not fit perfectly. With his left hand, Doyle worked it around, to and fro, and then to Bodie's astonishment, he demonstrated the knack, the trick, which Kelly had seen--the trick that must have won him more than a few fights.

He was ambidextrous. When he faced a man in the street, his opponent would naturally expect him to be right-handed and draw the weapon by reaching across his chest. That was slow, wasteful. Bodie blinked as he watched Doyle flick the big automatic out of the holster with his left hand and draw aim on an imaginary target.

Still, he was not satisfied, and rummaged through his pack for a block of rosin, which he used to slick-smooth the holster. A lot of rosin, a dozen draws, and he was happier with it. Bodie was mesmerised. All this time, Doyle seemed to consider the question of how much he wanted to tell Bodie, or could say without damning himself.

At last, he thrust the gunoil, spare shells and tools into his pack and said over his shoulder, "Four years ago I was in the city. I was a gunsmith, had my own workshop. A lad from the local market was pestering me. Wanted to be lovers with me. I didn't want him. Not that I don't like boys, I do. But not him. He was just plain not my type. Came the day I turned him down once too often, and the kid squealed rape. I had half his family howling for blood , and they brought the law in. I stood no chance. The lad even had three witnesses, his mates, who were ready to swear I'd held him down and fucked his little arse while he screamed blue murder. If I stayed put I was going to end up castrated. I don't know what you do on the frontier, but that's what they do to rapists in the city. Best way to put paid to their antics, and it's the best short-term deterrent they can think of."

"It's the same here," Bodie said quietly. "So you ran?"

"Tried to. The lad's uncle got in my way with a double-barrelled duck gun. I was trying to nick him, put a bullet in him somewhere where it'd just put him down. I shot about an inch too low and hit his lung. He died." Doyle turned his face away. "And I've been running ever since. There, Provincial Officer Bodie, that's the whole confession. Now, what? You get on the shortwave and call London, they send a squad for me?"

But Bodie shook his head slowly. "I believe you. I also know, there's no way back for you. You'll never prove you didn't rape the boy, and even if you could prove that, you'll still be up against a wall for the 'murder' of the kid's uncle. City people are lame-brained. Cop-coddled. They never know what violence is about from one month's end to the next. Never see a dead body. Anything goes wrong, they howl for the law, and then hide their heads in a bucket of sand. You'd be surprised how many men on the frontier are on the run."

"I wouldn't," Doyle said acidly.

Fleetingly, Bodie smiled. "Perhaps not. Then again, Doyle, I also know there's no way forward for you, either." He nodded at the street, beyond the nailed-down shutter. "Bounty hunters, nomad biker trash, officers like Matt Hayes who have a score to settle with you. Young idiots who think they can pluck a gun out of a holster faster than you can and have to challenge you to prove it. You're on a one-way street, and it goes to hell."

"I...know." Doyle's teeth worried his lip and he rubbed his face. "I've been looking for a way out, every mile of the road. Trouble is, no matter how far I go, it only takes a couple of months before my fame follows me. Soon, Bodie, there'll be no place left to run to."

"And then?" Bodie asked, hushed.

"Then," Doyle murmured, "I'll be dead. One way or another. A firing squad for some so-called murder somewhere. Or will Matt Hayes change his poster to read, 'wanted dead or alive?' Or will a cityside cop squad come for me? Or will I buy it in a fight? Christ, it could be tonight." He closed his eyes, shook his head slowly, resignedly. "I haven't got far to go. I know that. It may surprise you, but I'm not a fool."

"I never thought you were," Bodie said gravely. His mind chewed at Doyle's problem, but no matter which way he approached it, there was no answer.

They were silent for a long time, until at last Doyle stirred deliberately and said, "I asked for dinner over an hour ago, and I haven't seen it yet! I don't fight well on an empty stomach, Bodie."

With a slightly guilty pang, Bodie opened the door. "You asked me to fetch you dinner, too. Sorry. Let's go down and eat in the bar. You lucked out with this place, at least. They have the best cook on the frontier."

Before he stepped out, Doyle collected the four guns, and his jacket. The automatic went into his holster, he tucked a magnum into his belt and slid the other two into the pockets of the jacket. "It's time we got ready. The Stones won't be far behind. We've got a couple of hours at most--and that long, only because they won't make fast headway in this weather."

With every windows closed up, the pub was getting humid. The gale howled down the chimneys and the eaves banged alarmingly on the south wall. But Kelly had been out there and chained them down and Bodie was not worried.

Enormous eyebolts were set into both the eaves and the ground, and a chain as thick as his wrist was attached to both. The ground was foot-thick concrete, and the eaves had been made of railway tracks. The steel was blood-red with oxidisation, but it was so thick it would take a hundred years to rust though, and so heavy it would hold the roof down in any hurricane.

Worse than the wind was the cold. The draught coming in through the gaps around the front door was like ice. It reminded Bodie of the glacial, arctic gales that had scoured the whole county, counties and cities alike, in the days after the event, the impact of Comet Rodgers. It was as if the Apocalypse had taken place, but instead of the world being ravaged by hellfire and brimstone, it was devastated by the kind of cold that would have been common enough on Baffin Island, but not in these hills, these cities.

Bodie glanced sidelong at Doyle as they went down the stairs and felt the ferocity of that draught. The mask-like immobility of Doyle's face assured him, the same thoughts were worming through his companion's mind.

"Where were you?" he asked--the old question. No one needed to have it clarified. It only ever meant one thing, given the context in which it was asked.

"Staying with my grandmother in the country," Doyle said quietly. "I'd been sick in the summer, I was convalescing, ready to go back to school. We were walking in the hills when it...happened. Penrith was shaken flat by the earthquakes. The lake got up out of its basin and drowned everything, for as far as we could see. My grandma was a country woman, she had the presence of mind to hit the deck and stay down till the hurricane had gone over, and when we picked ourselves up again there wasn't much of anything left. And the old lady was blind."

"She'd looked at the sky?" Bodie groaned. "The fool! The same thing happened to my aunt. Thousands of people were blinded like that. It was very common...horrible."

"Yeah," Doyle agreed. "She just had to look. She'd shoved me underneath her to protect me, so I was safe. But she never got her sight back. The glare, or x-rays or whatever it is, just burned the purple in her eyes away."

"So that left you as good as alone at age--what were you, twelve?"

"Thirteen."

"Okay, thirteen years old, and you were on hillside with a blind old woman, while the temperature went down like a brick and the sky went black as night at two in the afternoon," Bodie said hoarsely. "What did you do?"

Doyle's face was stiff as a mask carved out of wood. "Grabbed her, hit her in the face to stop her screaming when she found out she was blind, and got her moving. I knew we couldn't go down hill, the lowlands were underwater. So I took her up to a farm I knew. A sheep farm above the lake. It was flattened by the earthquakes, of course, but the farmer and his wife hadn't been in the house. They also had a shortwave in the 4x4. Not that there was anyone to call for help--there wasn't! But Bert Jones was a tower of strength."

"Kept you alive?" Bodie wondered, hushed, consumed by another's story of survival. Everyone had their own story to tell, and sooner or later when strangers met, the question would be asked, 'Where were you?' And the story would be told amid a breathless, horror-rapt silence.

"He helped me stay alive, and I helped him," Doyle said hauntedly. Fifteen year old memories had returned full force and seemed to have slammed him in the midriff like a punch. How well Bodie knew that feeling. "We set to, took the rubble of the cottage to pieces and built a hut. Slapped mud all over the inside and lit a fire in there to harden it off. Chipped out a smoke hole, got a hearth going, fast. Bert killed a dozen of the injured sheep, and skinned them. The skins cured over a fire, and by morning we were eating mutton and dressed like eskimos, huddled by the hearth. Every hour, we'd call on the shortwave for ten minutes on the offchance someone somewhere was listening."

"Any joy?" Bodie asked softly.

"Oh, sure. Six weeks later we were heard. I'd gone into Penrith with Bert while Mavis, his wife, looked after the old lady. We scavenged the ruins for tinned food, pots and pans, anything we could use. We were burning the timbers of the cottage in our hearth, eating mutton three times a day. Wearing three layers of sheepskins. We were cold, hungry, filthy, but we were alive when a jetcopter found us and took us into London." He closed his eyes. "My father was still alive, but my mother and sister were dead. The three of us, Dad, Gran and me, found ourselves a hole in the ground and tried to keep warm. Living on rations, dirty, getting lousy, tap-dancing on the cockroaches every morning to keep them down. But there was plenty of wood to bum for heat. The city had fallen down." He shook himself and shrugged. "Dad taught me his trade, and I was a gunsmith until..."

He turned his face away, and Bodie felt a knot of pain ball. up in his innards. For Doyle to have come through all that and then be trapped into an appalling no-win situation by a malicious boy, was enough to drive a man into the most bitter cynicism imaginable.

"Here, sit down, I'll get you a meal," Bodie said with rough compassion which was as awkward as it was sincerely meant. Less than an hour ago he'd been holding a shotgun on this man and offering to hand him over to Matt Hayes if he refused to sell his gun to a lost cause.

"Got work to do first," Doyle told him. "You order. I'll eat anything that isn't actually moving."

With a grin, Bodie clapped his hands and summoned young Ben, who waited on tables, swept the floor and washed the windows in return for room and board. "Two steaks, eggs, potatoes, pie and cream, and...tea" he ordered. He might have said beer, but many people likened the local beer to horse sweat, it was too damned cold to want freezing liquid today, and besides, alcohol in the blood was the one thing neither he nor Doyle wanted.

While the kid scurried out to the kitchen with the order, Doyle was behind the bar. First, he stood still and looked around in every direction, gauging the angle of his shots. He would get only once chance, so it had better be good. Then, with his angles judged and his calculations made, he salted away the three magnums, on the shelf under the bar, where he could lay his hand on them quickly.

Both elbows leaned on the polished black teak bar and he gestured at the shotgun Bodie wore strapped to his thigh. "You carrying plenty of spares for that? You'll need them. When they start to go down, they'll panic and run. I'll drop them before they can get through the front door--"

"I'll make bloody sure of that," Bodie assured him, "because I'll have Kelly lock it surreptitiously the instant they're all inside."

"Right. So then they'll run to the back," Doyle went on. "They'll see Kelly's freezer chest blocking their path and the only other way they might be able to get away from me is up those stairs."

Deliberately, Bodie drew the pump shotgun out of its special long holster. "They'll run straight into this. I've got four twelve gauge in the magazine. And this." He leaned forward and plucked the pistol from his belt, at the small of his back. "And this." From his right boot, he produced the .60 calibre 'Derry' gun. "Stop worrying about me, Doyle. I'm a professional. If I was any kind of an amateur I'd have been stone cold long ago."

At last, almost reluctantly, Doyle smiled at him, and this time it was a genuine smile. "I know. No aspersions intended." He put his fingers to his lips and issued a piercing whistle. Two dozen heads turned, right across the bar room. "Oi," Doyle told them, "listen up. There's three magnum revolvers behind this bar. They're loaded and the hammers are back. Touch them and you'll probably blow your brains out. Understand?"

A titter of laughter answered him, but the townspeople had got the message. They were laughing because they were scared. Doyle was content that he had got his warning across, and while the crowd returned to the cards and Ma's best quality sipping hooch, he circuited the bar and joined Bodie.

But one by one the people were leaving, drifting away as time ran on. The Stone Angels would be in Windrage by evening, and already the sun must be almost down, though it was difficult to tell with the pub so hermetically sealed. Doyle sat, and he and Bodie waited in silence until Ben rushed out from the kitchen with a laden tray. They regarded each other warily, with a lot of healthy suspicion, but Bodie was no longer concerned. He felt that he knew Doyle now. Shared danger was the fastest ice-breaker.

"So, where were you?" Doyle invited as the boy thumped down the tray and he tried the steak.

The meat was old, but the cook here was a gem. Rick first beat the steaks with a mallet, then treated them with some kind of herbs, then washed them and grilled them slowly for half an hour before finishing them off on the pan. The end result was the same as the best quality fillet money just could not buy. You didn't kill cattle for food, not when they ploughed and fertilised your fields, provided you with milk and another generation of cattle to continue the tradition. But when one of them died of sheer old age, not one part of the animal was wasted. Waste was the only real sin.

As they ate, Bodie told his own story and Doyle listened in the same horror-rapt silence in which Bodie had heard Doyle's story. No one had had it easy. Every story was different, and yet they were all the same. Somewhere in the middle of the jumble of fear, pain, cold, hunger and grief were ordinary human beings struggling to survive and somehow managing it against the odds.

Their plates were clean and they were drinking a third cup of tea when Doyle suddenly cocked his ear to the wind and said quietly, "Hear that?"

Bodie began to listen and swore beneath his breath. The wind moaned, rose to a shrieking howl, dropped away to dead calm and then wailed like a banshee. Anyone on the frontier knew that sound. The full storm was less than an hour away. Erasmus Clay would be in no doubts.

The Earl of Aberdeen was warm, oil-lamp dim, humid, with air that smelt of frying onions and simmering dumplings. Cards and dice rattled, and if it was kicked in the right place the old jukebox in the corner would jangle out the tunes of yesteryear. On any other night the atmosphere would have been congenial, the bordello's friendly girls and boys would have been mingling, and Josh Kelly's eyes would be sparkling at the consumption of liquor.

Tonight, the front door opened every couple of minutes as first this man, then that one slunk away. Some of them gave Bodie a shamefaced glance, perhaps even a quiet word of apology or excuse. 'I've got a family to think about...' or, 'I don't know one end of a gun from the other, Bodie, I'd be no use to you anyway.... Others just scuttled away and didn't look back. In the street tomorrow they would flush beetroot-red when they met the officer and had to look into his face.

If he lived. And any way Bodie calculated the odds, they were stacked against him and Doyle. Not that Doyle looked worried. His eye was on the time, his ear was cocked to the wind, and as The Earl was suddenly empty he pushed back his chair and called for Ben to take away the crockery.

The kid loaded up the tray, but before he could make off with it Doyle dropped a hand on his shoulder. "Have you got a home to go to, son?"

"I live here, Mr Doyle," Ben said, flushed, flattered that the renowned gunfighter should take an interest in him.

"Then, you get yourself into the kitchen, put a solid brick wall between you and this bar," Doyle said sternly, "and when you hear Erasmus Clay's trash come through the front doors, get down on the floor under the table and cover your head."

Ben nodded vigorously. "I'd love to watch," he said wistfully.

"No!" Doyle barked. "There's going to be more stray bullets than mosquitoes over a swamp! Clear off, kid, and get your head down!"

The boy hurried away, and Bodie watched as he slipped by Kelly in the passage. The publican shuffled forward and cleared his throat hesitantly.

"The lamps are out in the corridor, Mr Doyle, as you said. I can't get a bartender for tonight. The usual one, George Parkes, just left, and he says he won't be back."

"He's got a lame wife and a sickly kid to look after," Bodie said quietly before Doyle could make any protest. "Under normal circumstances, Mary and Titch would be here, where it's warm and safe. If they're going to spend the night at home in a storm like this, they'll be scared, they want him with them...and if we get George Parkes killed, who's going to look after them?"

Doyle had opened his mouth, probably to say something contemptuous about Parkes in particular and Windrage's men in general, but he closed it again and shrugged indifferently. "I'll tend the bar myself, Kelly. But if I were you, I'd move the good stuff out of here. And I wouldn't count on selling much. As soon as Clay sees my face it'll start. And in the following three minutes, it'll be finished."

"What..." Kelly swallowed repeatedly before he could find his voice again. "What do you want me to do, Mr Doyle?"

"Stand beside the door," Doyle said, low and cynical, a tone of voice Bodie had heard once before, while he had been holding a shotgun on the man. "Distract the Stones as they come in. Talk, babble, anything at all, make sure they keep looking at you, not at me, till they're all inside. I'll be behind the bar. I'll keep my back to them as long as I can. When they're all in here, turn the key in that lock, take it with you and then get out. Go and look after Ben. The kid's going to be peeing himself when it starts."

Kelly's eyes flickered to Bodie. "Is that what I'll do?"

"Yes, it's what you'll do," Bodie told him tersely. "It's the only plan that makes any sense." He scraped back his chair and leaned both palms flat on the table as Kelly hurried away to find his keys.

The pub was so silent, it could have been a church or a courthouse. In the terrible quiet, over the noise of the wind, Bodie could hear his own heart beating, slow, steady, a loud drum in his ears. His mouth was dry and he noticed Doyle was licking his lips repeatedly.

"You okay?" he asked very quietly.

The other man pulled his shoulders back, worked his neck to and fro to ease its tension. "Stage fright."

"What?" Bodie took a step closer.

"Stage fright. You know, sweaty palms, itchy feet, heart going bang-bang," Doyle said drily. "I don't want to die, Bodie. Nobody does." He looked sidelong at Bodie, eyes wide, pupils dark in the dim light. "And if you're not scared, you're mad."

"I'm scared," Bodie admitted, and thought as he spoke, how strange it was to make that confession. He had never made it to another human soul. "It won't be long," he murmured.

"I know." Doyle took a deep breath, inhaled it slowly and then turned to Bodie and thrust out his hand. "Thanks a whole bunch for inviting me to this little shooting party of yours, Officer. And good luck."

Bodie shook his hand. "Call me Bodie."

"Oh, I will." Doyle looked him up and down with such a sultry expression, Bodie could scarcely breathe.

A moment later he was moving, getting in behind the bar. He took off his jacket, and as Bodie watched he whisked the automatic out of the shoulder holster with that strange left-handed draw, so quick, the onlooker was left speechless.

In the passage, hovering nervously with his bunch of keys, Kelly swore quietly. Doyle ignored him and methodically checked every gun he had salted away under the bar. Bodie drew the shotgun and, checked its load, checked the pistol and the sneak gun in his boot.

At the foot of the stairs he gave Doyle a look that spoke volumes. Doyle nodded mutely, and without a word Bodie climbed on, up to the landing. From there he had an excellent view of the door, and if he knelt on the stairs, just around the comer, he could use the heavy wooden banister for cover. When the shooting began stray bullets and ricochets would be as deadly as on-target rounds.

He lifted the shotgun from its holster, cocked its trigger and set it carefully on the landing beside him. He drew both the revolver and the sneak-gun, cocked them too, and tucked them carefully aside, where he could put his hand on them as easily as Doyle could reach his own weapons.

Then they waited, and the following half hour plucked on Bodie's tight-strung nerves like a musician picking the strings of a banjo. This was the time he hated. The waiting. Erasmus Clay could not be far away now. Every minute brought him closer. Inactivity invited introspection and Bodie knew no means by which he could stop his thoughts turning inward, and backward to the past. His feet had been on this path for more than a decade, and it would be ironic for it all to end here, tonight, like this....

---

The wind screeched, ripping at the shutters, and across Windrage people would be huddled by their fires, tying to keep warm and worrying about their roofs. Windrage was protected by the hills which girdled it on the south and east sides, but the farms and crofts dotted across the slopes between here and Yonderland were not so fortunate as to have that cover. Farmers dug out enormous basements, and when the sky darkened, giving an afternoon's warning that a storm was about to hit, they took their families, animals and most valuable possessions underground. If the cottage above was wrecked they would rebuild.

Very few actual towns existed, because of the ravages of the weather, and the constant threat of assault by nomad tribes like the Stone Angels, the Comancheros, the Vikings. Not many people were willing to invest so much time and resources in building and consolidating, which in the end only made a village into a town, and a town into a rich, irresistible target for land-pirates.

Why Erasmus Clay's tribe called themselves 'Stone Angels,' Bodie had not known until a survivor of one of their rampages of violence limped into Summertown, where Bodie was staying the night. The young man had been brutally raped and tortured. The skin of his back was in tatters after a merciless whipping, his face was a mass of bruises and his genitals were a mess. Still, Summertown's surgeon, Doc Levison, had worked miracles on the boy and he lived. He told his story to the local law, which in Summertown was personified by Provincial Officer Harry Kirk, and Bodie listened as the kid rambled, half delirious and scared to death.

The nomad tribe had ridden in the day before, drunk every drop of alcohol, eaten every bite of food and taken whatever they wanted, including the young people. In the midst of the carnage, Clay explained to an old man, just before he killed him, why the tribe called themselves by that name.

Stone Angels soared above the graveyard, marking the resting places of the dead. Clay's tribe was the new order of the world. They were the future, he claimed, and they marked the graveyard of the old world, over which they soared.

The thought made Bodie's blood run cold. Erasmus Clay had always been an anarchist. In the days before the event, he was one of those young shaven-headed 'Skins' wearing swastikas and goose-stepping in the street. He freely admitted, then, he had bombed law courts and army barracks, shot politicians and kidnapped soldiers, in an unremitting attempt to drag down The System and bring about the total anarchy that had been threatening for most of the troubled Twentieth Century, but never actually happened.

When Rodgers impacted, to Clay it was a sign from God. Fire from heaven. Heavenly judgement raining down out of the sky. He seized on it, and in the very early days when the sky was dark as midnight he made a lot of converts. By main force, he seized a supply of food, drugs and booze, and people flocked to him. He doled out the means of staying alive, and while people ate he force-fed them his new doctrine.

It was Armageddon. It was the time of Judgement. The army, governments, the churches, the police and lawyers and teachers, all those in authority, had corrupted the world and everything in it, into a parody of the truth, and they had paid the price. Now, the old order was going to perish, and out of the ashes would arise a new world.

But Erasmus Clay was disappointed. Within a year, groups of people were starting to get themselves organised. Citizens' vigilante committees drew up new laws and enforced them; teachers started to work again, although the skills they taught now were different. Of a sudden, it was criminally foolish to spend hundreds of hours drilling algebra and trigonometric functions into the protesting brains of thirteen year olds, when the kids could be learning to build a survival shelter out of scrap, make a safe fire, ascertain if the water was pure enough to drink and the food was still edible. How to splint a broken leg, how to recognise frost-nip, treat frost-bite and snow blindness. How to make a sled, and harness, and handle a team of dogs....

As people began to pick up the pieces and start again, Clay lost his supporters. The world had been purged, and the governments, churches, armies and police were gone. Most people said, good riddance to them, they were the ones who'd caused most of the pain in the old world. But the pattern of the new world was taking shape, and it wasn't Clay's vision of anarchy and savage tribalism, where the strong preyed on the weak and only the brutal survived.

In his fury, Erasmus Clay left the city and took with him the few followers he had managed to keep. They were men like himself, who had been savages before the event, and almost all of them were fugitives. They headed north and roamed the frontier at will, wreaking havoc, leaving a swathe of destruction behind them wherever they went.

Periodically, Provincial Officers would hire what guns they could and mount a full-scale search for them. But fuel was too limited to range far afield, and ammunition too scarce to waste it in the sort of firefights that were so common twenty years before. Bodie recalled seeing television, perhaps fictionalised, he wasn't sure, where cops and gunmen blazed away and wasted a year's worth of bullets in thirty seconds...where two cars or bikes, or worse, 'copters, would chase each other for many minutes, burning off real, genuine petrol. It was ridiculous--didn't they know that genuine petrol was like liquid gold, harder to come by than brandy or morphine?

So Clay remained at liberty, fifteen years after the impact event. But his days of freedom were numbered, Bodie was sure. The frontier was becoming more populous as living conditions got better. A few more families drifted into Windrage every couple of months, and in another cleft in the hills, only fifty miles north, another town had begun, Kate's Farm.

Kate was a pillar of the community. She was a good herbalist, she brewed the best chickshit 'top fuel,' she bred the best milk cows, and she had begged, borrowed and stolen enough glass to built greenhouses big enough to get two crops a year and feed a hundred people in the merciless cold of the north-east.

Bodie respected and admired her hugely. He knew her well, and she had offered him a job on her property, if he would take it. Kate's Farm was starting to become known as a centre of light and life. Erasmus Clay, and other outcast tribal trash, were aware of it. Now and then, the Farm's vigilante militia fought a terrible, bloody battle with raiders, but so far they had always won out.

As the Farm grew, it needed a stronger militia to protect it, and Kate was always recruiting. She offered Bodie a crate of genuine Irish whiskey, and three sheepskins, twenty gallons of top-fuel that would push his bike to eighty or a hundred miles an hour.

If Bodie had been able to convince someone, anyone, to replace him at Windrage, maybe he would have gone. Kate understood when he told her, he couldn't take the job. It was in the fine print in his contract that the Provincial Officer could not walk out--if he did, his face would appear on a wanted poster, and the penalty for leaving a town without any protection was a firing squad, no defence argument permitted.

The stupidity of it all made Bodie dizzy. How much 'protection' did one man represent? And that one man could not expect any help from the citizens of Windrage. Every man here was out to secure his own interests. They had wives and kids, homes and businesses to protect. Good excuses. Pat excuses. In the end, the bottom line read the same: Bodie was on his own.

And yet, not quite. Down below the landing on the stairway, Doyle was behind the bar. He was leaning on his elbows, reading a magazine--the new one, only brought up from London two months before, a whole thirty-six pages of news and interviews and advertisements. A treasure trove. Like everyone else in Windrage, Bodie had relished that magazine.

He read about the election of President Judith Camden, and her Vice President, Barbara Wainwright...about the twelve babies that had been born in the last three months, while only nine people had died, which represented a tiny but promising rise in the population...and the new glasshouses were finished, providing tomatoes and corn as late in the year as August, when the cold became too intense...new fashions, leathers so tight, they moulded to a man's body like a second, shiny black skin. A clothing factory had opened in the vault of a tumbled cathedral, and the looms were running again, making denim and fine cotton for blue jeans and shirts. In the back of the magazine were ads which lured and tantalised. A woman wanted a bicycle generator, would pay a dog sled, an ice axe and three assorted spades, or sex three times a week for three months. A man wanted spark plugs for a 4x4, would pay a bolt of carpet, or a leather jacket plus rainproof oilskin, or sex 'on call' for a month.

The city was a land of golden opportunity, but for men like Bodie and Doyle it was out of bounds. Doyle could not go back. If he did he faced a firing squad. And Bodie would not return. Getting out of the city was all that had saved his sanity five years ago. Going back would drive him to the edge, and perhaps this time he would go over it.

In the ten years after Rodgers, he grew up from boy to youth to young man. His family were gone. His last surviving relative was his Aunt Grace, and she never regained her sight after the airburst that flooded the sky with some kind of rays, at the time of the impact. Like Doyle's grandmother and thousands of others, she gazed at the sky as Rodgers dove into the atmosphere, and that was the last thing she ever saw.

When Bodie turned fifteen years of age the Citizens' Council passed into his young hands the responsibility for caring for his aunt, now that he had legally attained his majority. He could vote, own a gun, operate a machine, be conscripted for the militia, smoke dope, get drunk, get married and procreate. For years he had looked forward to being an adult, but his fifteenth birthday came as a shock.

The Council support for his blind aunt was cut off, since he was now a man and responsible for her. Two days after his birthday Bodie found himself on the street, looking for food and fuel. It was easiest to beg, but not particularly profitable. He was given a few supplies, but drew a lecture at the same time.

Why was an able-bodied, healthy man, almost fully grown, begging? And Bodie had to admit, the people who said all this were right. He looked for work, and found it the same morning...but the pay was rock bottom and the work stank, literally. The work was readily available because no one wanted it.

He shovelled out the sties and coops, feeding pig- and chick-shit into the fuel stills. A day's pay was a dozen eggs and a piece of smoked pork, half of which he paid the baker for a loaf of bread, and the dairyman, for a pat of butter and half a pint of milk. He and Grace ate that night, and for a month he kept the job, until he couldn't get the reek of the sties and coops and methane-poop fuel stills out of his head or off his clothes.

People in the street noticed it and gave him a wide berth. Bodie flushed scarlet with shame. A storm of freezing rain hit one night, and he stood out in it for an hour until he was blue with cold, shuddering...and clean. He never went back to the fuel factory.

The next morning he was in the nooks and crannies between the ruins, looking for easier pickings. He stole a can of beans, a bag of bread rolls, a piece of cheese, two potatoes, and a pint of fuel oil. When he went home early and smelling clean, Grace knew full well he hadn't worked for them. She sighed sadly, but she ate. She wasn't stupid enough to turn down the food and fuel.

For a week Bodie scavenged this way, while he looked for a decent job in the afternoons. He found a few hours' work around midday, each day, minding a 'shop,' which was a cellar filled with every item he could imagine. His pay was a can of peaches and a piece of chocolate. He was so famished, he ate the chocolate, but the peaches, he took home. With the stolen bread and milk, they would do. This could not go on, and he knew it.

One day, he got caught trying to make off with half a dozen eggs and a tin of sardines. The penalty for stealing food was not as high as that for stealing drugs, booze or top-fuel. Those items were like solid gold, they could change hands a hundred times like currency, before they were used. Food was life, so the penalty for its theft was not so harsh.

Instead of a heavy flogging with a horse whip, he drew a drew 'a half hour of leather.' This meant, he was tied face-down over an old bed frame, and the man from whom he had stolen was given a broad leather belt and permission to hit Bodie as much or as little, as hard or as lightly, as he wanted to, for the space of half an hour.

Bodie was lucky. The man worked out his fury in the first five minutes and after that the beating was only sporadic and not terribly hard. After twenty minutes the man was satisfied and justice was done. Bodie had counted eighty strokes so hard he was left whooping for air, and another forty that were just tickles by comparison, but which hurt a lot, because they fell on pre-pulped flesh. But though he was black and blue from shoulders to ankles, right down his back, his skin was whole. If the man had been mad with rage, Bodie could have been cut to pieces, and no one would have stopped it. This was his first bit of luck that day.

His second came as they released the handcuffs and let him go. He was so stiff and in so much pain, he could hardly move. He fell to the ground and lay there gasping while the crowd milled about and walked past him, sometimes stepping over him. Then a man's hands grasped his arms and lifted him up, and Bodie blinked dizzily into the face of his helper.

Food was forthcoming, and a brandy bottle with a couple of inches left in the bottom, and a pint of kerosene. These were delivered to Grace, while Bodie was taken elsewhere, to be bathed and put to bed. That day, he was too sick to even realise where he had been taken, but he groggily heard that Aunt Grace would receive more food and fuel the next day, and it was all going 'on the slate.'

There was a price to be paid, of course. Bodie never expected something for nothing. Only fools believed in miracles. The day after the beating, he realised where he was. It was a bordello...of course. He was fifteen, he was a lovely boy, as everyone had been saying all his life, with his glossy black hair and his long, curled eyelashes, and his brilliant blue eyes. Those were the gifts with which Nature had endowed him. Time to put them to work.

He was still a virgin, but that didn't last long. His virginity was sold at enormous price, to a rich man who returned to 'Samarkand' many times, to have him. The price of Bodie's virginity was a mink coat that smelt of mothballs. The man who 'broke him in' was called Donald something-or-other. It happened in a dark bedroom with red wallpaper and black sheets, and Bodie was so scared he had to smoke a lot of grass before he could go through with it. Maybe the grass dulled the edges, but he scrambled through. The soapy enemas and greasing he endured beforehand were just as bad as the fucking, and in future he vowed to do all that business for himself

Samarkand belonged to the man who had picked him up in the street when he was beaten. Jim Logan was a decent guy, and Bodie never resented him. Jim always sent Grace the food and fuel, and a blanket now and then, or a coat--it all depended on the work Bodie did. The 'rough stuff' paid best. If he could put up with that, Grace would get something special, or Bodie would have 'a bit extra' on the side. Something for himself, to stash away, against the day when he had enough to walk out of Samarkand and not come back.

He once calculated, if the average dick was six inches, he sucked a quarter of a mile's worth in the eighteen months he worked for Jim Logan. House rules were--he only got bumfucked three times a night, and he was grateful. Jim wanted to protect his investment, and he believed that any more would 'ruin' Bodie. But all this was bread-and-butter stuff, and Bodie realised, if he didn't get into the well-paid work, he would be at Samarkand forever.

One night, he took on two men at once, and that was an experience. He'd never been done, both ends simultaneously. He got a pair of lady's earrings for that, which he hid away carefully. Another night, he took part in a game. Two customers drew targets around each of his nipples and threw tiny darts at him, competing to get a couple of bullseyes. He yelped and ouched and swore for an hour while the customers turned his breasts into pin cushions, but Jim paid him a pocket calculator that did square roots and percentages, and ran off a solar battery.

Another night, he let a customer leather his backside black and blue, and Jim paid him a brand new pair of bike rider's gloves, still in the plastic bag.

By the time he was seventeen he had stashed away enough to be independent. Dressed in his best sheepskins and leathers, he packed a briefcase with his best gear, and knocked on doors up in Bright Lights.

'Bright Lights' was the top-end, where the 'rich-bitches' lived. They had either got rich by crime and prostitution (which was usual), or they had been rich before and enough of their lackeys and servants and bodyguards had survived Rodgers for them to keep up their act in the aftermath. Their avaricious eyes lit on Bodie's goods--ladies' earrings, a wrist watch, gloves, silk underwear, a nick-cad battery charger, a bottle of vodka--and he did great business.

Trade was good enough to move Aunt Grace into a better class of hole in the ground, get a girl in to look after her, get himself a new pair of boots, and go out again to trade off the remainder of the wages of sin.

He was free of Samarkand, and when Jim Logan met him in the street, he shook Bodie by the hand and praised him for his courage and ingenuity. If he ever needed a job, there was a place at Samarkand for him--not hustling, though. He was starting to get too old for that. His beard was coming in, he was growing muscles, and he was taller than Jim now. The customers wanted younger meat, but Logan could sometimes use a bouncer or a barman. For that also, Bodie was thankful.

For three months of glorious freedom he traded door-to-door from one end of Bright Lights to the other, and the rich-bitches were always delighted to see him. They got to know him, invited him in for tea when he arrived with new wares. Some of Bright Lights' men knew him from Samarkand, too, and he sucked a few cocks, ploughed a few pussies, and was ploughed, for which he was well-paid.

Things were beginning to look good, and he was considering moving Aunt Grace to even better accommodations. By then, Rodgers was seven years in the past, the sky was brighter and between eleven in the morning and two in the July afternoon you could take your jacket off and not freeze. The glass houses were set up and fresh food had started to re-appear. For a dozen tins of sardines you could get two whole red tomatoes and a palmful of crisp lettuce. Bodie thought he had never tasted anything so good. Nothing like it had passed his lips since he was eleven years old.

And then the axe fell, as it must.

Nomad biker tribes raided the ruins of the city, up on the north side, where the gravediggers were slowly working their way through the legions of frozen victims of the comet. Often working in darkness, they had been burying hundreds a day for years. Now that the weather was starting to warm up again, it was vital that the job be finished, but it was doubtful that they would be able to manage it. They were having to clear the wreckage to even reach the dead, and it was getting harder and harder.

At fifteen, Bodie could have got a job working with them instead of trying his hand at thieving, but he knew without even attempting it, he couldn't. It took a stronger stomach than he possessed, and he'd heard horror stories about that work. People went mad. More and more often, chain gangs were doing it. When a criminal was caught, instead of getting a whipping or a firing squad, he was chained on one end of a work gang and sent out on 'clearance detail.'

As the sky grew brighter, because the mantle of dust thrown up by the comet in what they called 'the nuclear winter' started to settle, the weather grew steadily warmer. People were noticing that the miles and miles of rubble, all that remained of the city, demolished in the earthquakes, were starting to become...aromatic.

For seven years, rats had been counted as vermin and killed on sight. Some Councils put a bounty on them, and if you brought in enough dead rats you could be paid in chocolate or packets of biscuits, whatever the professional scavenger crews had found in the frozen ruins the week before.

Amateurs fossickers were discouraged from going into the ruins, and it was not an idle warning: the rubble was unsafe, roofs collapsed, cellars fell in. People were killed routinely, trying to excavate in search of food or fuel, clothes or gadgets. Professional speleologists were the only people qualified to go down there, and their dangerous trade was highly respected.

Now, rats once again earned a bounty--but only if you brought them in alive. The rat farms were special cellars that were kept warm, filled with wood shavings or old paper or straw, and the rats nested there, were fed, and consequently, they bred. They were netted by the thousand, taken out to the increasingly aromatic ruins, and released. In four or five years they would account for the millions of dead who were unreachable by the 'clearance crews,' and the whole problem would be solved. Then, once more rats would be trapped and a bounty paid for dead ones, but in the meantime, the carnivorous rodents were the best bet the city had.

This was the situation when the nomad biker trash appeared out of the north and swooped on the city like demons. They were the Firebrands, the Vikings, the Comancheros, Barbarians, Apaches, the Eagles, the Mustangs...and the Stone Angels. Erasmus Clay was back in the city. Older, wiser, more bitter and much more dangerous.

His face was on posters, a bounty was on his head. For the man--or woman, no one was fussy--who brought him in, dead or alive, the city would pay ten pounds of precious powdered milk, a case of assorted tinned fruit, thirty packets of condoms, a bottle of wine and a bouquet of the most beautiful artificial roses. The bounty was so rich, only fear of the nomad savages kept people cautious.

When it swiftly became clear that the bounty was not going to give them Erasmus Clay on a plate, the Citizens' Council responded by throwing out the blanket conscription order. The BBC was back on the air in those days, and the news was broadcast every hour. Every male between fifteen and twenty years of age was to report to the draft office, which was marked with green flags. Any male who dodged the draft would be treated as a criminal, and would draw five years' service with the gravediggers.

By five o'clock that afternoon, Bodie was in a queue at the barracks. He thought the officers would give him a medical or test his IQ, but all he received was a 'tattoo,' in indelible ink, painted onto his chest. His service number. He was 3412/Bodie. They were not interested in his state of health or mind, but they should have been.

In fact, Bodie had the family tradition for it. His Aunt Grace had told him scores of stories of his grandfather, who had been a mercenary, fought in African bushfire wars, returned to the home country and worked first in the Queen's army and later for a security department dedicated to the safety of citizens. As a child, Bodie had always romanticised his grandfather and his occupation. He had played soldier games, and if Comet Rodgers had not reduced the whole world to ruins, he might have chosen to enlist in one service or another.

Now, he was sure the militia was not the place for him, but the draft authorities turned a deaf ear to his protests. Anyone paying attention would have known, Bodie was near the end of his rope. He had been hovering on the edge since his fifteenth birthday. Stress, work, the mental and physical strain of serving at Samarkand, the constant worry that he would end up there again, or hustling on the street, all this took its toll. Angst had been a constant companion for too long. What would become of Aunt Grace while he was in uniform, he asked, and was brusquely told, 'his old lady' could apply for Council support, now she had lost her supporter.

By that night Bodie was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, biker's boots, gloves, and he had been issued the weapon of the service. The barrel had been sawn off the six-bore shotgun so that it fit a holster, and a dozen precious cartridges were slotted in the bandolier he wore around his waist.

He slept in a barracks with twenty other men, and as he had more than half expected, the sergeant came to his bed after lights-out. Bodie just rolled over and told him to get it done and be quick, because he was dog-tired. The sergeant was big and powerful, and it was painful, but it was also swift, and then Bodie was asleep.

With morning, he drew training, and for the first time in his life he swung his leg over the saddle of a bike. It was a 250cc four stroke Honda. An instructor taught him which was the throttle, which was the brake, how to change gear. A vast area that had once been a car park had been cleared, and along with the rest of his unit, he rode round and round, getting the feel of the machine.

In the afternoon, they put him on a 450cc Suzuki. It felt different and roared like a demon. There was more power, better acceleration. He had to get used to it all over again, but by evening he was doing 'slalom' exercises between the concrete posts, and he felt as if he'd been riding a bike all his life.

That night he was stiff with pulled muscles, his forearms were scrubbed, where he'd fallen off twice, and when the sergeant came to his bed, all Bodie did was roll belly-down and groan.

Morning. They put him on a 750cc Honda and by the time the bell called him to eat at noon he had ridden the bike at sixty miles per hour. Satisfied with him, the instructors told him to practise two hours a day, and assigned him to the 'shooting gallery.' There, his ears were stuffed with wax plugs, and he learned how to use the shotgun, and hand guns, and a .303 rifle.

By the evening of that second day, he was given a black helmet with the militia badge on the front, and told that in the morning he was being 'sent up on the line.' The sergeant came to him again after lights out. Bodie was wide awake as he was fucked, but by now he was so used to the man, he didn't much care. He was not even mildly aroused himself. He was too preoccupied with the threat and promise of tomorrow.

Dawn: a bell rang, and when he and his unit trooped out into the ice-cold July morning air, they saw a truck waiting for them. They ate breakfast on the way north while the day grew warmer. Through the open back of the ancient canvas-topped truck, Bodie watched the ruins go by.

This part of the city was largely uninhabited. The work had only just begun to clear the rubble. The professional scavengers came up here, looking for canned food, or a tank of propane, or a fridge that could be drained of freon, or an underground tank of petrol that had survived. But even the scavengers did not like working this area.

The permafrost of the 'nuclear winter' had at last started to abate, and as the sun rose the whole place stank. That odour was beyond description. Bodie knew what it was, and it horrified him. The faces of his colleagues were just as pale as his own. Even Big Bob Lynch, the opportunist sergeant was tight-lipped, chain smoking. Bodie gripped his militia-issue shotgun and tried to concentrate on something else.

The new barracks was on the edge of the field of ruins. It took almost all day to get there, and they had hardly enjoyed the chance to take a look at the cellar where they would sleep before the alarm was raised. In the darkness of the premature July night--twilight was four-thirty, full dark at six--they saw the fires of the nomad biker tribes, heard the revving of engines, the war whoops, the screams of prisoners.

Bodie fought his first action that night, and another before dawn. He killed six men, and was astride a tall, hornet-howling offroad 'scrambles' bike when he chased a seventh man into the ruins.

Far from the barracks, he lost sight of the lights as the Viking he was chasing led him further and further away. At last, the biker lost traction on the rubble and went down hard. As the howling engines stalled out, Bodie finished him with one shot.

The silence of the night closed in around him. The sky was overcast--you hardly ever saw the stars, there was still too much dust in the upper atmosphere. The cold was intense, the ground was crisp with frost. The stink of the ruins, which had thawed during the day and were now starting to re-freeze, turned his stomach. And he was lost.

He kicked the bike two, three times before it started. He flicked on the headlight and turned back the way he had come. But the Viking had cut a haphazard course through the wasteland of rubble, he had no real idea where he was going. Most of the buildings were just flat, only the occasional wall still intact, standing taller than himself. He rode for half an hour before he reached a structure big enough to give him a vantage point.

He clambered up, stood on a section of roof that creaked ominously beneath his weight, and looked around in all directions. Rats squeaked and scuttled around his feet as he peered around, and then he saw the distant flicker of fires. He had ridden more east than south before he shot the Viking, and if he had continued on the way he was going, he would never have reconnected with his unit. God alone knew where he had been going

His flesh crawled as he jumped down off the wall. This place felt haunted. He realised, the inhabited part of the city was just a tiny little oasis of semi-civilisation, an island in the midst of decay. His mouth dried as he kicked the bike and prayed for it to restart. If it did not, he would have to walk out of here, and if the Vikings or the Stones did not get him, madness would, as he picked his way through the handiwork of Comet Rodgers.

The bike started and he swung in a big arc, back towards the firelight. The barracks was only two miles from the nomad camp. The battle was over when he made it back, and as he dragged himself into the cellar his mates grabbed him and embraced him, thankful to see him alive. They had believed the Comancheros or the Eagles had captured or killed him.

That night, Big Bob Lynch did not come to his bed, and Bodie lay awake, feeling himself suffocated by the miles and miles of ruins and disintegration which surrounded the city. He could not get out of his head the impression that all the survivors of Comet Rodgers were no better than maggots. The city was the dead body of an enormous animal.

An hour after midnight, he crept into the sergeant's bed, shoved him over to make room for himself and grabbed the man's cock in his fist. He needed human contact--any human contact, even this. He needed warm, living flesh pressed against him, enfolding him, shoving inside him, making him remember he was alive, driving out the nightmare images.

Lynch was so surprised, so delighted, he stroked Bodie, bit him quite gently in the shoulders and nipples, and for the first time tried to make it pleasurable for him too. That night pleasure was impossible, but Bodie didn't need the physical release of orgasm. He needed the warm, hard, tangible human presence of another living person against him.

The days that followed were the same. They skirmished with the tribes, some battles were won, some were lost. A group of officers came out in a 4x4 and a map of 'North Outbound One' was tacked to the cellar wall. It was the first map Bodie had ever seen, and he studied it with fascination. Outbound One cut a line, arrow-straight, for 'the frontier.'

He had heard the frontier spoken of in hushed voices for the last year. He understood that it was somewhere a long way distant, a place where people had gone feral, turned savage in their fight for survival. But here and there a small group of individuals had begun to carve order out of chaos. The air was clean up there. The water was fit to drink, and if you could find a sheltered valley that acted as a wind-break you could built a house, a real house, above the ground.

To Bodie, it all sounded like some fabled promised land. He had almost forgotten the years before the impact event. Sometimes it seemed that his younger life was nothing but a dream, a comfortable fantasy he had invented when he was a frightened little boy, because the world was too terrible to be borne.

While the others were drinking 'dishpan tea,' he edged closer to the map, stole a piece of paper and carefully copied it. He had no idea when he would be released from militia service, or even if he would survive long enough. But the day he was let free, he knew where he was going.

The frontier may be savage, but at least it was free and clean. He could not take any worse risks than he was running with the militia. Four times in the first week, he was almost killed. In the second week he was injured, and he prayed the doctor would reckon his wound bad enough to send him back to the city. But all Doc Hargreaves would do for him was give him a shot of heroin, dig out the bullet, bathe the wound in iodine and cauterise it with a glowing-hot poker.

Bodie was out of the action for another ten days, and the stultifying boredom of sitting in the barracks, counting the cockroaches and chain smoking when he could get a packet of tobacco and paper, almost drove him out of his mind. When he was cleared to return to duty he was glad to get back on the bike and go to work, if only to have something to do.

After five months of this, it occurred to him that he might never get out of the militia. One night, after he had been ploughed and was resting in the sergeant's bed, where he was a welcome guest now, he asked Big Bob in a barely audible whisper,

"When do we get rotated home?"

The shock was delivered after Bob had taken a deep drag on his cigarette. He offered it to Bodie, and Bodie was dragging when the sergeant said, "It's a two year hitch, kid. You got nineteen months to go."

Numbness and cold seeped through Bodie's nerves. He laid back against the other man's big, hard body and closed his eyes. He would be well turned twenty years old when he was free to walk. If he survived. The old wound smarted sharply, reminding him of his mortality.

Fair enough, if that was the way things were, so be it. He must be careful. He must be the best in the unit. He was a survivor--he was getting out of the rubble, the ruins, the stink and the rats. He was going someplace where the wind and water were clean, and men did not live in cellars.

Winter might have been the worst, but in fact it came as a blessed reprieve. Eighteen hours of darkness per day kept them in the underground barracks almost all the time. The cold was arctic, and they were issued with the thickest sheepskins, oilskins, thermal blankets, extra fuel. But the winter was far harder on the tribes. Where they went, Bodie did not know, but for months on end he and his unit only rode patrol around the designated perimeters, and saw nothing. And the winter cold froze the ruins, so that it was easier to be in the vicinity of the wasteland.

In spring, Big Bob was killed when he rode into an ambush, and Bodie was the next natural candidate for the job. By then he was hardened, inured. He put a set of chevrons on his helmet and took command of the unit without hesitation. They had lost a few men and were running short-handed, but summer brought out another batch of grass-green replacements.

He was marking time, waiting for his demobilisation papers, and his weekly reports from that year made for a bitter journal. After Big Bob was killed he made no other real friends, but he connected with a kid called Larry Quinn. All he had to do was go to the kid's bed after lights-out, and put a hand on his shoulder. Bodie would not have forced him, but from Quinn's immediate reaction he knew he didn't have to. Quinn groaned, rolled belly-down and growled something about making it quick, because he was bloody tired.

That night, Bodie lost another kind of virginity. He had never had the opportunity to fuck a man before. He was just short of twenty years old now, and he mocked himself. First time for everything? He groped himself with a palmful of gun oil, nudged Larry's thighs apart, got in between them, positioned himself and shoved as hard as he had to, as gently as he could. Larry whimpered, grunted, then sighed and relaxed. Bodie set up a quick rhythm and it did not take long. Afterward, with trembling knees and a back that ached with tension, he climbed back into his own bunk and tried to sleep.

In the morning, Larry grinned brashly at him, and Bodie knew he would be welcome in the kid's bed. He was grateful enough to do Larry small favours, because he had months to go before he could expect his de-mob papers, and he recognised the warning signs of trouble in himself. He had been close to the end of his rope when he was conscripted. That rope was now expanded to breaking point, like overstretched elastic.

Summer came, and he started to look for his release papers every time a dispatch rider arrived. The hours of daylight lengthened, the sun grew warmer. Nine years after the impact, the sky was often quite blue and for a few hours a day the south-west wind was even what Bodie would call warm. The ruins became totally unbearable.

During the entire two years, Bodie had not seen one scrap of pay. A militia man was given his clothes and food, a ration of booze, cigarettes and drugs. But his pay accrued until he was either killed, invalided out of the service or de-mobbed. The understanding was, if he did not have it, he could not gamble it. Gambling was a flogging offence, and anyone found writing notes of hand, or IOUs, was severely punished. In the case of a fatality--and there were many--the two years' accrued pay went home to the family. The cripple had his two years' savings to ease his life back home. And the man who was lucky enough to walk out on his own two feet was modestly wealthy.

The day Bodie's papers came through, there had been savage fighting. A dozen biker tribesmen were dead, and three of Bodie's men were done for. Bodie himself was suffering a badly twisted ankle, following a come-off. But when he limped into the barracks and saw his de-mob certificate pinned to the noticeboard, he hardly felt the ache of it.

The truck came out from the city with supplies the next morning, and a new sergeant was aboard. Bodie tousled Larry Quinn's blond hair affectionately as he got into the wagon, but five minutes after he had farewelled the camp on the southern end of North Outbound One, he blocked everything and everyone associated with it out of his mind. He was never going to do that kind of service again...and he was not going to sit and rot in the ruins of the city with the rest of the maggots.

His pay was waiting for him. He had a choice between a case of pocket watches, cuff links, rings, brooches, earrings and bracelets, which would have put him in business as a trader; or he could choose a fully reconditioned, serviced, fuelled Kawasaki 1000cc Katana.

He took the bike. Where was the decision? Everything he had owned before his conscription had been kept for him, and he traded the lot for leathers, blue jeans, boots, gloves, sheepskins, thermal blankets; a shotgun and ammunition, tools and a first-aid kit, some canned and dried food, matches, a billycan, and a bottle of Grandpa's World's Finest Firewater, which was guaranteed to grow hair on a bowling ball.

Before he left the city, he asked where he could find his aunt, and was sent to the Citizens' Committee Blind Home. He rode over, getting the feel of a more powerful bike than he had ever ridden before. The gargle of the big engine aroused attention and a bevy of nurses met him at the door.

He was shown into a nice, clean room, comfortable and warm. Music was playing, a caged pet canary sang constantly. Every fifteen minutes a lady with a nice voice read the home's news, and poems or prose which had been written by the residents. Every hour, the BBC came on the air with the city news, and the tea trolley rattled around continually. Bodie smelt something good cooking, while the residents amused themselves with braille playing cards and scrabble, and a set of musical instruments.

Aunt Grace had gained a lot of weight. She was sixty years old, like a barrel now, and settled here. Bodie saw all this at a glance as soon as he walked in. He was awkward and she was worried...worried that he would take her out of a place where she was cared for by the Committee and put her back in a private apartment where she would have to do everything herself. If Bodie remained in the city, she would lose her Council Relief, and be totally dependent on him for everything.

For half an hour she seemed to be trying to find a way to tell him, she was pleased he had come to visit, and she hoped he would visit again, often, but not stay. Not that Bodie needed to be told.

He kissed her forehead, tucked his helmet under his arm and walked out of the home. It was still morning, he had the hours of daywarmth, and if he put the bike on North Outbound One he could put the city behind him by evening. He had a map, and he was headed for a place called Scotty's Crossing, where travellers said you could get a decent meal and a warm corner to sleep in.

He swung his leg over the bike and hit the self-starter. The machine roared to life, he revved the powerful engine and swept back the sidestand. As the Katana gained some forward momentum he lifted his feet, nudged into second gear and opened the throttle. She sounded like a supercharged hornet as she took to the road, and he speared out of the city without a backward glance....

---

The angry hornet roar of bike engines returned Bodie to the present with a start. Down below, Josh Kelly fidgeted nervously, shuffled from foot to foot. He had his keys behind his back, and unless he was clumsy with fear he would have those doors locked in moments as soon as the sixteen Stone Angels were inside.

On the landing, Bodie bobbed down to get a clear view of the bar. Doyle was leaning on it with his back to the door. He was pretending to polish a bottle with a rag, while his face wore a mask-like expression. As Bodie moved he looked up, their eyes met, and Doyle's eyes said unspeakable things.

In that moment, he could probably have killed Bodie for shoving him headlong into this. When it was over there was going to be hell to pay.

"Ready?" Bodie asked quietly, reaching for the shotgun.

"Get on with it," Doyle rasped. "I'm--"

The door burst open, admitting a freezing, screeching howl of gale-force wind that banged it back on its hinges. Two men wrestled with it. A flurry of dirty 'brown rain' slicked the floor. That was rain mixed with 'atmospheric dust.' Tomorrow, the whole town would be crusted with red-brown.

"Get that fucking door shut!" roared a voice from inside the sheepskins of the tallest, broadest of the bikers.

That sound made Bodie's blood chill. He would have known that voice anywhere, any time.

Erasmus Clay always sounded furious. Having his dreams of anarchy shattered had laid waste to his whole concept of a new world order. Like his men, he was dressed in sheepskins which covered every inch of him, including his boots and helmet. Without those skins, when a storm hit a man was dead in an hour. Temperatures could get down to thirty below in the middle of the blow, and a mobile biker was riding into the teeth of air that seemed to be moving at the speed of his machine, which increased the wind-chill factor a hundred percent.

Fourteen...fifteen...sixteen. One by one, they shouldered inside. Bodie grimly counted heads. Seventeen in all, including Clay. He flicked a glance at Doyle, who was still behind the bar with his back turned, shoulders hunched against the cold. Then he watched Kelly, who was edging towards the door. His feet slithered on the wet floorboards and the keys jingled as he searched for the right one.

"What are you doing?" Clay barked at him, making Kelly jump out of his skin.

"Going to lock up," the publican stammered. "Otherwise we'll have that door busting open in the wind every five minutes. It's either lock it or wedge it shut, and it's easier to lock it, chief."

For a second Clay didn't budge, as if he was mulling this over, and then he turned his back on Kelly, took down his immense sheepskin hood, and lifted off his helmet.

He was forty. When Rodgers reshaped the world he had been twenty-five, already a dangerous young man. Now, he was powerful indeed, exuding physical menace and subjecting lesser mortals to psychological terrorism just with his appearance.

His head was shaved, and his skull was tattooed with red, blue and green snakes and reptiles. He shed his sheepskins, and his enormous, brawny body was revealed. He was dressed in battered, scuffed, road-dirty black leathers. His hands were like tanned brown hide, his face was deeply creased, the lines etched like scars. He wore two holsters, one over his shoulder and the other at the small of his back, sheathing a pump shotgun similar to Bodie's and a magnum almost identical to Doyle's. Two long knives were slid into each boot.

Every one of the Stones was similarly armed, and Bodie groaned soundlessly as he counted over forty visible guns among them. Against all of that, Doyle was standing behind the bar, alone, still as a statue, waiting. Poised. Bodie could hardly breathe.

"Barman!" Redbeard was Clay's right-hand man these days. He had been with the Vikings for two years, and still looked like one of them. He thundered his fist down on the counter, making glasses rattle.

Josh Kelly scuttled away fast. In thirty seconds, after the passageway was blocked off, he could be in the kitchen with his head down. Bodie's palms prickled with sweat on the butt and barrel of his own weapon. He settled on one knee in the cover of the banister and focused on Doyle.

"Barman!" Redbeard bawled. "What's the matter, are you deaf? What happened to the usual man?"

The Stones were piling their wet, smelly sheepskins in a mound by the door. Half of them were struggling and cursing with the heavy, rain-sodden garments, some were laying out their skins, flat on the floor, to dry. Bodie knew most of these men, either personally or from the posters that appeared in towns right along the frontier. One or two, he had arrested in years gone by, when they were little more than big, dangerous kids.

They were at a supreme disadvantage, and there would never be a better moment for Doyle to make his move. Heart thudding, Bodie watched as the gunfighter turned slowly, deliberately to face Erasmus Clay. A cold, bitter smile was on his mouth and his left hand was already going for the gun as he said,

"George went home, he was a family to think of. You're stuck with little old me. Ray Doyle at your service, gentlemen."

Time seemed to run slow, and stretched like elastic. In a split second that assumed the characteristics of an hour, Doyle turned, both Clay and Redbeard recognised him, and Clay roared, "Son of a bitch. Doyle!" He scrabbled for the shotgun with his left hand and the magnum with his right, but Doyle was far, far faster.

The automatic was out of the rosin-slicked shoulder holster like greased lightning. The first shot slammed into Clay's shoulder, spun him around and threw him to the ground. The second spread scarlet across Redbeard's chest. Doyle did not even pause to breathe, but pivoted like a dancer and aimed into the middle of the wolf pack.

His primary targets were those men who were reaching for weapons--the first of all was the skinny little whippet, Jojo, always the quickest, always the most vindictiv