The Professionals Circuit Archive - Nothing Left to Lose	 Nothing
Left to Lose

 

by Jane & Madelaine Ingram

  
 *(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 vindictive, because he was undersized and nursed a
bottomless grudge against anyone who was taller. His weapon was an
American police .38, and the revolver was habitually loaded with dumdums.

If Jojo had been a better shot he would have blown a hole in Doyle the
size of a bucket, but his first round went wild and he did not get the
chance for a second. Doyle dropped him with one shot, low down in the
belly, which slammed him against the locked door.

Stone Angels were diving in all directions, looking for cover. Most simply
hit the floor and scrabbled for their weapons. One tried the door handle,
tore at it and screamed, "It's locked, man, the fucker locked us in, I'll
kill him!"

Before the threat was finished, the automatic in Doyle's steady, level
hands had roared twice. Sam Two-toes had levelled his pride and joy, a
pearl-handled antique revolver that must have been a hundred and fifty
years old. He did not even make a shot before Doyle dropped him.

His mate, nick-named 'Chickadee' for reasons Bodie had never known,
managed to trigger a single round which clipped Doyle's shoulder close
enough to go through the cotton of his shirt though it missed the flesh
beneath by a whisker. Doyle had only to shift aim by a few degrees, and
his fifth round was dead on target, a foot beneath Chickadee's grimacing
face. In the confines of the bar room, the 9mm Baretta made a roar which
made the ears ache.

Five down. Bodie's finger rested lightly on the trigger as his ears filled
with the Stones' screams of rage and fear. They could never before have
been cornered like fish in a barrel. This was something they did to other
people. With the boot firmly crammed onto the other foot and Erasmus Clay
lying in a scarlet heap on the floor before the bar, the surviving dozen
were far from happy.

That bar was made of teak, and would stop anything short of an artillery
round. Doyle had gone down behind it as he lost his element of surprise.
Now, the whole match became a shooting gallery, and the trick, Bodie
guessed, was in the accuracy of his aim in a single split second.

The difference between the professional and the rank amateur became
obvious in a moment. Doyle bobbed up and a dozen shots skipped across the
bar toward him, shattered the glasses behind him, exploded the bottles of
White Lightning, but every round was wide of the mark by at least a foot.
Doyle's own aim was unerring.

Like a fool, Billy Joe Padget had wasted the only chance he was going to
get, trying for a head shot that missed badly. He toppled off his knees,
thrown backwards with the impact velocity of a single round, and was dead
before he hit the greasy floorboards. Doyle dove back into concealment.
Six down. The eleven remaining Stone Angels were howling for blood.

Twice more Doyle bobbed up, drew aim and dropped the Lind twins in order
of seniority. From his vantage point on the stairs, where he had not yet
been spotted, Bodie watched the gunfighter duck back behind the bar. What
Doyle could not possibly see was that blond, gangling Troy Hooker was
worming along the teak barricade on his knees and elbows, hugging it,
working his way around to the open end. From there, he could surprise
Doyle, and it would all be over.

When the gunfighter bounced up for another lightning-fast reflex shot,
Bodie leaned out with his revolver, and as Doyle fired to put down a man
called Rhemmy, Bodie put one shot into the broad target of Hooker's back.

Seven of the Stones were uninjured, and in the chaos they had not even
seen Hooker go down, much less heard where the shot that killed him came
from. Panic had caught them by the throats like a terrier with a rat, as
Bodie had known it would. Moses Callum was on his hands and knees, tearing
at the doorknob, but barrel-fat Frank Dougherty, called 'Dough-boy' by one
and all, had other ideas.

He was up, and in a headlong dive flung his huge body into the passageway
which was solidly blocked by Kelly's freezer. Bodie listened, heard the
tub of lard run smack into the freezer chest in the darkness, and
Dougherty howled blue murder as he rebounded.

Behind the bar, Doyle turned to follow the line of his flight, and as
Dougherty bounced off the fridge he put a round into him...and another,
and another. All that body fat would soak up bullets like a sponge, better
than a suit of armour. Bodie swore as the Baretta automatic clicked empty,
and Doyle switched quickly to the nearest of his magnums. He triggered
three ..45 calibre rounds, and at last Dougherty fell onto his face and
stayed down.

Sweat glistened on Doyle's grim face. Bullets whisked by him like
mosquitoes as he stopped Moses Callum in his tracks with a single body
shot, and he dove again as a shotgun levelled on the bar's polished
surface. Both barrels erupted, flinging a welter of bird shot, and broken
glass exploded off the shelves, raining down on Doyle's back.

Only five of the Stone Angels were in any condition to run. Callum had
demonstrated that the door was securely locked, and Dougherty had died to
prove there was no escape through the back. Only the stairs remained, and
Bodie was panting lightly as he waited for the survivors to try the only
escape route left to them.

Wild-eyed, Rob Harris and Trent Beckwith peeled themselves off the floor
and flew headlong at the stairs. Doyle was down behind the bar,
extricating himself from the hail of broken glass with all the haste he
could manage when he must move with exaggerated caution. If he was too
fast in any direction the razor-like shards would cut his hands to
tatters, and that would be the end of him. If Harris and Beckwith had
known this, they would have run at the bar, leaned over and pelted him
with every round they had left.

So much the better that they knew nothing of Doyle's situation and instead
threw themselves in a frenzy at the stairs. Bodie had only to level the
pump twelve gauge and pull the trigger. One round, two, and the two men
were tossed backwards like rag dolls into the littered, ravaged bar room.

In those few seconds, Doyle was on his feet again, crouched under cover,
and he snapped a fresh magazine into the automatic. His voice was a
steel-hard roar as he kept his head down and addressed the survivors of
Erasmus Clay's tribe.

"Knock it off, for Christ's sake! Do you think you can get out of here
alive? There's no way out. Who's left--Tino Gabardini, is it? Kiveris?
Throw down the guns, do yourself a favour!"

"So Provo-Pig Officer Bodie can put us up against a wall tomorrow?"
Gabardini was a tall, lanky man, no more than twenty years of age, not
very good with either handguns or rifles, but he had been Clay's most
staunch supporter. Now, he was merely foolish with terror.

He spun on his haunches, levelled a sawn-off .303 rifle at the door and
tried for the lock with three shots. Bodie ducked down, took his own
revolver in both hands and put one round in Gabardini's thigh. He was
right--he was looking at a municipal firing squad in the morning.
Provincial law, city law, it was all the same. Perhaps Gabardini did not
care how he died, so long as he was not executed. Howling with pain, he
rolled over on his back and struggled to get the rifle into line on Bodie.
As usual, his aim was lousy. A second round from Bodie ended his struggle.

Silence. Someone was still alive, the panting and gasping from the other
side of the bar signalled a survivor, but by Bodie's reckoning two of the
Stones were unaccounted for. He coughed on the choking, cordite-heavy air,
cleared his throat and barked, "That's enough. Both of you, get out here
where I can see you, throw down the cannons and put your hands on your
heads. Now, I said!"

He might have known. It was Beresford and Hobson, and they seemed to have
one thought in mind. If they were going to die, they were determined to
take Bodie with them. They hurled themselves at the stairs, wasting the
precious ammunition they had left on shooting that was ridiculously wild.

But luck was on their side. Bodie had his finger on the trigger of the
twelve gauge and was pumping the barrel, priming for a shot, when he felt
the white-hot sear of a hit in his left side. Fiery as a brand, sharp as a
dagger, it cut through him, and his hands went through the motions of
making the shot without his conscious control. The twelve gauge cartridge
stopped Beresford and Hobson dead in their tracks, but Beresford was still
moving, fingers clawing for the age-old Luger which had done Bodie the
damage.

Bodie's vision was blurred, he shook his head desperately to clear the
white cotton wool that filled his skull, but before he could take care of
Beresford he heard a single bark from the room below and the last of the
Stone Angels sprawled on his face.

When Bodie's eyes cleared it was over. His side was wet, hot as a poker,
and he focused on the pain, used it to sharpen his thoughts as he hauled
himself to his feet and clambered carefully over the two bodies which
blocked the stairs. His ears were ringing after the deafening barrage, but
nothing in the bar room was moving now.

Broken glass crunched underfoot as Doyle went around collecting the fallen
weapons. Not one would be wasted. Every gun would be serviced and put to
good use. Some would be traded to other Provincial law offices in
Summertown or Yonderland. There was never enough of anything on the
frontier.

Rifles, shotguns, revolvers and automatics were arranged along the bar as
Bodie limped down the stairs. His left hand was pressed tight to his side,
his head was swimming, but he stood unaided in the middle of the bar room
and when Doyle turned toward him, he gave the gunfighter an irreverent
grin.

"That was pretty nice work, Doyle."

"Pretty nice?" Doyle surveyed the scene of devastation and shook his head.
"Haven't you ever heard of karma? There's no way I'm going to get through
the Pearly Gates, mate. Not at this rate. I didn't take up this profession
deliberately."

"Never get into heaven, after the service to Mankind you just performed?"
Bodie looked around at the dead. "They were vermin. Human cockroaches.
Sunshine, your ticket on the Heaven Express is punched."

"You think so?" Doyle reholstered the automatic and stood, hands on his
hips, in the middle of a floor littered with glass, blood and brass
cartridge cases. "You know, my grandfather used to do this for a living.
He was something similar to a city cop, but a bit more army-style. Public
security or something. I was never a hundred percent sure of the details.
When he retired he became a gunsmith--he taught my father the trade. And
then dad taught it to me." Doyle drew his shoulders back and massaged his
neck as if he was aching. "That's all I wanted to be, you know? A
gunsmith, specialising in antique weapons like Sixteenth Century pistols
or Civil War muskets. Christ, how did I blunder into this?"

"You were shoved into it, bulldozed into it by a city law office, which
wasn't vaguely interested in listening to your side of a case, and a
little shit of a boy who lusted for you and couldn't forgive you when you
turned him down," Bodie said hoarsely. "But by God, Doyle, I'm glad you
were here."

Doyle turned to face him, head cocked. His eyes flicked from Bodie's face
to the wound in his left side and back again. "Looks like you've picked up
a nick. How bad is that?"

"Flesh," Bodie said tersely.

"You're bleeding like the proverbial stuck porker."

"I said, I'm all right," Bodie wheezed. "I've had a damned sight worse
than this one. I could show you scars you wouldn't believe."

"Oh, I expect to see them. One by one, in intimate detail. Remember?"
Doyle pursed his lips. "You were good, Bodie. I mean, better than I
expected. Most Provincials are useless. Counting paperclips is about as
far as they're trained."

"I was militia trained. Two years. A nasty little war on the edge of the
city." Bodie leaned heavily against the bar.

"Damn, I should have known you were a professional," Doyle said ruefully.
"Okay, so you know your stuff. I'm glad. If you'd been an amateur I'd have
bought it once or twice myself. You saved my hide, and I owe you...but I'm
still going to collect my fee."

"And my arse?" Bodie's head was spinning. The whole world seemed to have
contracted to the pain in his side and the wetness that was gushing in
slow, steady spurts over his fingers.

"Oh, yeah, that too," Doyle's voice said from many, many miles away. "I've
been fancying you for hours, cowboy." He paused, and his frowning face
swam closer, distorted and misty. "Bodie, you look like hell. Are you
sure--"

"I said, I'm all right," Bodie gasped, trying to shout and managing a
pneumonic whisper.

And then he lost his grip on reality, the floor slid smoothly over the
ceiling and he felt the ground hit him hard in the shoulder.

******

His mouth tasted of whisky...he smelt iodine and coffee...he moved, felt
the mattress under him, the sticking plaster and dressing on his side, and
he heard somebody yell out loud. Several moments later, he realised it was
his own voice that had shouted, and he prayed to God for the mercy of
swiftly returning to sleep.

No chance of that--the wicked were never so blessed. Bodie cracked open
his eyes and looked at the room. Doyle's room, the best in The Earl of
Aberdeen. The shutters were open, the sky was blue, the air was still. The
coffee percolator bubbled away to itself, and Doyle was stripped to the
waist, whistling softly as he shaved before the mirror over the fireplace.

He was finished with the razor before Bodie came fully awake, and tipped
his mug of hot water back into the bath, from which exuded the fragrant
smell of cedar oil. Bodie took a breath, held it and shoved himself up
against the pillows. Pain stitched through him, but nothing he couldn't
tolerate, which meant the worst was behind him. Maybe the wicked were
blessed now and then after all.

His movement caught Doyle's attention, and the gunfighter turned toward
him. "Back among the living, are you, Officer? You gave us quite a scare."

"How...?" Bodie's throat felt glued shut. He coughed, winced as his side
pulled and tried again. "How long?"

"Three days." Doyle gestured at the window. "Storm's gone. Sawyer's taken
the Stones out for a decent burial. Not that they deserve it, but they're
getting the whole sermon read over them this afternoon. Doc Daley should
be here in about another half hour. He's been coming in every couple of
hours since we carried you up here."

Bodie's head was spinning. "Three *days*?" he echoed. "I don't believe it!
Three days?"

"Believe it." Doyle sat on the side of the bed and peered into Bodie's
face. "You bled about a gallon, then the wound got infected and you spent
a day and a night raving, out of your mind. The Doc's stitched that wound
twice, and cauterised it three times. You're going to have one devil of a
scar. Every time we got it closed, you'd try to throw yourself out of the
bed, and you'd bust it open again. We'd have to give you a whiff of ether
to knock you out and start again."

"We?" Bodie demanded groggily. Now he bothered to notice, he could still
smell ether.

"I wasn't going to walk out on you," Doyle said with a self-mocking grin.
"For a start, I haven't been paid yet."

"Oh. I remember," Bodie said dizzily as he leaned back into the pillows.

"And then again, I didn't want to walk out," Doyle added. "I like you,
Bodie."

"Fancy me," Bodie scoffed.

"Like you, too," Doyle added. "You're good. You're far better quality than
the typical frontier legal beagle. I mean, some of them--like Matt
Hayes--ought to be in the city, polishing chairs with their bums. But
you're good. Then again, after two years with the militia, you ought to
be."

Thoughts drifting incoherently, Bodie could only grasp half of what Doyle
was saying, but he thought he had captured the salient points. "The
Stones?"

"Done for. I took Erasmus Clay with the first shot. The rest of them would
fall to pieces after that. I know most of those bastards from years back.
They didn't have enough brains to give themselves a headache, they just
did what Clay told them, and when Clay was down they ran around like
chickens with their heads cut off." He looked Bodie up and down
critically. "Still, they gave us one hell of a run. You're feeling better,
by the looks of you."

"Yeah." Bodie pressed his hand to his side. "I owe you."

"Rubbish," Doyle said offhandedly. "I told you, I like you. Kelly offered
me another room so we could let you thresh about in this one, but I told
him I'd stay put. Not that you let me get much sleep! This bed's been hell
since I put you in it."

"You...slept here?" Bodie froze as, all at once he realised he was naked.

"Slept?" Doyle's curly head shook. "Not a chance. You didn't let me." His
eyes glittered with mischief. "You're blushing, Officer."

"Fever," Bodie said bluffly. "Help me out of bed."

"Doc Daley said you have to rest."

"Screw Doc Daley. I want to take a leak," Bodie snapped.

"I'll get you the jug. Tie a knot in it for ten seconds." Doyle crossed
the room, swiped up a large ceramic jug from behind the bath tub, and
fetched it to the bed. He pulled down the bedding and surveyed Bodie
shrewdly. "You're thinner," he judged as he put the jug between Bodie's
thighs and delicately, deliberately took hold of his cock and angled it
into the jug. "Feel free."

His bladder was bursting, which meant it probably hadn't been emptied in
days--not since the last time he drank enough to fill it. The fevers would
have dehydrated him, too, but Daley would have left the jug, knowing what
the first thing on Bodie's waking agenda must be. Good old Doc Daley. All
Bodie had to do was relax and let the relief just happen.

A full minute later, Doyle removed the jug and patted him dry with a
handkerchief. "Better?"

"Much." Bodie tried to catch the bedding and cover his nakedness, but to
his chagrin Doyle only laughed.

"Too late for modesty, my son. I've bathed you, shaved you, changed your
dressing, held you down while you tried to fling yourself all over the
room. There's not much of you I don't know."

Bodie blinked at him as he felt his face flushing. "Why?"

"I...wish I knew." Doyle emptied the jug into the tub full of waste
bathwater, where its contents would be too dilute to be aromatic. "Who
knows why chemistry happens between two people?"

"Chemistry?" Bodie echoed. His mind was coming back on line, his thoughts
were clearing.

Sitting on the bedside, Doyle stroked his chest and belly. "I've spent
three whole days looking after you, even shaving you, while Doc Daley's
told me all about you, every little thing. He never left, the first night
after the shooting. You had such a fever, we weren't sure you'd live to
see morning. He told me a lot about you."

"Loose-mouthed bastard," Bodie said, but it was sighed philosophically.
The truth was, he didn't much care that Doyle was privy to his
secrets...even closer to the truth, he was pleased that Doyle knew, and
took a personal interest in him. It was flattering. Seductive.

"You're something of a local hero," Doyle said drily.

"Then again," Bodie added, "after the shooting party, so are you. The
people of Windrage should have been all over you like a rash."

A cheeky grin replaced Doyle's musing look. "They were. Two proposals of
marriage, three proposals of sex, and the offer of a job."

"A job?" Bodie's brows arched.

"Yeah. I've been meaning to ask you about that," Doyle said carefully.
"It's a bit sticky, and it's going to take your co-operation, or nothing's
doing."

"What do I have to do with it?" Bodie struggled to sit up against the
pillows. "Christ, help me, will you? I'm as weak as water."

Doyle helped him, half-lifted him, punched the pillows into shape and
arranged the bedding around him. "Comfortable?"

"You're kidding." Bodie pressed his hand to his side. "It'll be days
before I'll be comfortable." Then he permitted himself a very small, very
tired smile. "But...better. Thanks. Now, what the hell is this job the
Windrage Citizens' Committee has offered you?"

"Well, I'd be doing pretty much what I did the other day," Doyle began a
little awkwardly. "With you. Only, instead of it being under protest, as a
hired gun coerced into the job for a day, for a fee, it'd be permanent."

"You mean--" for a second Bodie wondered if he had heard correctly. "You
mean, you'll take my job? You're crazy!"

"Take your job and be a one-man Provincial law office, single-handed, all
on my lonesome?" Doyle shook his head emphatically. "I may be certifiable,
but not I'm that loony."

"From what I saw," Bodie grumbled, "you don't need any help."

Doyle leaned over and put a hand on his forehead. "You getting another
fever? You saved my hide three times that night!"

"Did I?" Bodie was flustered.

"That's the way I remember it." Doyle tilted his head at Bodie, frowned
over him. "I like you and we work well together. Your mates here in
Windrage have been begging on bended knees for me to stay and keep on
doing what I did. With you." He paused, teeth chewing thoughtfully on his
lip. "That is, be your partner."

"You...can't," Bodie whispered.

"I know." Doyle looked away. "I'm wanted in three or four frontier towns.
Those I can duck, but the City legal office has a memory like a whole herd
of elephants. I'm still wanted there. They'd love to put me up against a
wall."

"You were innocent!"

"Tell them that," Doyle said tartly.

"I will, if you give me half a chance," Bodie rasped.

The gunfighter's frown deepened. "You believe me. Now, why would you
believe me?"

"Like you said, chemistry," Bodie growled. "Instinct. Hunch. If you were
lying to me, I'd bloody know. But you're not, and I know that too."

"Thanks." Doyle stroked his chest lightly. "Then, you'd be inclined to
give the nod to the plan cooked up by Daley and Kelly and Mayor Morley,
and the rest of them?"

"I...might. What plan?" Bodie asked shrewdly.

For a moment Doyle bit his lip and studied the ceiling. "They want to keep
me here. Public hero and all that macho bullshit. The idea is, they put up
a headstone, marking an empty hole in your graveyard, with my name on it.
Seems Ray Doyle was killed in Windrage at a shooting party where the Stone
Angels were the guests of honour. Erasmus Clay put a bullet in him. Doyle
fought valiantly, wiped the floor with the Stones, but his wound was
beyond Doc Daley's miraculous powers of healing and he succumbed a day
after the shooting. He's buried here, and there's his headstone for all
the world to see."

It was beautiful. It was perfect. Bodie felt a smile settle over his face
and nodded as he regarded Doyle with half-closed eyes. "I'll cover for
you, sign the papers, if that's what you want me to do. You'll have to
change your name, keep out of the towns where you're wanted until people
forget who you ever were. I'll circulate the news that you were
killed...nobody in Windrage is going to betray you. Not when they want
you."

"And what about you?" Doyle asked darkly.

"I'm not likely to betray you," Bodie protested.

"Do you want me?" Doyle asked in a sultry tone.

Though he was feeling like hell, Bodie registered a kick through his
nerves. "Oh, yeah," he murmured. "I want you. I've wanted you since the
first time I set eyes on you. About a lifetime ago. Trouble is, it's going
to be a couple of days before I can do anything about it."

"I'm patient," Doyle said easily. "I mean, I'm not going anywhere, am I?"

"No." Bodie smiled tiredly at him. "You're not, at that." Weariness
overtook him and he closed his eyes. "Just let me rest for a while."

Doyle got to his feet and straightened the bedclothes. "It's food you
want, and some deep breaths. I'll send down to the kitchen, get Ben to
bring you up something you could manage. Eggs and toast, hot chocolate,
bit of bacon, oats?"

"Yes," Bodie agreed as he settled.

The gunfighter chuckled. "You're mending!"

"I know," Bodie assured him as his heavy eyes followed Doyle around the
room. The pale, slender body was half clad in blue jeans. Holster and
leather jacket lay over a chair, the guns were safely packed away. Out of
sight, out of mind. With luck they would remain packed for months. As soon
as the word got around of what had happened to the Stones, nomad trash
would avoid Windrage for months or years.

Tired but already feeling better, stronger, Bodie relaxed and let himself
look forward to what was to come. Having a partner would be a relief--a
real partner, not half-arsed back-up like Bill and Vince, who had been
enthusiastic but no good. Doyle was the best, and when his skills were
coupled to Bodie's, they were both in a winning position. And then, being
in Ray Doyle's bed was going to be interesting. To say the least.

Minutes later, young Ben was knocking, and Bodie's stomach growled as he
smelt food for the first time. He had expected to have to force it down
but in fact wolfed the whole plateful to the last crumb. With the inner
man accommodated, he felt half mended.

He slept then, and it was an hour later when he woke. Doyle was gone, and
Doc Daley was at the door. He had been a GP in the days before the event,
but after Rodgers he had been compelled to learn everything from
obstetrics to surgery. He was still limited, but he did better than many
of the frontier quacks and his patients never complained.

Short, stout, bald, with an asthmatic voice, a florid complexion and large
out-thrust ears, he gave the impression of a worried mouse. Bodie liked
him, and Daley was gentle even when he might confess he was really only
feeling his way and trying to find a cure by a Holmesian 'process of
elimination.'

For Bodie, he prescribed food, fresh air, gentle exercise, and a warm
water enema 'to get his insides going again' after three days of
unconscious immobility, and the high fevers that had dehydrated him. With
a sigh, Bodie admitted, Daley was probably right, and he submitted with
good graces. Afterwards he had to confess, he felt better.

As Daley was packing his bag ready to leave Bodie asked, "Do you know
where Ray Doyle is?"

"In the lockup, signing papers," Daley told him. "They have to be signed,
and you're not up to working yet."

"Papers?" Bodie fumbled with his clothes, determined that he wasn't going
to get back into that bed.

"Burial orders," Daley amplified. I signed the death certificates,
Sawyer's got the hole prepared, the Parson is ready to say something
profound over them, and we want to get it done, then forget it ever
happened."

"Doyle can't sign the burial orders!" Bodie protested as he pulled up his
jeans and carefully zipped them. "He doesn't have the authority."

"He does if he works here." Daley didn't sound bothered. "He told me
you're going to cover for him. All he has to do is put his name on a
Windrage law contract, what difference does it make whether he signs it
today or tomorrow--and in any case, the paper hasn't been prepared.
Craig's still working on it. Where's your rush, Bodie?" Daley snapped his
bag shut. "He should have the planting orders done by now. He's signing
them 'Billy Shane.'" He chuckled, highly amused. "Quite clever, when you
think about it--providing you've got a long enough memory."

He left the room, and Bodie puzzled over the peculiar name Doyle had
chosen until his wilful memory supplied the references. Two gunfighters
popularised by commercial video in the days before Rodgers almost
obliterated the past. Bodie allowed himself a chuckle. So Doyle had a
sense of humour too, did he?

The storm was well gone. The Earl of Aberdeen was under repairs after the
shooting, and the rest of Windrage was a dirty brown colour--the colour of
the rain, which carried more and more of the dust out of the upper
atmosphere every year. People complained bitterly, but every time the rain
fell the sky was scrubbed a little cleaner. Eventually, so the scientists
and BBC broadcasters swore, the rain would be clean, the sky would be blue
and the temperature would be warm enough for a man to cast off his
sheepskins for nine months in the year.

As he stepped out of The Earl, Bodie could believe that. The sun was warm,
the air was still and calm. People were out, working assiduously to polish
Windrage with mops, buckets, brooms, rags. Even roof slates were washed. A
little civic pride went a long way. And these people had everything to be
proud of.

Windrage had a population of almost three hundred, it was the biggest,
safest, most prosperous town on the frontier, and the Citizens' Committee
were pressuring for the right to call it a city. London scoffed, but Mayor
Morley, who was also the baker, had posted the official notice that
Windrage would declare its independence if it had to. What did it ever
receive from London, except excuses for why food, medicine and
replacements for the law office were unavailable?

The law office--or lockup, which more correctly described it--stood a
block east of the pub. On the short walk, Bodie nodded hello to the
townspeople, allowed his hand to be shaken a dozen times, let the women
kiss him. A little girl gave him a live flower, which was so precious a
gift Bodie could scarcely believe it. Flowers were almost unknown, and
what rare, cherished blooms survived at all were nurtured in the house and
cared for like invalid relatives. He thought this one might be a violet,
and held it to his nose as the child scampered away.

The bell over the door rang as he stepped into the lockup. On the right
was the chained gun rack, on the left, the officer's desk, the unreliable
shortwave and a pushbike generator. In the back was a single cell, which
was never occupied from one month's end to the next. The Stone Angels'
cache of weapons were secured in the racks and the shortwave was turned
on. Surprisingly, it was actually working today. Some magician must have
found the parts.

Doyle was sitting at the desk, thumbing through a new magazine. Only two
months old, this one, and a full thirty pages of glossy black ink that
came off on the fingers, and golden, yellowed paper. He looked up as Bodie
appeared and arched his brows.

"Should you be out of bed?"

"Should you be sitting behind my desk?" Bodie demanded.

"Our desk. I'm right where the people want me," Doyle said drily. "They
put me here, and Mayor Morley stopped by about half an hour ago with my
lunch." He gestured at an empty basket on the floor at his feet. "The
burial orders are signed. If you want to represent the law, we can amble
out and listen to the Parson. Can't imagine where he's going to find a
prayer for human trash like Erasmus Clay." He tossed down the magazine and
stood, head tilted at Bodie. "I've spent the last hour thinking."

"About what?" Bodie moved to and fro, trying the wound, feeling out his
muscles. Now that he was moving again, he felt much stronger.

If it wasn't for a slight weakness left by the fevers and a hot, sore
stiffness in his side, he would have said he felt marvellous. Or was it
simply a greater pleasure than usual to just be alive?

"I've been thinking about you," Doyle said darkly. "I just realised. I
ought to give you a black eye."

Bodie recoiled. "What the hell for?"

"For pulling a gun on me and shoving me right into the line of fire,"
Doyle said flatly. "You're damned lucky. I don't know what came over me
that day. If I'd had my wits about me, you would have been out cold, with
a black eye that'd win prizes."

"You can always make up for lost time," Bodie said brashly. "You reckon I
owe you?" He thrust out his chin. "Go on, then. Don't let debts dangle.
Get it done."

To his astonishment, Doyle's right fist drew back to his shoulder and
lashed out, and too late Bodie realised the blow would only feather past
his ear, almost like a caress across the side of his face.

He moved too fast, the residual dizziness cost him his balance, his side
gave a pang and he stumbled back against the wall. He slid to the floor,
winded and dazed, and was still blinking to clear his vision when Doyle
knelt astride his legs and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket,
fingers digging vengefully into the leather.

"You idiot," Doyle accused with some mix of roughness and tenderness. "You
really think I'd hit you, after I've just spent the last three days
busting my buns to look after you?" He gave Bodie a shake, and then his
hands relaxed, moved up and cradled Bodie's face. "You bloody know what I
want from you. I'll take it as soon as you're well enough, but for now
I'll have a little down payment. You're mended enough for this...at least,
that mouth of yours is working well enough for you to shoot it off again."

He leaned forward, and Bodie licked his lips as Doyle's mouth descended on
his own in a kiss that could have been hard, remorseless, relentless, but
instead astonished Bodie, left him breathless with its gentleness. He
rested back against the wall, totally passive, a little dizzy, hardly
conscious of anything but the other man as he let Doyle enter his mouth
with a questing tongue. He sucked it readily, invited its exploration.
Gently but just as ruthlessly, Doyle took everything Bodie would give and
at last, when he was released his lips felt bruised.

The gunfighter's eyes were dark and smouldering. He also was breathless.
"You're one of a kind, Bodie."

"I could say the same," Bodie panted. His hands spanned Doyle's narrow
waist, in the warmth of his jacket. "You can have me tonight."

"You're not well enough," Doyle said sharply.

"The hell I'm not," Bodie scoffed. "I had a worse wound than this when I
was nineteen years old, and my left shoulder was dislocated. They put me
back on the bike in two days and told me to go and earn my oats."

"Christ, that was vicious." Doyle rocked back on his heels, sat down on
the floor between Bodie's legs and cupped his hands at the nape of his new
partner's neck. "One day you're going to tell me about that. Everything."

"Same as you're going to tell me every single thing about yourself," Bodie
said quietly. With one fingertip he traced Doyle's luscious mouth. "We're
survivors, Doyle--"

"Call me Ray."

"Shouldn't," Bodie said wryly. "I ought to get used to calling you Billy.
Billy Shane. Funnily enough, I don't mind the name. It pulls all the right
levers."

"I liked it." Doyle nodded at the stack of burial orders. "That's what I
signed. Your teacher, what's his name?"

"Craig Ashmole. His 'mates' call him Asshole."

"That's him. He's making up my law office contract." Doyle leaned in and
kissed Bodie's forehead, then hoisted himself to his feet and gave Bodie
his hands to help him up too. "Head office down south is going to want a
potted history of my life, but we can write them one. Will they send
anyone to investigate me?"

"Not a chance." Bodie found his feet and grunted as his head spun a
little. Hour by hour, he was steadier, and the wound was no worse now than
a hundred others he had suffered. "The only communication we ever score
from them is a dispatch to tell us why we can't have a shipment of
ammunition or baked beans or a tank of liquid octane to make our home-made
chicken-poop fuel burn with some guts."

"Then I'm safe," Doyle whispered.

"Until or unless someone arrives in Windrage who knows your face," Bodie
added. "And we'll cross that particular bridge when we come to it. Like I
said, we're survivors. The odds were dead against us both, and yet here we
are."

He had taken a breath to continue but paused as a shadow fell from the
window and the chimes over the door rang. Doc Daley's face appeared,
wearing its customary flush-cheeked, cheerful grin.

"I thought you'd be here, Bodie! The Parson's on his way, if you want to
watch 'em put the Stones in the ground. One of you two heroes ought to be
there, show the official face."

"We'll both be there, Ron," Doyle assured him.

The doctor looked Bodie up and down but spoke to Doyle. "The boy's on his
feet, I see. Any problems, Ray?"

"Not so far," Doyle said with a dark, smouldering intent that could mean
nothing to Daley but made Bodie's temperature rise several degrees.

"Well, if there's any trouble send for me," Daley said sternly as he
ducked back out and clattered the door shut.

From the comer of the desk, Doyle plucked up the big automatic Baretta
that had scythed through the Stone Angels with such deceptive ease, and
slid it into the holster he wore by habit. He opened the door and stood
aside to usher Bodie through it before him.

"Shall we?"

Windrage's 'marble orchard' was on the north side of the hill, with the
hill itself separating it from the town. The ground was still as hard as
iron, even in summer. A few hours of warmth every afternoon was not enough
to thaw the permafrost down below ten or twelve inches, and every time a
north-east storm blew up the surface refroze.

Sawyer was a big man who had been a construction worker before Rodgers
arrived. He had been using a jackharnmer more than half his life, and
after the upheaval of the event he had excavated his tools from the rubble
and found them more or less intact. He had an Ingersol-Rand on the back of
a cart, and two horses between the shafts. The compressor burned
chick-shit/octane 'top fuel,' while the horses grazed a hundred yards
away, out of both its din and the noise of the pneumatic drill.

A single hole had been dug out, measuring eight feet by fifty, five feet
deep, and the bodies of the Stone Angels were already in it, each one
wrapped in a couple of industrial plastic garbage bags, sealed down with
electrician's insulating tape.

At the head of the grave stood the Parson. Harry Staples was not really a
priest, but he was the only person in Windrage who attached any importance
to the rites and rigmarole of baptism, marriage and burial, and he had
elected himself Parson. He had a Bible, but he never read from it. Most of
his sermons and lessons were based on private, personal revelation. He
said, every holy book in the world was obsolete after Rodgers, because
they predicted Armageddon, told man how to live before the great
judgement, promised a swift passage to Heaven or Paradise...and didn't say
one word about how the corporeal survivors of the Cataclysm were supposed
to make their peace with the Almighty. Philosophers from Summertown to
Yonderland had postulated that all the worthy human beings had been
gathered up in the great hand of God and spirited away to Heaven, while
the survivors of Rodgers were the Damned, and the world as it had become
was in fact Hell, or Purgatory.

"We are gathered here today," Staples was saying as Bodie and Doyle ambled
up behind the crowd, "to consign the souls of these poor savages to
Judgement. In life, they were the legion of the damned. In death, let them
face the Creator and pay the price for their evil. The fires of hell await
them, but out of the agony of atonement will be born bliss everlasting."

The speech went on, but Bodie stopped listening. From the top of the hill
they had a view of Windrage in one direction and the rainbrown landscape
towards Yonderland in the other. Two major roads cut north and south, east
and west, and these days most of the smaller, side-roads were open again.
One had been ripped up by the earthquakes at the time of the event, and
the repairs were never good enough for it to be used by heavy traffic, but
the main north-south corridor was quite acceptable.

As Bodie watched, he saw a distant column of wagons and buses heading
towards Kate's Farm, fifty miles further on. Kate did a lot of
horse-trading. The medicinal drugs produced at the Farm were the most pure
in the county, and coveted in the city. When the Farm had a surplus, they
traded drugs, wool, booze, sometimes fresh food, for spark plugs,
ammunition, octane, battery acid, the things that could not be grown or
made, but which were mined out of the city ruins by professional
scavengers, qualified speleologists employed by the Citizens' Council.

At last Staples wound down into silence and threw a spade's worth of mud
into the hole. Several men clustered about Sawyer, ready to fill it in.
Bodie turned his shoulder on their industries and would have urged Doyle
back to the town, but a man called them back.

"Mr Doyle? That is, Mr Shane?"

Chuckling, Doyle turned toward the voice. "Yeah, Leo?"

It was Leo Tomlin, who fancied himself as an artist and consequently got
the work of preparing anything from headstones to the facia of the town
hall. He was a jovial little soul, sixty or sixty-five, hard-bitten,
frayed about the edges but still working. He was in denim overalls,
sheepskin boots and rabbitskin gloves. He bred table rabbits in his
workshop and art gallery, where it was bright and warm. The bunnies ate
the discarded greenery of the cauliflowers, cabbages, carrots and turnips
grown in the Windrage Municipal Glasshouses, and Tomlin traded them for
chickens, eggs, fuel, Ma's best quality joyjuice, whatever he wanted or
needed.

"Got something to show you, Mr...Shane," he chortled. "Finished it in a
hell of a rush, but it's good quality. Step this way, and see what I
knocked up for you."

He led the way past the Stone Angels' last resting place, and immediately
Bodie picked out the new headstone. Sawyer had been sensible enough to
turn over the earth as if it were a real grave, and Tomlin's work was
hastily cemented in place at the head of the empty hole. He had used a
piece of golden sandstone, probably a leftover from the facia of the town
hall, and on it was chiselled, in something more or less like Times Roman,
'Here lies Ray Doyle, gunfighter and hero, came to defend Windrage against
the tribes, died in the service of his fellow man. He will be remembered.'

"That's just the ticket," Doyle approved, and shook Tomlin's hand in
thanks.

An elderly woman had joined them as they admired the stone--Mrs
Rutherford, a widow whose fingers never ceased to knit. She made the socks
and jerseys worn by almost everyone in the town, and as Bodie had fully
expected, she was holding out a pair of beautifully done grey wool socks,
offering them to Doyle. "You'll be staying then, will you, Mr Doy--Shane?"
she asked hopefully.

"I guess I will." Doyle took the socks and touched her shoulder. "Thanks
for these, love."

"No need to thank me," Mrs Rutherford said emphatically. "The work you
did...well, you and Bodie, but from the way Josh Kelly told it...well,
anyway, after what you did for us, we're proud to have you here. And we're
disgusted by the way you were treated in the city." She spat into the
grass. "City people never did have the sense they were born with. You're
better off out of there."

"Can't disagree with that," Doyle said wryly as he examined the socks and
Mrs Rutherford prattled on.

Weariness was overtaking Bodie. Preoccupied with his own woes, he was no
longer listening and gave a start of surprise when Doyle's fingers sank
into his shoulder and Doyle spoke to him, probably for the third or fourth
time.

"Bodie! You've gone grey, what's the matter?"

"Tired," Bodie admitted. "Just tired. Let me go home and lie down."

"In my room at The Earl," Doyle insisted. "I've seen the rat hole you call
a bedroom behind the lockup. I wouldn't garage my bike in that. And that's
another thing, partner, if we're going to live and work together--"

"Sleep together?" Bodie added hopefully.

Doyle gave him a sidelong look as they began to make their way slowly back
over the hill.

"Well," Bodie said reasonably, "we've been sleeping together for days, but
I've been too comatose to know it."

"True," Doyle admitted. "All right, if we're going to pitch in together,
we're going to have a proper place. I refuse to sleep in a room the size
of a foot locker that smells of old boots and wet newspaper!"

"Deal," Bodie said tiredly. "Just get me back to a mattress, any mattress,
and let me lie down for an hour."

******

It was mid-afternoon when he put his spine on the bed. He only intended to
close his eyes and rest, not to sleep, but he went out as if he had been
drugged, and when he woke he knew before he was fully conscious, hours had
gone by. He could hear the hiss of lamps, the shutters were closed and a
fire was crackling in the hearth. Coffee was stewing, and soft metallic
noises came from the table.

He prised open his eyes and saw Doyle working on a folded cloth, with
tools and oil servicing his guns. Experimentally, Bodie yawned, and
nothing hurt. He swung his legs off the bed and stretched his right arm
over his head. He did not stretch the left as far, but the wound was no
more than a nuisance which had already started to itch.

"You look better," Doyle observed. "You've been asleep for four hours. I
didn't disturb you. You needed it."

"I must have." Bodie rubbed his face and discovered himself
beard-stubbled.

The kettle was bubbling on the side of the hearth, and while Doyle
finished his work with the tools of his trade, Bodie poured a mug of hot
water and helped himself to Doyle's straight razor, soap and towel.

The guns were put away and Doyle had poured coffee when Bodie patted his
face dry. "I sent for a meal half an hour ago," Doyle told him. "It's
rabbit pie tonight. Chicken last night. You people do all right here. I
got the guided tour of your glasshouses while you slept this afternoon."

"They're not bad people," Bodie said with a vague gesture at the town.
"They're just...."

"Ordinary people," Doyle finished. "Scared rigid when trash like the
Stones rolls in here. Oh, Mayor Morley took charge of their bikes.
Seventeen reasonable quality machines. Your mechanic--Bradley, is it?"
Bodie nodded. "He's going to break down a dozen of them for salvageable
spare parts, and the other five are going to be serviced and spray-painted
and go on the market. Seems we need a reliable shortwave, a set of tyres
for the municipal 4x4 and a decent oxy-welding set." His eyes sparkled.

"Something amuses you?" Bodie wondered, but Doyle's humour was infectious.

"This place." Doyle wiped the smile off his face. "I was just remembering
what the old Rutherford woman said. I'm better off out of the city. "

"Amen to that," Bodie breathed.

Before Doyle could answer, a knock announced their dinner, and Ben tried
the doorknob. Finding it unlocked, he looked into the room, and Doyle
swept the table clear. The smell of rabbit pie only ten minutes out of the
oven, with fresh red cabbage and a jug of beer, tantalised the senses.

Bodie had not realised how hungry he was, but he fell on the food and ate
ravenously. Doyle seemed just as hungry, and the pie dish was down to
bones and crumbs before they spoke again. Then, Doyle's whole manner had
changed and Bodie's hair almost stood on end.

He was the hunter again, and Bodie was the hunted. The prey. Without a
word, Doyle snuffed out the lamps to save the oil, leaving just one
burning. The generator was still not working reliably enough to dispense
with the lamps, but Bradley swore he would have it back 'in the pink' by
the end of the week.

Deliberately, Doyle straightened the bed. Bodie had only got out of it an
hour before and it was still warm. He fluffed the pillows and searched his
bag for a tube of lubricant and a box of condoms. These, he placed on the
pillow, and turned back to Bodie with an expectant face. Only the swift
rise and fall of his chest betrayed his excitement.

The dimness covered Bodie's flush. Doyle was waiting, just watching, not
making a move to rush, or force, or to help. Slowly, with a little
lingering clumsiness, Bodie took off his shirt, hung it over the back of a
chair, and unbuckled his jeans. The heat turned up as he dropped them.
Underneath, he was wearing plain white jockey shorts, and the front of
them was stretched by an enormous erection which had been growing since
Doyle cast himself in the role of the hunter.

He palmed himself through the briefs and looked at Doyle as he felt a rush
of absurd awkwardness. Doyle had slept in that bed with him, buff-naked,
for days. He knew what he was getting. Resolutely, he whipped the shorts
out of the way, threw them at Doyle, who fielded them deftly, and covered
his momentary awkwardness with a brash display. Hands on hips, he aimed
the weapon at Doyle.

"You're supposed to say 'stand and deliver,'" Doyle quipped. "Although, in
your case you're going to be on your knees when you deliver the goods."

A shiver shook Bodie. His skin prickled with gooseflesh and he passed the
flat palm of his hand over his belly. "If that's how you want me."

"Sunshine," Doyle said, a purr in his throat, "I want you every way you
can imagine, and some maybe you can't."

"Don't be so sure of that." Bodie sat on the bedside, reclined against the
pillows and spread himself provocatively. "You know a cityside
bordello--called Samarkand?"

"I know it." Doyle's brows arched. "It was your favourite playpen, on
leave from the militia?"

Bodie's head shook minutely. "It was a place for escaping from. I used to
work there when I was a kid."

That surprised Doyle, and he whistled through his teeth as he undressed
and brought a fresh towel from his pack.

He was vastly aroused, his cock a mouthwatering lance of rose-gold, musky
seduction. Bodie could hardly get his eyes off it as Doyle returned to the
bed. His fingers itched to stroke it, his lips longed to suckle, his arse
ached to have it. All in good time, he told himself. Patience. This time
around, the show was Doyle's. He had earned the right to call the shots
here. Bodie had called some much more dangerous shots three days before.

"You're full of surprises, Bodie." Doyle sat on the side of the bed and
sketched a one-fingered caress up one side of Bodie's bobbing cock, around
the flared, helmeted head and down the other side. "How long has it been?"

"Since I was done?" Bodie sniffed disdainfully. "Stop worrying, get on and
do it."

"Okay, you're on." Doyle smiled, and climbed over to kneel astride the
larger, more heavily muscled body.

He kissed Bodie's mouth, his throat and both his nipples. There, he
stopped and bit, gently at first and then more sharply, making Bodie surge
up as an arrow of pure lust raced straight for his balls. Doyle chuckled
and moved down. His tongue traced a wide circle about Bodie's navel before
he moved down again, and began to rub the super-sensitive underside of
Bodie's cock through the dark, silky pelt of his chest hair. Bodie groaned
helplessly and clutched his side as he began to thresh.

His balls were first tickled, then kissed, then squeezed lightly and
tugged down. Two scissorlike fingers separated them, pushed them up on
either side of his cock, rolled them to and fro in the velvet-soft skin,
and he was out of his mind. Where the hell had Doyle learned all this? Was
this what he liked to do to himself? Who had taught him?

Flying, Bodie was hardly likely to protest when he was urged over onto his
belly. Doyle's hands helped him, and he sprawled crossways over the bed.
The pillow tucked under his shoulders and he expected to be lubed and
filled at once, but to his surprise and delight, Doyle walked around the
bed and stood before him.

The gunfighter's beautiful cock caressed around Bodie's whole face, traced
the lines of his brow and nose and chin, and then pushed at his mouth. As
his lips parted he was invaded, and a slow, steady rhythm began. Doyle
smelt pungent, musky, male, and tasted clean and salty. He was hard as a
rock, hot as a poker, the fine skin stretched over such rigidness that
Bodie could have believed it was moist velvet over a bar of forge-hot
iron. The clean young-male scent, Bodie had always loved, and he took
Doyle by the hips to hold him there, control his thrusting rhythm, in case
he try to finish this too soon. But Doyle had no intentions of that, and
minutes later Bodie was still eating him alive.

At last Doyle withdrew his cock and moved in a little to place his balls
against Bodie's mouth. They were tight, high, swollen with excitement, and
Bodie mouthed them eagerly. He slipped first one and then the other into
his mouth, careful of his teeth, and used his lips to tug on them, his
tongue to press. The dual sensations plus the heat of his mouth drove
Doyle wild, and Bodie felt a thrill of satisfaction as Doyle forcibly
extricated himself from Bodie's hands and mouth.

"God, you're good, Bodie," he gasped. "You learn that lot in Samarkand?"

"Uh huh," Bodie said smugly. He spread his legs. "I'm ready for you."

"You're not, but you soon will be," Doyle said drily as he began to get
his breath back. He plucked up the box of condoms, tore one out of its
foil packet and set it into Bodie's hand. "Put that on me." He stood
close, with his cock bobbing inches from Bodie's face.

The white latex sheath rolled down over him, greasy with pre-lubrication,
and Bodie shivered as he ran his fingers over it. It was ridged, with
rings and little bumps and nodules, and tiny, malleable, soft/firm spines.
An expensive condom, packed more than fifteen years ago, under the brand
name of 'Rough Rider.'

When that went into him, Bodie was going to feel every little nudge and
tickle, and his heart beat faster. He tried the ticklers with his tongue,
spat out the latex taste of the condom and spread his legs as his arse
began to ache, begging mutely to be filled. How long it was since he had
been so keen? He could not even remember the last time.

Doyle walked around the bed, and with slitted eyes Bodie watched the
heavy, wanton sway of his cock in that white latex covering. He could
almost count the ridges and nodules, and the sight of them made him itch
inside. Doyle moved behind him, and he closed his eyes as he heard the cap
being removed from the lubricant. His cheeks were kneaded and spread; the
towel was tucked under him, between his cock and the quilt. He hissed at
the cold touch as a generous amount of the lubricant was spread around
outside, and then the applicator nozzle was intruded gently into his anus
and Doyle squeezed.

Full of the cool, smooth juice, Bodie tensed. The bed dipped, his hips
were taken between Doyle's hands, his buttocks were spread wider and
flattened under Doyle's palms, and then he felt the first pressure, the
first painful shove, a gut-wrenching burn of stretching muscles and skin.

Sweat broke from his pores and he bit into his arm to keep silent. This
was unavoidable, there was no other way--no 'kind' way. To go more slowly
only dragged the agony out. It was like pulling a tooth: the fastest way
it was yanked, the kinder it was. Agony dulled into
discomfort...discomfort bloomed into pleasure. The pain was still there,
hiding behind the pleasure, but he didn't care to notice it.

Doyle was thrusting strongly, deeply, and the condom worked its own magic.
Bodie humped and panted, cursed and huffed into the pillow. He pressed
down into the towel, rubbed and rolled and pushed until there was no
turning back. Point of no return. Glory. Angels' wings and heavenly
violins. Fireworks...exhaustion.

He came before Doyle, and yelped sharply as Doyle continued to move in the
too-sensitive moments right after climax. Then Doyle paused, hands
clenched into his shoulders to hold himself until Bodie had relaxed again.
In a few moments, Bodie grunted his permission to proceed, and Doyle began
again with renewed, desperate vigour.

Bodie had only to brace himself, open himself, give of himself, and then
absorb Doyle's pagan howl of anguish like an accolade. Sore, aching a
little, he smiled into the pillow as the gunfighter collapsed on his back,
spent and trembling. He turned his head but could not see Doyle's face,
and for some time the other man was unable to move, save to gasp for
breath.

At last Doyle took his weight on knees and hands and slowly, carefully
withdrew. Bodie ouched and sighed. He propped his eyes open with an
enormous effort to watch as Doyle sat in the middle of the bed and, clumsy
with fatigue, peeled off the priceless condom.

"You," he said breathlessly, "are incredible."

"Thanks," Bodie purred, deep and bass. "So are you. I haven't been fucked
like that in years."

"Not since Samarkand?" Doyle guessed as he dropped the spent, messy condom
onto the floor and went down in a winded, sweated heap on the pillows.

"Not since I got out of the militia," Bodie corrected. "There was a
sergeant, used to do me every night after lights out. Not that I minded, I
suppose. Big Bob Lynch never hurt me any more than he had to, and we got
friendly after a while. You wouldn't call it rape, though I could have
turned it into rape by being dumb enough to refuse."

"But you were as smart then as you are now," Doyle said astutely. "You're
no man's fool, Bodie."

"There are no fools left in the world," Bodie said in a weary,
philosophical tone as he carefully worked himself around on the bed until
he was aligned with Doyle. He put his head on the pillow beside Doyle's
tousled one and laid the flat of his hand on Doyle's still heaving chest.
"All the idiots died in the early years," he said thoughtfully. "It took
guts and brains to survive. Natural selection."

"Natural?" Doyle shoved the towel, lube and condoms onto the floor and
pulled the quilt up to cover them, keep in the shared body heat. "You call
the anarchy that happened after the impact event natural--?"

"Totally," Bodie affirmed. "I heard it broadcast by the BBC, a dozen
times. A comet is a gigantic chunk of ice, mostly hydrogen, some methane,
that sort of stuff. It goes around the sun in a long, elliptical-shaped
orbit and if anything--like a planet--gets in its way, too bad. We had
near misses dozens of times. Hundreds of times. Then one day, back around
the turn of the century an astronomer called Rodgers in some place called
Arizona...I think that was a country near America...saw this chunk of ice
coming for us, off an orbit so long, the last time it had crossed the
earth's orbit, the telescope hadn't even been invented.

"Now, if humans had stopped fighting sixty different wars at once, every
decade of the Twentieth Century, we might have had the time or resources
to invent a spacecraft good enough to go out there and blow this chunk of
ice to hell. But our ancestors, in their infinite wisdom, only ever
invented bigger and better ways to kill more humans. So, when Comet
Rodgers came to earth like the wrath of God, there was nothing to stop it.
Work of nature, Ray. Classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time."

Doyle propped himself on one elbow and looked into Bodie's face. "You're
hiding quite a brain behind that pout of yours."

"Thanks." Bodie smiled smugly. "Not really, though. I just heard it on the
radio the other day."

"You've got a proper radio that works?" Doyle was surprised. "That is, not
like that piece of garbage at the office?"

"It worked up till a few days ago." Bodie stretched carefully. "If we're
going to trade half the Stones' herd of bikes, I'd be surprised if we
couldn't come up with a good, working shortwave, and maybe even bribe a
radio technician to live here." He rubbed his back on the mattress and
clenched his toes. "Christ, I feel good. I feel...fucked, is how I feel."

"Surprising," Doyle said drily. "Hurting?"

"Nah." Bodie leaned over and kissed his neck. "Just a bit sore. The great
thing about using a condom is, you don't have to rush away to use the can.
Fantastic condom, that one. I felt every little tickle. It was bloody
marvellous. You always use a rubber?"

"It's cleaner that way," Doyle said delicately. "The day you give some
sober thought to where you're shoving your dick, you lay in a good
supply."

"Right." Bodie traced a spiral pattern around Doyle's right nipple. "You
like it that way?"

"You mean, do I like to be bum-fucked?" Doyle wriggled down in the bed and
closed his eyes. "Sometimes. So long as it's the right person."

"Meaning, me?"

"Oh, yeah." Doyle turned over and laid one arm across Bodie's chest. "In
my game, I have to be careful. There's two kinds of challenges I can meet.
I can face a gun in the street, and I'll probably mop the floor with the
punk who pulled it on me. But the gun you turn your back on in bed is the
one that might just take you out."

"Profound." Bodie took the opportunity to caress his companion's soft,
tousled hair. "You can trust me, Ray."

"I know I can." Doyle smiled faintly, tiredly at him. "That's what I'm
doing in this bed with you."

Bodie mirrored his smile. "Partners?"

"In every way." Doyle punched his pillow to comfort.

"Welcome to Windrage, Provincial Officer Shane," Bodie said ruefully, and
turned out the lamp. In the warm lick of the firelight, he turned his face
into the strong curve of Doyle's shoulder and closed his eyes.

-- THE END --

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