"Richard Harding - Outrider 03 - Blood Highway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harding Richard)

Richard Harding - Outrider 3, Blood Highway A GRIM FEAST The town had been
torched. Systematically each of the wooden houses had been burnt to the
ground. There were few signposts that pointed to the basic definition of the
old houses-an arch here, a charred piece of porch there-but mostly the houses
were piles of cold, dead, black cinder. From the corner of his eye Bonner saw
movement. The automatic whipped from his pocket and blasted. A vulture
exploded in a puff of feathers and blood. The body with a stomach full of
rotting flesh thudded to the ground. The sound of the shot raised the clouds
of birds that had resettled on the lofty banquet. He raised his gun and was
about to blast the birds, fat and lethargic as they were with their picnic.
But he stopped himself. The bullets were for men. A single thought pulsed
through the Outrider's brain: Who? Who did this? THE OUTRIDER; Volume
Three: Blood Highway by Richard Harding Copyright 1984 by Robert
Tine Chapter 1 The Hotstates. The Hots, the smugglers and the raiders up in
Chicago, the last open city. called them. The Hotstates were a few thousand
square miles of the old United States, the lower half of the new continent.
There were vast deserts in the west, swamps in the south, and mountains in the
east. North of the mountains there was a wide swath of dead ground that marked
the border with Leather's slavestates. The Hots were cut in half by a great,
wide river that flooded and dried up and overran its banks as it pleased. It
had some long screwy Indian name that no one could even remember. The
Hotstates were the personal property of Berger. Not a nice guy, they all said
around the bar at Dorca's when his name came up. But nice? Who was nice
anymore? If you chose nice as your watchword in life you didn't live long. Or
you became some other man's slave. Just as Leather had the Stormers, Berger
had the Devils. Not nice guys either, they said at Dorca's. They talked a lot
at Dorca's. Long, meaningless wrangles about who was tougher, Stormers or
Devils or Snowmen from the old north west. They talked about the different
raiding gangs, who was chickenshit, who was a hard bring down, which ones
would stab you in the back for a set of worn old tires. Sometimes, when they
knew for sure that he was on the road, they might mention Bonner. Not a nice
guy either, someone would whisper. But fair, someone would put in with a look
over his shoulder to make sure that Bonner's good buddy Dorca had heard that
no one was speaking ill of Bonner, the Outrider. Over the years Bonner had
acquired an almost mythical significance in the minds of the Chicago crew of
riders, raiders, crazies, and freaks, the bloodthirsty businessmen who made a
living stealing from their better organized neighbors. It looked to them as if
Bonner could walk into fire and not smell of smoke when he came out. He
tangled with The Leatherman himself and hurt him bad. He had clobbered Devils
and Snowmen and the few dumb raiders that thought they had what it took to
take Bonner down. But only the dumb and the desperate tried that. You messed
with Bonner and you died. It was a simple rule of life, like drinking from a
pool of rad-water meant death. Pull a trigger at The Outrider and you had only
seconds-if you were unlucky a minute or two-of life left to you. They said
that even the rats stayed out of his tumbledown house a few blocks from
Dorca's. "The man can't be brung down," someone would say, "it just ain't a
possibility...." Sometimes Dorca would hear the whispered conversation and he
would slam the bar, his bar, with the hefty leg of a pool table that he used
to keep order in his joint. Then he would announce why Bonner couldn't be
sliced. "He's smart!" the tank-sized tavernkeeper would bellow. "He's smart!