"Richard Harding - Outrider 02 - Fire And Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harding Richard)

were fixed on Bonner. "Do me a favor," he said, "try and get your old stuff
back from Leatherman." "Will do," said Bonner. "And be careful about it,"
added the Armorer, knowing that would be impossible for the
Outrider. Chapter 5 The bus station building housed Lucky, and Lucky was
the best mechanic in Chicago. He was a stunted, pale little man with a
shattered kneecap that made his leg stick out to one side. He walked
awkwardly, dragging his leg behind him. Between his extremely, pale coloring
and his odd crabbed walk, he looked like some sort of peculiar creature that
had grown used to being underground. The duty of looking after Bonner's car
fell to Lucky. "No finer machine on the continent," he would say proudly. The
car was an exquisite creation, all of it the work of Lucky. Lucky was to
engines what the Armorer was to weapons. The car stood in an old bus bay, and
it looked tense, anxious, as it seemed to set its fat, smooth tires down onto
the broken, prebomb roads. The vehicle was mostly engine. The area from front
axle to steering column was taken up by a long, rectangular straight-eight
Lycoming marine engine. Lucky had salvaged it from the rotting hulk of a
speedboat he found on the bed of what had once been Lake Michigan. The big
block of engine looked like a coffin nestled in a rat's nest of electrical
cable and cooling hoses. The big engine was mounted on an all-pipe chassis
that Lucky had assembled on his own, double welding the heavy metal together
to make sure it would support the combined weight of the heavy engine and the
mammoth fuel tank. Gas was hard to find everywhere but it was harder to find
on the road than anywhere else, and every rider tried to carry enough to see
him through his journey. But it was always a trade-off: the more gas you
carried the more weight you carried, and the more weight you carried the more
gas you had to bum to carry it. Lucky had done some rudimentary calculations
and decided that Bonner could carry fifty gals no problem. A graceful rollbar
swept over the driver's head, a hard metal arch that would protect Bonner if
he should ever have the ill luck to actually tip his vehicle over. Mounted on
that bar was a.50-caliber machine gun, a piece of heavy artillery that Bonner
could use like a pro and which had gotten him out of a jam more than
once. "She's the fastest, she's the meanest, she's the toughest, the best
little machine riding the roads today," boasted Lucky, "and you still treat
her like shit," he finished disgustedly. "The lady and I have an
understanding," said Bonner with a smile. Lucky was always giving Bonner hell
about his mistreatment of the iron warhorse. "Yeah? What understanding?" Like
the Armorer, Lucky was sure that no one could ever understand his art the way
he did. The cars were always his babies and mistreating them was a sin of the
gravest kind. Of course, again like the Armorer, there was probably no sin
that Lucky couldn't forgive Bonner, the man he always called the boss. "She
takes me where I want to go," said Bonner, "and I promise that I'll return her
to her daddy Lucky." "Good thing too," said Lucky. Bonner slid behind the
wheel and hit the starter. The big engine boomed into life. Lucky smiled
happily. The blast of that powerful engine, the throaty roar from its twin
exhaust pipes, was the sweetest music in the world to him. He could have
listened to it foi hours without tiring of it. Bonner slid the car into gear,
but before he could take off. Lucky shouted a question: "Where you
going?" "Slavestates." "Again? What for?" Bonner thought about that for a
second. He was going, not for gas, not for poor dead Cooker's promised land,
he was going to find Leather and his evil forces and this time... this time...