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

yanked on the whistle. The long, ghostly howl echoed out over the railyards
and beyond, into the sleeping broken city. Chapter 6 That low blast from
Seth's train whistle rolled across the city like smoke gently bouncing off the
broken walls of a thousand dead buildings and awoke two people. The girl
opened her eyes in the empty apartment and looked at the bright sunlight
passing through the cracked windows of the skylight. Tears flowed from her
eyes onto the pillow and she felt the place in the bed where her man's body
had lain an hour before. Gone again, she thought. Would this be the time he
wouldn't return. She drove the thought from her mind and cheered herself up
with a single thought: Bonner was the Outrider, and the Outrider didn't
fall. ... Savage snorted in his sleep and the snort awakened him. A second
blast from the whistle pulled him to full awareness. "Whassat?" he said
aloud. He swung out of bed and wandered into another room. Spread out on the
floor, in a tangle of blankets and sheets, lay Savage's lieutenant, one of the
big raider's best riders. Savage led the largest group of raiders in Chicago.
He had under his command a force of about forty men with guns and bikes, and
Savage made sure that his crew lived up to their leader's name. Most men felt
that Savage's raiders were no better than Stormers. Savage kicked the man
awake. "What?" said the man. "Franklin," ordered Savage, "get
up." "Wha'for?" "Cause I want to talk to you." "Jeez, boss." Savage kicked
him again. "Get up when I tell you to." Franklin hiked himself up on his thin
elbows. "Okay, okay, I'm all ears." He could feel the unwelcome morning
aftereffects of a night at Dorca's swirling around his brain. "I heard that
crazy nigger's whistle blow." Franklin looked at Savage as if he was crazy.
"You woke me up to tell me that?" Was Savage finally losing it, he
wondered. "Don't sass me, Franklin," said Savage threateningly. Franklin
thought a moment and figured that the boss was probably giving him some pretty
good advice. "Sorry, boss." "That's better. So where's he going?" "Seth?
He's inbound for who knows where, him, Starling, Bonner." "I thought Bonner
didn't ride this time of year." "So this time he is," said Franklin
patiently. "You know what Bonner's like. He makes his own rules." "He's
riding with Starling, right?" "Yeah." "And he has Seth tailing him in that
thing of his?" "Yeah." "Then it's big." Bonner never did anything small,
thought Franklin. He hoped that the boss wasn't thinking of going after them.
Franklin just wasn't in the mood for a firefight in the cold-though a
firefight with Bonner would certainly warm things up in a hurry. Franklin was
settled in for the winter, Franklin thumped the pillow, as if he was about to
lie down again. "How can you be sure its so big?" Savage kicked the pillow
out from beneath his subordinate's head. "Because I'm smart. Round up the
riders." "Awwww, boss..." It took awhile to round up Savage's band from the
lodgings and brothels in the ruined city; most were, like Franklin, nursing
heavyweight hangovers, and the loud rumbling of the two-score bikes and cars
hurt a lot of heads. Street workers watched the force assemble from the
shadows and wondered where the hell Savage and his crew were headed. The
raiding season was just about over. Anything of value in the feudal states had
already been shipped to the various capitals. Like a single, many-headed
steel beast the raiders hit the road, thundering, down on the lake bed and
heading east. Savage was on the lead bike. He figured that Bonner and
Starling had a few hours on them. No problem, he thought. He just wanted to
get close enough to follow them a ways, to find out what was so big that it