AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

Hard to believe, but once the burn victims were gone and those who were going to go crazy had lost their minds, the ones that remained, the hardiest survivors, began to rebuild. Slowly, life had been reborn. Men stopped living in their caves and burrows and they began to adapt, to fit their lives to their new world. They built shelters, they planted what crops they could, but they still lacked the courage to walk over the hill, to trail down the road to see what lay just over the horizon.

Bonner had been the first. The first to get an old Dodge motor running well enough to venture out into the world.

He had traveled, cautiously at first, through the continent finding groups of survivors—not many but enough to convince him that his work was worth doing. Slowly he began linking the bands together, building a network, trading information for supplies. Others had joined him. Leather came riding out of the dawn one morning and said he had been all the way to New York.

Gradually people had come to trust the Outriders, they were the closest thing to heroes the new world had. Bonner began to coax the survivors out of their little enclaves— they were like nervous puppies—trying to get the bands to join together, to unite, to rebuild. It wouldn't be the old America, but it would have been a land that might have been free of fear and that would have been a good enough start for Bonner.