Night. Day. Night. Day. Night… The West Texas morning greeted Walker in furious gusts that tore along the arroyos and across endless wastes of dry brown sage. There was a white noise silence that seemed to come from everywhere, but he barely noticed it over the voices of his murdered friends. The dead and the dying shrieked over and over, again and again inside his head. Pain, burns, those things were there, but he’d turned that part of himself off. The part that felt. Mind over matter. You don’t mind… He’d seen all the faces of his friends. Seen them as he crawled out from the wreckage of the burning convoy. Seen what the bikers had done to the living and the dead. …It don’t matter. For three days now he’d crossed the land and seen it as nothing but a cemetery. One big, gigantic cemetery. Dead farms falling into the wild picked over crops. Dead towns surrendering to sand and blasted by the wind and heat. A dead city in the distance like the shadow of some ancient alien thing.
