Cyberpunk was dead. Surely it would rise again, it’s tough to keep a good cyborg down, but for now North America had an awful lot of technological ladder to climb from the 19th century back to the 21.5th. The EMPs and microwave airbursts made sure of that.

For now, Matt was the undisputed King of the Road. A road littered with dead vehicles with worthless electronics but valuable raw materials. The real gold mine was anything petroleum based such as plastics, lubricating oils, and especially gasoline and diesel fuel. Sure, some city-slickers had frail, slow, wheezing steam engine driven carts (Matt couldn’t think of them as cars), but mostly it was horse ranchers that were becoming wealthy.

But nobody had yet matched The Beast (or The Road Warrior? Matt had never named a truck before but he felt his creation earned a name.), the armored truck that now was the center of his life. Scavenger, tow truck, barricade runner, mobile home. And 2 and a half tons of near unstoppability and go-where-you-want-to-ness.