He stamped on the roof of the bus. “Wake up, you lazy sluts!” he bellowed. “Get up here and show your stuff!”
A frowzy female head appeared in one of the bus’s rear windows, hair like a great lopsided wad of pink cotton wool. A second woman popped up beside the first, her face powdered white and her cheeks rouged a feverish red. The third occupant was male. Dense black facial stubble had grown through his many layers of Pan-Cake makeup.
This unwholesome trio exited the bus and started up the ladder to the roof. They were dressed in matching outfits: a white string T-shirt and stiletto-heeled leather boots. None of them wore anything below the waist. Their well-worn genitalia had the ruddy brown color of smoked meat; their buttocks and thighs were badly bruised. The pink-haired slut carried a battery-powered boom box, which she passed up to the driver.
The big man propped the boom box on his shoulder and hit the power switch. Predark music blared from the speakers at ear-blistering volume. There were lyrics to the song, hard to catch at first, something about partying like it was the year 1999.
The three whores began dancing, and the driver did a few turns himself before setting the boom box on the roof.
“Got your cups?” he called to the crowd over the rhythmic racket. “Well, goddammit, go get ’em!”
As most of the folks rushed off, the driver descended the ladder and ducked inside the bus’s doorway. When he reappeared, he had a gray insulated plastic mug in his good, left hand.
Huth was standing close enough to get a look at the prosthesis at the end of his other arm. It wasn’t carved of ivory, or any other natural material. Every finely sculpted finger had two articulated joints, the thumb had one, plus the knuckles, and there was a small knurled knob on the back of the wrist. As he watched, the big man tightened down the knob, which made the fingers and thumb contract in a deathgrip around the mug’s handle.
Mug in fist, the driver danced some more; he was very light on his feet for a man of his size. After a minute or two, he stopped and pulled the end of a length of plastic hose out a side window. When he opened the metal clamp on its tip, a clear fluid sprayed into his waiting tankard.
“We are gonna have so damned much fun!” he shouted to the cloudless sky.
Then he called up to the whores, “Dance, you sexy devils! Show these good folks what you can do!”
The trio began bucking their pelvises and rotating their hips with more enthusiasm.
“For those of you who don’t know me,” he told the crowd, “I’m Big Mike. Also known as Mike the Drunkard.” He tipped back the mug and began to swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He didn’t stop until he’d emptied it.
“Ya-hoooie!” he said. “Everybody belly up! Come on, now, don’t be shy. It’s fill-’em-up time!”
Huth, who had no cup, was shoved, elbowed and punched out of the way by those who did.
The boom box on the roof stopped playing for a second, then the same song started over again automatically.
Mike the Drunkard used his real hand to backslap and goose the spectators as he topped off their containers. And the whole while he jabbered at them. “Ooh, are we going to par-tay!” he said. “Get this bus a-rocking in no time.” He made a lewd crotch thrust at his own drained mug before refilling it.
In short order, Big Mike had everybody around the bus drinking, dancing and laughing. Everybody but Huth, who stood at the edge of the crowd, leaning dejectedly on the handle of his shovel.
When Mike scrambled back up to the roof of the bus, he turned down the volume on the boom box. The song started over for the fifth time. By now, all the people knew the words of the chorus and shouted along. To them, 1999 meant predark. Happy days. Times of plenty, of relative order and safety. A golden age.
“Right about now,” Big Mike said to them, “you’re probably asking yourselves, where does this big old sexy magic man come from? And where did he get all the chiller joy juice he’s giving away?”
“Tell us!” someone yelled back.
“Yeah,” another person chimed in, “tell us!”
“The answer to both questions is Slake City,” Mike said.
It took a few seconds for this information to sink in. Gradually, the residents of Byram ville stopped dancing. They stood like statues beside the bus, glaring at the big man.
Mike raised his good hand. “Now, I know you’ve heard it’s a wasteland over there. But that’s a rumor started by some of the people who are already there. They’re greedy bastards. They want to keep all the sweet stuff for themselves.”
“That’s Baron Jolt’s turf,” said a man standing up front, “and as far as I’m concerned, that raping, chilling bastard can have it.”
“Everybody knows Slake City’s nothing but a nuke slag heap!” another man said. “The background radiation turns you into a pile of pus and sores inside of a month.”
“Nah-nah,” Mike said, shaking his head. “That’s how it used to be. Not anymore. The place is all cleaned up. It’s safe as mother’s milk. And Baron Jolt is long gone. We got real jobs there, now. It’s fat, I’m telling you, just like before skydark. People are eating regular, getting drunk regular, living out of the chem rains in clean shacks with good shithouses. Slake City is starting over again, and the folks who get in on the ground floor are going to have the edge. Have a chance to get baron-rich. That’s why I’m here. Slake City needs folks like you. Enterprising, right-thinking folks who know an opportunity when they see one.”
While the crowd considered this, Mike the Drunkard clambered from the roof and quickly refilled all the empty cups.
It was then that Huth took note of the massive bracelet around the bus driver’s left wrist. Dull silver in color, its surface was filigreed with solid-state circuitry. The sight of the ornament made Huth’s mouth drop. Pulse pounding, he fought to get a closer look, though it meant absorbing numerous blows to his head, back and arms.
“How did you lose your right hand?” Huth called out.
“Got it caught up the wrong ass,” Mike said.
Everybody laughed. Everybody but Huth.
The former chief whitecoat of FIVE, now latrine engineer, used the handle of his shovel like a lance, clearing a path to the front of the crowd. He held up the pocket of his lab coat to the big man. “Do you know what this means?” he asked.
Big Mike squinted down at the four letters stitched in red. “Can’t read too good,” he confessed.
Huth reached out and tapped the metallic wristband. “I came from the same place as that.”
Big Mike stared at Huth’s gap teeth, his dirt-caked face, his unspeakable pants and dismissed him with a “Yeah, right…”
“I know what it’s used for,” Huth went on, frantic to get his point across. “You’ve got bands just like it around your ankles, too, don’t you?”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. “So…?”
“Did it hurt much when they lopped off your hand?”
Mike the Drunkard seized Huth by the collar and dragged him and his shovel up the steps into the bus. Inside, it smelled like a cross between a distillery and a bear pit. The rear seats had been removed to make room on the floor for a pile of badly stained mattresses. A half-dozen fifty-five-gallon metal drums of joy juice were securely strapped to the floor. The drums were all stenciled with Baron Jolt.
Huth endured a brutal shaking, then the big man held him close and growled into his face, “How do you know about my hand? Who the fuck are you?”
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