Breakthrough

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?”

“I crossed over ahead of the people who did that to you,” Huth said. “My coming to this world was an accident. I was lost in the wilderness and then I ended up in this place, in very sorry circumstances. My name is Dr. Huth. I am somewhat famous where I come from. Maybe the others talked about me? Or mentioned my name in passing?”

“Nope,” Mike said.

“One thing’s for certain,” Huth continued, “you have become their puppet. Those laser cuffs can turn you into a victim in a hurry. Without hands and feet you’d be a big lump of warm, helpless meat that anyone could play nasty with. How much chain did they give you? Fifty miles? A hundred miles? Go one step farther, break the transmitter’s signal, and zap! All fall down.”

“You better not queer my pitch here,” Mike warned, poking Huth hard in the chest with a huge finger. “I got a quota to make.”

“Take me back with you. Take me back to my people.”

Mike gave him a dubious look.

“That’s all I want. Really.”

The big man’s eyes glittered. “No problem,” he said. “You can ride with me all the way to Slake City.”

Overjoyed, Huth started to throw his shovel out a window.

“No, keep that,” Mike told him. “It’ll come in handy later. I got to go outside now. I got to make my closing pitch before these triple stupes start to sober up.” He dug under a seat and removed a big yellow plastic tub. He patted the tight-fitting lid and said, “The deal clincher.”

Huth remained inside the bus while Big Mike stepped out and addressed the crowd. “I’m looking for a few good folks who aren’t a-scared of rumors,” he said. “And I’m willing to sweeten the pie a little. I know you’ve all got a taste for what’s in here.” He opened the tub and showed them the heap of white crystalline powder it contained. “This is the real thing, people. One hundred percent pure jolt. It’ll make you feel ten feet tall. And you’ll screw my pretty sluts like a pack of slag heap weasels. Don’t push, now. One at a time, now. Come and get it.”

Using a battered teaspoon, he laid a heaping dose of powder on every outstretched palm. Though some people licked it, most of them snorted it. The powerful drug took hold quickly, with alarming effect. It made eyes bug out and sweaty faces grimace spastically. To quench their suddenly raging thirsts, the revelers guzzled more free joy juice, and they all fell into a slow-spinning, half-speed dance.

At a signal from Mike, the music abruptly stopped and the three whores climbed down from the roof with the boom box. They entered the bus and walked past Huth, heading straight for the pile of mattresses in the back.

“Come on, people,” Mike urged, gesturing toward the bus’s entrance. “The real fun is starting. Slip and slide. Slip…and…slide.”

As stoned as they were, most of the Byram ville folks didn’t fall for his spiel, but they were in no shape to try to stop the few who did. Four men between the ages of twenty and thirty, and a heavyset, thirtyish woman mounted the bus’s steps. As the woman passed Huth and turned down the aisle for the rear, she jerked her black sleeveless T-shirt over her head and tossed it aside. Her huge soft breasts swayed pendulously as she struggled with the zipper on the front of her dusty BDU pants.

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to come with me now,” Mike assured the rest of the crowd. “I’ll be back by here in a week or two. Give you all some time to think it over. Maybe I’ll even bring back your friends for a visit. You can hear firsthand what you’re missing.”

With that, he climbed back in the bus, started it up and U-turned for the checkpoint. Huth took a seat up front, right behind the driver, as far away from the goings-on in the back as he could get.

After they had cleared the gate, Mike double-clutched and shifted the bus into high gear. “How about some driving music?” he said over his shoulder. He poked the boom box, which sat perched on the dash. The 1999 song started up again at top volume, canceling out the grunting, whimpering racket from the rear.

Big Mike, clearly feeling the effects of all the joy juice he’d drunk, threw back his head and falsetto-screeched along with the vocalist.

For his part, Huth was content to bob his head and tap out the now-familiar beat with the toe of his size-13 jogging shoe. He watched the flat, parched landscape roll past the grimy window, toothlessly grinning while tears streamed down his face.

Chapter Four

Dredda Otis Trask deepened the tint of her helmet visor to shield her eyes against Slake City’s blinding, panoramic glare. From the history of her own Earth, she knew that there had once been a vast body of water in this place, the last remnant of an ancient inland sea. In Shadow World’s reality, on a late January day more than a century past, Great Salt Lake had been vaporized by a multiwarhead nuclear strike. And a fraction of an instant later, the sands of the exposed lake bed and the shattered metropolis of Salt Lake City were melted together, fused into a boiling, hundred-square-mile sea of thermoglass. As the infernal heat was sucked up into the atmosphere, towering waves of glass solidified in a nightmare snapshot, their peaks capped with a foam of rusting, fire-blackened litter. Massive, shock-blast-tossed fragments—skyscraper I-beams, sections of railroad track and metal utility poles—stuck up from the wave troughs like the masts of a drowned navy.

It was a place long dead, but it was neither silent nor still.