The hellpit of Byram ville, whose smoke plume Huth had first seen from atop the red mesa, had grown up around a predark truck stop. At the center of the enclosure were the remains of a service station, restaurant and minimart. The great steel awnings that had once shielded the rows of junked fuel pumps from the sun had been torn off by skydark’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour shock wave. The original roof of the one-story structure had likewise vanished, the plate-glass windows turned to twinkling fairy dust. Roof and windows had been crudely repaired with sheets of metal stripped from the abandoned and overturned semi trailers that littered the huge parking area. These aging artifacts of long-dead interstate commerce were the very heart and soul of the place. Byram ville’s upper crust lived inside the trailers and conducted their businesses out of them. The poorer residents kept house in the rusting hulks of passenger cars. The lowest of the low—Huth, included—slept curled up on the ground like mongrel dogs, in the lee of their economic betters.
Unless someone had died during the night, there were forty-five full-time residents of Byram ville. The locals survived by trading with travelers, taking whatever the newcomers had of value in exchange for jolt or juice or sex, or food or drinking water, or temporary protection from what lay outside the defensive perimeter. Though Interstate 15 was primarily a walking road, occasionally a wag would pass through, bearing trade goods and news from other parts of Deathlands.
After clearing the entry checkpoint, the bus driver parked alongside the ville’s central structure and leaned on his horn for a good thirty seconds. Heads poked out of semis and car bodies and the ruined restaurant and minimart. Seeing what had arrived, people came running.
Carrying his shovel, Huth joined the crowd that surrounded the strangely decorated wag. The driver stood in the bus’s doorway, grinning. He was a big man, easily 350 pounds and six foot two. He wore a squashed canvas fedora, which sat like a pancake on the back of his huge head, and faded bib-front denim jeans. “Come one, come all!” he yelled. “Gather ’round, everybody!”
As the crowd closed in, the driver used the metal ladder bolted to the bus’s side to climb to the roof. Once there, he did a sort of flamenco dance, his arms curved gracefully over his head, his laceless logger boots hammering on the sheet steel.
Huth noticed the way the sun gleamed off his right hand, which was the color of old ivory and obviously artificial.
“Come on and bring your cups!” the driver shouted. “I got free joy juice for everybody! I got free slip and slide, too!”
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 Pancake 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.