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.
Between howling gusts of wind, the external microphones of Dredda’s battlesuit picked up what sounded like the scattered, desperate cries of abandoned infants. There were no lost babies out there. The phenomenon had to do with the nukeglass’s structural weaknesses, which were caused by mineral impurities, and by the pulverized debris and air bubbles it contained. Extreme changes in day-night temperatures caused hairline cracks to appear in the matrix, and as the splits spread and ran, they made the shrill, disturbing sounds.
Occasionally, there were much louder noises. As the fine cracks branched out, they became networks of fissures that eventually crashed down the roofs of hidden hollow spots. Some of these collapsed air pockets were the size of amphitheaters.