Part 1 (1/2)
FREEDOM LOST.
Deathlands.
Axler, James.
Prologue.
The Past.
The figures were locked in a two-step, supporting each other as they weaved across the arid landscape. Their feet stumbled, uncertain of the next step as they walked clumsily over the uneven terrain. Above their heads, the wild sky was a deep, striking blue, without a single cloud hanging in place to battle back the hot sunlight.
There was an absence of any kind of hill, or mountain or coverjust flat, broken highwaysix lanes of highwayas far ahead as the eye could see.
Pieces of broken pavement and sc.r.a.ps of long-dead automobiles littering the roadway kept tripping up the two menthat, and the state of near exhaustion they barely endured as they picked their way northward along the abandoned stretch of road.
Once, the highway had been known as Interstate 77. Now it was just another road, one of thousands that still crisscrossed the former United States of America, unmaintained and forgotten.
Far behind them, long hot miles back down the interstate and directly off an exit ramp near the remains of a single ruined overpa.s.s, were the burned and crumbling remains of the play palace and amus.e.m.e.nt park that had been known to many as Wille ville. But it had an earlier incarnation meaningful to good Christian soldiers, as Freedom City, U.S.A.
Before the darkness fell across the world, the site had been a queer mix of Bible-thumping religion and overblown Vegas-style entertainment. The crown jewel of the attraction was a sparkling, modern, twenty-four-story hotel with all of the amenities, including a private, hidden casino in the bas.e.m.e.nt for those ”very special” guests of the Lord.
Freedom City U.S.A. was also equipped with an amus.e.m.e.nt park for children, a fully functioning television studio with satellite hookup and live feed, a radio station broadcasting on both AM and FM wavebands, private quarters for the staff and employees, and an eighteen hole golf course with special tee off spots for senior citizens.
All of these diversions were offered for free to select members of the church group who sponsored the dream of the compound's owner and president. The master of Freedom City was a ”born-again” showman, promoting his land of fun through publis.h.i.+ng and radio, but primarily via cable TV with regular appeals for money to help do the Lord's work.
He had taken the t.i.tle of televangelist, one of those new words that sprung into being when mes.h.i.+ng the old and the new.
He claimed to be able to produce miracles, healing the sick on a daily basis. The lame threw down their crutches. The ones committed for life to wheelchairs stood up and danced. The blind were made to see. The men, women and children who held their diseases close, hidden in their bodies as cancer tumors, were made whole and well again.
These acts were performed live with a very special handpicked studio audience who got to enjoy the pleasures of Freedom City after their television debuts. And for the poor souls unable to travel, they too were offered salvation by pressing their hands up against their TV screens at home, and told to channel their energies through the very lines of fiber optic cable carrying the broadcast signal into their neighborhoods.
The Lord had chosen to respond to all of these good works done in his name by allowing the miracle producing head of the church and complex of Freedom City to be exposed as a lecherous and greedy little troll, who wept like a baby once his sins became public. Once the word was out that their leaderthe good married reverend himselfhad been discovered in a bedroom of one of the hundreds of hotel rooms housed in the twenty-four story crown jewel of his empire with two women half his age, the holding corporation for the entire kingdom had been plunged into a non-ending series of investigations and exposes. All of the media attention culminated in the leader's imprisonment, bankruptcy and ruin.
The dream was over.
The park was closed. The golf course was padlocked shut. The hotel was turned over to private enterprise, rented a few times a year for business conventions.
Then, less than a decade or so later, the literal end of the world the former Baptist millionaire had promised for so long finally did happen. When it did, concepts such as religion, and inventions such as television, and businesses with corporations and strong men of leaders.h.i.+p involved in tawdry affairs with young girls were utterly, totally, completely moot.
Over a hundred years later, Freedom City, U.S.A. I had become a ville run by a man with an iron fist and a handpicked team of security men. At first, the area was under the command of one Baron George Frederic Sokolow. Sokolow was a brutal man, but trusting and fair. His successor, by way of betrayal, had been one Baron William Elijah.
Unfortunately for Freedom City, U.S.A., the good I and proper Biblical name of Elijah was not chosen as the site's new appellation. The name of the place became Willie ville.
Now, all gone, Freedom City had died thrice. The first time had left the structures intact with the soul removed. The second had seen all around it fall into waste and ruin.
The third found it blown into bits and burned to the ground, overrun and destroyed by legions of muties.
The two figures fleeing from Willie ville kept moving. To their right, skeletal skysc.r.a.pers of the city known as Charlotte towered high, but the city and its artificial canyons lined with sidewalks and parking meters wasn't their destination.
”We there yet?” the taller of the two asked in a drugged, slow voice, a voice like a sleepy playback on an elderly tape recorder with dying batteries.
”What do you think?” the other retorted, his voice a wet, phlegmy sound. ”Look around, stupe. We're not even past Charlotte yet, and I sure as h.e.l.l don't want to go in there. I hear there's patches of hot rad spots.”
The shorter of the pair, the man with the fast quip, was hairless, and his scalp was a mix of bright red new skin intermingled with blackened scabs and old scar tissue. His companion had enough s.h.a.ggy brown hair running down from above a lean, hairless forehead to the nape of a narrow back to provide ample tresses for each of them.
Both of them were wearing sungla.s.ses. The bald one with the ugly head had a pair of black knockoff RayBan eyewear, in the cla.s.sic boxy style of the 1950s. The long-haired figure wore a pair of amber aviator's gla.s.ses, with thin metal frames of gold. The gla.s.ses were a size too small, but still better than braving the sun without any eye protection.
The first man with the injured head and face had been trapped when things had gone to h.e.l.l weeks earlier in Willie ville. A semicompetent sec man and hired mercie by trade, he'd been unlucky enough to rouse the ire of the now-deceased Baron Willie Elijah, and on the day the ville was blasted into ruin, he'd been strapped with other unfortunates to a great wheel used to raise and lower the elevator car that traveled between floors of the twenty-four-story hotel jutting from the center of the baron's ville.
Unfortunately for those who manned the elevator wheel, the baron had chosen the penthouse as the roost of his domain, where he could look out on all that was his and rest a.s.sured it was good.
This aerie was also home to his family and followers, and where many of his sec men who hadn't incurred his wrath and been banished to the wheel stayed, as well. All of them, and more, had been up there on top of the world the day Willie ville began to die.
There had been an explosion within the upper floors of the former pleasure palace, and the elevator carfull to overflowing with panicked men and womenhad come cras.h.i.+ng down at a terrific rate. The wheel that the slaves had been strapped to spun faster and faster, whipping them around like insects struggling to keep their footing on a traveling vehicle.
Under the sounds of the explosions and screams came the sickening snaps of breaking bones and the haunting noise of naked flesh being ripped open and torn apart. Then there were more blasts of horrific intensity, followed by fire as the entire twenty-four floors of the hotel came tumbling down into the bas.e.m.e.nt.
The two men now leaning woozily on each other for support had been among the few survivors from the devastation in Baron Willie's headquarters.
In the instance of the man wearing the RayBan sungla.s.ses, the end result created by the flames was a scarred visage that suggested the aftereffect of a novelty wax head placed within a microwave oven. Flesh had bubbled and melted. The forehead was slashed with still healing wounds and bits of black shrapnel that had yet to work themselves out of the skin. No eyebrows were above the currently hidden eyes, but one eyeball was wide-open, glaring and minus an eyelid.
The other eye was half-closed in a mess of scarring.
The nose was missing, gone as if it had never existed, and when he breathed, air was sucked in through the remaining narrow holes above the ruined mouth. There were no lips to be seen, only a wet orifice cluttered with sc.r.a.ps of white teeth and a bright red tongue between cheeks stubbled with clumped patches of beard and blotches of crimson.
His injuries made it impossible for him to fully close his mouth. Like his nasal cavity, his mouth hung open, panting as air went in and out of his lungs like an overworked bellows. Smoke inhalation from the fire had created a permanent rasp when he breathed. The fire had also claimed the man's ears.
He fell to his knees, his chest rising and falling as he struggled to regain his breath. The second figure placed a hand on his fallen friend's shoulder and waited silently.
The placed hand was strange, inhuman, dirty andwrong. The fingers looked as though they had an extra joint between the midbend and the knuckle, and indeed they were so equipped. The fingers also came with two additional bonusesa mult.i.tude of tiny suckers, each little mouth capable of sticking to almost any chosen surface, and a thin secretion of bioproduced adhesive.
The hand was the first clue in separating the pair, for the man on the ground, despite his horrific injuries, was a human. A ”norm” by birth, now a freak by accident and lucky to be alive.
The standing figure behind him was a mutant, and there would be no changing that birthright. The mutie was commonly called a ”stickie” due to the suctioning fingers, which could tear flesh off bone.
Stickies had the same suckers on their long tongues, as well.
There were also other ways of identifying a stickie. Their speech patterns were usually slow and monosyllabic. Many times their teeth were sharp, both by nature and because stickies enjoyed filing their teeth down into needles for shock value. And many had the unusual trait of being born without any ears, so their hearing was limited, making them seem even slower and dumber to a human foe. The lack of ears also forced most stickies to be loud talkers, making them seem even more annoying to all except for their own kind.
No one knew why most stickies were missing ears.
There were two kinds of stickies. The one in the aviator's gla.s.ses was the more intelligent kind. A second breed of stickie came with very little in the upstairs attic, no body hair and suckers on their feet. Also on the hands and feet of these murderous unfortunates were highly developed sucker pads instead of fingers and toes, the digits exuding a gelatinous ooze even more adhering than the secretion characteristic of their brighter kin.
”How much longer?” the stickie asked slowly.
”I don't know,” the scarred man replied as he gulped oxygen. ”We're heading north, so I know by the sun we're going in the right direction. I couldn't begin to tell you what kind of time we're making. We're killing ourselves now, and we haven't gone near far enough. Trip is going to take weeks on foot in the condition we're both in. Mebbe even months, unless we find some kind of wag or horse.”