James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

As would the rest of humanity.

The situation was made more complicated-and dangerous-by Ryan’s personal history with Willie Elijah. He was counting on the pressing nature of the stickie threat to outweigh, at least for the time being, whatever resentment the baron still held for the way he

had bowed out of the genocidal campaign known as the Mutie War. Elijah had always been a greedy, possessive bastard. Ryan knew if there was one thing that would get his miserly back up, it was the possibility of losing everything he had accumulated.

As Ryan and his friends stepped out the rear doors of the trailer, six more armed sec men swung in behind them. After a rough pat-down for hidden weapons, they were escorted across an open field of yellow dirt and dried-up grass. Ryan was amused to see that the sec men had left Doc his “walking stick.”

About a half mile away, above a high hurricane fence, loomed the post-Apocalypse metropolis of Wil-lie ville. It was pretty much as Ryan remembered it

Dominating the skyline was the tall predark building that served as the baron’s headquarters and barracks for his sec men. Even in the soft and somewhat flattering rays of sunset, it looked like the last rotten tooth in a dead man’s jaw. The side that faced them was checked from top to bottom with windows, many of them black and broken. Orange lights flickered in the rooms with intact glass.

As they passed through the rolling gate in the hurricane fence, Ryan could see the rest of the complex. The landscaping of the grounds, which had never been looked after, had deteriorated to bare dirt and mummified plant beds. The curving concrete or asphalt driveways, paths and parking areas were split and broken by bristling tufts of spike grass. Clustered around the base of the baron’s HQ were a few low buildings.

With their peeling paint and crumbling masonry, all of the structures looked scabrous. On the other side of the broad scar of rilled dirt that in happier times had been an eighteen-hole golf course, Ryan could make out the top of a motionless Ferns wheel and the stark white skeleton that supported the roller coaster’s tracks. The baron’s infamous mutie zoo was back there, too, out of sight

A slight shift in the wind brought the sickly sweet smell of Willie Elijah’s brewery rushing over them. Ryan recalled that the beer was made in the one-story building off to the right of the golf course. He also remembered the way the malty, scorched stink permeated the entire ville in the dog days of summer. Farther to the right was the gaudy, which had once been a fuel-and-repair station for gas- and diesel-powered motor vehicles.

Beyond the decrepit amusement park, on the other side of the berm, were the ville’s slave quarters. The baron liked to keep his muties outside the walls at night. The small number of muties who handled menial tasks inside the berm were hobbled by chains and shackles on their ankles. On the other side of the slave hovels, which the muties shared with the baron’s livestock, were cultivated fields. Elijah maintained a kind of pecking order of deformity among his field workers. The least obviously mutated served as overseers to the more grossly rad-altered ones.

Because Ryan hadn’t witnessed the full glory of late-twentieth-century humankind, he had no yardstick by

which to judge the merit of this place. Willie ville and other decayed settlements like it were all that remained of human civilization. And the baron, grievously flawed leader though he was, had created a secure border for his subjects. Willie ville’s defenses were so imposing that the town had never been successfully stormed and sacked, either by mutie bandits or by other barons’ mercies. If there was to be a rebirth of human culture in Deathlands, it would have to begin someplace like this, where there was relative safety, agriculture and primitive industry.

Their armed escort steered them toward the massive steel-and-concrete-slab awning that protected the main building’s front entrance and U-shaped driveway. Across the face of the structure were huge, faded, red, white and blue script letters that read Freedom City Motor Hotel And Casino.