James Axler – Freedom Lost

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 leadership 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 skyscrapers 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 hell 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 shaggy 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 sunglasses. The bald one with the ugly head had a pair of black knockoff RayBan eyewear, in the classic boxy style of the 1950s. The long-haired figure wore a pair of amber aviator’s glasses, with thin metal frames of gold. The glasses 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 hell 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 assured 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 crashing 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 basement.