James Axler – Freedom Lost

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 sunglasses, 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 scraps 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 multitude 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 glasses 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.”

The listening stickie used its other hand to adjust the cap it was wearing. The letters “PTL” were stitched in yellow on the blue hat, a souvenir of time spent in servitude in Wille ville. The creature had no idea what the initials stood for, nor did it care, since it couldn’t read anyway. The hat had three things in its favor it fit snugly over long hair, it wasn’t filthy like the rest of the stickie’s clothing and the wide brim kept the sun off its pale face.