James Axler – Freedom Lost

“The South rises yet again,” Doc murmured.

At least with having the scavie along, there was no need for J.B. to take out his small but sturdy mini-sextant and take a reading to determine their location. At one time, the Armorer had access to one of the finest collections of predark maps and atlases in the country, thanks to the supply the Trader had collected and kept aboard his own vehicle over the years.

Now, without the Storage space provided by the fleet of war wags the Trader had maintained, J.B. had to rely on his memory. There was no room in his pack for heavy books and maps. A man on the move had to travel as light as possible, with the weight he carried devoted to ammunition and essential supplies.

Luckily J.B. possessed a near photographic memory, and he had managed the feat of retaining thousands upon thousands of roads, borders, star charts and anything else of use in the fine art of navigation. When his own internal library of information was combined with the reading he could retrieve from the minisextant, J.B. could almost always tell his friends with a fair degree of accuracy what part of Deathlands they ended up in.

“This area doesn’t look all that rural,” Krysty observed, leaning out over the railing of the deck and into the afternoon sunshine, which cascaded beautifully off her red hair. “Looks more like a city.”

“It is. It was. This is Winston-Salem, one of the bigger metro areas of old Carolina. Made cigarettes here. You can see what’s left of the downtown over there,” Alton said, pointing out a cluster of skyscrapers beyond the tall redhead. “I don’t recommend going there for a sight-seeing tour.”

“Why’s that?” Krysty asked.

“Stickies,” the bearded man replied. “Downtown belongs to them. For a long stretch of time, there’s been an unspoken truce between the Carolina norms who live in this region and the mutiesstay away from the claimed grounds and there’ll be no fighting or retribution.”

Doc had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “And do tell, where does this hospital fall?”

The scavenger smiled. “No-man’s-land. Stickies are technically closer, but since anything of conceivable practical use had been long taken out, I was gambling there would be no reason for them to be in here.”

“Only a fool gambles with a retarded deck of cards, and any group of stickies is full of jokers and deuces,” Ryan said. “There is no rhyme or reason as to what they do and when they do it. Crazy bastards.”

“Amen, brother,” Alton agreed. “Still, we could be in worse shape. We’re in the middle of what used to be called Medical Row. Go along Hawthorne for about two miles until you hit what’s left of Silas Creek Parkway and Highway 40. Nothing in between but a few residential sections and rows upon rows of doctors’ offices. Had a doc for any ailment that plagued you back then.”

“Not anymore,” Mildred said quietly to Ryan. “I knew this placespent some time at this very hospital, in fact. By the 1990s, North Carolina had some of the finest physicians and medical equipment in the entire country.”

“The old road’s still intact more or less. We’ll follow it toward Freedom. I’ve got some business there, and it’ll give us a safe place to spend the night What’s wrong?” Alton allowed his voice to trail off as he tried to comprehend the sudden dark expressions that crossed the faces of Ryan’s group upon the mention of the word “Freedom.”

“This Freedomthat the name of some kind of ville?” Ryan asked, his mind involuntarily crawling back to another Freedom, the Freedom City Motor Hotel and Casino, located in the southeastern part of the Carolinas. It was the lair of the former Baron Willie Elijah and his mutie-hating mercies, the site of a vicious battle with Lord Kaa, a self-styled “lord of the mutants” who had confronted Elijah and his humans in a brutal fight ending in the baron’s ultimate demise.

“Yeah, sort of,” the scavie replied with a grin. “But better. You got to see it to believe it.”

“Already have,” J.B. said firmly. “Don’t want to go back, either.”