James Axler – Freedom Lost

” The X-Men ,” Dean read off one poster. “Mutant Hope In A World Gone Mad. Twenty Monthly Titles For Your Reading Excitement, Only From The House Of Ideas. What a load of crap. Those guys in the funny suits are norms. They sure aren’t like any muties I ever saw.”

“Nor are any of those women,” Krysty added.

“Mutant tits,” Jak said.

“Wait, I have heard of this Batman,” Doc said. “He was what they once called a superhero. His costume was worn to strike terror in the hearts of evil men.”

“No kidding?” Ryan said. “Was he a fancy sec man or what?”

“No, no, Ryan, you misunderstand. Batman was a fictional creation who appeared in comic books for the delight of the under-eighteen set.”

“Meaning?”

“Children’s entertainment,” Doc said succinctly.

“We’ve got time,” Ryan mused, glancing at his wrist chron. “You want to go in for a look, Dean? Better than standing out here in the mall with our thumbs up our asses waiting on J.B.”

“Yeah! All right,” Dean eagerly agreed, “That would be a hot pipe, Dad!”

Before the boy could open the door to the store, Ryan held out a hand. “Hold up. The window’s so crowded, we can’t see in. Let me take a quick look first.”

He pulled open the glass entrance and stuck his head through. He felt half-silly doing a recce inside a place obviously designed to be a spot for what Doc had told him was the entertainment of half-wits and children, but he knew from hard experience that nothing was ever as it seemed in the Deathlands.

Still, his eye wasn’t ready for a sight such as this.

From floor to ceiling were off-white cardboard boxes filled with magazines, wall pegs adorned with packaged miniature toys and games, racks of compact discs and black vinyl LPs, and an array of other colorful debris that Ryan didn’t even pretend to recognize. Even the surface of the drop ceiling was adorned with more of the posters as seen on the front of the establishment. As Ryan stepped through the glass door into the morass, a tinkly bell jingled overhead to announce his arrival.

“Wasn’t kidding about the closet part in the name of this place, lover,” Krysty said, walking in close behind him. “Going to be crowded in here.”

“Feel anything?” Ryan asked, hoping Krysty’s latent psi abilities might pick out any dangers hidden behind the crowded piles of boxes.

“Just claustrophobic. Only danger here as far as I can tell is mebbe having something fall on you.”

Ryan glanced back and grinned. “You break it, you bought it, darlin’.”

“Wow,” Dean breathed, his eyes open wide. “Look at all this stuff!”

Ryan pressed forward, allowing the others to come inside the small pathway that wound its way along the store’s contents to the back counter.

“That smell,” Doc whispered. “Wait, let me place it in the proper context!”

Jak wrinkled his nose. “Stinks. Smell sweat.”

“Yeah, somebody needs to wash their ass,” Dean agreed.

“No, I speak not of the stench of unwashed flesh, young Cawdor. I’m talking about the heavenly aroma of old paper. Rotting pulp.”

“Dust, you mean,” Krysty said, running a finger along a box top and bringing it up coated with fine dirt.

The smell was unfamiliar. In the Deathlands it was quite unusual to find much in the way of printed material, new or old. The larger villes might have their own little news sheets run off on antique printing pressesDoc had spied a version of this in Freedom and had happily grabbed one up in search of any printed information, only to find it was a series of advertisements for the endless array of mall stores but in the poorer sections, more often than not paper was viewed as nothing more than useful kindling or toilet tissue.

As for older, predark vintage books and magazines, most of the paper goods had long since crumbled into dust due to the abnormal weather conditions around the globe or vanished into nothingness in the long nuclear winter immediately following skydark. There were rare exceptions, the odd baron and a hoard of books.

A fair estimate of the general populace of Deathlands would probably put most men and women in the category of the functionally illiterate. There was no time for reading for the enjoyment of books, nor was there a viable system of delivering written letters or messages. Written contracts with signatures were a thing of the past, except for barons who delighted in thrusting papers down for hired help to make their signature mark without even knowing what agreements such contracts contained.