James Axler – Freedom Lost

Freedom Lost

Freedom Lost

41 in the Deathland series James Axler

Prologue

The Past

The figures were locked in a two-step, supporting each other as they weaved across the arid landscape. Their feet stumbled, uncertain of the next step as they walked clumsily over the uneven terrain. Above their heads, the wild sky was a deep, striking blue, without a single cloud hanging in place to battle back the hot sunlight.

There was an absence of any kind of hill, or mountain or coverjust flat, broken highwaysix lanes of highwayas far ahead as the eye could see.

Pieces of broken pavement and scraps of long-dead automobiles littering the roadway kept tripping up the two menthat, and the state of near exhaustion they barely endured as they picked their way northward along the abandoned stretch of road.

Once, the highway had been known as Interstate 77. Now it was just another road, one of thousands that still crisscrossed the former United States of America, unmaintained and forgotten.

Far behind them, long hot miles back down the interstate and directly off an exit ramp near the remains of a single ruined overpass, were the burned and crumbling remains of the play palace and amusement park that had been known to many as Wille ville. But it had an earlier incarnation meaningful to good Christian soldiers, as Freedom City, U.S.A.

Before the darkness fell across the world, the site had been a queer mix of Bible-thumping religion and overblown Vegas-style entertainment. The crown jewel of the attraction was a sparkling, modern, twenty-four-story hotel with all of the amenities, including a private, hidden casino in the basement for those “very special” guests of the Lord.

Freedom City U.S.A. was also equipped with an amusement park for children, a fully functioning television studio with satellite hookup and live feed, a radio station broadcasting on both AM and FM wavebands, private quarters for the staff and employees, and an eighteen hole golf course with special tee off spots for senior citizens.

All of these diversions were offered for free to select members of the church group who sponsored the dream of the compound’s owner and president. The master of Freedom City was a “born-again” showman, promoting his land of fun through publishing and radio, but primarily via cable TV with regular appeals for money to help do the Lord’s work.

He had taken the title of televangelist, one of those new words that sprung into being when meshing the old and the new.

He claimed to be able to produce miracles, healing the sick on a daily basis. The lame threw down their crutches. The ones committed for life to wheelchairs stood up and danced. The blind were made to see. The men, women and children who held their diseases close, hidden in their bodies as cancer tumors, were made whole and well again.

These acts were performed live with a very special handpicked studio audience who got to enjoy the pleasures of Freedom City after their television debuts. And for the poor souls unable to travel, they too were offered salvation by pressing their hands up against their TV screens at home, and told to channel their energies through the very lines of fiber optic cable carrying the broadcast signal into their neighborhoods.

The Lord had chosen to respond to all of these good works done in his name by allowing the miracle producing head of the church and complex of Freedom City to be exposed as a lecherous and greedy little troll, who wept like a baby once his sins became public. Once the word was out that their leaderthe good married reverend himselfhad been discovered in a bedroom of one of the hundreds of hotel rooms housed in the twenty-four story crown jewel of his empire with two women half his age, the holding corporation for the entire kingdom had been plunged into a non-ending series of investigations and exposes. All of the media attention culminated in the leader’s imprisonment, bankruptcy and ruin.

The dream was over.

The park was closed. The golf course was padlocked shut. The hotel was turned over to private enterprise, rented a few times a year for business conventions.