Showing results by author "James Axler" in All Categories

Deathlands is a desolate and mute testimony to the aftermath of the nuclear blasts that laid waste to the Earth. Wayfarers in their blighted world, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists search for a better future in the devastated ruins of a once-proud land. The radiation-poisoned hellhole is their home and they are determined to defend it from the predatory foreigners emerging from a gateway.

Kane and his fellow Outlanders are thrown into a world where the nuclear war never happened but a clandestine war rages on against the sinister forces that still rule humanity. Here, this deadly spectre has openly revealed itself - as mankind's great benefactors. As Kane and his band meld with their doubles in this new reality, their quest to change history is confronted by ultimate evil.

The nuclear conflagration that had nearly consumed the world generations ago stripped away most of its bounty, throwing survivors back to more savage ways of existence. Amid the ruins, Ryan Cawdor leads the daring few who wage a grim battle in a quest for a better future. As elsewhere in the Deathlands, what remains of the Sunshine State is ruled by tooth and claw and unbridled instinct. It's an alien, inhospitable terrain of sulphur pits and lethal geysers, inhabited by mutated life-forms.

Carving out a living in the Deathlands is no easy feat. To most, the only thing that matters is one more day spent above ground. To the man known as Trader, the only thing that matters is the bottom line. In a mutie-filled, irradiated wasteland, Trader and crew set out to find the scavvie Marsh Folsom. Stories going around say that Folsom has knowledge of an underground cache with a legendary bounty.

Emerging into one of the pre-dark installations known as Redoubts, the group is taken prisoner in a fully functioning army base operating in a parody of life before the blowout. Its occupants are inbred soldiers, a legacy to the lost secrets of the Totality Concept. Led by the mad general of an obscene military project, the base has found its last hope in the ragtag bunch, a fate that may be even more horrifying than the hell they have survived.

Desperate to find water and shelter on the barren plains of former Oklahoma, Ryan and his team come upon a community that appears, at first, to be peaceful. Then the ville is attacked by a group of its own inhabitants — people infected with a parasite that has turned them into slave warriors for an unknown overlord. The companions try to help fend off the enemy and protect the remaining population, but when Ryan is captured during a second ambush, all hope seems lost. Especially when he launches an assault against his own crew.

Emerging from a gateway into the snowy barrens of the Colorado Rockies, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior group are forced to strike a deal for survival. This part of white hell is controlled by Baron Nelson, a grief-ridden widower burning for vengeance against the hired killers who murdered his boy. Not far from Nelson's barony lies Yuma, a nasty hellhole every badman in the Rockies calls home. Ryan, Doc and J.B. Dix begin a perilous journey across desolate mountains to Yuma to capture and deliver the boy's killers back to the baron.

Generations after global annihilation, Kansas is a mutated landscape of dense, deciduous forest. Gone are the amber waves of grain, another hideous result of nuclear devastation that changed the face of the Earth forever. Now it's survival of the freakish. Following rumors that might lead them to the long-lost Trader, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists find themselves the unwilling house guests of the wealthiest barons in all of Deathlands.

Ryan Cawdor’s time-lost companion, Doc Tanner, has finally found the Operation Chronos facility that can return him back to his own era. But reaching it through a gauntlet of mutie enemies and their enslaved army is only one half of the battle. As the Chronos facility falls to the mutie siege, a traitor within the ranks of Ryan’s crew finally reveals their hand, and the remaining allies find themselves backed into an impossible corner... with no way out.

Ryan Cawdor's post-holocaust odyssey across America is about to come full circle—Ryan Cawdor is going home. Forced away from Front Royal by a power-mad brother who had already committed fratricide, Ryan had roamed a devastated America searching out the small pockets of life where civilization was being reborn. Emerging from a gateway in the ruins of New York City, Ryan decides to put his own house in order—it's time to avenge the deaths of his father and older brother.

An insular group of fanatics calling itself the Children of the Rock is leaving a trail of barbarism and a growing tide of hate in its wake. The leader of the cult is connected to Ryan's past — to Trader and the war wagon days. Littered with victors and losers, it's a past some can't walk away from.... In this haven in a ravaged country, Ryan and his warrior wayfarers find that new laws of survival have emerged.

Looking for respite after a bitter struggle in Kentucky's Hazard ville, the wayfarers must make do with Arctic tundra and earthquakes. Trapped in the hostile landscape by a mattrans jump, Ryan and companions find the ultimate challenge to their will to survive. The odds dwindle when they become the new bounty in a struggle for dominance between a group of Neanderthals and descendants of a military garrison stranded generations ago.

A bad jump from a near-space Gateway leaves Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists in the devastated heart of the American Midwest. Moving through the ruins in the safety of an abandoned war wag, they discover a small community that was once the sprawling metropolis of Chicago. The town seems devoid of life, until the first night, when Krysty Wroth vanishes without a trace. Then the group is attacked, leaving Doc Tanner gravely wounded. Ryan realizes that someone, or something, wants them gone — or dead.

Washington, DC, was hardest hit in the nukecaust that heralded the Deathlands era. But beneath the crater of radioactive ruins, a functioning city of survivors is crafting a culture that plans to reshape America. Ryan Cawdor and his companions enter into this enclosed, underground world and find an ordered and progressive society based on the tenets of the US Constitution. But as they settle into this seeming idyll, the companions uncover a sinister threat at the ville’s heart and a bold plan to finally wipe out the last remnants of humankind.

Ryan Cawdor has been narrowly rescued from a harrowing, uncontrolled plummet through the maelstrom of time, only to find himself stranded in a place outside of the reality he knows, his savior not quite the man he appears to be. At the Cawdor family home of Front Royal, the companions meet Ryan’s long-lost son, who is no longer who he once was. They learn Front Royal has fallen to invaders, forces under the command of a longtime bitter enemy and constant nemesis.

Hearing a rumor that the Trader, his old teacher and friend, is still alive, Ryan and his warrior group struggle across the treacherous Texas desert to find the truth. But an enemy with a score to settle is in hot pursuit — and so is the elusive Trader. The predark city of Sonora — preserved for a century in the salt and sand of the nukescape — becomes the staging ground for a showdown between mortal enemies, where the scales of revenge and death will be balanced with brutal finality.

Emerging from a gateway into a redoubt filled with pre-Dark technology, Ryan and his band hope to unlock some of the secrets of post nuclear America. But the fortified redoubt is under the control of a half-mad former sec man hell-bent on vengeance, who orders Ryan and the others to jump-start his private war against two local barons. Under the harsh and pitiless glare of the rad-blasted desert sun, the companions fight to see another day, whatever it brings....

The South Pacific is a rad-blasted paradise, inhabited by giant mutated crustaceans and savage cannibals. The local baron rules the Marshall Islands with a despotic iron fist and a secret formula for making Deathland’s gold: gunpowder. But his true invincibility lies in his possession of stockpiles of pre-dark rapid fire missiles and a fleet of functional PT boats. Ryan Cawdor and his companions have faced off against the baron and survived. But this time there’s only one way out of these death seas — through the sec-men infested waters of the baron’s kingdom.

Transformed by the nuclear conflict of 2001, the Earth had turned into a wasteland ruled by anarchy and barbarism. Heirs to this blighted world, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior wayfarers fight for survival...and a way to restore humanity's lost promise. The preholocaust redoubts housing the dangerous and unpredictable mat-trans units are the legacy of the whitecoat scientists and their precocious knowledge. For the very few in the know, the network of redoubts serves as an escape route and transport through the bleak landscape.

Following up rumors of trouble on his old home ground, Ryan Cawdor and his band seek shelter inside the walls of what was once the largest shopping mall in the Carolinas. The baron of the concrete fortress gives them no choice but to join his sec teams. As outside invaders step up their raids on the mall, Ryan has to battle both sides for a chance to save their lives.