Showing results by narrator "Zeke Alton" in All Categories

With Apaches on the prod, ex-cavalry sergeant Sean Keegan, bounty hunter Jed Breen, and ex-Texas Ranger Matt McCulloch take shelter in a West Texas way station — along with a hot-as-a-pistol female bound for the gallows, a spiteful newspaper editor, and a coward with $50,000 who promises them five grand if they’ll deliver his blood-soaked stash to his wife.

They call her the Ghost of Dunhill Cemetery, but most people think “the Cemetery Girl” is just a story. In some ways, that’s true. Her chosen name is Calexa Rose Dunhill, but she doesn’t know her real name. When she first arrived here, all she knew was that someone had tried to murder her, dumped her body, and left her for dead. Calexa has been hiding out, afraid to seek out her true identity in fear that her would-be murderer would find her and finish the job. And someone is searching for her...a man who holds the key that will unlock the secrets of Calexa’s past.

Trapped in the Outlanders era, a century in their own future, Ryan Cawdor and his survivalist companions encounter the Cerberus rebels when both groups are at their lowest ebb. But, unknown to them, they are standing on Site Zero, a critical experimental zone for the sinister Millennial Consortium, traders who specialize in scientific technology. The Consortium’s mysterious director intends to explore these time travelers in unimaginable ways to ensure his mastery of the new world.

In Texas’s Big Bend country, every man has a price. For crime lord Harry Holland and his ruthless gang of cutthroats, that price is $20,000—a ransom demand for the kidnapped daughter of a retired Army colonel. So far, neither the Army, the Rangers, nor bounty hunters have been able to penetrate Holland’s guarded fortress. In desperation, the colonel turns to the Jackals. As a longtime friend, retired cavalry sergeant Sean Keegan is determined to bring the man’s daughter back alive—with or without the ransom money—but first he needs to convince his partners.

In a North American British province, a group of Norweigan settlers have carved a life for themselves in a lakeshore village called Skarkavik. Hunters and fishermen, they raise their families in peace under the natural cover of the surrounding forest. Decker Galloway believes the land’s natural resources are being wasted on the few when so many have a greater need. Having made his fortune logging the wilderness of the eastern provinces, he wants to turn his axes and saws loose on the untouched western region. And no villagers are going to stand in his way.

Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past.

It starts as a happy reunion between Preacher and his fellow trappers in a peaceful Indian village. But it ends swiftly in death and destruction when a rival tribe attacks the village, slaughters some of Preacher’s Crow and mountain man friends, and carries off the women and children as prisoners. Preacher was off hunting when it happened. Now he’s teaming up with old friend Lorenzo and half-breed Tall Dog, to get the prisoners back—and get revenge. But the road to justice is paved with some very dark omens. And the trail leads to the baddest place on God’s good earth.

The boundaries of order created by the nine baronies during America's apocalyptic aftermath have fallen away to a new wave of transcending chaos. The scion of the Cerberus rebels' fiercest foe has risen from his own ashes—and hijacked the very storehouse of earth's reality. The Ontic Library, buried deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, is the glue holding the fabric of what is real—and what is not—in place. Archivist Brigid Baptiste takes the plunge into the sentient data stream of infinite knowledge to stop a god prince from discovering the knowledge that could destroy the world.

Spread across post-apocalyptic North America, the nine great cities ruled by the alien-human hybrid barons have crumbled…ushering in not defeat, but a new epoch of alien rule of Earth. But their assault is threatened by a force of extraordinary humans, the Cerberus rebels, dedicated to freeing humanity from the aeons of slavery that the alien Annunaki race have placed upon it. In Louisiana, a salvaged piece of sentient spaceship signals the beginning of the long-awaited second salvo.

The drug crisis hits home for Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong when the son of her outlaw lover Cort Wesley Masters nearly dies from an opioid overdose. On top of that, she’s dealing with the inexplicable tragedy of a small Texas town where all the residents died in a single night. When Caitlin realizes that these two pursuits are intrinsically connected, she finds herself following a trail that will take her to the truth behind the crisis that claimed 75,000 lives last year. Just in time, since the same force that has taken over the opiate trade has even more deadly intentions in mind.

The mysterious and glamorous Lady De Winter is one of their most valuable agents. A despicable murder inside a locked and bolted room on the Rue Morgue in Paris is just the start. This whirlwind adventure will take Milady to the highest and lowest parts of that great city—and cause her to question the very nature of reality itself.

Years ago, a weird mask of unknown origin and limitless power was buried in the cement of an apartment building's basement floor. Edge City and its residents have all but forgotten the mysterious green-faced killer known only as "Big Head." But now, decades later, the bizarre Tex Avery-style killings are happening all over again and are on a collision course with a bizarre political campaign where a homicidal maniac wants to "Make America Green Again"!

The militant Warriors of the Cross, have come to Shadows Fall to capture and wrest control of the legendary Forever Door from Old Father Time and a town they see as being filled by sinners, witches, and demons. James Hart makes a startling discovery about his grandfather. And Mayor Rhea Frazier and the revenant Leonard Ash renew their relationship, after his return from the dead.

Joe Human is taken to a harsh POW camp on a distant planet where he will be examined, tortured, and forced to endure experiments that rip into his very mind, as the alien Krael seek to answer the question: What is human? A question that, in their hellish situation, the prisoners are finding harder to answer.

Part 2 of 2: Modesitt moves deep into Recluce's past to chronicle the founding of the Empire of the Legend, the almost mythological domain ruled by women warriors on the highland plateau of the continent of Candar. He tells the story from the point of view of Nylan, the engineer and builder whose job it is to raise a great tower on the plateau known as the Roof of the World. Here the exiled women warriors will live and survive to fulfill their destiny.

The oligarchy of Overlords battling to resurrect alien rule on Earth remains ever threatened by a group of rebels determined to meet the ancient Sumerian enemies with a show of force. While glimmers of containment, if not victory, have appeared, humanity still inhabits a world where buried secrets and impossible truths lie coiled in the shadows....

Earth remains the volatile prize of aeons of war and domination by two panterrestrial races. Returning the fight to these inhuman overlords, the Cerberus rebels are the champions of the planet's postapocalyptic dark ages. They spark a uniquely human resilience and courage to stand down the forces of infinitely powerful, perhaps unstoppable entities in the ongoing war to retake Earth for humanity.

Several baronies have disappeared, as if swallowed by the Earth. Strange disturbances lead Kane and the others to a giant sinkhole in a remote and wild area of Mexico, where reality merges with an ancient culture of sorcery. Here, a beautiful, mysterious guerilla leader wages war against a terrifying army of demons spiriting humans into the subterranean netherworld. Joining the fight, the Cerberus rebels invade the cavernous chambers of a hidden world, and confront a self-styled warlord using predark nuclear tech to rule the depths of the planet.

Fleeing from the growing sinkhole that was once the Glory mines, Ryan Cawdor and his companions struggle to make their way east to Ryan’s home of Front Royal as a safe haven for delivering Krysty’s child. Along the way, they are welcomed into a Deathlands community based on the structure and devolved traditions of a 20th century Iowa State prison. One of the bizarre customs that has evolved is the tallying of victorious acts of violence as a way of achieving dominance. Through a misunderstanding, Doc Tanner is believed to have achieved 246 of such acts.

Following the events of Deathlands 133: Grim Choices, Ryan Cawdor and his companions find themselves far from their intended destination of the surviving redoubt on the outskirts of what once was the capital of a mighty nation. The gateway they’ve arrived through has planted them in the geographic middle of the Deathlands, and they soon find themselves in a violent struggle between multiple warring factions for the spoils of a legendary stockpile, buried in a former military installation somewhere in the region.