Showing results by author "James Axler" in All Categories

After the nuclear winter, the taint of humanity worsened in the raw blood-quest for survival. Hunger for jack and power now fuels traders and barons, who relinquish authority only through death, crushing everything in their path. Still, a handful seek a better way of life, where iron fists and ordnance are replaced by harmony, justice, and fair trade. Separated by fate and a freak storm in the shifting landscape of the Great Plains, the companions find themselves on a path of strange prophecy.

In the nuke-altered America of the 21st century, time conspires against survival, especially for a legendary group of warriors led by Ryan Cawdor. Born and bred in Deathlands, Ryan dares to unlock the secrets buried deep in the wreckage of a planet. Time may be the enemy in the daily struggle to stay alive, but perhaps it can reveal something better....

Across the flat plains of the Dakotas, an iron horse shrieks and rumbles across refurbished tracks. Inside the boxcars, Ryan Cawdor and his companions face trouble unlike any other. Jak is missing, Krysty is dying, and the train is loaded with sec men, whitecoats, and a horrifying experiment — a baron with psionic abilities using stolen children to fuel his mad dream for mind control of every living soul in Deathlands.

Survival is a dangerous enterprise in the aftermath of a nuked America. Humanity perseveres, but the Deathlands code is far simpler: Kill or be killed, live or die trying. Driven by the fires of hope, a resilient band of warriors traverse the new frontier of the future, survivors by skill and legends by reputation. The legend of the trader returns in the simmering dust bowl of the Badlands, the past calling out to armorer J. B. Dix. Her name is Eula. Young, silent, and lethal, she's part of a new trading convoy quick to invite Ryan Cawdor and his band on a journey.

Crawling out of the ruins of a nuke-shattered America, a new reality shapes an unpredictable terrain of human resilience and unabated savagery. Born and bred in Deathlands, Ryan Cawdor has seen the pulsing of its dark heart. And he understands more than most that tomorrow is certain to arrive. But to see it means surviving today — any way he can.

Post-nuclear America has changed little since the primal leveling of the 21st century. Warrior survivalists Ryan Cawdor and his band live by a code that honors the kind of absolute freedom only a raw frontier can provide. Until rumors of a wider, more prosperous world than the Deathlands thriving deep in Mexico, untouched by the nukecaust, lure them into uncharted waters....

The sulphur-teeming Gulf of Mexico is the poisoned end of the earth, but loaded cargo ships ruined by skydark lure doomie and cutthroat alike, Here, Ryan and the others glean rumors of whole cities deep in South America that survived the blast intact. But as the companions contemplate a course of action that may divide them, a new horror approaches unseen on the horizon. The Lords of Death are Mexican pirates raiding stockpiles with grim vengeance. When civilization hits rock bottom, a new stone age will emerge, with its own personal day of blood reckoning.

Using a rigid code of honor learned from pre-nukecaust fantasies and westerns, Thunder Rider is a self-styled superhero, serving up mass murder in a haze of napalm and nerve gas. Seeing his trail of destruction firsthand, Ryan Cawdor accepts a bounty from a ravaged ville to find and eliminate this vigilante. But Thunder Rider is determined to have Krysty Wroth, Ryan's lover, as his new sidekick and her abduction makes Ryan's quest deeply personal, and unleashes the vengeful fury of Cawdor and his warrior companions.

Traversing the terrain of Utah, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists find new evidence that the past is alive and dangerous — with a score to settle. Once before they'd battled and destroyed the brilliant and cunning cyborg know as Delphi, but he's reborn and ready to continue his drive for domination. And he's eager for the keys to the kingdom that only the legendary Deathlands survivors — and their secrets — can help him attain.

The endless struggle for power among the barons is a way of life in Deathlands, but Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists take no sides — unless forced to. But as the land around the Rio Grande reaches the breaking point in a bitter war, the companions are harnessed into battle, moving toward a grim confrontation with an old enemy whose secret stockpile of 21st-century nerve gas is poised to unleash infinite madness once more upon a ravaged Earth.

An earthquake in the Arkansas dust bowls leaves the companions for dead, until they are all reunited except for armorer J. B. Dix. Alive, though with no memory of the past, he is in the uncertain employ of the iron fisted ruler of a vital outpost along the routes that traverse the wastelands. Duma is the biggest, most dangerous ville in all of Deathlands, where jolt, jack, booze, and sex are worth more than human life. Stalking Duma and preparing to attack this orgy of firepower is a crazed band of inbred worshipers of Nagasaki...and their unwilling new sec force led by Ryan Cawdor.

In Deathlands, power brings more power to those able to command it by means fair or foul. Yet few among the most tyrannical barons can rival the ruthlessness of Sandra Tregart, whose despotic visions are being realized by resurrected technology: air power. With her restored biplane, she delivers death from the skies to all who defy her supremacy — a virulent ambition that challenges Ryan Cawdor and his band in unfathomable new ways.

Compassion is a luxury in a brutal land where life is cheap, but Dr. Mildred Wyeth holds fast to her physician's oath to show mercy. Now she's stricken by a plague that brings on a deep craving for human flesh. Unwilling to lose one of their own to this pervasive pestilence without a fight, the companions follow the trail to Cajun country, where the mysterious queen of the Cannies is rumored to possess the only antidote to the grim fate that awaits Mildred...and perhaps her warrior friends.

Hunted across the southwestern desert, Ryan doesn't know who wants him dead badly enough to slaughter innocents as a way of luring him into the open. But the advanced tech his pursuers are using is unknown in Deathlands, created by the most brilliant minds of 20th-century America. Now evil is alive and stalking the warrior group. His name is Delphi and he's prepared to reclaim the one man who understands with brutal certainty how time can be controlled, manipulated, remapped.

In this raw, brutal world ruled by the strongest and the most vicious, an unseen player is manipulating Ryan and his band, luring him across an unseen battle line drawn in the dust outside Tucson, Arizona. Here, a local barony becomes the staging ground for a battle unlike any other, against a foe whose ties to pre-Dark society present a new and incalculable threat to a fragile world. Ryan Cawdor is the only man living who stands between this adversary's glory...and the prize he seeks.

Weary, sick, and hungry, the group barely survives a trek through the torturous deserts of the Southwest which leads into the bayous of what was once Louisiana, a place one of their own first called home. The eerie, lifeless silence of the swamps warns of trouble ahead. But nothing can prepare them for Dr. Jean, a madman who has harnessed pre-Dark tech to create an army of crazed zombies marching toward his own twisted vision of Deathlands domination.

In the ancient canyons of New Mexico, the citizens of Little Pueblo prepare to sacrifice Ryan and his companions to demons locked inside a 20th-century dam project. But in a world where nuke-spawned predators feed upon weak and strong alike, Ryan knows avenging eternal spirits aren't a part of the game. Especially when these freaks spit yellow acid — and their creators are the white coat masterminds of genetic recombination, destroyed by their mutant offspring born of sin and science gone horribly wrong....

In the forested coastal region of the eastern seaboard, near the Pine Barrens of what was New Jersey, Ryan and his companions encounter a group of rebels. Having broken away from the strange, isolated community known as Atlantis and led by the obscene and paranoid Odyssey, this small group desires to live in peace. But in a chill-or-be-chilled world, freedom can only be won by spilled blood. Ryan and company are willing to come to the aid of these freedom fighters, ready to wage a war against the twisted tyranny that permeates Deathlands.

A cold sense of dèjá vu becomes reality as the group emerges from a gateway they'd survived before — a grim graveyard of lost friends and nightmares. The consuming need to escape the dangerous melancholy of the place forces Ryan and company onto the frozen tundra, where an even greater menace awaits. The forbidding land harbors a dying tribe — cursed members of the ancient Inuit, who seize the arrival of Ryan and his band as their last hope to appease angry gods...by offering them up as human sacrifice.

Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new Provisional US Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armored locomotive, he's poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways — as the rest of Ryan's group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough.