Showing results by author "James Axler" in All Categories

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.

The Earth is laid waste by a devastating blight that destroys the world's food supply. Mass starvation wipes out millions almost overnight. Society collapses, and those who survive must contend with renegade groups striving for naked power. A new currency comes into existence - precious food and the force of arms that helps get it at any cost.

The Amazon Basin remains a land of primordial beauty and primitive people. Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists emerge from a gateway into an abandoned US military complex, now a native shrine to the white gods of pre-blast days. Here, the group is given royal treatment, only to discover that privilege has a blood price.

Stories of the Trader and his convoy of war wagons endure in the badlands of post-holocaust America. A dealer in Deathlands' most precious commodities - weapons and fuel - Trader takes note of a young Ryan Cawdor. Surrounded in myth and rumor, Trader sets into motion the beginnings of legend at a place called Virtue Lake...At Spearpoint, the ultimate redoubt housing a valuable cache of predark technology, two opposing wills clash. Levi Shabazz intends to carve his own empire out of the vast wastelands, but the Trader intends to thwart him and end his bloody siege of power.

Caught in the vice of the mountains, J.B. and Mildred are ripped from their friends by snowmobile-riding bandits that worship violence, velocity, and their black-horned Baron. Ryan tries to mount a rescue, but against raging blizzards, drug-fueled barbarians and a fracture in his own ranks, progress is frozen in its tracks.

Still working on securing the partnership with Grace Milligan for her fuel refinery while in Fairzie, Trader and Marsh cross paths with a scouting party that has followed stories about a fuel source. That’s only the tip of the spear. That scouting party has been sent by Ironhand Jackson, the boss of El Dorado. In El Dorado, Ant, a woman who works as an enforcer for Hoyt Lynch, the self-made lord of Boardwalk, arrives to kill Jackson. Lynch has learned of the fuel refinery’s existence and desperately needs it because his own fuel reserves are running 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.

In the aftermath of the apocalypse, little remains except age-old evils of greed, perversion, and force. But a small group of survivalists cherishes the legacy of human courage and hope. Led by the charismatic Ryan Cawdor, they persevere in a brutal world through warrior skills and a bold desire to regain the promised future. The fertile bayous teem with mutant life-forms and altered species. Off on a trek with his son, Ryan fends off the dangers from marauders and Nature's traps, but also finds signs of hope for humanity's new future.

Resources are scarce in the Deathlands, but the mega-cemetery of Oregon holds the treasures and trinkets of three million corpses killed in the nukecaust. Stumbling into warring parties of graverobbers, Ryan Cawdor and his companions fall in with an old ally of J.B. Dix who offers an attractive promise of unlimited ammunition for their services. But the graves hold other secrets that could spell the annihilation of the human race unless their excavation is halted.

Ruled by a perverse and malevolent Nature, roamed by lawless remnants of humanity, the Deathlands is what's left of the continental US after a nuclear apocalypse unleashed hell on Earth. Here, only a few can survive and still retain hope for the future and of these, none are more determined than the exiled son of a coastal baron and his closely knit band of warrior survivalists. The years of struggle in the new reality made Ryan Cawdor a bold and undisputed leader, but now he may have to contend with his former mentor, the enigmatic Trader.

The warrior survivalists are reluctant guests in a reactivated 20th-century medical institute in Maine. Here, scientists still pursue their abstract theories, oblivious to the realities of a world gone mad. But when they take an unhealthy interest in Krysty Wroth, the pressure is on to find a way out of this guarded enclave.

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.

After the events of Deathlands 131: Freak Pharm and the overthrow of the corrupt pseudo-medical theocracy there, Ryan Cawdor, Krysty Wroth, and their fellow companions had decided that the recovering community of Bomville would likely be the safest place to prepare for the eventual birth of Krysty’s child, rather than venturing out yet again into the unknown. Otherworldly circumstances soon convince Ryan and Krysty that the opposite is true.

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.

In the epic conclusion to the Cornerstone saga, the sinister forces at work in the troubled ville grow insidiously stronger, and Ryan Cawdor is the only one with first-hand knowledge of the true enemy. However, he’s trapped outside the ville, wanted for murder, and, with a hijacked Cornerstone mission team, must return to the redoubt where he and Jak Lauren nearly died, in hopes of finding the means to defeat the monster in Cornerstone’s midst.

Cornerstone is a ville like no other that Ryan Cawdor and his companions have ever encountered. Hoping to find medical treatment for wounds sustained combating Magus and his creations, especially Ryan’s own debilitating injury, they have been brought to Cornerstone by their new friends, a relationship forged from those same battles. The ville appears to be a prosperous bastion of civilization, sheltered from the savagery of the Deathlands by virtue of the community’s relationship with an extraordinary manifestation of the will of Gaia.

Near what was once the Pacific northwest, Ryan Cawdor and his roving band of post-holocaust survivors discover a beautiful valley untouched by the nuclear blast that changed the earth forever. Resisting the temptation to settle in that idyllic land, the group is captured and forced deep beneath an extinct volcano to an isolated community of in-bred scientists. These psychopathic descendants of a 20th century government research team are blindly laboring to find better ways of genocide, unaware that the world they are striving to slaughter has already died.

J.B. Dix takes several arrows before his team manages to extricate themselves, and, while the wounds themselves are not fatal, Dr. Mildred Wyeth worries with good reason that the arrows may have been tainted. J.B. soon shows symptoms of a deadly infection. Their best chance is a journey of several days to where there had once been a hospital when Mildred trained there a century earlier, in the desperate hope of finding the drugs that J.B. needs to survive.

Having narrowly escaped with their lives from the redoubt near Cornerstone, the Deathlands survivors known as the Companions arrive via mat-trans at a destination they presume to be North Dakota, if the mysterious codes given them while in Cornerstone are accurate. That assumption is soon put in doubt as they discover a devastated city covered in continual ashfall, a sky perpetually obscured by black clouds illuminated only by sporadic lightning. The former metropolis is not deserted, however, but densely populated with ravening hordes of barely human creatures.

Survival is an endless battle in the dark age of post-holocaust America, but even amid the ashes of the past, new pockets of civilization emerge, fledgeling communities bound by savage rules. Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior-survivalists are transported from one Valley of the Shadow of Death to another, shaken by the mind-bending effects of the mat-trans, emerging at last into a promised land whose inhabitants are healthy and young.