Prologue

      On a brisk January afternoon, the United States of America disappeared in a thundering microsecond of nuclear fire.

      Within a heartbeat, the governments of the world were gone, scattered to the searing radioactive winds. Every major city was reduced to glowing ruins under rumbling mushroom clouds, while tidal waves of boiling water swept along the coastlines of the continents. Mountains rose and fell, lakes were burned dry, volcanoes erupted at random and titanic earthquakes racked the landscape, shattering bridges and dams and changing the shape of the planet forever. In New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, millions perished in screaming agony before most people even realized what was happening. It was the end of civilization.

      When the firestorms finally ceased, and the quakes calmed to gentle rumblings beneath the broken streets, the few survivors stumbled from the ruins of their homes only to discover that the telephones, radios, computers, automobiles and trucks that they depended upon were now useless lumps of plastic and steel. Advanced technology was gone. Glowing craters dotted the landscape, creating deadly deserts where once proudly stood thick forests, cool lakes and rich green fields.

      The sky was dark for decades, the endless thunder and lightning heralding the deadly storms of acid rain, torrents of pollution that stripped the flesh off a body in only minutes. Humanity learned to hide from the lethal downpours, but then hordes of mutants rose from the radioactive craters, shambling creatures in every shape imaginable.

      Dressed in rags, thousands fled the blackened ruins of the cities, hoping for a better life in the wilds. But the rad-blasted earth would not grow crops, and the scattered clean areas were viciously fought over. Crude cities—often surrounded by high walls—were built from the twisted scrap of the predark world to protect the patches of clean earth and to keep out the slavering muties. Safe behind the ramshackle walls, a primitive form of civilization started to evolve. However, these barbarous enclaves were brutally ruled by self-proclaimed barons and their private armies of sec men who walked the thick defensive walls. In any ville, to disobey a command from a baron meant instant death.

      Hideous new diseases, savage cannibals, muties, slavers, acid rain, rad pits, that was America in the twenty-second century.

      Welcome to the Deathlands.

      Yet amid the madness and death, a handful of fighters roamed the cursed earth of North America. These companions were led by Ryan Cawdor, the son of a baron.

      Endlessly searching for some section of the world where they could live in peace, the companions traveled incredible distances in relative safety because they had access to the greatest scientific secret of the predark world. Buried deep underground were huge military bases called redoubts. Nuke-proof, these fortified bunkers were powered by fusion generators and were safe havens of fresh air, electric lights and clean water, their vanadium-steel doors resistant to any conceivable attack. Designed to house hundreds of soldiers, the secret bases had originally been stocked with megatons of food, medical supplies, clothing and weapons. But sometime soon after skydark, the troops disappeared, taking almost all of the supplies with them, leaving only the occasional MRE food pack or stray box of ammo for the companions to salvage. A pair of boots here, a can of oil there, yet these precious items gave them the necessary edge to stay alive in the Deathlands.

      Even more amazing than the redoubts themselves were the mat-trans units. These incredible machines were somehow able to shift objects from one redoubt to another in only seconds, no matter how distant the second redoubt. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to precisely control a mat-trans “jump” had been lost, so the friends had to make a blind jump into the unknown. Usually, it was only to an empty redoubt, once to an Alaskan redoubt full of weapons and food, and sometimes to a bunker full of muties that had forcibly penetrated the defensives of the underground base.

      Arriving at a hand-built gateway, Ryan and the others found themselves trapped in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, one of which was the infamous Bikini Atoll, ground zero for dozens of nuclear bomb tests. The companions also arrived in the middle of a revolt against Lord Baron Kinnison, a disease-ridden drug addict who ruled the tiny villes of the rad-blasted islands with an iron fist.

      With muties everywhere, the companions raced to regain the damaged gateway and escape, but were ambushed and blown off the side of a mountain to plummet helplessly into the cold sea….