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      I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.

      —The Holy Bible,

       Book of Daniel

      THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

      This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

      There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

      But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

      Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

      Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

      J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

      Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

      Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

      Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

      Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

      In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Prologue

      When a mosquito speared Okie Moore right between the eyes, he deftly squashed it against his forehead. Blood from the bug’s crushed abdomen trickled in a cool bead down the side of his nose. He wiped it across his cheek with the back of his hand, smearing a fresh daub of red into the impasto of squashed bodies, legs, wings—tiny gobs of black mush trapped in the hairs of his beard. A cloud of bugs wheeled around his head; mosquitos broke formation and dive-bombed him in waves, trying to get at his earlobes, but they were protected by his greasy, shoulder-length hair.

      Okie ignored the shrill, singsong whine and concentrated on the Fire Talker’s rapid flow of words and exaggerated gestures. They were the evening’s featured entertainment. The young ’uns squatting in the sand next to him moved a dozen steps to the right, into the shifting river of smoke that poured off the communal bonfire—the skeeter No Fly Zone.

      The air this particular evening was heavy with bugs and moisture, that and the smothering heat made deep breathing difficult. Circled around the campfire were more than two hundred filthy people in brand-new, matching clothing. The men, women and older children wore baggy, gaudy Hawaiian-style shirts and shorts, still creased from the packaging, and gleaming white high-top basketball shoes. The toe boxes of the women’s and kids’ shoes were crammed with rags to make them fit. They looked like a band of homeless who had just looted a Wal-Mart summer clearance sale, or a gathering of Jimmy Buffett impersonators.

      These Deathlanders weren’t homeless, though, and they weren’t defenseless. Well-oiled AKMs, semi-auto pistols, slide-action shotguns and heavy machine guns all stood close to hand, shoulder slung or holstered, or tripod swivel-mounted to spray 180 degrees of water approach with predark alloys of lead.

      The price of sitting on a gold mine was eternal vigilance.

      And the gold mine in question was above ground and visible for miles in all directions.

      In the furious aftermath of Armageddon, the Yoko Maru, a container ship loaded with substandard, U.S. market-reject merchandise bound for Brazil, had been driven high and dry onto the shoal of Padre Island. The narrow slip of Padre, once two hundred miles long, had been crosscut by category 7 storms into a chain of hundreds of smaller landmasses and barely submerged sandy reefs. The little landmass that Okie and his clan shared with the Yoko Maru stood directly opposite the entrance to Corpus Christi Bay, which had expanded to drown the low-lying Texas port community of the same name. Tidal waves had swept away the pillars and roadway of JFK Causeway Bridge that once connected Padre to the mainland. Postnukecaust, the only access to the island was by boat.

      “And then the Vikings jumped in their time dilator and took their war to Mars,” the Fire Talker announced with a dramatic, skyward sweep of his