Hell Road Warriors. James Axler
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FUTURE SPOILS
The human will to survive has sharpened to a knife edge after a century of postnuclear madness. In a lawless land where firepower and savagery rule, power lies with the barons and coldhearts who wield control through terror. Against all odds, a courageous few still fight for something better to live by—honor, decency and hope.
CHILL FACTOR
Emerging relatively unscathed from the apocalyptic rebirth of North America, Canada hides a trove of Cold War–era secret government installations known as Diefenbunkers, filled with caches of weapons, wags and food. Ryan Cawdor and his companions agree to ride sec for a convoy headed west across the remnants of the old Trans-Canada Highway to retrieve the ultimate prize: four portable nuclear reactors. It’s enough power to light up a ville for years, a bright beacon for a new tomorrow. But they have death on their tail, a baron and his sec men who will stop at nothing to claim the prize as their own.
In the Deathlands, the road to hell is a one-way ride...
The boar’s eyes burst as horror pushed through its pupils
The thumb-thick worms in its eye sockets waved like feelers and stiffened like pointers at Doc. The boar’s head swiveled in response, its tusks rasping against each other as its mouth fell open and its tongue lolled out, accompanied by an orgy of wiggling filth.
“By my stars and garters!” Doc exclaimed.
Ryan fired three 9 mm rounds through the dead boar’s head. Its skull broke apart, spewing broken lengths of black worm. The porcine behemoth staggered, but didn’t fall. Fresh worms waved forth from the shattered head and snout as if tasting the air. The corpse tottered toward the humans.
The entire fifty-strong herd of giant, newly dead mutie wild boars began to roll over and rise up.
“Fireblast…” Ryan breathed.
Hell Road Warriors
James Axler
The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.
—Norman Cousins
1915–1990
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
Chapter One
Ryan shouldered his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster and put his hand on the lever to open the mat-trans chamber. His companions had cleaned themselves up from the jump, and everyone was geared up and ready to go except Doc, who was coming down from his postjump