Showing results by author "James Axler" in All Categories

On a crisp January day, a presidential inauguration day, a one-megaton blast ripped through the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. Subsequent explosions around the globe changed the face and the shape of the earth forever. Out of the ruins emerged Deathlands, a world that conspired against survival. In the blasted heart of the new America, a group of men and women plan desperately to escape the eerie wastes and mutated life forms of their nuclear hell.

America had barely survived the nuclear holocaust, but two centuries later a new order emerges to inflict its rule on the fortified cities. Beyond the walls are the outlands, where a fragile freedom remains. Once a fearsome warrior of the new order, Kane discovers a secret that has damned humanity since the dawn of history. Now banished as an enemy of the state, he joins forces with Brigid Baptiste, keeper of the archives, and Grant, brother-in-arms and innovative weapons specialist.

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.

His new world born out of the fire and ashes of a nuclear exchange, a rogue warrior searches for ways to undo the past. With brother-in-arms Grant and the archivist Brigid Baptist, he dares to seek out the secrets of time.... Kane and his fellow exiles are thrown into a reality where the nukecaust didn't happen — instead, the inhabitants had driven the enemy from the planet. But now the dark forces are back for a final confrontation in a war that may bring the ultimate freedom or final destruction.

As magistrate-turned-rebel Kane, fellow warrior Grant and archivist Brigid Baptiste face uncertainty in their own ranks, an ancient foe resurfaces in the company of Viking warriors - harnessing ancient prophecies of Ragnarok, the final conflict of fire and ice, to bring his own mad vision of a new apocalypse. To save what's left of the future, Kane's new battlefield is the kingdom of Antarctica, where legend and lore have taken on mythic and deadly proportions.

The world blew out in 2001. Vast areas of what was the United States lie beneath an unbrella of noxious dust and radioactive debris, a mantle of destruction drawn over a land of doom. Much of the East Coast has been oliterated; the Southwest is a land of fire; cities of smoldering ash have give birth to horrifically mutated life forms. Such is the Deathlands, legacy of global annihiliation.

Two centuries after skydark, the oligarchy of the nine barons who have governed nuke-ravenged America endures - yet their control as plenipotentiaries of earth's first nonhuman inheritors rapidly diminishes. For as the myth that shrouds the planet's secret rulers is exposed by a handful of scientists and warriors dedicated to freeing humanity from the eternal yoke of slavery, the truth becomes more deadly....

A former enforcer of the baronial police, Kane, with fellow renegade Grant and archivist Brigid Baptiste, discover a new gateway in Central America — one that could lead them deeper into the conspiracy that has doomed Earth. Traversing a new Caribbean sea ruled by mutant creatures and ruthless pirates, they encounter a most unusual baron struggling to control the vast oil resources of the region. Uncertain if this charismatic leader is friend or foe, Kane is lured into a search for an ancient relic of mythic proportions that may promise a better future.

Eight Generations after the atomic mega-cull, a shattered world still struggles to heal itself. The iron-fisted rule of the nine baronies is compromised by an intrepid group of warriors who have uncovered secrets as dark as they are damning. For nothing in the history of humankind is what it seems. Reality is obscured by the grim impermanence of power...and deceit. All that remains is the human spirit's enduring will to survive.

As the ruling oligarchy of nine barons rebuilds what was once the United States after an internecine war for power, a mysterious entity is attempting to impose a dark destiny on Earth. Kane and Grant, once part of the brutal police machine of a feudalistic order, are now leaders in a rebellion by those who once served the malevolent imposers. But the tides of battle turn once more with the discovery of a functional pre-dark moon base, whose human defenders are all that stand between Earth and its obliteration.

When the world blew out in 2001, the secrets locked in its darkest corridors became the answer to humanity's survival. Now, more than two centuries later, a mysterious Imperator prepares to seize his birthright from the nine hybrid barons fighting each other for domination of the planet. All that stands between freedom and extinction is a renegade force of exiles who are prepared to challenge the ancient warring entities thrusting mankind into a horrifying future....

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.

An ambush by a roving group of mutant Stickies puts Ryan and Krysty Wroth in the clutches of a tyrant who plans a human sacrifice as a symbol of his power. The execution is set to take place at the new moon — one night away. Ryan devises an escape plan but is betrayed by another prisoner. As they break for freedom, the Stickie leader unleashes a team of hunter-trackers among the maze of narrow canyons of the Southwest. For Ryan and Krysty, there's nowhere left to run....

Ryan travels to the snowy wastes north of the 49th parallel to rescue his young son, enslaved in a mining colony. In this forbidding landscape, one of Ryan's oldest enemies lies in wait, orchestrating a deadly finale to their private war. In the biting cold, Ryan must battle a legion of hunter androids designed to track and kill any intruders with ruthless ingenuity. But for Ryan Cawdor, the need to save his son is greater than any threat the one-eyed warrior may encounter.

The fate of humanity remains ever uncertain, dictated by the obscure forces that have commandeered mankind’s destiny for thousands of years. The plenipotentiaries of these ancient oppressors - the nine barons who have controlled America in the 200 years since the nukecaust - are now falling prey to their own rabid desire for power. Their imposed doom is aided by a handful of intrepid men and women in a bitter fight to destroy the self-proclaimed new humans and deliver humanity from the yoke of the interminable slavery....

Kane finds himself 25 years into a parallel future, a world where the mysterious Imprator has seemingly restored civilization to America, overthrowing the baronial oligarchy — with the help of the Cerberus exiles. In this alternate reality, only Kane and Grant survived the battle and its spilled blood has left them estranged. Yet Kane is certain that somewhere in time lies a different path to tomorrow's reality...and his obsession may be humanity's last chance to battle evil in two worlds — the past and the future — where a sinister madman controls the heart of the world.

The mysterious barons — either hybrids of another race or genetic evolution gone mad — are dying. Kane, once a keeper of law and order in the new America, is part of the driving machine to return power to the true inheritors of the Earth. California is the opening salvo in one baron's savage quest for immortality—and a fateful act of defiance against earth's dangerous oppressors. Yet their sanctity is grimly uncertain as an unseen force arrives for a final confrontation with those who seek to rule, or reclaim, planet Earth.

The Nukecaust radically altered the face of the globe and even the secret malevolent architects of mankind's history could not predict the will of the human spirit to survive - and to rebel. As Earth's destiny remains pawn to sinister forces not of this world, an underground resistance movement is fighting back against the ruling barons and their hidden masters. Kane, once an enforcer of the evil he now seeks to destroy, is joined by his compatriots in a brutal, covert war to reclaim the future for its rightful owners.

The brutal struggle for power in post-nuclear America continues for the nine barons who rule the new world order. These emissaries of a long lost race are facing extinction from within their own ranks and from the rebel forces fighting to reclaim earth and expose the horrifying truth of mankind’s heritage. Computer programs from the world before the Skydark are being salvaged and use to power the cities and villes of the 22nd century. An enforcer turned renegade, Kane and his group learn of a mother load of tech hidden deep within the ocean of the western territories.

Torn between swearing allegiance to the mysterious imperator and maintaining control of their individual territories, the barons are vulnerable. Imprisoned in Cobalt's Area 51 stronghold, Kane, once a soldier of the ruling elite, is aided by rebel forces who fear future genocide for both human and hybrid alike. As the baronies factionalize, Kane and his compatriots must choose sides in a war that is about to shift the paradigm of power and deal human destiny a terrifying new twist....