Forbidden Trespass. James Axler
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WEARY WANDERERS
In the war-torn wasteland known as Deathlands, desperation and destruction have replaced dreams and peace. Each day arrives with a new life-threatening challenge for wanderer Ryan Cawdor and his fellow band of survivors…
FEAST OR FAMINE
Bizarre murders are taking place in a fertile farming community, and the locals are quick to point fingers at Ryan and his companions. But they know another culprit is responsible. A colony of mutants has been driven from its underground home, forced to find sustenance in the light of day. And only human flesh will satisfy their hunger. Caught between a rock and a horde of hungry cannibals, Ryan and the companions face an ultimatum—help the cannies reclaim their territory, or risk becoming the next meal. Except something far more sinister—and ravenous—lurks beneath the lush fields…
It was all over but the fleeing
None of the group came close to Ryan’s keenly honed sense of danger, the unconscious ability to flash-sort through even the tiniest fugitive sensory inputs, to identify the pattern that added up to threat.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan saw a skinny old man, standing by the side of the road, leveling a single-action Peacemaker blaster at Ryan’s head.
But just as the one-eyed man’s sense of danger had its limitations, so did his striking-rattler reflexes. He already knew he was nuked, even as his brain sent his body the impulse to dive aside.
The ancient blaster vanished in a giant yellow muzzle-flash, which instantly echoed in a blinding red flash inside Ryan’s skull.
Then blackness. Then nothing.
Forbidden Trespass
James Axler
’Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs, and we all but food.
To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,
They belch us.
—William Shakespeare
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 pre-dark 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…
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