Gaia’s Demise
Gaia’s Demise
#47 in the Deathland series
James Axler
…for when all the strong elements, military and feudal, were unhinged, mighty forces became adrift, and the void was open. And after a pause, into the void strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatred that has ever corroded the human heart. The door of opportunity was open, the dreadful time was at hand, and God help us, it was all about to begin once more…
—Sir Winston Churchill,
The Hinge of Fate, 1938
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…
Prologue
A hundred years ago, a rain of nuclear bombs obliterated civilization in a few minutes of blazing horror. It was the end of the world. Doomsday. Skydark.
The great cities were gone in a blinding flash, replaced by bomb craters whose deadly glow illuminated the nighttime sky. Mountains rose and fell, valleys slammed shut and lakes boiled under the atomic bombardment, permanently altering the topography of North America. Burning clouds of isotopes and poisons filled the sky in an endless, raging hurricane, and acid rain pounded the lush farmland and forests of the continent into sterile desert.
With the first nuclear explosion, the tissue-thin tapestry of civilization was ripped apart. The rule of law was replaced overnight with the somber, draconian edict of survival of the fittest. Cannibals hunted prey, cold-hearts brutally raided farms and slavers seized anybody they could as chattel. Plus, lost in the wilds of the new world were functioning predark war machines. Shielded against the onslaught of the atomic holocaust, the computer-operated juggernauts were patiently waiting to continue a war that was long finished, and death was almost always the reward for the person who foolishly awoke one of the terrible sleeping giants.
In crumbling ruins, ragged people fought to the death over a dented can of food or a single precious bullet.
Any type of gun was more valuable than gold, defense against the horrible swarms of muties, twisted abominations that arose from the nuke craters and feasted on the flesh of humanity.
Slowly, over the long decades, civilization of a sort was returning to the world. Crude walled cities were rising from the ashes of the past. The populations of these villes were ruthlessly governed by self-appointed barons, each ruler backed by a private army of brutal sec men. Whips and chains kept the people inside, while barbed wire and blasters kept the muties out.
Electricity was seldom seen, starvation universal, rape a daily event, death the only known means of escape. This was America in the late twenty-first century. Welcome to the Deathlands.