Doom Helix
James Axler
Devastation from the nukewar shattered civilization and left a planet both primitive and ripe for rebirth–or retaking. While the balance of power has fallen to avaricious, amoral barons, a handful of humanity still holds hope of a future worth fighting for or dying to defend.If a better life inside the hellground exists, Ryan Cawdor and his friends will find it.The Deathlands feudal system may be hell on earth but it must be protected from invaders from Shadow Earth, a parallel world stripped clean of its resources by the ruling conglomerate and its white coats. Ryan and his band had a near-fatal encounter with these genetically enhanced aggressors and their advanced weaponry and wags once before. Only a fatal chink in enemy armor saved planet Earth from plunder. Now, these superhuman predators are back, ready to topple the hellscape's baronies one by one.
The companions really didn’t have a choice
“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan asked, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”
The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.
“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what Big Mike said, they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup.
“It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are, and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”
After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”
“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”
Doom Helix
Death Lands
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been.
—John H. Reagan
1881–1905
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