Literature Dramatized

Denver offers a glimpse of that very hope — a power plant, electricity, food, and freedom. But the city is caught in a civil war between two would-be leaders and their civilian armies. Challenged by both sides to do their bidding, Ryan discovers a third player in the quest to control the mile-high city — a secret enclave of White Coats with the strength and technology to pursue a twisted agenda of their own.

Dewey “Mac” McKenzie is wanted for a killing he didn’t commit. He saved his hide once by signing on as a cattle drive chuckwagon cook and bolting the territories. Turned out Mac was as good at fixing vittles as he was at dodging bullets. But Mac’s enemies are hungry for more — and they’ve hired a gang of ruthless killers to turn up the heat....

Sometimes when a man’s luck turns, it turns hard. Bo Creel and Scratch Morton are experienced drifters, but now the two trail pards are down to their last dime. So they accept the best job they can get, serving as deputies in a boomtown called Mankiller. Their boss is a drunken sheriff named Biscuits O'Brien, who would rather drink than work. Their tin stars are mighty pretty, but the job starts to get serious quickly, and soon the newly-minted lawmen are standing between a cunning clan of killers and the town's desperate citizens.

The sun is setting on humanity. The night now belongs to voracious demons that prey upon a dwindling population forced to cower behind half-forgotten symbols of power. Legends tell of a Deliverer: a general who once bound all mankind into a single force that defeated the demons. But is the return of the Deliverer just another myth? Perhaps not. Out of the desert rides Ahmann Jardir, who has forged the desert tribes into a demon-killing army. He has proclaimed himself Shar’Dama Ka, the Deliverer and he carries ancient weapons - a spear and a crown - that give credence to his claim.

Of all the resources Ryan Cawdor and his group struggle to recoup, hope for escaping the grim daily life-and-death struggle has suffered most. But now reports of a ville holding the mythical waters of rejuvenation, a fountain of youth, appear to be true, luring Doc and the others on a journey inspired by promise, tainted by mistrust. Hiring on as sec men with a convoy headed to the healing waters of Babyville, the survivors discover the deadly price of immortality.

It's a perilous world after the fiery apocalypse of World War III, and John Thomas Rourke — ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer, weapons specialist, and survival expert — pursues his arch-enemy Vladmir Karamatsov into the strife-torn, blackened wilderness of mainland China and a rendezvous with certain death. Karamatsov, bent on the destruction of the entire world, is determined to seize control of the vast Communist Chinese nuclear arsenal that survived the hell-fire destruction of the Night of The War.

When a farmer's wife is murdered, an innocent man is accused: Patrick O'Brien. The book-loving brother had shared his love of literature with the woman, but her husband claims she spurned Pat's advances and that's why he killed her. Now it looks like Patrick will swing from the gallows - especially after his lawyer is targeted, too.

In what was once the nuclear testing ground of the pre-dark world, the Marshall Islands are now the kingdom of the grotesque lord Baron Kinnison. Here in this world of slavery and brutality, the companions have fought a fierce war for survival, on land and sea — yet the crafty baron still conspires to destroy these interlopers. Activating a 20th century hot air balloon left untouched by the blast, they escape to the neighboring pirate ruled forbidden island, with the Baron and his sec men in hot pursuit — and become trapped in a war for total supremacy on this water world.

Malcolm Theodore Puddle is a 21-year shipping clerk — from way back East. What is he doing out here? The Mountain Man’s former neighbor, Humbolt Puddle, has died and left his crumbling 600-acre ranch to his only living heir, just as a greedy and ruthless cattle baron is circling the Humbolt ranch like a ravenous vulture. Poor, unsuspecting Puddle is walking into a death trap. Smoke is the not the pitying kind. But any enemy of Smoke’s neighbor is his enemy, too.

Here in America, life is full of surprises. Duff never expected to hear from his old friend Charles McGregor, his battalion commander from the Black Watch Regiment of Her Majesty’s army. Turns out McGregor lives in New Mexico now. And he needs Duff’s help. He’s started a new life as the mayor of Antelope Wells - a mining town that’s being targeted by a power-hungry madman Ebenezer Schofield, who wants to declare the whole area an independent principality - and himself as king.

They just wanted to get home for Christmas...but fate had other plans. It's December 1890. A Texas rancher named Big Jim Conyers has a deal with Scottish-born, Wyoming cattleman named Duff MacCallister. Along with Smoke and Matt Jensen, the party bears down on Dodge, Kansas, to make a cattle drive back to Forth Worth. But before they can get out of Dodge, guns go off and a rich man's son is killed.

The brutality of post-nuclear America has spawned a dark frontier where the harsh and unforgiving new rules of existence cannot obliterate the decency and determination that drive the true human spirit. It's tested and tormented but never destroyed. A lust for power and a strong sec-force are the basic requirements of any Deathlands baron. But brilliant, charismatic Baron Eugene Arcadian has bigger visions than simply a monopoly on jack and trade. He wants the future.

A visionary has a dream: to drive a railroad across the North American continent and through the vast Canadian Rockies. A thousand miles of rugged land stand in the way. So do hostile Indian tribes and outlaws who the see the railroad - and the men building it - as easy prey. But the project has a guardian angel of its own...Smoke Jensen. Smoke knows that this is one job he can’t do himself, so he heads to Canada with some hard-fighting mountain men from the Colorado Rockies at his side. By the time the railroad passes through Vancouver, Smoke needs every gun he can get.

Preacher, against his better judgment, agrees to lead a wagon train of women across the West. He hires a pack of mountain men to assist him, but he gets more than he bargained for when a gang of cutthroats follows the train with murder, rape and slave trafficking in mind. Led by the nefarious Easterner Victor Bedell, the outlaws will accomplish what few have done before: they will get a bullet into Preacher. But they’ll make a fatal mistake. They’ll leave him for dead. Soon the mountains will echo with avenging gunfire.

Having taken a job shotgunning a stage coach, Yakima gets tangled in corrupt town where theft, lies and murder dog him at every turn. The deeper he gets involved with the townsfolk, the harder he struggles to make things “right,” Each choice making things more dangerous and deadly.

Looking for respite after a bitter struggle in Kentucky's Hazard ville, the wayfarers must make do with Arctic tundra and earthquakes. Trapped in the hostile landscape by a mattrans jump, Ryan and companions find the ultimate challenge to their will to survive. The odds dwindle when they become the new bounty in a struggle for dominance between a group of Neanderthals and descendants of a military garrison stranded generations ago.

The South Pacific is a rad-blasted paradise, inhabited by giant mutated crustaceans and savage cannibals. The local baron rules the Marshall Islands with a despotic iron fist and a secret formula for making Deathland’s gold: gunpowder. But his true invincibility lies in his possession of stockpiles of pre-dark rapid fire missiles and a fleet of functional PT boats. Ryan Cawdor and his companions have faced off against the baron and survived. But this time there’s only one way out of these death seas — through the sec-men infested waters of the baron’s kingdom.

The Krakau came to Earth to invite humanity into a growing alliance of sentient species. However, they happened to arrive after a mutated plague wiped out half the planet, turned the rest into shambling, near-unstoppable animals, and basically destroyed human civilization. You know - your standard apocalypse. The Krakau’s first impulse was to turn around and go home. (After all, it’s hard to have diplomatic relations with mindless savages who eat your diplomats.) Their second impulse was to try to fix us.

Necromance-for-hire Dante Valentine is choosy about her jobs. Hot-tempered and with nerves of steel, she can raise the dead like nobody’s business. But one rainy Monday morning, everything goes straight to Hell. The Devil hires Dante to eliminate a renegade demon: Vardimal Santino. In return, he will let her live. It’s an offer she can’t refuse. There’s just one catch. How do you kill something that can’t die?

Following the events of Deathlands 133: Grim Choices, Ryan Cawdor and his companions find themselves far from their intended destination of the surviving redoubt on the outskirts of what once was the capital of a mighty nation. The gateway they’ve arrived through has planted them in the geographic middle of the Deathlands, and they soon find themselves in a violent struggle between multiple warring factions for the spoils of a legendary stockpile, buried in a former military installation somewhere in the region.