James Axler - Sunchild

“The question remains unanswered. Is there any of the poisonous old tech still on the premises, the rancid remnants of a bygone and perhaps best forgotten age? Some relic of that pernicious evil known as the Totality Concept?”

Doc hadn’t idly brought up the name of the Totality Concept. He had spoken the name in the hopes of eliciting some kind of reaction.

The baron hadn’t recognized the name at all, and had seemed genuine in his bemusement at the use of the term. But then, Doc hadn’t been watching the baron. His eyes had been kept firmly on Jenna, and he had seen her sharp features harden as the words were spoken. The raven eyes had fixed on him, met his full on and tried to fathom his intent.

There was old tech here. Old tech related to secret government projects of the past. And maybe there was something that would link this ville to the main body of the Illuminated Ones, and the place in the North they were searching for.

Pilgrimage to Hell

Red Holocaust

Neutron Solstice

Crater Lake

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

James Axler

…there have always been secrets, and there has always been power. It’s just that some of it has been out in the open, and some of it has been in the shadows. That’s the worst—you can never be sure what’s going on in the shadows. That twilight world where there are only half-truths and half-lies, and no such thing as trust.

—From a report to a Congress Committee on hidden cabals and covert operations,

August 23, 1954

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.…

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

Epilogue

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye.

A sharp, stabbing pain shot through his head, piercing to the back of his brain like a red-hot needle pushed through the center of that diamond-hard blue orb.

No matter how many times he made the jump using the mat-trans, no matter how often he steeled himself for the inevitable agonies of recovery and regaining consciousness, it still amazed him that it could hurt so much. He’d lost count of the number of times his scarred and pitted torso had been injured in combat, racked with pain in torture; still, any of that seemed preferable, right now, to the agonies of regaining full consciousness after a jump.

Ryan’s muscled body, honed by years of travel and combat, trained to cope with a harsh existence, complained in no uncertain manner as he rose from his prone position onto one elbow. His curly black hair, matted with sweat, hung down over his active eye and the empty socket, protected by a patch and scored by a long, livid and puckered scar.

The lead in his muscles moved as the lactic acid dispersed, and the oxygen from the stale air he breathed so heavily started to traverse his bloodstream. He looked across to the seemingly slight but deceptively wiry frame of J. B. Dix, the man known as the Armorer, a position he had fulfilled for Trader, and where Ryan had first met the man he could call friend in a land where such things were rare.

John Barrymore Dix was slumped across the frosted floor of the mat-trans chamber, across the now still disks that glowed when the chamber was about to activate. A faint tang of ozone remained in the brackish air, a sign that Ryan hadn’t taken long to regain consciousness after the final stages of the jump. J.B., on the other hand, was still out cold, his chest moving visibly as he tried to gulp in air. His precious and battered fedora lay beside him, along with his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun, his Uzi and the Tekna knife that had been invaluable when the aging tech of the blasters had given trouble.

Not that it often happened. The Armorer was an artist, if such a thing could be said to exist in the Deathlands. His eyes would sparkle behind his wire-rimmed spectacles—now safely stored in his pocket against the trauma of the jump—when he talked of weaponry, and his knowledge of blasters, grens and any other weapon was second to none. He made sure that the group with whom he traveled kept its weaponry in excellent condition at all times, taking pride in his work. A pride that was far from idle, as a misfiring blaster in the middle of a firefight would mean buying the farm when survival was much the preferred option.

Beside the prone J.B., her hand reaching out to him protectively, was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Sometimes cynical in the face of adversity, her phlegmatic attitude in some ways echoed that of the Armorer, and had led to their relationship and understanding deepening over their travels. Despite the horror of the post-apocalypse world into which she had been thrown, Mildred’s predark idealism still powered her onward. Trapped in cryogenic suspension following complications during a minor operation, Mildred had awakened into something that for her was a nightmare. Initially, she had clashed with Ryan Cawdor, questioning his right to assume leadership of the group. But Ryan’s fighting skills and survival instincts had won her respect, as had his strong sense of justice, albeit tempered by necessary pragmatism. Besides which, she noticed that although assuming leadership and thus having the final say, Ryan believed strongly in teamwork, and played to the strengths of his companions.