Showing results by narrator "Tim Williams" in All Categories

Once, Frank Morgan had a wife and a future on the land — until a rich man with a grudge drove him out of Colorado. Since then, Morgan's taken up the one skill that always came easy — gunfighting — and drifted to a mining town in the New Mexico Territory. But there's nothing easy about two vicious gangs descending on the town and threatening to wreak havoc. With his reputation preceding him, Morgan is elected to stand in the outlaws' way.

The endless struggle for power among the barons is a way of life in Deathlands, but Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists take no sides — unless forced to. But as the land around the Rio Grande reaches the breaking point in a bitter war, the companions are harnessed into battle, moving toward a grim confrontation with an old enemy whose secret stockpile of 21st-century nerve gas is poised to unleash infinite madness once more upon a ravaged Earth.

Pulling sec duty aboard a steamboat on the mighty Sippi is a welcome reprieve for Ryan and his friends…until armored warships reduce their vessel to a burning husk. Abruptly stranded in a nightmarish, poisonous swamp, fighting off crocodiles and muties, the companions and their crew of allies get to work building rafts. Their escape route, however, is swiftly intercepted, and they learn they've sailed into the middle of a fierce conflict between two villes fighting over the iron trade. The companions don't seem to stand a chance against the fleets of ironclad gunboats.

Desperately short of supplies, Ryan and his companions are forced to seek help at the prosperous-looking ville of Amity Springs. Hired on to retrieve a stolen relic, they quickly become caught up in an escalating power struggle between two strong-willed lady barons. Each woman covets the cache of predark goods buried in the ville's backyard. But they are not alone in their desire. And all that stands between a motherlode of buried bounty and the destructive power of unchecked greed is Ryan's grim determination to survive another day.

When Doc is taken captive by a band of marauders in what was once Nebraska, Ryan and the companions rally to get him back. But they aren't just fighting the local muties. They're also up against the area's terrifying terrain, which shifts and morphs at a moment's notice. With their options dwindling in this mazelike region that doesn't obey the laws of physics, the team joins forces with a beautiful and deadly woman who evens the odds on the battlefield. But while this warrior seems to be on their side, she has a secret agenda that could spell the end for them all....

Compassion is a luxury in a brutal land where life is cheap, but Dr. Mildred Wyeth holds fast to her physician's oath to show mercy. Now she's stricken by a plague that brings on a deep craving for human flesh. Unwilling to lose one of their own to this pervasive pestilence without a fight, the companions follow the trail to Cajun country, where the mysterious queen of the Cannies is rumored to possess the only antidote to the grim fate that awaits Mildred...and perhaps her warrior friends.

Hunted across the southwestern desert, Ryan doesn't know who wants him dead badly enough to slaughter innocents as a way of luring him into the open. But the advanced tech his pursuers are using is unknown in Deathlands, created by the most brilliant minds of 20th-century America. Now evil is alive and stalking the warrior group. His name is Delphi and he's prepared to reclaim the one man who understands with brutal certainty how time can be controlled, manipulated, remapped.

Hiring on as crew to a merchant's wag-train, Ryan and his companions anticipate trouble as they head west toward what was once Montana. The terrain is treacherous, but the company is worse as anger, jealousy, and male rivalry erupt into chaos and death. But as they get closer to their destination, the true nature of the journey unfolds. There's a map to a mysterious valley rich with predark stockpiles. But is it the promised land they've been seeking...or the dead end they never saw coming?

Herbert George Wells was one of the most prolific and visionary British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. H. G. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, although he wrote across many genres, including nonfiction. His fiction embraces history, science fiction, horror, satire, fantasy, and social commentary. Wells was also a futurist, foreseeing air travel, tanks (as in “The Land Ironclads” - part of this anthology) space travel, nuclear weapons, and even satellite television.

Justice is a damning word in what used to be called Oklahoma, thanks to a sadistic baron known as the Hanging Judge. Crazy, powerful, and backed by a despotic sec crew, the judge drops innocents from the gallows at will. When Jak narrowly escapes wearing his own rope as a necktie, a rift among the companions sends them deep into the mutie-infested wilderness outside the ville. Separated and hurting, time is running out for the survivors to realize they're stronger together than they ever could be alone — before a ruthless madman brings them to the end of their rope.

Violent gangs, a corrupt mayor, and a heavily armed police force are the hallmarks of former Detroit, a mutie-infested, rubble-strewn metropolis. When Ryan and the companions show up, the Desolation Angels are waging a war to rule the streets. After saving the companions from being chilled by gangsters, the mayor hires Ryan and his friends to stop the Angels cold. But each hard blow toward victory proves there's no good side to be fighting for. As Motor City erupts into bloody conflagration, the companions are caught in the crossfire.

Desperate to find water and shelter on the barren plains of former Oklahoma, Ryan and his team come upon a community that appears, at first, to be peaceful. Then the ville is attacked by a group of its own inhabitants — people infected with a parasite that has turned them into slave warriors for an unknown overlord. The companions try to help fend off the enemy and protect the remaining population, but when Ryan is captured during a second ambush, all hope seems lost. Especially when he launches an assault against his own crew.

Built upon a predark military installation in former California, a ville called Progress could be the utopia Ryan Cawdor and his companions have been seeking. A place where humanity and technology thrive, it's the nucleus of a new hope for Deathlands. The successful replacement of Ryan's missing eye with a cybernetic prosthetic nearly convinces the group that their days of surviving hell are behind them. Then they discover that the high tech in Progress isn't designed to enhance human life, but to destroy it.

Nora Helmer has everything a young housewife could want: Beautiful children, an adoring husband, and a bright future. But when a carelessly buried secret rises from the past, Nora’s well-calibrated domestic ideal starts to crumble. Ibsen’s play is as fresh today as it was when it first stormed the stages of 19th-century Europe.

New Hampshire is rich with big game, more than enough to feed Ryan and his hungry companions. But claims to a fallen elk get ugly and Ryan is forced to kill another hunter, the self-proclaimed king of the Granite Highlands, over the meat. Soon the hunters become the hunted as the dead man's widow gives chase, armed with predark tanks and heavy artillery. As the kill zone widens across cannibal-ridden lava fields, Ryan and his group search for leverage in the merciless landscape.

An orphaned teen with the ability to transform into a vicious whirlwind latches on to Ryan and the companions as they travel through former North Dakota. Her deadly power seems like a boon at first, until it starts to control her. When threatened, she destroys everything in her path...including those she loves. Then a group of outcast fighters kidnaps the young woman and manipulates her — and her terrifying mutation — for their own destructive agenda. With the vortex unleashed, the companions face a tough decision: chill the orphan or perish in her violent wake.

Fear and human depravity permeate the frigid air in a once-dynamic Alaskan city. Ryan Cawdor and his group of survivalists go on red alert the moment they set foot on the forbidding tundra, but regardless, they find themselves rounded up by cannibal coldhearts. The companions quickly discover there's a fate much worse than becoming food. Dangerous new experiments are taking place in a long-abandoned military base and, in the bitter heart of the frozen North, new horrors reach out to poison their hope for a better tomorrow.

If any kind of utopia exists in postapocalyptic America, Ryan and his companions have yet to find it. But high in the Virginian mountains, their quest may find its reward. Heaven Falls is an agrarian idyll, its thriving inhabitants harnessing powerful feminine energy and the medicinal qualities of honey. Bountiful and serene, this community is the closest thing to sanctuary the companions have ever encountered. But as they are seduced by a life they have only envisioned, they discover Heaven has a trapdoor that opens straight to hell....

Ryan and his friends become the subjects in a deadly experiment when they're taken captive inside a redoubt at the South Pole. A team of scientists is convinced the Earth must be purified of mutants, and now they have the perfect lab rats to test their powerful bioweapon. Within Antarctica's harsh and unstable conditions, the companions must fight the odds and take down the whitecoats before millions are killed. But in this uncompromising landscape, defeating the enemy may be just another step toward a different kind of death....

Emerging out of the ashes of the nuclear apocalypse, no one has been more successful and determined than Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists. But if the wasteland's endless miles come between them, the odds for getting back together again — for their very survival — are not in their favor. A cryptic message regarding the long-missing Trader sends Ryan and the Armorer on an odyssey to the Pacific Northwest, away from their base, away from their band of warrior survivalists, away from Krysty Wroth.