Epilogue

With popular myths and legends, there were always variations, even discrepancies in the basic facts. A tale was told a certain way in one locality, another way someplace else. The story of Trader and Virtue Lake had its different twists, too, depending on who was doing the telling and what part of Deathlands the teller was from.

The folks down in the southern baronies claimed that the awful sounds that the first witness—Bob, or Tom, or Jim— heard down at the bottom of the flaming pit were the screams of Baron Zeal’s ghost as his soul fried in Hell.

Up near the Shens, it was said that the terrible noises weren’t made by a ghost, but by a living man. Now that may seem farfetched at first, but anybody who’s been around explosives much knew they could do some mighty strange things from time to time. Under the right circumstances, a tremendous blast in one direction hardly stirred a hair on a baby’s head a few feet away.

The way the Shen folk liked to tell the story, the big explosion drove the nerve gas away from the center of the refinery, and the rising heat and smoke from the fuel fires kept it out. They speculate that if a man could have made it safely into a heavy-walled, stainless-steel tank, and by a miracle have lived through the shock of initial blast, he and the tank could have ended up at the bottom of the crater, where jets of leaking fuel burned hot and heavy. And what with the other debris down there in the pit, of course the tank door could easily have become wedged shut.

How long could a man survive trapped in a torture cell like that, hopping around like a cricket on a hot skillet?

A day? Three days? A week? Three weeks?

What would his face look like at the moment of his death?

These were the questions Shen people loved to debate around their campfires.

One thing was certain though—Trader never put in his own two cents’ worth to straighten out the facts. Maybe because he figured it was impossible, given the way things traveled Deathlands by word of mouth. Maybe because the way the story came out served his needs. After the tale spread far and wide through Deathlands, crooked barons and murdering road pirates always thought long and hard before they messed with the likes of Trader.

Inside Deathlands

Birth of a Series

The following presentation attempts to provide the thinking behind the creation of theDeathlandsseries, which first saw the light of day in 1986. Multiple perspectives are presented: that of the writer whose concept was eventually turned into books; of the editorial team who thought the concept was viable and who brought the idea forward to be evaluated against the then current editorial trends; and of the artist who rendered the idea into art .

But why bother to explain how a book series is created? Perhaps this question is best answered by looking at another entertainment medium—the film industry. In recent years, the movie industry has allowed us to see what goes on behind the scenes in the creation of popular movies. Despite the fact that all is revealed to us, it does not change our perception or acceptance of this or that picture. Indeed, it does not matter that we have a better insight into the “tricks” of movie making.

There were, of course, no tricks in the creation of theDeathlandsseries. However, with the best intentions in the world, there were bound to be inconsistencies as the series evolved. Such is the human factor. One might argue that such occurrences are forever preserved for posterity and lend the series a certain cachet .

For those who have lovedDeathlands, and for those who will come to love it, the following feature is a special offering that we are sure readers will findinteresting and enjoyable.

A Familiar Tale— A Strange Land

Laurence James onDeathlands

A band of half a dozen or so strangers, with a variety of specialized skills, is thrown together by circumstance and necessity in a changing world, and they become close friends, totally trusting and relying on each other. They ride out together on a mission to fight powerful evil. After various adventures and plenty of slaughter, the survivors are triumphant and move on, leaving the place a little cleaner.

But there is a price to be paid. Four windswept graves.

It is, of course, the wonderful, elegiacThe Magnificent Seven , how the West was won, through the sacrifice of a hell-bent-for-leather group of people. A story fit to be told, over and over, with new characters and settings.

Though there are any number of fundamental differences, the similarities are there. The truth is that for meDeathlands is really a very superior Western, a modern version played out on the new frontiers of a damaged tomorrow.

A group of friends moving through a deeply hostile environment, encountering evil barons and their murderous followers—many far more amoral and wicked than Eli Wallach inThe Magnificent Seven . After tribulations and the occasional sad death of their number, the rest move on, leaving things just a little better and the air a little cleaner to breathe.

In the mythos that isDeathlands , will Ryan Cawdor and company ever be able to find their own peace and release from the endless chilling? I personally don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it might be that there is no ultimate rest waiting for them, unless it might come after some apocalyptically star-toppling and climactic battle against the united forces of darkness. If that was ever to happen, then I think I would be proud to be there.

The series has always had a variety of mingled threads. Generally the blame for the bleakness of the postholocaust world that is Deathlands is laid at the portals of the coldheart politicians and crazed whitecoats; the double-damned scientists in their reinforced-concrete bunkers with their clicking, whirring computers and their crystal vials of noxious unguents; men and women who see research as some pure, soulless grail and close their eyes against the megadeath culling that this might result in, along with the side effect of the death of society, or of civilization.

They are the true enemy to be feared, now and always. And our hopes remain the same

Think of the manifold virtues of Ryan Cawdor in his world. Include courage, strength, self-belief, honesty, advanced survivalist skills—in the best, undebased sense of the word—loyalty and an implicit belief in the importance of helping others less able and weaker than himself.

A child raised to respect these values would not go far wrong in any time and place.

Even the wonderful Doc Tanner—let it be whispered that he is my favorite character—has most of these virtues to a greater or lesser degree, despite the profound changes wrought in his personality by those long-dead, time-trawling whitecoats.

Krysty Wroth has these strengths, and in addition, the deeply feminine-based intuitive strengths as expressed in her Gaia powers, a kind of connectedness that people in more organized, civilized settings seem to lose track of.

But what is this recognizably unrecognizable world that is Deathlands?

It is basically a dark and lonely version of today. Though we have moved farther afield on several occasions, the vast majority of the stories so far have taken place within the existing boundaries of the United States of America. Like many writers, I’m fortunate enough to have a fairly eidetic memory, which is a somewhat pretentious way of saying that I’m blessed with very good visual recall. Since that faraway Christmas in 1985 when I first stepped into the now familiar armaglass walls of a redoubt gateway, on every visit to the United States, I have always been looking at everything through my Deathlands-filtered spectacles.

What will that mountain resort look like after nearly a hundred years of desolation? That church? Motel complex? Shopping mall, national park, school and so on. Small things like the insides of homes, vehicles, weapons. How will broader issues be developed, like science, education, political correctness, religion, economics, hospitality and, most important of all, sociology? And that simply means people.

One thing that longtime readers will have realized is that people in Deathlands, roughly a century down the line, haven’t really changed all that much.

Ryan Cawdor would have recognized his brother in someone like Jedediah Smith, famous mountain man, as well as the trappers, hunters and courageous guides who risked their lives in pushing at the perilous boundaries of the Old Frontier. Though for Ryan and his comrades, the world has turned well past John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. There is so much in Deathlands that we would all recognize and much that has grotesquely, appallingly changed.

If Deathlands works at more than one basic, adventurous level, and I believe it does, then I hope it makes everyone look more carefully and think just a touch more deeply about their own world and their fellow men and women.

Perhaps consider how they wouldlike to act if faced by the horrors that so often confront Ryan Cawdor and his friends.

Someone once said something about how evil can only flourish when decent people stand by and do nothing.

That is what Deathlands is all about.

Proposal for a Short Paperback Series

Deathlands(Provisional title)

The Moment of Conception

There is no such location as the United States of America. Sometime during the final two decades of the twentieth century, WWIII almost destroyed civilization in a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and in so doing laid waste the lands of Earth, turning them into vast tracts of desolation and death.

After ten years of nuclear winter, when the sun was blotted out by the thick, choking clouds of simmering nuclear poison and dust and temperatures on the planet plummeted to depths undreamed of by even the most pessimistic of scientists, life returned. In fact it was always there. Somehow, somewhere. All over the world, in isolated pockets, survivors fought back against the terrifying odds stacked against them, and won. Kind of.

Now, one hundred years after the bombs and missiles fell, the planet Earth is a changed place. Much of the world is still a steaming nuclear swamp. But by now there is a degree of civilization in various parts of the world, some of it high. We are not, incidentally, talking here of a situation where people have completely forgotten what it was like before the missiles hurtled out of the sky.

In the wastelands of the world, the Sahara, say, the Gobi, the Australian interior and so on, much remains as it was. The Indian subcontinent is little changed. Southern Africa is relatively unscathed—although of course now, due to the worldwide collapse of commerce, the banking system, etc., the blacks have taken over from the whites.

But we concentrate on the U.S., where muchhas changed. Not unnaturally, the East Coast has been pretty well wiped out. Texas has been turned into a desert. The West Coast, especially around San Francisco and L.A., is utterly altered. Missiles fired at the San Andreas Fault caused most of the populated West Coast strip to disappear into the Pacific. Here there are only vast lagoons stretching far inland, and seething strontium swamps.

Most, though not all, of the North American interior lies under a boiling, red-scarred belt of cloud, in places maybe a mile thick: a dense blanket of poisonous gases and floating nuclear debris, a coverlet of destruction mantling a land of death, for below is a reeking wasteland, populated by strange, mutated beings, freaks, strontium-spawned monstrosities, both animal and human.

But these lands, these lost territories, aren’t all death. There are parts almost freakishly untouched by the nuclear holocaust, patches of forest and cultivated upland only slightly transformed by radiation showers. There are now small townships and trading posts, and villages where life is so normal you don’t get to see a mutie more than maybe once a week.

There are, of course, no “states” as such, merely territories presided over either by the strongest or the wisest: hundreds of little baronies, if you like, or principalities. There are communications; there is electricity—in the outlying regions, not dependable; there is travel of a sort. In the newer urban regions that have grown up around the coastal areas, there is a high level of civilization and sophistication, yet even here the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest or strongest, prevails. There is gasoline and there are autos; there are weapons; there is food.

And there is a very good reason for all this: for way back in the latter half of the twentieth century, successive governments laid down vast stockpiles of equipment and military material in secret underground strongholds and silos for just such a time as a postnuclear war period. The snag was, most of the favored ones, the top officials, government men, bankers, civil servants and the like, never made it to the shelters when the missiles began dropping. Thus, strange and bizarre secrets still lie under the reeking nuclear swamps, or high in almost unreachable mountain fastnesses, waiting to be discovered.

NB: This will be a meld of the known—to today’s readers—and the “unknown.” I want to stress that although the story has SF ingredients, it isnot pure or hard SF, nor do I want it to be. It is a fast-paced action series in the high-adventure manner, built within an SF framework.

Background

The jumping-off point for the series—although the protagonists in the story will know nothing of this when they start out—is that before WWIII, the U.S. government was secretly making a number of astonishing discoveries of a very weird scientific nature, including matter transference over long distances. They had also established a limited form of time travel and had set up a number of temporal and locational “gateways” in secret locations across the U.S. Briefly, they had discovered how to jump back in time up to a limit of two hundred years. These discoveries were made only a few years before the outbreak of WWIII, and thus they had not been used much at all by the scientists who had created the gateways. Most of the gateways open onto other areas in the U.S. Only one or two can be so manipulated that the user jumps back in time.

Storyline

The main story will concern a group of people who basically want to escape from this land of nuclear death, this hell on earth. There’s got to be a better way of life than this— somewhere. There are rumors—stories, legends, maybe just old wives’ tales—of a place of marvels in the northernmost extremity of Deathlands: a place of strange wonders, a place where, it is hinted, there is a vast treasure.

In Book 1 the group gradually gets together: a mix of startlingly different types—men, women, some good, some bad, some vicious, some escaping from whatever law there still is, some weak, some horrifyingly strong.

After a harrowing journey, through appalling atmospheric and weather changes, and continually harassed by clans or tribes of distinctly unfriendly locals, they manage to reach “the redoubt,” high in the mountains, and there discover for themselves that the “treasure” is not at all what they thought it was going to be. For the redoubt is a hidden scientific enclave full of weapons and material, and containing one of the locational gateways. In an apocalyptic finale, they are besieged by a murderous bunch of locals, and, in a blazing shootout, the redoubt starts to self-destruct The only way out is through the gateway, and they don’t know where it leads or even what happens when you go through. But it’s their only way out. They jump

As I’d like it, Book 1 ends right there, with the reader not knowing where they jump to, or what happens. Book 2 opens with them coming through and discovering that they’ve landed in another of these secret redoubts, but one thousand miles away, say, in the south.

In each subsequent book the locational jump will take them to a different part of Deathlands, and will be the frame for a new adventure, a new situation, a new conflict, a new confrontation with danger and horror. And over the course of the series, they will gradually uncover the secret of the ultimate escape from Deathlands: a final jump right out of the terror and the carnage back into the rural peace of civilized America at the turn of this century—1900, or thereabouts. And out of the entire group, only two will make it.

Ryan Cawdor, the hero, a tough but pragmatic character who desperately wants out from the hell of the late twenty-first century, and Krysty, the enigmatic, Titian-haired heroine, who is by no means what she seems on the surface. These are the two main characters.

During the course of the series, original members of the group will die or be killed, new characters will be introduced. One character possibly holds the key to the main quest, a drunken, shambling wreck of a man simply known as Doc, who joins the group early on and seems to know far more than he lets on.

There will be a central villain who, too, joins the group in Book 1: Jordan Teague, a brutal and sadistic monster. Once ambushed by a band of mutie marauders, the freak blast of a grenade blew away most of one side of his face and mangled the rest. The medics did the best they could. Teague now has one biotronic eye; half of his face is alloy. All of his brain is consumed with a burning hatred for his fellow men.

It is Teague, in fact, who welds the group together originally, but only for his own purposes. He is no altruist. He wants power, and these one-hundred-year-old U.S. government secrets can give him exactly what he wants. A running battle will develop over the series: sometimes Cawdor is ahead, sometimes Teague. Until finally Teague is spectacularly destroyed.

I see various twists to the main narrative. I don’t think it would do any harm if, say, Krysty, the main female character, was lost for one whole book—captured at the beginning of one story by Teague, or perhaps by some other mysterious agency, but Cawdor is diverted from rescuing her by other, far more pressing problems.

In each book in the series a different story: each one self-contained, each one with a suitably blazing climax. And each one with a different and colorful locale in Deathlands. A kind ofRunning Man orThe Fugitive saga.California: A story set amid the eerie lagoons and missile-sculpted mountains of this dramatically altered area.Florida : In the noisome, fetid, night-dark swamps, strange mutated creatures lurk, and an even stranger society of human beings.

Heartlands: In the blasted heart of what used to be Middle America there survives a small town where there are wind-up gramophones and horse-drawn buggies, and everything’s apple-pie cozy. Or is it?

This kind of thing. But I’d also pull in “echoes,” if you like, of the twentieth century: appalling traps set by the original scientists that have to be eluded or somehow gotten around. Cryogenic burial—i.e., freeze your loved ones who are suffering from terminal illnesses so that in a century or so they can defrost and be cured—has distinct possibilities, if twisted around a little. A group of murderous “dirty tricks” government operatives, say, springing up like dragons’ teeth.

The Idea Takes Hold

Further Thoughts

First and foremost this series is both an escape story and a quest story. At first the central group of characters in the series wants to escape from the grim and savage hell of postholocaust America—or at least the vast poison-land time, or another heard vague stories of a kind of promised land of untold riches somewhere to the north. That isn’t in fact quite how things are, or how they’re going to pan out, but that is what they’ve heard. And that is what motivates the main nucleus of the group through whatever desperate adventures befall them, and through however many books the series runs to.

In Book 1 they find that there are indeed riches—of a kind. But these aren’t the riches that they thought they were. Two-thirds of the way through the book they reach the goal they were headed for, after a grim and appalling trip across Deathlands. They reach a redoubt. They don’t know it, but there are redoubts scattered all over what used to be North America. Each redoubt is more or less different from the rest, with one thing in common: there is a central chamber at its heart in which there is a locational “gateway.” This takes the form of a pillar of fog, from floor to ceiling, maybe thirty feet in diameter, rolling and seething and swirling, a continuously shifting column of thick gray-white mist. Plunge into that and you’re suddenly somewhere else, in another redoubt, maybe one thousand miles away across the continent.

But in one redoubt, one very special redoubt, plunge into that thick fog

and you’re suddenlysomewhen else. You’re two hundred years into the past, in a time when the atom had not even been split, when Einstein was still groping for a theory of relativity, when if you were to talk seriously of a war that could wipe out half the world’s population and turn one-third of the globe into a hellish nightmare landscape of radiation swamps populated by monstrous mutants, you’d be thrown into the nearest madhouse. For this is a time of peace and prosperity and stability, a time of centuries-old values that have not yet been blasted apart forever by the hell of nuclear war.

But they don’t know this yet, the group of men and women who finally reach this first redoubt. Only gradually do they become aware of it. At first, at the end of Book 1, they get a hint that there is indeed an escape route through these gateways, and at first they don’t dare to believe it. At least not wholly. It’s too much to hope for.

Still, it’s a goal in itself and so it becomes a quest. And as they journey onward, jumping from location to location, into each new form of madness that they must first overcome or escape from, so they find out more and more about the reason for these hidden redoubts—they learn more and more about the untold secrets that scientists were probing in what was once the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, over one hundred years before.

In each book of the series, the main characters—epitomized by Ryan Cawdor and the strange, enigmatic, red-haired girl Krysty—will uncover new clues to the central mystery, helped to a certain extent by the weird hints, mutterings and ravings of the seemingly half-crazed Doc, a character who at times seems to be merely a shambling, brain-blasted victim and slave of the brutal Jordan Teague, who at times seems to be a visionary, a figure of power and extraordinary knowledge.

But Doc knows far more than he is able to tell. There is a reason for this. He was in fact born in 1860. He was a scientist. In 1904, by sheer appalling chance, he was picked up by U.S. scientists from the 1980s in their first trawl in the past when they discovered that they could jump back through time. The 1980s scientists brought back a number of “subjects” from the early 1900s. Some died, others had their brains scrambled through sheer culture shock; Doc survived because he himself was a trained scientist and could thus accept things that others of his time and culture simply could not. They found him a willing, able and intelligent subject. Then the missiles rained down from the skies in the early 1990s, and the scientific complex where Doc was being held was blasted, and through some weird and horrific freak—possibly due to the nature of an experiment that was taking place near to the “time” gateway at the time—Doc was hurled into the future, into the late 2070s.

For some years he wanders through the nightmare landscape of the nuclear Deathlands. Most of the time it’s as though his brain has been shot away. At other times he has periods of lucidity in which he knows roughly who he is, but even so the “why” is still lost in a mind fogged by the terrible experiences through which he’s been. But he does, in these “clear periods,” know something about the gateways, their possible uses—and that there is still one all-important secret he can’t quite grasp. Uncovering that last secret so that a final escape from Deathlands may be achieved will be one of the threads of the series. Ryan and Krysty certainly realize that Doc holds the key to escape, and that they mustn’t ever lose sight of him.

This “time” aspect will not be heavily stressed. It is background to the series as a whole. It’s a means to an end that only a few of the Deathlands “pilgrims” will finally make use of at the end of the series. During the course of the series, in each separate book, hints will be dropped, allusions made—less and less cryptic as the series itself progresses.

However, each book will be a separate adventure with a separate plot and a separate and suitably violent and explosive finale. That must be stressed. Because, as I said before, this is basically an action-adventure series whose jumping-off point, if you like, happens to be an SF one.

Of course, as the series takes place in the 2080s, or thereabouts, there will necessarily be an SF element in it. But I want to keep the books as much as possible action adventure with bizarre-horror overtones, and science fiction undertones.

For example, weapons. In such a world as I envisage, there would be no great manufactories pumping out new weapons by the ton every week. That would imply a higher level of manufacturing sophistication than I want. The group of pilgrims would, as each new situation demands, grab weapons as they find them. I envisage, as I implied in my original proposal, great stores of weaponry and material, greased and factory fresh, hidden in secret cavernous locations in various parts of Deathlands, forgotten, unknown. These will, of course, be mainly weapons ofour time. On the other hand there will have been certain technological advances—I have in mind a laser rifle which sends out a beam of pure destructive power, either on narrow beam for cutting, or full beam for blowing a hole through man or machine the size of a wrecking ball—even after a nuclear war.

Let’s say the nuclear winter lasts only five years—today some say thirty or forty years; others argue for two or three years max. After that, mankind has about one hundred years until the end of the twenty-first century when the series takes place. Clearly, in some parts of the world, and certainly in some parts of America, it would not take one hundred years to get back to some reasonable semblance of normality. Not everything would be utterly destroyed, and later generations would obviously build on what was left, and what would be left would be rather a lot, I suspect.

That a kind of new Dark Age would, broadly speaking, descend upon the world is unarguable. However, it would not be a total Dark Age—a Dark Age shot with thick streaks of gray, if you like.

As I said in my original proposal, in parts of America there are communications—of a visual kind even, such as are being experimented on right now. And there is power and fuel—oil, gasoline, electric—though these are in relatively short supply. I don’t want a situation where my characters cannot, if they suddenly want to, hop on board a heavy-duty land truck and shift hell along what remains of a four-lane blacktop. But I do want a situation where things could suddenly go seriously out of kilter—power cuts out, fuel leaks—and they face disaster because they can’t immediately put their hands on more fuel, more power, whatever.

The Deathlands

The Deathlands themselves take up most of the North American continent roughly from Ohio down to Alabama, across to Texas, up to Montana and back down through Wisconsin.

But not all of this huge area has been totally destroyed, or lies beneath a mantle of reeking nuclear smog. There are, as I said, inhabited areas where life goes on. But mainly a bloodred sun hangs sullenly over a torn and tortured landscape; where there is no nuclear desert, there are the fetid strontium swamps where radiation poison over one hundred years or so has not only created new and terrible life-forms, but also played sinister havoc with those that existed before. It is a vast land of living nightmare.

The West Coast has been for the most part entirely re-sculpted following the terrible devastation caused by the final upheavals of the San Andreas Fault, deliberately missiled in the war. San Francisco, Monterey, L.A., San Diego—these thriving centers of population no longer exist. Indeed, California itself has become a narrow strip of nuclear sand dunes and shoreline banding the lower reaches of the Sierra Madre. Baja California has virtually disappeared. Vast steaming lagoons lie to the south; long canyonlike fjords now thrust deep into the heart of the mountain chain to the north.

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico are now simmering hot lands, dust bowls skinned of cacti and even the most primitive forms of vegetation, where two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds shriek and roar as they hurtle across this bleak Mars-scape. And when by some atmospheric freak storm clouds sweep across from the Pacific, it is acid rain that falls—pure acid that can strip a man to the bones in sixty seconds of shrieking agony.

Centers of Civilization

These lie mainly on the East Coast, where the population, over a century, has had time to recover to a certain extent from the appalling devastation. The region of New York and Manhattan Island—where bombs were midair detonated— is now akin to Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu: that is, a brooding, ruined city overgrown with noxious vegetation. Yet people, of a kind, still live here and battle for survival and supremacy among the tree-and undergrowth-choked urban canyons.

The main area of civilization has now shifted south to the Virginias and the Carolinas. Here is industry, both heavy and manufacturing. Here they can run cars and trucks with comparative ease; they have small planes, and war choppers. But there have been no new and startling technological leaps, most things are derivative of what was being produced in the late twentieth century.

To the northeast of New York, in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, there lies a true wilderness, an area now of great, and sometimes weird, natural beauty, populated only sparsely by tribes of small, self-contained communities.

Mutants

I keep mentioning mutants. These come in all shapes and sizes, literally! Those long-ago radiation showers created havoc with the genetic codes in both humans and animals. Not only do you find strange and bizarre beasts lurking where man no longer treads, but also there is now a vast multitude of weird “human beings.” There are the simple differences: men—and of course women, too—with three eyes or four arms, or with terribly deformed and nightmarish features: noses like elephants’ trunks, or with armadillo-like skin, etc. But there are genetic mutations that are far more subtle—what might be people who are psychokinetic, who can thought-read, who can see through walls, who can levitate, who can kill with their minds, who can destroy with their eyes. And so on.

In general muties are feared, distrusted, hated. Some excellent emotional conflict can be gotten out of this. Because they are so feared and loathed, mutants tend to clan together; areas where they have proliferated tend to be avoided by normals. In the Deathlands, however, there is a certain amount of give-and-take, come-and-go, and the muties here have become an analog of the nineteenth-century Indians. In the more “civilized” areas they are often hunted down and destroyed. In an odd kind of way, out in the Deathlands there is a freer and more liberal attitude toward them than in the civilized parts of the country.