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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 of
Running Man or
The 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
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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 post-holocaust
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, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]