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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.
Book 1: Pilgrimage to Hell
The general locale of the first two-thirds of the book is what used to be
Montana, starting from the rolling prairies and ending somewhere high in the
rugged wilderness of Glacier
National Park. (NB: It seems easier here to use the present-day appellations
of the various places: it goes without saying that one hundred years after a
nuke war, Montana and Glacier
National Park would not be so named.)
I want to kick off with an introductory sequence that I think will sum up what
I basically have in mind for the entire series:
eerie atmosphere, bizarre horror and bloody action.
Prologue
Four men are trekking up through the wilderness. They have backpacks, food,
weapons. They are: Hennings, Duber, Rogan and Manix. Hennings is an okay guy;
Duber and Rogan are greedy, brutal men; Manix is a mutie. To look at him he's
perfectly normal, but he has a strange extrasensory power: he can "smell"
danger. That's why Duber and Rogan have forced him to come; they need him
because there's danger aplenty up here. Hennings has been brought along as
shotgun, a backup heavy, to blast anything that Manix misses.
This is a strange place, odd stories have been told of the area.
Somewhere up here, in the heart of Glacier National Park, there exists a
treasure of some kind, or a hidden place beyond the peaks, of untold riches.
The stories have gotten confused over the past sixty or seventy years, and men
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who have sought to explore the area have all disappeared, never returned to
the plains. All except one: a guy who trekked out with a twenty-strong party
about five years previously. After a month he returned to the plains, a
wild-eyed, staggering wreck of a man babbling of "fog devils." He died without
revealing much else. Since then, no one has ventured back into the mountains.
But the greed of men such as Duber and Rogan drives out fear; always such men
believe they can succeed where others have failed.
There's a sullen atmosphere of resentment and unease between the four men. The
air is strangely heavy with electricity.
Tempers are fraying. Darkness is falling as they stumble up a rocky track
beside a precipice an electric darkness crackling
eerily with blue-tinged flares. They round a bend in the trail.
Ahead is a bank of thick, impenetrable fog extending across the trail. It
shifts and quivers, seems almost alive. Tendrils of fog lick out from the main
mass of it, like groping fingers. A dull, eerie glow emanates from it,
lighting the immediate area somberly.
A fight breaks out among the men, already bickering and snapping at one
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