Alan Berkshire

Bowden Alan Berkshire

Alexander Bowden wakes up in a strange subterranean room, entombed in a sarcophagus-like box, disorientated, cold, naked and alone. He discovers he is in a nuclear fall-out shelter in the wilds of Wiltshire, England, tended by an equally strange, blue-skinned half man, half cyborg, LOMAC, a Living Organic Miniaturised Advisory Computer. The world is gone, devastated in a nuclear firestorm, his wife, his son, everything and everyone he ever knew, gone forever. Then he finds evidence of a small band of survivors situated in the borough of Woolwich, South London. Could his family still be alive? Driven by this single, crazy, impossible thought Bowden is determined to find out, travelling through a post-apocalyptic world, devoid of life, he finds the fall-out shelter, now a fortress. Man's constant struggle for survival continues, only this time the enemy is vermin, giant, mutated rats bent on the total destruction of the few remaining humans on Earth. Plunged into a maelstrom of conflicting forces Bowden battles to solve the mystery of a hidden nursery full of deformed babies, the significance of a "super-drug" code named PMX, and the identity of a young, deformed man who inhabits the ruins surrounding the shelter. Ultimately Bowden's sympathies lie with the hidden "resistance", a small group of men and women fighting against the tyranny within the shelter, especially after witnessing the brutal murders of its leaders by Major. Randolph J. Saxon, the director of the facility. Aided and abetted by his son, a huge, fair-haired giant nicknamed "The Blond" and his cadre of twelve "supermen", the "Elite", Saxon rules the shelter with a fist of iron. Faced with the horrors within the shelter and knowing the horror without, Bowden decides to leave and head north, find peace, be free... But things are never that easy.