This story is told in three separate novels. The novels are together under one cover because it is about three different groups of survivors during a two hundred year period following a worldwide nuclear war. Each novel has its own characters and each can stand alone. But, in the end, all of the characters and their stories come together. The first part happens at the end of this two hundred year period in a isolated area along the California coast where some survivors were being forced to live under strict rules dictated by a powerful group known as the Controllers. The second part is about a group of people who were living in a cave where they had gone for protection from the impending war. After forty years in the cave, they wanted to return to the surface, but their leader, for personal reasons, did not want them to go up. It is about their mutiny and what happened when they returned to the surface. The last part is about a group that managed to escape the war by traveling far away to another planet. They were a group of teenagers who were kidnapped and made immortal by a woman whose overall plan was never clear. After more than a century on the planet, she decided to erase the immortality of a select few of them. But the teens take over and decide to return to Earth to restore the immortality for those few. On Earth they eventually meet the other two groups of survivors and the identity of the Controllers and their purpose becomes known.This three-part story is about what could happen if the competition for everything was eventually settled when all sides were armed with unimaginably large quantities of the ultimate weapon which was specifically developed to kill fellow human beings. This was survival of the fittest in the nuclear age.
