Valerie Nieman: 2 books

The cities were all gone, the people were gone, too. And the children. All dead. A nation divided, turns on itself with brutal, primitive cruelty, unleashing the ghastly mutations of blistering chemical warfare that leave a desolate wasteland where the United States once flourished......

Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, wakes among the dead. Bloodied and disoriented from a gaping head wound, the man who staggers out of the mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia, is much more powerful—and dangerous—than the one thrown in. An orphan with an unknown past, he must now figure...