She returns to the town, where a wounded Doc had managed to dispatch Lear for good, cuts down the corpses hanging in the town entrance, and transports Doc back to New Montana by stretcher. Gage pursues Jackson to the mines and fights with him, leaving him to die in an explosion using dynamite. Gage severely wounds Lear, and is saved from a sniper by a repentant Melena. They liberate Beatrice and the other captives from the silver mine, then engage the entire town. Doc revives her and tends her wounds, and together, the two plot to take down Jackson and the entire town of Defiance. She survives the fall, and manages to get back to New Montana, but contracted a severe case of black lung. They briefly torture Gage, then Womack drives her out into the wilderness, and dumps her in a gorge. She apprehends Jackson, but is captured immediately, having been betrayed by Melena, and also identified by Womack, who was now terminally infected by black lung. While Jackson and his men celebrate, Gage urges Melena, Jackson's girlfriend, to leave Defiance that night, revealing her identity as a bounty hunter. She warns the woman to be quiet and patient. Among the pilgrims is Beatrice, one of the women Gage saved from Chavo earlier. Shortly after, Jackson took Gage, Lear and several men to capture pilgrims with armored vehicles and armed escorts. Jackson decides to include Gage in his plans, which includes enslaving the entire region to work in the silver mines near his town, he offers Gage 15% of the cut of the profits in exchange for her services as a gunfighter, and unintentionally revealing a scar on his forearm, which Gage's sister had made when she bit him, before he killed her. Jackson's right-hand man, Lear, is distrustful of Gage, but is unable to prove anything, and Gage endears herself to Jackson by saving his life when Grubbs and a posse sneak into Defiance to try taking him out. Masquerading herself as Chavo, Gage makes it into Defiance unchallenged. Doc warns that every bounty hunter that tried has been killed and strung up as a warning to other would-be bounty hunters. Gage decides she wants to try taking him down alone. He tells her of a massive reward for Thomas Jackson, an unusually industrious outlaw who is building a shelter-town for criminals, calling it Defiance.
While there, she visits Doc, her mentor and friend. She brings the body back to claim the reward from Sheriff Grubbs, a slightly corrupt and greedy lawman of New Montana. Gage, a bounty hunter, tortures Womack, a follower of an outlaw named Chavo, leaves him in the wilderness, then locates and kills Chavo after a brutal fight, freeing several pilgrims in the process.
Anyone caught driving such a vehicle was given the maximum sentence, and numerous people have become bounty hunters, bringing in drivers and other lawbreakers in exchange for tabs and silver, dead or alive. Humanity is forcefully reverted to a simpler lifestyle, relying on barter for the two most valuable resources now: Water purifiers, called tabs, and silver, ground up to line the interior of breathing masks, to keep out a painful and fatal airborne disease known as Black Lung.ĭriving vehicles that use fossil fuel becomes outlawed. The combination of pollution and relentless mining of Earth's resources through industrialism has left the environment nearly unlivable and extremely hostile to human habitation. In the not-too-distant future, the world is ravaged by brutal climate changes, colloquially known as the Cloud Fall.