Two men awaken from a long cryogenic sleep, to do battle in a future as primitive and violent as the remote past. California has become an arid island wasteland of subsistence farming, hunting and scavenging. The air quality is now perfect unlike the bio-contaminated atmosphere of almost a century before.

Tom Sawyer and his pal Huckleberry Finn have great adventures on the Mississippi River, pretending to be pirates, attending their own funeral, and witnessing a murder.

After Drew Dixon, an upright young man, is sent west by his religious family to avoid being drafted into the Civil War, he drifts across the land with a loose confederation of young vagrants.