Hardened criminal Lester is in prison for armed robbery and murder. When his request for parole is refused, he escapes and hatches a plan for revenge and make him rich. He leads two gang members to the home of a witness who helped put him in jail. But the FBI and a SWAT team are on his trail...

After she witnesses a mob murder, a woman hides out in a cabin in the woods under the protection of a pair of hardboiled federal agents.

Mitchell Osgood dreams of being a famous writer, but the book he has written constantly is rejected by the editors. When the psychopathic killer Albert Merrik is released from prison after 15 years, Osgood believes that writing down the history of his crimes could be his breakthrough. Although he refuses to talk to him at first, Osgood follows him around and offers him a job in his book shop. To get the right impressions for his book, he feels that he has to experience Merrik psychopathic again.

Unicom is a powerful organization overseeing most of the world after its economic collapse. They have banned computers and robots in an attempt to insure "life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic stability". When a Unicom Synth robot infiltrates a southwest TV station and kills the manager, a revolutionary against the gestapo-like corporation, a lowly Unicom delivery man must help the rest of the station survive through the incoming "thermal storm".