The Doomsday Nine

Not quite 20 years-old, Kalld and his female sidekick, Kivi, are trail scouts for a squad of roving baseball players, leading them through the treacherous post-World War III landscape. Their destination is no longer just the next town, but a mysterious doomsday shrine which holds the promise for earth's future. Not only can the knowledge found here rid the planet of the mad religious cult that has prevented progress but it can stop the growing hold that aliens from another planet are extending over the earth, seeking to make it their world. But the trek to the shrine is a perilous one. Traps have been laid by both the aliens and religious fanatics. And the dangers of the mutant-populated countryside are everywhere. The two young scouts have a great destiny to fill as the rest of earth's history will be determined by the course they set to reach the mysterious shrine.
The story follows their journey through a world broiling under a radioactive sky heated by a constant sun. The small squad of heroes is joined by a disabled genius who has created a scientific marvel which can help them escape the many snares around them. Crisis after crisis confronts them. Upon entering a town that had been completely untouched by the nuclear war they are imprisoned there as lunatics. After escaping they are in quick succession trapped in a plain filled with thousands of magnetized, gyrating skeletons; hunted by packs of hairy, half-naked, inbred maniacs who live under former highway overpasses and are called "Bridgers;" swallowed in a living chasm of rock to only then be helped to the surface by a mutant species of humanlike leprechaun-sized people. Once the doomsday squad survive these ordeals, its worst battle begin at the site of the mysterious shrine!