The Omega Project

1

I didn’t know much about guns. The one I’d been gripping in my sweaty palm held four bullets in its clip and one in the chamber — same as it had when I’d removed it from the corpse I’d come across two weeks ago. It was rare these days to find a dead body that hasn’t been skinned and stripped of its meat. Thankfully, I’d never been forced to consume human flesh, which was why I was here … out in the woods, hoping to shoot a deer before the last deer was taken, before the last of my supplies ran out and hunger drove me either to cannibalism, suicide, or starvation.

I’d arrived in the woods before dawn, having ridden all night on my motorcycle. No lights needed, thanks to my night-vision glasses, no sound since the bike was powered solely by batteries. I’d been staked out in this blind for the better part of eight hours. Sweat continued to pour down my face and soak my camouflage clothing, and the bugs were relentless, but I’d chosen this spot because it was only twenty paces from the creek, offering me a clear shot at anything or anyone that ventured by. Truth be told, I’d never shot anything more lethal than a BB gun, but desperate times required desperate measures.

When I was younger, my father had taken me camping with the Cub Scouts. The closest we’d come to hunting game was roasting marshmallows. A real hunter wouldn’t have been hunting deer with a handgun. A real hunter probably wouldn’t have had ant bites all over his ankles or mosquito bites on his arms, and he wouldn’t have been so scared.

I wasn’t scared of the woods. I was scared of being lost in the woods, unable to find my way back to the main road and the brush where I’d hidden the bike. Mostly, I was scared about what else might be in the woods hunting the deer hunters.

I called them the “SS”—sociopathic survivors. Rapists, murderers, cannibals — the SS were soulless beings hell-bent on enjoying their final fleeting moments on Earth. I’d never seen them in action, but I’d seen the forensic evidence of their depravity and it terrified me.

The last bullet in my gun’s chamber was reserved for my brain should those pack animals hunt me down.

The SS were bottom-feeders before the Die-Off, which is why they’d survived. They lived off the grid. Same for the fortress farmers, bunker clans, conspiracy theorists, and other whack-jobs who could read the tea leaves and had known the world’s oil reserves were running out.

Note to any future generations listening to these audio tapes: The powers-that-be knew the world’s oil reserves peaked in 2005; in fact, they knew how things would end as far back as the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was in office. And still the assholes did nothing.

My father had known, which is why he left his tenured position at the University of Virginia and moved us to a small rural community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. No Internet connection, no cable TV. We went from being a normal modern-day household to twenty-first century pioneers, gradually inching our way off the grid. None of us was thrilled; my mother had contemplated divorce, my younger sisters labeled Dad the new Unabomber and threatened to run away from home. As for me, if my father had told me a flood was coming then I would have been outside with him building an ark.

It had been shortly after the first mushroom cloud bloomed over Tehran that my father explained his motives. “Robbie, life is a test, and humanity is about to face a big one. Unfortunately, when it comes to facing the unthinkable, most people prefer to remain in denial. You saw the movie Titanic, right? When the ship hit that iceberg, some passengers headed for the lifeboats, while the majority of people were so convinced the ship couldn’t sink they either stayed in bed or went back to the bar to have another drink. When you get older you’ll learn two hard facts: You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved; and preferring to remain ignorant when faced with a catastrophe demonstrates a lack of intelligence.”

Dad could have added human ego to the equation.

I’d grown up in a world of bank bailouts, recessions, unemployment, collapsing economies, and endless wars; my country embattled in a perversion of democracy where corporations had been granted the same rights as citizens. Corruption overruled any sense of justice, the radicalization of the political system preventing the few true representatives of the suddenly impoverished masses from enacting solutions that could have reversed the eventual collapse of society. As my father said, “Human ego created these problems, and human ego will drive us over the cliff. The world would be better off if a computer ran everything.”

Computers.… The next computer I own will be implanted in my skull.

A sound! My heart skipped a beat. It was an animal, approaching the creek from the thicket to my left.

Quietly, I wiped fresh sweat beads from my already moist brow and palms, shifting my body weight to aim the pistol, my eyes focused on the clearing. It was a deer, a young male, maybe eighty pounds, as anxious and as thirsty as yours truly. My hand trembled as he glanced in my direction, my body shook as he turned, offering me a clean shot at his flank.

I hesitated, drawing a breath, suddenly fearful of the gunshot and who might hear it …

Thwaap!

The buck collapsed upon its forelegs in silence, the arrow having appeared seemingly from out of nowhere, its tip passing cleanly through the startled animal’s spine and out its chest cavity.

Leaving my makeshift hunting blind, I approached the dying beast. The angle of the arrow’s entry indicated the archer had shot from the trees.

“Touch the venison and you’ll die where you stand.”

I turned slowly, my heart racing as she emerged from the forest like an erotic female warrior from a Luis Royo painting. Her ebony hair flowed nearly down to her waist in a curly tangle camouflaged in twigs and leaves, every inch of her flesh concealed in green and brown paint or beneath a skintight matching bodysuit. Ten paces away and I could smell her scent — a heavy animal musk. She looked about my age. The quiver was strapped to her thigh, the muscles of her upper body taut as she aimed the graphite bow’s arrow at my heart.

I was as stunned as I was smitten. “The deer’s yours. Take it.”

“I intend to. Drop the piece.”

“The what? Oh, the gun. Seriously, you can have it. I doubt I could even shoot the damn thing straight.” I lowered the weapon, placed it on the ground, and backed away. “What’s your name?”

“Shut up.” Quivering the arrow, she grabbed the gun, expertly ejecting the clip to check the chamber. Reassembling the weapon, she shoved it into a satchel concealed around her waist, hoisted the dead deer over her shoulders, and was gone.

Alone again, I waited thirty seconds, then followed her through the dense brush, losing her trail within minutes.

Who was she? Was she alone? Part of a group? Her attitude suggested otherwise. My guess? When the lights went out and the grocery store shelves were rendered bare, she had fled to the mountains — or more likely her family were mountain folk. Whatever the case, she was everything I was not; ruthless, cunning … a hunter who showed no mercy.

And yet she had spared me.

Well, dork-wad, you did give her the gun. Practically curtsied as you laid it on the ground.

I paused again to listen to the forest; heard nothing.

By her scent, I knew she lived in the woods, probably a cave. Heading for higher ground, I followed a path of ferns and moss-covered rocks that emptied into a clearing of tall weeds.

To my left, the Blue Ridge Mountains caressed the setting sun between its peaks and valley. With darkness a mere ninety minutes away, I had to choose — the woman or sanctuary?

It had been twenty months since I’d carried on a conversation with another living person. I might be an introvert by nature, but listening day and night to the voice in my head had been maddening, leading to the creation of these recorded journal entries. But seeing her … she was a thunderbolt, a goddess. I knew I had to find her, even if it meant risking an encounter with the SS.

Pausing at the edge of a clearing, I retrieved water and an apple from my knapsack, consumed a quick snack, buried the evidence, and continued my trek up the mountain.

After three hundred feet the woods began anew. The shadows of pine trees were closing in, dusk coming fast. For half an hour I wandered through a maze of trees, until the night was upon me and I accepted the fact I was hopelessly lost.

Hearing men’s voices, I quickly hid.

There were a dozen of them, more in the cave.

The dogs had found the woman’s lair, its small entrance concealed by brush. I figured now they would stake out the area, waiting for her to return.

I smelled her as she moved through the shadows to join me behind the bushes. I felt the gun press firmly against the left side of my ribcage. “I need a place that’s safe.”

“Get me back to the main road.”

The motorcycle was hidden in a ravine behind mile marker thirty-six. Six months ago, I had replaced the engine and fuel tank with an electric motor and rechargeable truck battery, rendering it fast yet whisper quiet. We waited another hour before heading south, my night-vision visor illuminating any nocturnal predators that might venture near the highway.

My family’s suburban neighborhood had long since been abandoned. Our house stood alone among burnt-out foundations on a cul-de-sac. I had cleared the surrounding terrain to expose anyone who approached. Every window was bricked up, the house and matching eight-foot wall that surrounded the backyard’s concealed acreage painted to appear like charred cinder.

The lawn was covered in sheets of metal — hundreds of car trunks and engine hoods, planted flat into the grass and welded into a giant jigsaw puzzle. Climbing off the motorcycle, I instructed the beautiful huntress to follow precisely in my footsteps, my night-vision glasses revealing a preset path that turned and twisted to tall shrubs that camouflaged a subterranean side entrance. Once we were inside the house, I bolted the steel door behind the woman, shocking her by turning on the lights.

“You have electricity? How?”

“While other people were searching for food and water, I was busy collecting car batteries and solar panels.”

“And car hoods. What’s that all about?”

“Security. Step onto my property and you get zapped with ten thousand volts of electricity. By the way, my name’s Eisenbraun, Robert Eisenbraun. Most people used to call me Ike.”

“Andria Saxon.” Dropping the deer carcass on the floor, she roamed the house, taking inventory. “Air-conditioning … a working refrigerator and stove — pretty impressive, Eisenbrain. What else do you have here?”

“A running shower and soap for starters. And it’s Eisenbraun.”

“Tell you what, I’ll handle the brawn, you handle the brains and maybe we’ll manage to survive this mess.”

2

“You make love like a freshman.”

“And you make love like a woman breaking in a wild stallion.”

We had lived together in my parents’ home for three weeks, sleeping in separate bedrooms, which we kept bolted from the inside. She taught me how to target shoot from tree limbs while I educated her on how everything worked in our shared fortress, but we rarely engaged in conversation about our lives before the Die-Off.

And then late this afternoon, she turned to me while we picked apples in the orchard and kissed me.

Within minutes we were in bed, naked and entwined; the two of us entering an exciting new world.

When we were done, Andria climbed off and lay beside me, the flesh on her tan back and buttocks sporting a series of scars. “Scratch.”

I accepted my duties, restricting the urge to hug her from behind lest she crush my windpipe with an elbow to the throat.

“You may have noticed that I have control issues, Eisenbraun. I guess it comes from being on my own since I was fifteen. A little lower. Now harder, use your nails.… God, that’s good. So what’s your story? How’d you learn to do all this?”

“I studied a lot. You know … lack of a social life.”

“Funny, I pegged you as a jock. How tall are you? Six foot five? Maybe two-twenty? Bet you played basketball.”

“Track and field. Mom was a natural athlete, I inherited her foot speed. Did some long jump and the hundred meters in high school until the varsity football coach forced me to try out as a receiver. I couldn’t catch a cold, let alone a football. ‘Stone hands Eisenbraun,’ they called me on the field, ‘Jew bastard’ off it. Things changed after they switched me to free safety and found out the Jew liked to hit.”

“Chip on your shoulder, huh? That makes us kindred spirits. Did you play ball in college?”

“I wanted to, but the Pentagon ordered me not to play. Guess they were afraid of concussions damaging the old noggin.”

“The Pentagon?”

“My uncle was a general, a bigwig with DARPA. When I was fourteen I created an algorithm for a video game that ended up being used to train gamers to fly military drones. Three years later my uncle was placed in charge of a top-secret initiative, called Omega. I left school during my sophomore year in college to work with his team.”

God, I was blathering like a little girl.

“And?”

“And it’s top secret. Now you tell. Where are you from? Who taught you to hunt?”

“I’m part Seminole, and don’t change the subject. Tell me about Omega. And no bullshit about it being top secret. The world’s in the shitter because of assholes like your uncle.”

“My uncle wasn’t an asshole and Omega wasn’t a weapon. It was actually an initiative that could have averted the Die-Off. The Omega Project was a $750 billion energy program, seeded in secrecy by the Pentagon during the Obama years to replace fossil fuels with fusion energy.”

“Just what the world needs, more nuclear waste.”

“No, no, that’s fission. Fusion is clean energy that’s released when two hydrogen atoms are merged together. The technology’s biggest challenge was that the sunlike temperatures required to generate a chain reaction also released neutrino particles which destroyed the reactor’s vessel. The solution to the problem required fusing deuterium with helium-3, which stabilized the process.”

“English, Eisenbraun.”

“To stabilize fusion required helium-3, an element that originates from the sun. The problem was that only a few cups worth of helium-3 ever reaches our planet thanks to Earth’s dense atmosphere. The moon, however, possesses over a million metric tons of the stuff, enough to generate energy for the next thousand years.”

“So, Omega was a secret mission to mine helium-3 from the moon?”

“Exactly.”

“But you mentioned the Pentagon. Why involve those warmongers?”

“First, because the dysfunctional assholes in Congress would never have considered funding such a radical energy plan at a time when politics was focused on unemployment, even though the program created a lot of jobs. Second, because the Pentagon not only had access to the money, they also had the ability to operate the program in secrecy without congressional oversight. Still, the scientific challenges were considerable, requiring NASA to design new lunar shuttles to transport the helium-3, plus a habitat that could safely house a mining crew — don’t forget, each astronaut required large supplies of food, water, and oxygen.”

“I thought there’s water on the moon — scratch my butt.”

“There’s ice, so yes, there’s water. There’s also moon dust, which became a major challenge. Moon dust particles act like glass shards, making them a constant threat to the astronauts’ skin and eyes. There’s also limits on what the human body can endure, especially when it comes to long-term exposure to gravitational forces one-sixth that of Earth. Between the health concerns and the costs — about a million dollars per astronaut per day — my uncle decided to go in a different direction … drones.”

“Drones?” She rolled over, positioning her head on my chest — her right hand casually stroking my penis. “Keep talking.”

“By, uh … drones, I meant replacing the lunar astronauts with mining equipment that could be remotely operated back here on Earth. All that was needed to do the job was a supercomputer to operate the drones. The way my uncle figured it, if a computer could remotely operate everything from a passenger jet to a surgical appendage performing brain surgery, then why not a mining operation on the moon? That was the reason my uncle recruited me for Omega, to join the best and brightest scientists in designing and engineering GOLEM.”

“What’s GOLEM?”

I sucked in a breath as her lips kissed my stomach. “GOLEM? It’s an acronym that stood for ‘Geological Offsite Lunar Excavation Machine.’ Whoever made it up stole it from a Bible story about a soulless being, created by man, to serve his needs. See, GOLEM wasn’t going to just be a supercomputer, it was going to be the ultimate in artificial intelligence — a machine that could think and adapt in order to control complex multilayered tasks a quarter of a million miles away.”

I closed my eyes, willing her mouth to venture lower.

She stopped. “Keep talking, Eisenbraun. How did a young track-and-field nerd like you get involved with GOLEM?”

“My uncle was confident I could resolve the computer’s design flaws, so he assigned me to work under GOLEM’s director, Monique DeFriend, the former head of CSAIL, a prestigious artificial intelligence lab. She buried me in menial tasks, until I submitted a design for GOLEM’s DNA matrix that blew everyone away. Two days later she placed me in charge of GOLEM’s programming. I had just turned twenty.”

“Nice. So what happened?”

“What happened? The GDO happened. The world went to hell.”

Andria released me, her mood darkening. “Who are you to complain? You survived, Eisenbraun. You, with your solar panels and water filters and lake water. I didn’t have seeds and canned goods; I didn’t have a backyard filled with fruit trees.”

“You also didn’t have starving anti-Semites as neighbors. When the government collapsed, my parents preached secrecy to my younger sisters—‘If the neighbors find out we have food, they’ll take first and ask for handouts later,’ but it’s hard for teens not to want to help when their friends are literally starving to death.

“I was on my way home from the chaos in Washington the day our neighbors struck. My parents and sisters were butchered for three bags of brown rice and a bushel of apples. The rest of our supplies were still hidden in the garage attic.”

“I’m sorry.” She lay back down, her hand draped across my chest. “After they murdered your family … what did you do?”

“First I buried my family behind the orchard wall. Then I used the rest of our gasoline to burn down the murderers’ homes while they slept. I’ve been alone here ever since.”

“You’re an angry little bastard, Eisenbraun, but you’re no longer alone.”

She climbed on top of me and kissed me, her tongue harsh as it probed my mouth, her hand stroking my loins until I entered her again.

3

The August sunrise lit the sheer gray vertical cliff face into a canvas of gold, causing my heart to race. “Andie, I really don’t feel good about this.”

“You’ll feel better once we get started.”

“I don’t want to get started. When you said you knew how to cure my night terrors, I thought we were going for a hike.”

“We are going for a hike — straight up to the summit.”

“Without ropes and harnesses? This is crazy.”

“It’s not crazy, it’s called ‘free soloing,’ and you can do it.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You have the physical strength, what you’re lacking is the psychological control needed to stay on the wall. It’s all about learning to control your fears through Buddha breathing — in through your nostrils, filling the belly, then slowly exhaling through your mouth. Commit to the climb. Focus your fingertips on the rock; be light like a spider monkey. And whatever you do, Ike, keep looking up.”

Andria and I had been living together just over five months when I began suffering severe anxiety attacks. She had kidded me about feeling the pressures of being domesticated, and in a way she was right. Worrying about my own survival had been far different than protecting the woman I loved from the murderous gangs that roamed the countryside.

Fear entered my dreams in the form of night terrors. Ghoulish men would break into our home, the faceless demons raping and torturing Andria as they pinned me down and forced me to watch. Each night terror ended with her death, followed by my bloodcurdling scream.

Things grew so bad that we had to sleep in separate bedrooms again.

When my anxiety grew into a severe depression, Andria decided we needed a change of scenery. Claiming she knew the perfect mountain hideaway that would be free of the sociopaths, we packed supplies and rode all night on my battery-powered motorcycle, arriving just before dawn at the foot of Buzzard Rock, a 1,145-foot-high mountain located in Loudoun County, Virginia.

As she pointed out our route, I felt the blood drain from my face. “Relax, Ike, I’ve climbed this face a dozen times. I’ll go first, do what I do and you’ll be fine. And remember—”

“I know, I know … keep looking up.”

We began our ascent. I carefully measured the first fifty handholds, my body trembling in fear as I learned to balance myself on a rock wall. After a while my fingers, hands, and feet became fleshlike pinions, adhering me to the cliff face. I learned to cleave to inch-wide grooves between the slabs of slate; the toes of my running shoes sought the tiniest of perches to bear my weight as I flattened my body to the unforgiving mountain.

Ten feet turned into fifty; fifty became a hundred, each arm length accompanied by controlled breathing and the occasional “I’m okay” in reply to Andie’s query. We paused, poised on a three-foot ledge 372 feet above our starting point that offered us a treetop view and a place where we could rest and eat.

I bit into a ripe pear, my body tired, my muscles taut. “Andie, this was an amazing workout, but I’m shot and we still have to climb back down. Seriously, I never thought I’d make it ten feet, let alone this high.”

She was lathered in sweat, her high cheekbones darkly tanned, accentuating her heritage. “We’re going all the way, Ike. Trust me, the hardest part is over. From here on up it’s a cinch.”

I trusted her.

Foolish, foolish man.

The next few hours of climbing were slightly easier as the cliff face was shredded in three-inch cracks that helped get us to another perch just below nine hundred feet.

I pointed to a rusted pinion embedded in the rock. “Pussies.”

Andie smiled, tearing into an apple. “You’re the man, Eisenbraun. When we get up to the summit, I’m going to fuck your brains out.”

I glanced up. The good news was the appearance of dry-rotted roots sticking out of the cliff face. The bad news was a five-foot curl of rock that protected the summit like a protruding lower lip. “How do we get around that ledge?”

“I’ll show you when we get up there. Ready? I’m getting really horny.”

We started out again, my fingers by now raw and blistered, the sweat on my palms becoming a new threat as the midday sun beat down upon us. The roots were a mixed blessing, offering us handholds we could grip — along with palms full of splinters.

And then we arrived at our final perch, the two of us staring at a ceiling of rock that jutted five feet out over our heads.

Andria pointed to a series of roots along the outer lip. “This will sound scary, but what we have to do is lean out and grab on to that root, then invert and blindly work our feet and legs up and over the ledge.”

“You’re insane. I’m so tired I can barely hold on.”

“Which is why we have to reach the summit, so we can rest and climb down tomorrow.”

“And just how are we going to get down?”

She flashed me her shit-eating grin. “We’ll take the trail.”

Anger shook me as I cursed my companion to exhaustion. I felt utterly helpless, my existence forced into a do-or-die situation that was as frustrating to fathom as it was insane — as insane as what had happened to my family and the rest of the world, as insane as the psychopaths that roamed the countryside and haunted my dreams — only this time I had a choice. This time I could save my life or at least die with some dignity.

“Embrace the fear, Ike. Use it to focus your strength.”

“Okay, Andie, but I’m going first.”

“That’s not a good idea. I’ve done this before—”

“Bullshit. You’ve never climbed this mountain; if you had you wouldn’t have taken us up this route. I knew it back on the last perch when I saw your face. You realized you had screwed up, but as usual you tried to wing it … control the moment. You’re right about one thing though, if we don’t get over that summit now, we’ll never make it down, not in the dark. So we’ll give it a try, only I’m going first. Not because you’re a woman or some other bullshit sense of male chivalry, but because I love you and I just … I just couldn’t bear to watch you fall.”

Tears flooded her eyes, marking the first time she had shown me any real vulnerability. Reaching carefully into her backpack, she removed a twenty-foot length of nylon rope. “Tie off,” she said, securing one end around her own waist, handing me the other. “When you reach the summit you can pull me up. If something happens, then we’ll die together.” She leaned over and kissed me. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved, Eisenbraun. Don’t fuck this up.”

I looped the rope tightly around my waist while drawing deep breaths into my gut, summoning every reserve of strength I had left. For the first time since we began the climb I felt truly alive, knowing in my heart that no matter what else happened to me in the days or weeks or years ahead, that right here, right now there was no possible way I was going to allow myself to fail.

4

A die-off provokes a different kind of fear than a war or a natural disaster. In war there is a common enemy; in a tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane there is a common bond among humans to aid those in need.

In a die-off, death is a game of musical chairs that begins as an innocuous boil. An occasional power outage evolves into rolling blackouts, followed by assurances from government officials that oil reserves will last another thirty years, even as prices spike and the lines at your local gas station stretch for miles. The grocery store becomes a battle front as every nonperishable left on the shelf is fought over in hand-to-hand combat and customers with loaded carts, refusing to risk their precious bounty, charge out the doors without paying. These scenarios degenerate into civil disorder and mandatory curfews, the protests and street violence that follow unleashing the military.

Stop the music and remove the chair known as “personal freedom.”

Phase two is rationing. Oil, natural gas, coal, firewood … food. Communication fractures into weekly assurances that times are tough but things will be improving soon. These pep talks from politicians, also known as lies, are designed to buy time — time being the variable that allows the weak to perish, either with a whimper (starvation) or a bang (riot police with orders to shoot to kill).

For the lower classes, the music has stopped.

A long winter without heat strikes next. Add in diminishing water and food supplies, not to mention a cessation of hospital services — and there goes the middle class — first in the colder rural regions, followed closely by the urban areas. As we remove this chair, the government shuts down, society collapses, and now it is officially every family for itself.

Dying comes in many flavors. You can starve, freeze to death, die of heat exhaustion, thirst, physical ailments, or perhaps you’ll be shot attempting to get food to feed yourself or a starving child. In the last few years I had seen it all, and the images never went away … the nightmares and the anger stuck with me forever.

In the warmer states, suburbanites had lasted a season longer than their city-dwelling counterparts, but a die-off, like musical chairs, is a zero-sum game. Eventually every family, save the farmer with his own well-armed private army of migrant workers and the inaccessible survivalist community, was forced to abandon their powerless homes and their gasless vehicles to search for food and potable water, joining a nomadic exodus that defined the postapocalyptic landscape. Hunters still hunted and fisherman fished, but the competition for food turned neighbor against neighbor, no catch safe among the hordes of the wandering desperate. Parents pushed their starving children in shopping carts and wheelbarrows, leaving the elderly behind to die with the family pet they could no longer feed. Unyielding hunger could transform a populace into a mob of borderline psychopaths, and western nations do not go quietly into the night like an emaciated African born into hunger. They go out shooting.

I had survived these trials and tribulations through preparedness, sheer luck, and a fear that spurred ingenuity. I accepted isolation over insanity, waiting out the first year within my fortress of solitude. What kept me going was a numbers game: without oil, the world’s population would drop from seven billion to just under six hundred million. If I could safeguard my chair, then maybe I’d live to see a different, wiser world.

Instead, I found myself quarantined against a society gone mad in every sense of the word. As fate would have it, after sixteen months of rationing, I was forced to venture out of my prison … and that’s when I met my new companion.

My initial impression of Andria Saxon, besides love at first sight, was that she was a natural warrior — a fearless hunter as at home in the forest as I was in the lab. As I grew to know her, I realized I was wrong.

Andria refused to give me many details about her family life, other than that she had been on her own since she was fifteen. Over time, I was able to put together the missing pieces of a difficult existence — her “toughness” forged in strip bars, street corners, and flophouses. Having lived in her deceased mother’s car for almost a year, Andria was as unaffected by the Die-Off as the Eskimos, Mayans, and other indigenous people who’d had little use for technology. What forced her from the streets of Lynchburg, Virginia, and up into the Blue Ridge Mountains was her fear of being sodomized and enslaved as livestock.

Andria trusted no one, especially men. I would learn later that her intentions at the time we met were to gain access to my safe house and kill me. What stayed my execution was her need to understand how everything in my home worked. It was only after our first week together that she decided I was worth more to her alive; after a month she knew I was not a threat.

For Andie, our time in bed together was lust — mindless fun. She would never allow herself to become vulnerable to her long-harnessed emotions.

Our adventures on the cliff face led to profound psychological changes in both of us. For me, a man who lived to survive but was afraid of life, I realized a newfound freedom that released me from the phobias that had dominated my existence since high school. As for Andria, she later confessed that the mountain was never meant to be survived. Believing her destiny was already set — that she would eventually be enslaved and tortured by the gangs of sociopaths, she had brought me to Buzzard Rock to end both our lives; albeit in as thrilling a manner as she knew how. It had been my selfless act at the summit that had melted her cold veneer, just as it had been my leap of faith that had ended my night terrors.

We returned the next night to my family’s Virginia home reborn as newlyweds, each kiss as if it were the first, always knowing it could be the last. For the next twenty months we lived together in a gilded love nest surrounded by chaos — always careful not to conceive a child as we waited for the world to change.

And then one fateful day, the wolves showed up at our door.

“How many of them are out there, Ike?”

It was hard to see, the lenses of most of the closed-circuit surveillance cameras still clouded with the morning dew, their sheer numbers having short-circuited the electrical grid. “I count nine, plus the two wounded stiffs who tried to save their electrocuted dogs.”

Andria handed me a loaded handgun — the very one she had taken from me the day we met. “How long before they realize the grid is down?”

“Not long.”

“Let’s get outside; we’ll pick them off one by one as they climb over the garden wall.”

I followed her through the kitchen, past the bricked-up windows, and out the reinforced steel back door to the garden. The eight-foot-high walls surrounding the yard were topped with coils of barbed wire, but I doubted the supports would hold beyond the first assault.

Ten minutes passed, and then we heard boots trudging heavily on the metal car hoods as they approached.

I listened, my heart racing. “They’ve split up!”

“Stay here, I’ll take the front door.”

“Andie, no—”

Wa — boom!

The blast took out a twenty-foot section of wall, pieces of brick and mortar rending the smoke-infested air. My head throbbed in the deafening aftermath, my ears ringing as bullets sprayed the orchard, shredding our fall harvest into pulp.

Andria grabbed my wrist and dragged me into the house mere seconds before the front door blew open, the concussion wave collapsing the dining room cupboards that displayed my mother’s good china. Blindly, she fired into the smoldering doorway, her shotgun burying lead in the chest of an auburn-bearded hayseed, shattering his necklace of human teeth.

Pulling Andria out of the hallway, I yanked open the cellar door and led her down the creaking wooden steps, praying that the predators hadn’t discovered the basement emergency exit. Andie checked the security monitor while I unhooked the motorcycle from its charger — the batteries barely energized from last night’s run.

“Looks clear.” She unbolted the door and climbed on behind me, wrapping her arms around my chest as I powered up the engine, its silent rumble overpowered by the blast of machine gun fire that splintered the cellar door above our heads.

We motored into daylight and up a two-foot-wide, shrub-enshrouded stretch of tarmac. The tires flattened the hood-covered lawn, the sound alerting the cannibals searching the front of the house. We were halfway down the cul-de-sac by the time their assault weapons opened fire.

The motorcycle died before we reached the end of the street.

“Andie, run!”

Abandoning the bike, we sprinted down the road, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of the enraged wolf pack. The grid had killed their dogs — a lucky break, but there was no cover, just a deserted suburban development, separated from the nearest woods by the interstate, which ran below the deserted community.

We slid down a weed-covered embankment to access the highway, my heart skipping a beat as I heard Andria scream out in pain.

“My ankle … I felt something snap.”

I helped her up, only to see her cry out in frustration, her foot unable to bear any weight.

“Ike, give me your gun.”

My heart pounded. It was suicide time.

I searched my waistband. “Shit. I must have lost it sliding down the hill.”

“Goddamn it, Ike—”

“It’s okay, I can carry you.”

“And outrun these assholes? Ike, listen to me, you need to kill me, you need to snap my neck! Come around me from behind, you can do it. Ike, please—”

“Andie, I can’t—”

Tears flowed down both our cheeks; her eyes were filled with desperate fear. “You said you loved me, Ike! You swore on that love you’d kill me if it ever came down to this.”

“Shh!” Hearing voices, I dragged her down into the weeds.

Gunfire erupted, bullets ricocheting off the highway’s steel girder.

“Andie, the bullets. On the count of three, we stand up into the line of fire.”

She kissed me hard and fast. “You are my heart.”

I was about to tell her how much I loved her when the gunfire abruptly ceased. Lying in the grass, I could hear their boots thrashing through the weeds. “I’ll stand and draw their fire again, then drag you off the ground.”

“Okay.”

“One … two…”

If I said “three” I never heard it. What I heard instead was the bone-rattling reverberation of helicopter blades beating the air, followed by gunfire — the kind of gunfire that can split a car in two.

I crawled on top of Andria until the rain of hot lead ceased and the chopper landed on the interstate.

“You folks all right?”

I looked up at the soldier, his face obscured by his helmet’s dark visor. “Who are you?”

“Naval reserves. Domestic forces are sweeping the area for survivors. We see a human carnivore, we kill them and ask questions later.”

There were sixteen people aboard the Sikorsky transport — bewildered adults, malnourished children, a paraplegic bound to a wheelbarrow and an infant suckling her mother’s breast. We learned that the Internet was back up, powered by solar grids and windmills. Pockets of communities had organized, calling upon war veterans and returning soldiers to mobilize military firepower to reestablish law and order, their vehicles fueled by secret reserves stored at military bases.

We were flown to the University of Virginia. Major universities were now functioning like state capitals, offering survivors food and a dorm room in exchange for work. A Web site — Survivors.org — had been created to locate family and friends.

I was relieved, but not surprised to learn that my Uncle David was alive.

Andria’s broken ankle was fitted with a walking boot. We lived in a tent and worked in the fields.

A month later, in July of 2025, representatives from seventy-two university communities convened in Topeka, Kansas — the geographical center of America — in order to create a new framework of government. What emerged from this six-week convention would have made the founding fathers proud. No more political parties. Term limits for all elected officials. Most important — the elimination of future financial influences on elections, safeguarded by a Supreme Council, which would ensure that each candidate operated on equal footing.

The first president of New America was a professor of ecology and agricultural science, elected by the founding members of Congress. Her vice president, Dr. Lee Udelsman, was a fusion expert who had worked on the Omega Project before society had collapsed.

Uncle David showed up in Virginia a short time later, our reunion soured when he learned I had no interest in finishing my work on GOLEM. We negotiated a consultant fee — a research grant and lab that would allow me to experiment with a new pet project, along with Andria’s acceptance at the soon-to-be established Space Energy Agency in Cape Canaveral, where we would share an apartment while she trained to pilot mining shuttles to transport loads of helium-3 back to Earth.

Could we rebound as a species? I had no doubt. If anything, humans had demonstrated, both as individuals and as nations, a fortitude born of courage. Still, ours was a resilience strengthened by numbers; when we divided as a people the strong feasted upon the weak, manifesting our worst attributes — man’s ego unbridled. The Great Die-Off had served as yet another reminder of the devil lurking in each one of us; its aftermath mind-numbing, more than five billion people wiped out.

For now at least, it appeared the reign of the Homo sapiens subspecies known as “Petroleum Man” had officially ended, and with it Big Oil’s stranglehold on clean, renewable energy sources.

The question was: Had we learned anything?