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.