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.

MAY 29, 2025

“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.