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.