The rest of the summer was spent doing one of three things: scavenging for any supplies we could find, avoiding people with the red plague, and fighting off those desperate or crazy enough to attack the house in an attempt to take what we had.

You'd think I was kidding about the last one. Heck, we were Canadians, known across the world for being civil and polite, even to total strangers. Funny how the lack of law enforcement, food and water, and the effects of a killer plague changed all that. Now we had gangs of crazy starving people roaming the streets and willing to do just about anything to get a bite to eat. That is, if they weren't already dying from the plague.

We had three pitched battles during the summer on our street alone, with a handful of us in possession of guns and supplies fighting off mobs that came to take our stuff, armed with bats, axes and anything else that came to hand. I'm not sure which was worse: watching Jesper die in front of me from a shot to the head or learning from my dad how to do the same to somebody else, then doing it. I found myself fervently praying every night during the third wave lockdown that I wouldn't see anybody I knew in those mobs and be forced to shoot them.

As hard as I tried not to, it was inevitable that I would have to shoot somebody, with things being as crazy as they were. I remember the day that I did. I twisted hard to the side and puked out my guts after shooting my first zerker. As in 'berserker', the name we were giving to the crazies in the streets. This zerker in particular was a guy not much older than me, maybe Cam's age, dirty and gaunt from three or four weeks without substantial food. He had charged our makeshift barricade that we had pulled together after a couple failed attempts from smaller mobs to get onto the street.

Using stalled cars, chunks of wall and debris to plug the holes, we had managed to block the entrance to the dead-end street we lived on, using the houses and their fenced yards to cover the back. It was more of a fortification than a deterrent. The mob had somehow reasoned that, if we had guns and were willing to use them to defend ourselves, we were also defending supplies and clean water. A hastily assembled wall wouldn't actually stop them. We were just hoping it'd give us enough cover to protect ourselves.

Ironically they were right. Suspecting that the mob eventually would figure it out, my dad, working from some mental prepper handbook, had quickly started to prepare us for an all-out attack shortly after his scouting trip. Of course he was also right, as he had been ever since the visitors started their assault. Kinda made me wonder which chapter in that little book was written about alien invasions. Because he was spot on with most of it.

Anyway, using ropes and a lot of sweat, we pulled the stalled cars into place in a day, feeling eyes on us the whole time. The old guy a couple doors down, helped, as well as a couple of immigrants from Africa that also lived in the dead-end. Both of their families had come from rather screwed up countries on the home continent so had quite naturally started squirreling stuff away as soon as they could.

They weren't armed, like us and the old man, but they had more than enough supplies for a couple years. They had done enough giving things away upon the threat of violence, they were willing to help us stop it from happening again. Thank goodness they were: we seriously needed their help moving those cars and building the barricade.

The attack came within minutes of us filling the last big gaps in the makeshift wall, confirming that they had watched us build it and were now trying to catch us before we could finish the job. My first target was also the first guy down our street, charging with a long-handled axe in his hands and hoarsely yelling.

Of course, charge was a relative term. They were tired and hungry, with not much left in the tank. So it was more of an awkward stumble. But, in numbers, they would easily overwhelm the handful of us if they managed to swarm over our ragtag wall.

"Shoot him," Cam directed tautly from where he was manning a vantage point on the far end. "Drop him before he gets too close."

"I, uh, ..." I stammered, my hands suddenly sweaty and the hunting rifle in my hand suddenly weighing as much as one of those wrecked cars did.

It's not like I didn't know how. Between Dad's training and the video games I had been playing for years, I had the motions down pat. But, sighting down the scope at an actual living, breathing person was way different than staring at a TV screen playing Call of Duty or Battlefield.

"Liam," my dad growled. "We all have different targets. That one is yours. You need to shoot him, or he's going to climb our wall and put that axe into your skull."

Him or us. Yeah, I got that. I just couldn't convince my fingers to play along even as adrenaline sent cold shivers through my body at my dad's blunt ultimatum.

"Damn it, kid," the old neighbor growled from just to my left. "Just squeeze the frickin' trigger and let the bullet do all the work!"

Silently yelling at the old man to shut up, I put my eye back on the scope. And I immediately hissed in dismay. Despite moving at half speed, my target was almost two thirds of the way to the barricade. Others too, had joined him, each running as fast as their spent bodies would allow.

My dad's gun barked and a zerker on the left dropped. Then it was the old man bringing another on the left down before Cam fired and brought one down on the right.

"Liam!" my dad snarled and, stomach churning, I put the crosshairs on my zerker's face and squeezed just like my dad had taught.

Already braced for the rifle's kick, I stayed firm when it fired and the stock snapped back into my shoulder. At the same time, I watched through the scope as the zerker grew a bright red flower in the center of his face and a halo of bloody mist around back. Then he was dropping brokenly to the ground to lie in a grotesque heap.

I had done it. I had just shot somebody. That's when I turned and puked my guts out all over the back of the car I was standing on.

"First one's always the hardest," the old man said, sounding strangely sympathetic even as he continued to fire. "But you'll get used to it, kid. You don't have a choice."

He was right. I didn't have a choice. Like Dad said, it was them or us. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I returned to my sight hole in the chunk of torn-out wall I was using as cover. Then I dropped the next three zerkers in quick succession, teeth clenched against the bile that threatened to come surging out with each one.

That mob turned out to be one of the smaller ones, maybe twenty in total. We managed to drop the bulk of them in the first ten minutes of them coming onto the street. We weren't so lucky with the next two, both nearly fifty in number as word spread of our tenuous sanctuary. With those, we had zerkers actually reaching the barricade where the Africans, wielding baseball bats, did their best to keep them off us while we shot more distant runners.

Somehow our family managed to survive the onslaught, mostly due to my dad's nerves of steel and prepper skills. The others in our small group, however, weren't so lucky. One of the Africans was killed in the first big mob attack, pulled off the wall and clubbed to death right in front of us. The old man died in the next one, victim of a zerker that managed to stab him in the side with a makeshift spear before we could shoot him. Cursing and spitting up blood, he made us all promise to survive long enough to kick the visitors' collective asses before he died.

It was pretty nerve-wracking, those first few days with two men down as we manned our barricade and waited for the next attack. An attack that, as September came to an end and the days started getting colder, never came. Our rapidly dwindling ammo supplies silently thanked us for that. While we had enough to survive another hard attack, it would've left us with virtually nothing after.

Of course the city falling quiet like that brought along a whole new set of nervous questions. Like: had the Red Horseman finally finished with us? Was everybody else dead from the plague? Or had we, and the small knots of other survivors, managed to successfully weather the storm and outlast the zerkers?

Of course we knew things were far from being over. One look up at the night sky at that unwinking green dot of doom was enough to tell us that much. Which made me wonder: with three waves already down on us, what did the visitors have for us next?

With that question firmly in the front of my mind, I carefully wove through the fenced yards protecting our dead end's backside on a mission to check on the condition of the river distillery. The mob attacks had made our trips to the river pretty rare so we hadn't seen it in three or four weeks. With Dad scouting into the city, and Cam and Mom on guard duty, it was on me to see what was up with the vital piece of equipment.

It was early in the morning when I set out, with the sun just peeking over the horizon. That meant shadows were still deep, and the air was crisp. With my hepa-mask hiding most of my breath, and keeping out the twin smells of rotting flesh and smoke that now hung thick in the air after a summer of the Red Horseman's ride, I was trying to remain as stealthy as possible as I slid from one shadow to the next.

"You know, you're really not that good at sneaking," a soft woman's voice said from somewhere to my left. Jerking to a stunned halt, my hand dropped to the big knife I had sheathed at my waist as I threw myself up against a wall and looked wildly around.

"And your knife isn't going to do much good against somebody with a gun," the voice pointed out in a rather matter-of-fact tone, telling me that while I still couldn't see her, she could see me.

"Do you have one?" The question came out before I could stop it, eliciting a giggle.

"Of course I do," she replied. "So should you."

"For the zerkers? But a knife is much quieter."

"The, ... what? Oh, you mean the crazies that were attacking anybody and everybody for a crust of bread. Yeah, a gun will get more than just the one you'd manage to kill with your big knife there before they killed you. And if they're already on top of you, being quiet is the least of your worries."

A slender shape detached itself from the shadows and stepped into partial view.

"But I wouldn't worry so much about those. The plague's finally killed the rest of them off," the figure said, instantly pulling my eyes to her. "That, and something quite a bit more dangerous than a virus."

"More dangerous, ...?" I began to ask. Then she was beside me, her hand taking hold of my arm in a surprisingly strong grip. Then, before I could resist, she was pulling me through the shadows.

We silently crossed three more yards before she was pulling me hard down onto the ground. When I looked at her, my face hardening with anger, she held up a gloved hand to stop me from speaking. Then she was pointing at a gap in the back fence we were now looking at.

Easing forward, she kept us low until we reached the gap. Then again she was pointing, this time through the gap.

Frowning inside my hepa mask, I had turned away from her shadowy form to peer through the gap. And I immediately felt my heart lurch at what I saw.

It was another figure wrapped in shadow, moving slowly in a ready crouch across the park we now looked out over. Strangely I felt a sense of ominous foreboding as I watched it smoothly move. Then I noticed this figure was holding what appeared to be some sort of assault rifle fitted with a silencer.

A silencer? What the hell? I had glanced back at my mysterious companion then but she shook her head, holding up her hand yet again. So I returned my attention back to the newcomer. And I almost swore at seeing that, despite it's deceptively slow pace, it was almost out of the park.

My companion kept her hand raised until the figure disappeared and was gone for a good 30 count. As soon as she dropped it, I was speaking.

"Who the hell was that?" I asked in a hoarse whisper. "The cops? The military?"

She shook her head.

"A hunter," she said.

"A hunter? With a silencer on an assault rifle? What the hell are they hunting?"

Silently she pointed at me then, after a slight hesitation, jabbed a thumb back at herself.

"If you had kept going in the line you were taking, you would've been right on top of him. Then he would've dropped you before you crossed the next yard without you even knowing he was there," she softly revealed, turning to look into the now empty park. "My dad always said I knew woodcraft better than anybody he knew. That I could track smoke through fog on a dark night. After he died from the plague three weeks ago, my uncle sent me into the city to scout it out. I almost instantly found one of those." She pointed at the spot where the crouching figure had disappeared.

"I tracked it for nearly a day and, despite my skill, it nearly shook me a dozen times. And it nearly caught me a dozen more. It was near dusk that it finally stopped. But just long enough to smoothly and without missing a single shot, wipe out ten survivors that were working on repairing a guard wall over on the south side."

Her index finger and thumb formed a gun and she made like she was firing.

"Pop. Pop. Pop. The survivors dropped without a sound, every one of them shot in the head," she said, her quiet voice now filling with an equally quiet horror. "They didn't have a chance."

"Holy shit," I breathed, not wanting to believe my ears as my thoughts churned chaotically.

Could this be it? Could this be the next wave of the visitors' attack? They had been pretty minimalist up to this point, expending relatively low amounts of resources to bring the planet to its knees. It made a perverse sort of sense that, when it came time to actually occupy Earth, that they'd send assassins not armies. After all, there couldn't be many humans left after a plague hit us with a 97% kill rate. All they would need would be assassins to take care of the rest of us.

Assassins, going by what I saw, that looked pretty much like people, making them hard to spot. Which made me wonder: how the hell did they pull that one off??

Thinking of assassins brought me back to my mysterious savior.

"Help me out here. There's something I don't understand. You didn't do anything to save them, but you saved me. Why?"

"Because, after watching those hunters for three weeks, I'm pretty sure you're not one of them. And I'm tired of watching real people die in their silent hunt."

"How do I know you're not one of them??"

Again she laughed, this time a dry thing filled with very little humor.

"Because if I were, you'd already be dead, champ, instead of asking me stupid questions." She smoothly stood.

"Now, let's go find you a gun!"