Which brings me right back to where I started, staring at my shaking hands and willing my heart to slow down as I tried to digest what I had just experienced.

I made the river valley just barely ahead of the anarchists, tossing my pack down ahead of me into the coulee before parkouring down the path to throw off pursuit as I followed it down the hill. Now I stood with my chest heaving and my hands shaking as my mind chaotically churned and fear sent adrenaline running like quicksilver through my veins.

I was frozen. I literally didn't know what to do next. The visitors had twisted my world into a broken shell of what it once was, devastating her cities and her people until only those that walked where shadows walked still remained. Now even those shadows weren't safe with alien hunters spitting silent death from every vantage point and mind-broken anarchists raiding and pillaging the handful of survivors that had withstood the first three waves of attack.

My family had been brutally taken from me. With their deaths my only hope of survival was destroyed. How was I supposed to do this by myself?

Hearing several shots being fired from the ridge stirred me from my dark reverie. Carefully I leaned out from behind my cover to look up the hill. What was going on up there?

Without warning a hand was slipping over my mouth. Then, before I could react, I was pulled back behind cover.

"Shhhh!" Tasha hissed tautly into my ear as she threw her arm around me and pulled me tightly to her. "Stay absolutely still. There's like three hunters up there and the anarchists are trying to fight them off."

Despite that, I found myself struggling against her desperately strong hold. When she finally dropped her hand off my face to maintain her grip on me, I hissed:

"You knew the anarchists were going to attack my family, didn't you," I accused in a hard whisper. "It's your fricking uncle leading them! That's why you didn't want me to go back to the house. You knew they'd be there."

"Yes." Her answer was curt and oddly truthful.

"Then why didn't you do something to help them? Warn them or something? Or come with me when I went back?"

"I didn't know you weren't with them until I saw you this morning," she quietly confessed. "When I overheard my uncle planning the attack, I immediately left camp in the hopes of reaching the city before they did so I could warn you guys. But I was on foot, and they had quads they had protected from the EMP. By the time I got here, they were already moving in on your house. I was too late to save your mom, dad and brother. But then I saw you a couple blocks away and knew I could at least save you."

"The anarchists killed them, Tasha," I groaned, my strength leaving me in a rush. I sagged back against her. "They killed my family. Cam as he defended the back gate. And Mom and Dad when Dad refused to give up the location of his cache. Your uncle shot my parents. He shot them right in the head. I saw it all."

The tears came hot and bitter as the full weight of my loss slammed into me.

"Oh man," I quietly sobbed. "What, ... what am I going to do?"

Tasha's arms went from restraining to hugging.

"It's the same question I asked after my dad died," she said, her voice sympathetic as she whispered in my ear. "He wasn't quite right when he quit the armed forces after Afghanistan. But he was there for me when Mom died from cancer, the only person that gave a damn about what happened to me. When I lost him to the plague and my uncle went crazy, I didn't have any family left either. All I had were my prepper friends. When my uncle convinced them to join his anarchists, I lost them, too."

Then her hug abruptly became fierce.

"But I didn't let it break me, Liam. I used the pain to help me survive. Just like you're going to." Then, with one last reassuring squeeze, she was pushing me back to my feet.

It was just the push I needed. As I steadied myself, an image of my dad flashed before my eyes. Of him slowly shaking his head 'no' when he spotted me getting ready to jump in, gun blasting, to save him and Mom. In seeing that, I realized something.

My dad knew that eventually he and Mom, even Cam, would be gone. When that happened, I would need to use everything that he taught me to stay alive in the middle of an alien invasion. Starting with letting him, Mom and Cam go. In that moment, frozen forever in my mind's eye, when he caught sight of me, he had realized then that it was that very instant in time that it would happen. That I needed to be cut free of them and pushed away so I could keep surviving instead of dying in a hail of bullets, like Cam had.

So he had shook his head no, then goaded Runningdeer into killing him before I could shake off my surprise, forcing the issue. Forcing that moment of separation onto me. 'We're Kelsos, Liam,' I could almost hear him say. 'We make sacrifices so that some of us can survive!' By making the ultimate sacrifice, he, Mom and Cam were going to help me survive.

Dad also told Runningdeer that the anarchists had killed his only surviving son when they took out Cam. That meant they should've thought I was already dead. With my parents and brother gone, and the rest of our small survivor group likely killed during the anarchist raid, there was a good chance there was nobody left alive that knew anything different. There shouldn't be any pursuit from the anarchists looking to find another way to my dad's survival cache.

I sucked in a quick lungful of air and roughly scrubbed away my tears with the back of a hand. Unfortunately, there was only one way to make sure. I needed to leave Lethbridge.

Deciding to do so was enough to help me rediscover that hardness that had appeared when I first looked down on Cam's dead body and vowed vengeance. That darkness that I would now need to do whatever I needed to.

"We need to get out of here," I said, finally lifting my head to look over at Tasha as I resolutely straightened myself. "Get out of Lethbridge. With the hunters here, and your uncle losing his mind and killing anybody who opposes him, this place has turned into a death trap."

To my surprise, Tasha nodded in agreement.

"You're reading my mind," she said before glancing up hill. Gun fire could still be heard, but much more sporadically now, almost desperate in the way it would furiously burst for a few seconds, then fall silent. That told me the hunters were just about finished taking care of my pursuers.

Which also meant they would then be free to hunt us. We needed to be a long way from here when that happened.

"Maybe we can make for Calgary," I began. "There's got to be some government or military left there that we can find, ..."

"No." Tasha's disagreement was vigorous. "If Lethbridge was big enough to warrant a bunch of alien hunters, how many do you think are in Calgary, waiting for survivors like us to show up so they can ventilate our skulls? Or even on Highway 2, watching for somebody to come along?"

I grimaced.

"Good point. Then where?"

Tasha thought hard for a moment.

"Before my uncle cut our camp off from the network, we had a ham radio that we used to talk with other prepper groups in Alberta and British Columbia," she said, looking back over at me after a few second's consideration. "I overheard my dad talking several times about a Camp Zero, a final refuge that had been established somewhere in the mountains between the Crow's Nest Pass and Roger's Pass. I say we try to get to Camp Zero. If it's real, even if no other survivors are there, there should at least be shelter and supplies enough to last the winter."

Winter. Even as I thought about it, the warm chinook blowing out of the mountains seemed to feel colder. We would definitely need shelter and food if we were going to survive Nature's wrath now that the visitors had taken everything else from us.

Then something occurred to me.

"Wouldn't your uncle know about Camp Zero?" I asked in a low voice.

"My dad didn't trust my uncle almost from the minute he stepped off the plane from Ottawa after mustering out," she replied. "With your dad and him no longer friends after my dad decided to join the military, my dad kept all that stuff to himself. He was the only one that talked on the radio. I'm pretty sure my uncle doesn't know about the final refuge." I could see her frown in the shadows beneath her hood.

"You know, I think that's the reason my uncle cut us off. He resented the fact that my dad shut him out of all the big decisions with our camp."

"He isolated you guys so he'd be the undisputed boss," I said and she nodded.

"Yeah."

"There's a pretty good chance he's going to get his whole group killed by doing that," I said and Tasha's frown turned into a grimace.

"Yeah," she repeated. "One of the reasons I left. And why we need to get out of here asap."

I turned to look west, towards the mountains.

"So we go on foot? That's going to take a while. It's already October. Snow's only two or three weeks away, at best. Sooner, if we're in the mountains," I pointed out. "I don't really want to be making a run for the hills in two or three feet of snow."

Tasha turned thoughtful.

"Actually, I might have something for that," she said. "If she's still alive, that is."

"She??"

Instead of explaining, Tasha waved me quiet. We both stood still and listened for a moment. And I felt a chill go through me when all we heard was silence. Which could only mean one thing. The hunters were done taking out the anarchists.

Holding a finger to her lips, Tasha pointed downhill at the river before motioning that we follow it west for a distance before going back uphill and into the city a good distance from the makeshift battlefield on top of the ridge. Whatever she was planning, I figured it was better than being here, right under the hunters' collective and very sharp noses. So I nodded in agreement and together we began to carefully make our way down the hill.

Parkour probably would've gotten me down there faster, bouncing off corners in the path and skipping over boulders and such. But it wasn't the most stealthy of ways to move and stealthy was what we needed to stay beneath notice. So we snuck, nice and easy like, easing our way down the path with frequent halts to check to see if we were being followed.

We were near the bottom when I spotted my pack. As I retrieved it and slung it over a shoulder, Tasha looked at it, then me.

"Your bug out bag?" she asked and I nodded. "Good. You'll need that stuff. Mine's stashed just outside of town." Then she was looking downriver. "C'mon. We don't have much time."

It took maybe an hour or so to make our way along the river far enough for Tasha to be satisfied that we had avoided getting spotted by the hunters. We were just about to angle back uphill when I spotted it, a strange motion a little further down from the spot we were aiming for.

Instantly I reached out and grabbed Tasha by the back of her hoodie, pulling her to a halt. When she looked over her shoulder in question at me, I pointed to the motion. Frowning, she turned to look. Then almost immediately pulled us both down onto the ground.

"What the hell is that?" she said in a hoarse whisper, staring at it.

For the lack of a better description, it looked like a flying cigar, matte gray and maybe the length of a car, judging from how it compared to other objects around it. It glided silently maybe about ten or fifteen metres above Scenic Drive, the road that ran around the edge of the city, going about as fast as somebody on foot could go. If I were to make a guess, I would say that it almost appeared like it was looking for something. Going by the fact that it was moving silently and so deliberately, I had a feeling we were looking at a piece of visitor tech, a drone of some sort.

Then a chill went through me as I realized just what it was looking for. Survivors.

Tasha must've come to the same conclusion. I heard her mutter:

"It must call in the location to the hunters on the ground." Then she was twisting to look over at me. "This complicates things."

"Yeah, no kidding. If that thing spots us, we'll have hunters on our ass like right now," I said. She shook her head.

"No. I mean yeah, it has to be an alien drone, spotting survivors for the hunters on the ground. Or maybe for the mother ship." That almost made me look skyward to see if I could spot the green dot of doom making its way over top of us. Then Tasha was going on, her hoarse whisper recapturing my attention.

"But that thing is directly in the way to Tanner's house. If we tried to reach her now, ..."

Without warning the gray cigar halted. Then, twisting hard in place, it streaked off to the east, accelerating from zero to gone in a heartbeat, leaving only a sonic boom behind as it shattered the sound barrier on its way out.

"Lucky break!" she breathed. Then Tasha was up and running as hard as she could up the hill. Gritting my teeth, I followed as fast as my legs would carry me. We had to reach the top before the drone returned. Or, even worse, the hunters showed up.

It took maybe five minutes of frantic running and scrambling before we reached the top. Then we were darting across Scenic, chests heaving as we desperately sucked in air. A few running steps and we were back in the houses, the heavy scent of death and smoke thick here. As we ran down an alley, I could see where other battles had been fought by survivors against zerkers, where houses had been put to the torch in an insane attempt to smoke the embattled survivors out. Without fire trucks and men to combat the blazes, they had quickly spiraled out of control, destroying vast swathes of entire neighborhoods.

Then Tasha was pulling me down a side alley and the scene of destruction disappeared for the moment. We went another twenty running steps before she was jerking to a halt. Then she peered around the corner of a strangely well-kept garage. Only to jerk back when the sharp report of a gun sent a bullet snapping just over her head.

"Damn it, Tanner, it's me!" she hissed as we both pinned our backs against the side of the garage.

"Tasha? What the hell! What are you doing here?" another teenage girl's voice demanded.

"Making a run for it," Tasha replied, slowly looking back around the corner to look at somebody further in. "You still have those bikes?"

"The ones rigged for off road? Yeah. Why?"

"I need them. Get your BOB. Time to jet."

Tanner turned out to be a wiry white girl, blonde hair cut into a faux hawk, and dressed in a dark hoodie painted with makeshift urban camo, loose pants and boots like Tasha. She quickly focused bright blue eyes on me as I followed Tasha around the corner and into the garage proper.

"This Liam?" she asked and Tasha nodded. "Good." She passed me one of a half dozen heavy duty mountain bikes standing behind her. "At least you know what you're doing." Another bike went to Tasha then, throwing a pack onto her back, she climbed onto a third. Pushing herself closer to me, she stuck out a gloved hand.

"Zuri Tanner," she said as I took it. "But I'd prefer it if you just called me Tanner. Hate the first name."

"Fair enough," I said, giving her hand a shake. "Liam Kelso."

"Youngest son of the famous Gary Kelso," Tanner quickly fired back with a grin. "Part time civil engineer, full time biggest prepper badass in Western Canada." She looked behind us. "Didn't he come with you?"

"The anarchists got him, Liam's mom and brother a couple hours ago," Tasha revealed, earning me a look of sympathy from Tanner.

"Aw, sorry, man," she said. "Plague got my parents and two sisters. The crazies would've gotten me too, if Tasha didn't bail me out a few weeks back and set me up here."

"Socialize later," Tasha grimly directed. "We spotted an alien drone a few minutes ago, providing the hunters with air support. We need to bug before it comes back."

"Right," Tanner said with a nod as I climbed onto my bike. "Which way?"

"West. We're making for the mountains."

"Cool. I have a map of a safe western route out of the city right here, ..." Tanner said, reaching for her pack.

"Not quite yet," Tasha said, glancing over at me. "We need to make one last stop."

That stop ended up being a sporting goods store on the southwestern edge of town. It had been pretty picked over by the various waves of desperate people searching for stuff to use to stay alive so I didn't think we'd find anything. That is, until Tasha pulled out several ghillie suits from the back, the kind used by snipers.

"They're thermal protected, too," she said, handing one to me. "Not that the ducks or deer cared. But hopefully they're enough to keep the drone from spotting us right away."

"Worth a shot," I said, looking it over. After Tasha showed us how to put them on, we were back on the bikes and pedaling for the edge of town.

As we did, I turned to take one last look over my shoulder. 'Good bye, Mom, Dad, and Cam,' I silently said. Then I was focusing on the road, hoping that I had seen the last of the aliens and their waves.

Little did I know that there was still one more wave to come.