by Steve Alten
Stop the music and remove the chair known as “personal freedom.”
Phase two is rationing. Oil, natural gas, coal, firewood … food. Communication fractures into weekly assurances that times are tough but things will be improving soon. These pep talks from politicians, also known as lies, are designed to buy time — time being the variable that allows the weak to perish, either with a whimper (starvation) or a bang (riot police with orders to shoot to kill).
For the lower classes, the music has stopped.
A long winter without heat strikes next. Add in diminishing water and food supplies, not to mention a cessation of hospital services — and there goes the middle class — first in the colder rural regions, followed closely by the urban areas. As we remove this chair, the government shuts down, society collapses, and now it is officially every family for itself.
Dying comes in many flavors. You can starve, freeze to death, die of heat exhaustion, thirst, physical ailments, or perhaps you’ll be shot attempting to get food to feed yourself or a starving child. In the last few years I had seen it all, and the images never went away … the nightmares and the anger stuck with me forever.
In the warmer states, suburbanites had lasted a season longer than their city-dwelling counterparts, but a die-off, like musical chairs, is a zero-sum game. Eventually every family, save the farmer with his own well-armed private army of migrant workers and the inaccessible survivalist community, was forced to abandon their powerless homes and their gasless vehicles to search for food and potable water, joining a nomadic exodus that defined the postapocalyptic landscape. Hunters still hunted and fisherman fished, but the competition for food turned neighbor against neighbor, no catch safe among the hordes of the wandering desperate. Parents pushed their starving children in shopping carts and wheelbarrows, leaving the elderly behind to die with the family pet they could no longer feed. Unyielding hunger could transform a populace into a mob of borderline psychopaths, and western nations do not go quietly into the night like an emaciated African born into hunger. They go out shooting.
* * *
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.
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.
“Andie, run!”
Abandoning the bike, we sprinted down the road, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of the enraged wolf pack. The grid had killed their dogs — a lucky break, but there was no cover, just a deserted suburban development, separated from the nearest woods by the interstate, which ran below the deserted community.
We slid down a weed-covered emba
nkment to access the highway, my heart skipping a beat as I heard Andria scream out in pain.
“My ankle … I felt something snap.”
I helped her up, only to see her cry out in frustration, her foot unable to bear any weight.
“Ike, give me your gun.”
My heart pounded. It was suicide time.
I searched my waistband. “Shit. I must have lost it sliding down the hill.”
“Goddamn it, Ike—”
“It’s okay, I can carry you.”
“And outrun these assholes? Ike, listen to me, you need to kill me, you need to snap my neck! Come around me from behind, you can do it. Ike, please—”
“Andie, I can’t—”
Tears flowed down both our cheeks; her eyes were filled with desperate fear. “You said you loved me, Ike! You swore on that love you’d kill me if it ever came down to this.”
“Shh!” Hearing voices, I dragged her down into the weeds.
Gunfire erupted, bullets ricocheting off the highway’s steel girder.
“Andie, the bullets. On the count of three, we stand up into the line of fire.”
She kissed me hard and fast. “You are my heart.”
I was about to tell her how much I loved her when the gunfire abruptly ceased. Lying in the grass, I could hear their boots thrashing through the weeds. “I’ll stand and draw their fire again, then drag you off the ground.”
“Okay.”
“One … two…”
If I said “three” I never heard it. What I heard instead was the bone-rattling reverberation of helicopter blades beating the air, followed by gunfire — the kind of gunfire that can split a car in two.
I crawled on top of Andria until the rain of hot lead ceased and the chopper landed on the interstate.
“You folks all right?”
I looked up at the soldier, his face obscured by his helmet’s dark visor. “Who are you?”
“Naval reserves. Domestic forces are sweeping the area for survivors. We see a human carnivore, we kill them and ask questions later.”
There were sixteen people aboard the Sikorsky transport — bewildered adults, malnourished children, a paraplegic bound to a wheelbarrow and an infant suckling her mother’s breast. We learned that the Internet was back up, powered by solar grids and windmills. Pockets of communities had organized, calling upon war veterans and returning soldiers to mobilize military firepower to reestablish law and order, their vehicles fueled by secret reserves stored at military bases.
We were flown to the University of Virginia. Major universities were now functioning like state capitals, offering survivors food and a dorm room in exchange for work. A Web site — Survivors.org — had been created to locate family and friends.
I was relieved, but not surprised to learn that my Uncle David was alive.
Andria’s broken ankle was fitted with a walking boot. We lived in a tent and worked in the fields.
A month later, in July of 2025, representatives from seventy-two university communities convened in Topeka, Kansas — the geographical center of America — in order to create a new framework of government. What emerged from this six-week convention would have made the founding fathers proud. No more political parties. Term limits for all elected officials. Most important — the elimination of future financial influences on elections, safeguarded by a Supreme Council, which would ensure that each candidate operated on equal footing.
The first president of New America was a professor of ecology and agricultural science, elected by the founding members of Congress. Her vice president, Dr. Lee Udelsman, was a fusion expert who had worked on the Omega Project before society had collapsed.
Uncle David showed up in Virginia a short time later, our reunion soured when he learned I had no interest in finishing my work on GOLEM. We negotiated a consultant fee — a research grant and lab that would allow me to experiment with a new pet project, along with Andria’s acceptance at the soon-to-be established Space Energy Agency in Cape Canaveral, where we would share an apartment while she trained to pilot mining shuttles to transport loads of helium-3 back to Earth.
Could we rebound as a species? I had no doubt. If anything, humans had demonstrated, both as individuals and as nations, a fortitude born of courage. Still, ours was a resilience strengthened by numbers; when we divided as a people the strong feasted upon the weak, manifesting our worst attributes — man’s ego unbridled. The Great Die-Off had served as yet another reminder of the devil lurking in each one of us; its aftermath mind-numbing, more than five billion people wiped out.
For now at least, it appeared the reign of the Homo sapiens subspecies known as “Petroleum Man” had officially ended, and with it Big Oil’s stranglehold on clean, renewable energy sources.
The question was: Had we learned anything?
PART TWO
2028
Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?
— JARED DIAMOND, Easter’s End
5
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
— BUDDHA
NORTH CAROLINA
37 MILES SOUTHWEST OF FAYETTEVILLE
SEPTEMBER 19, 2028
My father used to tell me that of all the human emotions, anger was the most dangerous. Not because it might lead to high blood pressure and arguments that could destroy a relationship, but because, when a person got really angry, their soul actually vacated the body. Sounds crazy, right? Just wait, there was more. According to ancient Jewish teachings, the danger in a soul leaving the body was that another soul — a lesser soul — could temporarily take over, and that was when the really bad shit happened.
Today marked the eighth anniversary of the murder of my family. As if channeling my father, my online therapist advised me to let go of my anger through forgiveness. Humoring him, I asked myself, if my child were starving, would I take another person’s life to feed my kid? My father, being a moral man, would not have taken another person’s life under any circumstance, nor would he have resisted sharing our food, especially if the lives of his family were threatened. Had one neighbor approached Dad, it would have been a different outcome. But the neighbors had formed a mob, and mobs thought collectively in primitive terms, as in, “the Jews are hoarding food” or “Juden Raus!” (see Hitler’s Germany), or “the Jews poisoned the wells,” (see Black Plague). I could go on, but it wouldn’t change a thing. Dad was dead, so were Mom, Diane, and Debby … and so were a lot of other innocent people.
I still had anger issues. In fact, I was having one right now, sitting here in my first-class berth on a solar-powered train en route from Orlando to Washington, DC. The bellows fanning the fire in my veins was the vanilla sway spewing from the mouth of the peroxide copper-blonde sitting across from me. “Vanilla sway” was Dad’s pet term for contrived lunacy reported as fact to sway public opinion, specifically climate change “science” funded by oil companies and repeated ad nauseam on certain cable news networks and blogs until the contrived fiction became accepted as debatable evidence. My father, a progressive thinker sickened by corporate corruption, warned me that even the most outlandish lie, repeated enough times to enough people could eventually turn horseshit into vanilla, thus the term “vanilla sway.” “Don’t get sucked into a debate with these types, Robbie, they’ll drain you like a thousand-dollar whore.”
“Shall I repeat the question, Mr. Eisenbraun?”
Katherine Helms certainly appeared over my h-phone’s holographic transmission like a thousand-dollar hooker, her skintight black halter top accentuating her breasts, which looked like two cantaloupes cloaked in shrink-wrap. It was an interesting ploy, considering the religious group she was representing was funded by the Clean Coal Coalition. Before you get any wild ideas about my politics, it’s important I mention that the CCC’s cla
ims about producing a greenhouse gas — free fuel was simply more vanilla sway — sort of like Ms. Helms’s breasts. Based on the obtuse angle of the nipples, I was 94 percent certain they were fake — not the good surgically enhanced fake either, but the virtual fake: an h-phone app designed to enhance phone sex.
Alexander Graham Bell would have been proud.
“It’s Professor Eisenbraun, Ms. Helms, and I can hear you just fine. As to your question, any answer I give will simply be manipulated by your network to stoke the debate against fusion energy.”
“Five billion people died in the GDO, Professor. Are you telling me the thought never occurred to you that the event was an act of God? Even the initials ‘GDO’ are an anagram for a higher power.”
“It’s also an anagram for ‘dog’; are you saying the family pet pushed our species to the brink?”
“What I’m saying … what I’m asking is whether you believe God wants man tinkering with His creation.”
“Based on the small size of your frame, I’m guessing God didn’t bless you with those imposing thirty-six Ds. Wouldn’t breast implants be considered tinkering?”
I smiled as the reporter’s cheeks flushed red, her eyes narrowing. “How dare you compare my breasts to your blasphemy! I know your type, Mister Eisenbraun. A woman to you is nothing more than a life-support system for the vagina!”
I muted the h-phone, silencing her abusive barrage. For the record … wait, that’s a bit redundant. Technically, all of this is for the record, recorded internally inside my skull by ABE, the Amalgamate Biological Enhancement chip I designed and had surgically implanted in my brain stem. The ABE prototype was the reason Milk Cans Malloy over there was interviewing me, only her vanilla sway was not outweighing the vision of those simulated cantaloupes bouncing on her chest, and my patience had reached its limit.