A meagre fire of bleached and knotted driftwood spat fat orange sparks and a thin column of smoke into the cool purple-lit evening. Around it sat four figures in the dark furs and dull pitted armour of Bas-Quebec militiamen sharing a meal of blackened rock-lizards and pale steaming blanchéroot. Arrayed behind them were bedrolls and simple tents, bundles of swords and pikes wrapped in leather and muddy linen, a pile of small circular shields held together by iron bands criss-crossing like pie crusts. Four exhausted mounts foraged for grass and trailing riverweed along the meltwater stream that meandered by the camp.

The youngest of them was a smooth-faced youth half-hidden in the armour of a much larger man. He stripped the slick greyish meat from a lizard leg with a pair of cracked front teeth and threw the matchstick-thin bones into the fire. The others filled their gear more convincingly; they were experienced men, faces heavily lined, noses twice-broken and inexpertly set, hair grey and oiled tightly back or hanging in greasy blades around scarred and sunken cheeks. They ate in silence, jaws busy breaking down the tough blanchéroot cords.

The youngest militiaman lifted his tin cup and stretched. He wandered upstream of the horses and dipped his cup to drink. He lifted it to his lips and closed his eyes, smiling; the water was fresh, glacier-cold all the way to his stomach, each gulp blossoming along inner contours before the cold met the heat of his meal.

Then there came a sound, a single low guitarstring twang.

The boy was dead before he could turn, a steel-shafted arrow entering the back of his neck at a steep angle and pinning him to the ground through the throat. He would not call out. His cup fell from his fingers and into the stream, where it bobbed in the foam and slipped away with the flow, followed by a twisting and billowing cloud of arterial red.

'Leave one alive,' said Bella Swan, pointing back along the stream towards the thin tongue of woodsmoke. 'Chase him this way.' Her men nodded and crept away, hugging the treeline.

She skidded down the steep needle-coated bank and ran lightly across the crunching pebbles to the young militiaman's body. She planted a booted foot on the young militiaman's neck and pulled her arrow free, wiping it clean with a gloved hand. She loaded the dull-tipped shaft into the runners of her leafspring bow. The bow had been her father's, a single piece of steel recovered from the suspension of an old cement truck, shaped and re-purposed into a weapon able to punch holes in quarter-inch armour at fifty paces and a obliterate a skull at five hundred. She fixed her jaw and drew the bow, stifling a grunt as she did, the muscles of her arms and back gathering and knotting into a riot of angry fists beneath her green-stained skin. She counted down from five.

From downstream came yells and gurgling cries, then a wild splashing gallop as the largest of the militiamen burst around the dogleg bend in the stream on horseback, kicking up water and blood, the arrow-stuck and broken body of his comrade bouncing behind him with one foot caught in a stirrup. The flat wide face Bella saw beyond the gory spray bore no expression besides his knitted brow and the hard thin line of his lips, a look not of terror but of consternation. He kicked the saddle free as he passed, the whole mess of leather and arrows and shattered limbs throwing up a shower of red foam as it skidded into the water beside her fresh kill.

The rider was fifty yards away and picking up speed before Bella could compose herself. She would have only one chance. She took a breath, aimed just a hair above the rider's head, and let fly.

A guitar twang, a whistle of wind, a vanishing line in the air. The arrow had left the bow cleanly. Her men rounded the corner, wooden bows half-drawn, glancing up just in time to see the wicked steel shaft bury itself the horse's rump. Horse and rider fell as one into the loose shale and shallow water, the horse all kicking legs and flashing eyes, the man pinned awkwardly beneath.

'Go.' Her men ran to claim her prize.

Bella slung her bow across her back and returned to the campsite. The night was drawing in and the fire burned only weakly, so she took the small bundle of fuel the men had gathered for the night and threw it on. In the healthy new glow she saw the fight play out. She saw her four rangers descending on the three militiamen, catching one through the eye in their introductory volley. He still lay where he'd been hit, a bundle of tattered black bearskin and hammered iron, a length of steaming blanchéroot still clutched in one calloused hand, arrow jutting from his face and snapped in two in his fall. Skidding tracks and half-buried arrows in the mud showed that the remaining two men had run downstream for their horses, straight past their bundle of weapons. There was a fight over the first horse they came to-a dispute solved by more arrows, this time at close range. The remaining man had toppled the body from the saddle and made a run for it, running alongside the horse for cover.

She picked through their bundle of weapons and found nothing of use. Simple swords and rusty spears. Nothing more complex than a slingshot had blown in from the East-or any direction, for that matter-in twenty years. In the early days, her father had taught her, there had been rifles and guns of all kinds, and plenty of ammunition for them. You were sure some new and predictably temporary State King or Minor President would surface every now and then, which meant an endless supply of arms caravans moving back and forth along their overgrown little patch of the I90. They would bomb them or topple them with mudslides and take whatever they could use-figuring that they were doing some poor bastards somewhere a favour. But that well had run dry. The cities had regressed to medieval pits. Having run out of bullets and the means to make more, men had taken to slaughtering each other with improvised clubs and swords. They formed gangs and warbands, tribes and doomed resurrectionist governments. The coasts were a mess. The Aryan Nation were at war with the Black Panthers and The Families in the shelled-out remains of New Jersey. A group calling themselves The Last Irish were running a nightmare campaign of ethnic cleansing out of Boston. Los Angeles was a churning chaos of warring streets. The Pope of California was at war with the Rainbow Resistance in San Francisco. Closer to home, Seattle was a no-go for any able-bodied man or woman wishing to avoid being drafted into the endless holy war with Vancouver.

Her men arrived with the surviving militiaman and sat him bruised and bleeding by the fire. They stripped him down to a faded FDNY t-shirt and filthy thermal underwear. He shuddered without making a noise, clutching an arm that was clearly broken in different directions at the elbow and the shoulder.

'Gather the bodies,' said Bella. 'Get them up out of the water. Take the saddles from the horses and send them on their way.'

She looked to the militiaman. 'Are there more of you?' He shook his head, eyes fixed on the fire. She pointed to the youngest and fastest of her men. 'Watch duty. I want you on higher ground. Look out for more smoke.'

He turned to run, then paused. 'By myself?'

'By yourself.' Bella spoke through a fixed grimace. 'Man up. We'll make camp nearby. We'll leave sign here for you to find us.'

'But...the beast.'

'The beast! If you meet the legendary dog-boy, tell him we have his supper right here.' She aimed a kick at the militiaman's leg. 'Not another word!' Her scout pulled his hood over his head and ran for the treeline, sinking from the light into the wild foliage and grasping dark of the valley wall.

She sat by the militiaman and stoked the fire with a branch. 'I'm going to need to know why you're here. We don't accept tourists in these parts. Sightseeing is not an option. But if you give me something I can use, we'll see about re-setting your arm and putting you back on the road. With a fundamental change of orientation, of course.'

'Lissen good, bitch,' spat the battered man. 'Ain't no simpler way to put it. All of you are dead. So just come to terms and go back to whatever shithole you've been hidin' in and kiss yer family goodbye. That's about all I has to say to you or anybody. You can let me go or stick me full of arrows for all I care. I'm dyin' either way.'

'Tell me what you mean.'

'Not sure that I want to. Boy you killed was my nephew. Hated the little scumbag, but it's the principle of the thing.'

'Where are you out of? Who are you with? Bas-Quebec? Closer? That's canuck armour. Or is it a knock-off?'

'They're going to pluck the head off your neck, lady. They're going to pluck it off and empty you out like a bottle of ketchup.' The militiaman-or whoever he was-leaned his head back and smiled. The teeth on the left side of his jaw were bleeding stumps. 'Stories from New York were twisted enough, but you shoulda seen them in Chicago. Shoulda seen them in Minneapolis. The swarm. The endless swarm just amblin' west toward the red setting sun. They're still not done with Spokane.'

'Who? Tell me.' She felt for her bow. 'Were you scouts for this army, is that it? You want what little we have here, is that it?'

'Army!' he laughed. 'I said it was a swarm and I meant it! We ain't scouts! We're just the first deserters from a hundred last stands! We've been running just ahead of the bloodsuckers since they busted through Detroit!'

One of her men whistled, pointing at a rocky ridge downriver. Somewhere just beyond it, a single burning arrow was following a long arc back to Earth. An emergency signal from her scout.

No time to find you, it meant.

Just run.