Four months after the lights went out, Sara Jennings is alone.
Just her, a cabin in the Wyoming high country, a cat named Muffy, and the guns her father left her. She counts her jars three times a week. She talks to herself now. She has stopped expecting anyone to come.
Then Kurt Lenman stumbles into her clearing with a bullet hole in his side. A boot print appears in the mud three quarters of a mile up the drainage. And Greaser Cunnington, the old outfitter who lives in a teepee five miles up the north fork, brings her news of something moving down out of the north.
They call themselves the Black Hand. They do not plant. They do not hunt. They wait until you have put your food up, and then they come take it, and burn the house behind them.
Winter is coming, the passes are closing, and there are two people on that mountain against forty.