The Slow Dying Sunrise: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller: 4

Five years after the lights went out, every sunrise makes the same promise. And every morning, over about forty minutes, that promise leaks away.Stuart Redman walks mail now. It is honest work in a broken country, and he has made his peace with it.Then a starving female German Shepherd comes down the north road dragging a chewed rope, half dead and in whelp, with a hand stitched collar no one in the fifth year would waste on an animal they meant to sell.Sewn under the dog's buckle, in oilcloth, is a note in a woman's careful hand.It gives the dog's name, Juno. It gives an address. And it ends with eleven words that will cost Stuart everything he has left: There is nothing I can give you for it. I am asking anyway.The address is a burned chimney standing in a field of nettles. The men who tried to deliver her before are dead or missing. And somewhere past the divide, in a place with a brick wall and a bar on the outside of its only gate, a woman has been asking for eleven years.Stuart is fifty-one, with a knife wound in his arm and a hip that talks to him in the cold.He is going anyway.