'I love you more!'

The clanging racket of metal woke him from what had already been an uneasy, troubled slumber.

He never slept well, or deep enough, anymore, so it didn't take minutes to become fully alert. He was already alive and electrified, left hand glued to the sidearm strapped to his waist, right hand adjusting his decade-old bifocals, eyes and ears adjusting to the gray, dim light of dawn and the sounds accompanying it.

"Likely dogs again," Luke thought to himself. "Hunting for scraps which aren't there."

He slowly opened the rotted wooden door and peered out the crack, Luke saw that indeed, it was dogs. Two of them -- four-legged, emaciated skeletons decorated with matted, tangled swatches of hair -- rooted through two of the trashcans he had set up toward the mouth of the alley, knocking over one. The trashcans weren't meant to block off the alley, but rather to serve as an early warning system for him against predators both human and beast. Something couldn't enter the alley without knocking a trash can or two, and in turn alert him to their presence.

"I should put them down," Luke mused as he shut the door and returned to his sleeping nook on the first floor of the decrepit building. But he knew he couldn't afford to waste the ammo for the .45 he had on his side. Then the thought followed that it would be a more merciful act to put a round in his own skull, rather than the skulls of two desperate canines, and to exit this world gone mad.

At that point, almost magically -- much like it had during his two tours in Iraq and one tour of Afghanistan, in a different lifetime -- Luke felt the yellow-gold locket against his jugular notch, and he calmed. Besides the .45, the heart-shaped bauble -- inscribed on the back with "I love you more!" -- was his most prized possession. Through three years of war, more than 25 years ago, and after close to a decade of trying to survive like a roach, Luke still had it. He used to joke with Jamie, his wife, that it would be "over his dead body" before somebody took the pendant from him.

As it would turn out, on at least four occasions he could recently remember, it was over someone else's dead body which allowed Luke to keep the locket. Scavengers loved to steal anything not nailed down from other survivors, in order to trade for goods and services. It was almost exactly how many of the science-fiction writers Luke used to read would portray the end of the world, which he found surreal at first but, after years of enduring it, found it almost uncanny the foresight into human behavior, during times of complete devastation, those authors had.

Luke nestled himself back into his corner of the building, pulling a moldy, filthy Army issue sleeping bag over him. His stomach rumbled slightly, but he attributed that to the act of getting up to check on the noise -- it was too early to eat, and would disrupt his meticulous rationing schedule. Instead, he began to reminisce about the locket.

It was a five-year wedding anniversary gift from Jamie, which surprised the hell out of him to begin with. She knew he eschewed jewelry; his wedding band and his Army-issued dog tags were the only accoutrements he wore. So when she gave him the box during their celebratory dinner at a renowned Nashville steakhouse -- they'd chosen to spend a weekend pass in the Music City, due to its proximity to Fort Campbell -- he was dumbfounded. "Why did you waste money on a watch? You know I won't wear one," he scoffed, somewhat rudely, to her across the table.

"Why don't you just quit being a man for a minute and open it?" she fired right back. Jamie had sass; it was one of the many things which made Luke fall head over heels for her when he first saw her.

So he did.

A yellow-gold locket, shaped in a heart, rested on the white felt inside the black box. He grunted slightly, but kept his mouth shut as he pulled it out of the box. He popped the clasp on it and opened the locket, to find a photo of him and Jamie at the church altar, sealing their marriage with a kiss he still remembered as being one of the most exciting, tender and passionate ones of his life.

"Flip it over," Jamie urged. "There's more."

So Luke did, and saw the inscription. "I love you more." Their inside joke ever since coming together. Luke could never win the battle; when he'd respond to her "I love you more!" with one of his own, he'd receive a thousand-yard glare and the simple uttering of his name from her. It was enough to teach him he would never win the battle, she'd always love him more no matter what, so he came up with the compromise of "I love you just as much!"

The thought made Luke's weathered, dirt-smeared face crack a slight smile, allowing for a flash of white amongst a backdrop of black, brown and gray.

Luke was speechless at the gift, he recalled. And it soon became, much like a St. Michael the Archangel medallion is to police officers and soldiers, his patron saint. From the streets of Fallujah, dodging improvised explosive devices and sniper rounds, to the eight-month hell known as Ramadi, or his "vacation" in Kandahar, Luke wore the locket. It never left his neck, and he began to attach a superstitious quality to it.

He felt its power got him through those hells. It definitely got him through the hell of Jamie's cancer.

Luke pictured himself at her bedside, holding her hand as she stared at him, her breath slowly whooshing in and out thanks to the ventilator.

"You're strong, Luke. We've had plenty of time to prepare for this," she whispered.

"You can never prepare for this," he hissed. "We're too young to have to deal with something like this."

"But here we are, love, dealing with it," Jamie cooed. "We have no other choice. So we can sit here, or me lay here rather," she chuckled, "and piss and moan about it, or we can make the best of what time we have left."

"I love you," Luke had uttered, a sob stuck in his throat.

"I love you more," she had responded, as always.

Luke didn't realize he had fallen asleep during his trip down memory lane. It was a serene sleep, born of warm memories, love and years of running exhausted like one of those skeletal dogs. It was peaceful, it was restful and it was quiet.

So he didn't, for once, hear the shuffle of detritus scattered on the floor of the warehouse. Two sets of feet, trying to inch their way as noiselessly as possibly toward the sleeping figure in the corner.

One, an grizzled older man with a Rasputin-like beard, had his .38 caliber revolver drawn, moving forward like he was clearing a room -- much as Luke did years prior. The other, a younger man not a day past 17, had a knife drawn, in case close-quarter combat became necessary.

They drew closer to Luke, who continued to snooze away, unaware of the danger lurking just feet away from him.

Instead, he was off to another parcel of memory in his slumber, he and Jamie's honeymoon to Gulf Shores. Her black hair, glowing in the sunset; her, pushing him into the warm, salty gulf water while laughing her fool head off, and him letting her because her laugh was a symphony to him.

Her, every night, telling him "I love you more!"

Another smile crept onto Luke's lips, which paused the two intruders in their tracks. The older one motioned to the other to hold, then progressed toward Luke.

In his dreamy trance, Luke is seeing Jamie walk up the white sand beach toward him, drinks in hand. She began raising his drink -- a margarita on the rocks, rimmed with salt -- up toward him. Her Cheshire grin. Her hair waving in the ocean breeze. The sun setting behind her, striking the drink glass and slightly blinding Luke.

"I love you," Luke says.

"I love you more!" Jamie replies.

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"What the hell was that guy saying before you offed him?" asked the younger man.

"I dunno," mumbled the older one, as he tucked the heart-shaped locket into his trouser pocket. The locket alone should get him at least three days worth of food, he figured, and that's without the addition of the sleeping bag and the .45. He'd have to barter hard with that shyster Green, though. "I thought I heard 'em say 'love' or sumpin'."

"He had that goofy grin on his face the whole time," crowed the teen. "He looked like a damn fool."

"Eh, leave him be," shooed the older man. "At least he went out happy, whatever he was thinking 'bout.

"We would all be so lucky to have the same."