The Wolves Of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

 

Life is hard for Lynn McBride.  She and what's left of her family have fled to the Yukon after the lives they had were devastated by nuclear war and the flu that was released as a bio-weapon.  She lives with her mother, uncle, brother and a young boy whose father died but was her uncle's best friend.  Her days are consumed with getting enough food for the family to live.  She spends her days hunting, her weapon a crossbow.  She is a young woman now but there is not much hope of forming her own family as men are few and far between.  

Then Jax appears one day with a dog.  Dogs are rare now and Jax, a young man on his own, is an even rarer entity.  He is hesitant to befriend the family after being on his own but slowly comes to trust them.  That trust is shattered when members of the Immunity come looking for him.  This is the group that created the flu that ravages the population and now they are searching for an antidote.  It turns out that Jax was raised in their camps and survives now due to the experiments he underwent there.

Jax takes off after he is forced to kill the Immunity who came searching for him.  Lynn goes after him and her uncle and is captured.  It turns out that Lynn has her own secrets as her father, who died from the flu, was a research scientist and injected her with his secret antidote when she got sick as well.  Now Lynn's blood can cure those who are ill and she has become a prized resource.  Can Lynn and Jax survive the attempts of the Immunity to capture them and use them as subjects in another terror war?

This is a debut novel.  The beginning is quite interesting as the author details the life of survivors who have had to move further and further into the wilderness in order to survive the horrors man has unleashed on the world.  The action picks up with the introduction of Jax and questions of morality and what one would do to protect their family arise.  This book is recommended for readers of dystopian science fiction.