The fridge had three things in it: a jar of pickles that expired last month, a bottle of ketchup that was mostly air, and a stick of butter wrapped in paper so thin you could see the shape of the butter through it.

Mike closed the door and leaned against it. The kitchen was small and the linoleum was peeling at the corners and the sink had a stain in it that had been there before the Sickness and would probably still be there after.

"Anything good?" Sarah asked from the doorway. She was holding Jimmy's hand. Jimmy was five and wearing a jacket that was too big for him and looking at the fridge the way you look at something that might contain miracles.

"No," Mike said. "There's pickles if you want pickles."

Jimmy shook his head. He didn't like pickles. Sarah looked at Mike with the expression of someone who was tired of asking questions she already knew the answers to.

---

They had been at this for twenty-one days.

Mike counted because counting was something you did when there was nothing else to do. Twenty-one days since the Sickness. Twenty-one days since he'd come home from the factory and found his foreman slumped over the coffee machine in the break room and his co-workers scattered like they'd been blown by a wind that only hit certain people.

Twenty-one days since he'd walked through his neighborhood and realized that the only people still moving were the ones who hadn't turned thirty yet.

He didn't know how it worked. He didn't know why his neighbor Mr. Patel, who was fifty and healthy as a horse, was dead in his garden, and why the kid across the street, who was sixteen and had asthma, was fine. He didn't know why his own uncle, who was twenty-nine and had been drinking himself to death one weekend at a time, was alive, and why the doctor who lived two blocks over, who was thirty-one and apparently very healthy, was not.

Knowing didn't help. Knowing didn't fill fridges or keep kids warm or stop the cold from seeping through windows that hadn't been properly sealed when the building was new and nobody in it was dying.

---

Doc showed up on day eighteen, which was three days ago, and had not left since.

He called himself Doc even though he wasn't a doctor. He'd been a community college student until the Sickness made his professors dead and his textbooks useless, and then he'd started calling himself Doc because it made people trust him and trust was useful in a neighborhood where the word for useful had been reduced to food, heat, and not getting sick from things that shouldn't make you sick.

"I checked Jimmy's temperature," Doc said on his first evening, holding a thermometer that he'd taken from somewhere and held up to the kitchen light like a man examining a gem. "It's a little high. Not dangerous. But we should keep an eye on it."

Sarah had nodded. She was nodding a lot lately. It was easier than explaining to a five-year-old why there was no soup and why the heat was off and why the man who called himself Doc kept looking at their food the way a wolf looks at a rabbit that hasn't realized it's been cornered.

"Can you fix things?" Mike had asked Doc. "Like, actual things. Not just temperature checks."

Doc had looked at him for a moment. "I can set a broken bone. I can stitch a cut. I can tell you if something is wrong and whether it's something you should worry about or something you should accept."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

Mike had nodded. It wasn't nothing. It wasn't everything either.

---

Day twenty: the grocery store on Grand Avenue was gone.

Not destroyed. Not looted in the dramatic sense. It was just... empty. Shelves bare, refrigerators empty, the automatic doors hanging open like a mouth that had forgotten how to close. Mike had gone there on day twelve and found it half-empty. He had taken what he could carry and left the rest. On day twenty, he went back hoping that maybe someone had restocked, which was a stupid hope but hope was free and stupid hopes were all he had.

Sarah went with him. She always went with him now. It wasn't protection—Mike was five ten and had spent two years on a construction site before the Sickness made construction sites empty too. It was companionship. She didn't say much. She just walked beside him with Jimmy on her hip and her eyes scanning the ground the way people scan the ground when they're looking for something they know isn't there.

On the way back, they ran into a group of kids from the next block. They were older—sixteen, seventeen, maybe nineteen—and they had sticks and pipes and the kind of confidence that comes from being bigger and stronger than the person in front of you.

"Mike," the leader said. He was a kid Mike knew by sight but never by name. Tall, thin, with a scar through his left eyebrow that made him look older than he was. "Heard you've been collecting."

"I've been living," Mike said.

"Same thing around here." The kid smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "We're organizing. You should join us. We're setting up a system. Food distribution. Security. You in?"

Mike looked at the sticks and pipes and the faces of the other kids. They weren't evil. They were just hungry and scared and doing what hungry and scared people do when they realize that the world that was supposed to protect them was gone.

"I'm already in," Mike said. "I'm just not sure your system works."

The kid's smile faded. "You don't want to join?"

"I want to eat," Mike said. "That's my system."

---

Day twenty-one: Jimmy got sick.

Not the Sickness. Just sick. A fever and a cough and a listlessness that made Sarah's face go the color of old paper. Mike checked his temperature again—Doc was still around, hanging in the background like a ghost who hadn't realized he was dead—and it was 101.3. Not dangerous. Not yet.

"We need medicine," Doc said. "Something for the fever. And if that cough gets worse, we might need antibiotics."

"Do you have any?" Sarah asked.

Doc shook his head. "I used the last of the amoxicillin on day fourteen. It was for Mrs. Chen's grandson. She's gone now. The Sickness got her too. She was thirty-two."

Sarah closed her eyes. Mike looked at the ceiling and counted the cracks in it. There were seven of them. He stopped counting at seven because seven was a stupid number to stop at and he wanted to see how far he could go. He got to fourteen before he gave up.

"Where can we get medicine?" Mike asked.

Doc was quiet for a moment. "There's a pharmacy on Milwaukee Avenue. Still has stuff on the shelves. But it's not unguarded."

"Who guards it?"

"The same kids who want to organize everyone in this neighborhood. They've turned it into... I don't know. A fortress. A storehouse. Something."

Mike nodded. "How do we get in?"

"That's the question, isn't it?"

---

They didn't go to the pharmacy that night. They couldn't. It was dark and cold and Mike didn't have a plan and plans were the one thing he had in short supply.

Instead, he sat on the floor of the kitchen with his back against the fridge—the one with the pickles and the ketchup and the butter—and watched Sarah rock Jimmy in the chair by the window and listened to Doc breathe in the other room, which was probably sleeping but probably not.

Jimmy's breathing was shallow. His fever hadn't broken. Sarah's face was the color of old paper and her hands were shaking and she wasn't letting him see it.

Mike thought about the kid with the scar through his eyebrow and the sticks and pipes and the offer to join a system. He thought about the pharmacy on Milwaukee Avenue and the kids who had turned it into a fortress. He thought about how he didn't know how to fight seven people with a stick and a bottle of pickles.

He thought about his father, who had been dead for eleven years, and about the way he used to say that the hard choices were the only ones that mattered because the easy ones didn't count.

Mike didn't feel like he was making a hard choice. He felt like he was making a necessary one. Which was worse, maybe.

---

He went alone.

He left Sarah a note that said I'll be back and took nothing with him but the stick he found in the hallway and the jar of pickles from the fridge, which he carried because it was heavy and because if he was going to do something stupid, he might as well have something heavy to throw.

The pharmacy on Milwaukee Avenue was guarded by four kids, not seven. The ones he'd seen with the sticks and pipes had split up. Mike counted them from the street: two at the front, one on the side, one on the roof. Four. Doable. Maybe.

He didn't have a plan. He had a stick and a jar of pickles and a five-year-old brother who was burning up in a chair by a window and a woman who was too proud to cry in front of him.

He walked to the front door and knocked.

The kid on the other side opened it a crack and looked at Mike with the expression of someone who had been expecting him and was not happy about it.

"What do you want?" the kid asked.

"Medicine," Mike said.

"You can't just take it."

"I'm not taking it. I'm asking for it."

The kid stared at him. Mike stared back. Behind the kid, through the crack in the door, Mike could see shelves. Full shelves. Medicine. Boxes and bottles and things that might save Jimmy's life.

"My brother's sick," Mike said.

"So's everyone's brother. So's everyone's sister. So's everyone."

"I know."

The kid was silent for a long time. Then he opened the door wider. "Come in," he said. "But you're not taking anything without paying."

Mike stepped inside. The stick was still in his hand. The pickles were still under his arm. He didn't know if he was walking into a trap or a negotiation or just another version of the same stupid world that had killed all the adults and left the kids to figure out what came next.

He didn't care. He was inside.

---

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