What happened was simple and stupid. A virus. Nobody knows where it came from. It spread through the air, through water, through the surface of things. It killed everyone over 21. Not all of them—some people's immune systems were stronger, some were weaker. But most of them. All the teachers, all the parents, all the bosses and the cops and the doctors and the people who ran the gas stations and the people who drove the trucks.

Jake's parents were 21. Technically that made them safe, and technically it also made them dead. The virus did not care about technicalities.

He lived in a double-wide trailer in a nowhere place in the Midwest where the corn ends and the strip malls begin and nobody can remember exactly which is which. His grandmother had left him the trailer. She was 20 and on a bus in Ohio when it happened. She never came back.

Jake's days were simple: wake up at noon, eat whatever was in the fridge, go down to the abandoned Walmart on Route 9 and look at the shelves. They were fully stocked three weeks ago. They were slowly emptying out now. Practice shooting at cans with a .22 rifle he found behind a couch. Watch the sky.

The sky was the most interesting thing he had to watch. It was always the same sky—flat, gray, the color of a penny left out in the rain—but he watched it anyway because watching it was something.

Dana Calloway showed up on a Thursday. She was 16, used to be head of her high school cheer squad, and now she ran a small operation trading canned goods for ammunition. She drove a pickup truck that had been her father's and had the sharp, unfriendly expression of someone who had learned very young that kindness was a luxury she couldn't afford.

"I heard you had a rifle," she said, standing in Jake's doorway. She did not wait for an invitation. She never did.

"I did," Jake said. "Now I don't."

"You sold it?"

"I practiced with it. That's selling."

Dana looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "I need someone who can shoot. We're heading down to the Walmart. I want to see what's left."

Jake followed her. He had nothing else to do. The Walmart was three miles away, and he walked because he had nowhere to be and the ground was solid under his feet.

The Walmart was mostly empty. The shelves that had been full were now bare or nearly so. The food section had been picked over—the canned goods gone, the frozen food melted and ruined, the fresh food long gone. But in the back, behind the registers, there were still some things: bags of chips, boxes of crackers, a few canned things that nobody had bothered with because they weren't interesting enough.

Dana loaded her truck with three boxes of crackers and two bags of chips. Jake helped her. He was not a strong man but he was not weak either. He had spent his life doing small things with medium effort, which was the skill set that had prepared him perfectly for the end of the world.

"Thanks," Dana said. "I'll pay you with a can of beans."

Jake took the can of beans. It was a good can of beans. He ate it that night for dinner.

The next person to show up was Tommy Nguyen, 15, who could fix almost anything that ran on electricity. He lived in a library that he had converted into a workshop. He spoke in monosyllables and had memorized the entire electricity section of the public works code, which made him the smartest person Jake had ever met and also the most boring.

Tommy came to Jake's trailer with a radio that he had fixed and a battery that he had made from scratch. "Listen," he said, turning the radio on.

The radio played static. Then, faintly, a voice: "This is the Des Moines emergency broadcast. Remain calm. Do not—remain calm. Do not—remain calm."

The voice repeated itself every thirty seconds. It had been repeating itself for two weeks.

Tommy sat down on Jake's couch and stared at the radio as though it were a person he wanted to talk to but didn't know how to start.

"Can you fix it better?" Jake asked.

Tommy shook his head. "It's a receiver, not a transmitter. I can make it receive better, but I can't make it send."

"Try."

Tommy tried. He fixed the radio better. The voice came in clearer. "Remain calm. The situation is under control. Do not leave your homes unless—remain calm."

Luis Ramirez showed up two days later. He was 14, had arrived from Texas with nothing but a backpack and the conviction that he could walk across the continent to the Pacific. He was 14 and already had the posture of a man who had survived more than his age should allow.

"I'm going to the ocean," he told Jake. "You want to come?"

"Have you been to the ocean?"

"No. But I'm going."

"How long will it take?"

"Hard to say. Maybe two months. Maybe three. Depends on how fast I walk."

Jake looked at Luis's backpack. It contained a sleeping bag, a can of beans, a flashlight, and a map. The map was folded and creased and had a circle drawn around a point in the Pacific that said "OCEAN" in block letters.

"You know there's a whole continent between here and the ocean, right?"

"I know. That's why I'm walking."

Luis stayed. He did not ask permission. He just set up his sleeping bag in the corner of Jake's trailer and went to sleep.

Jake watched him sleep and thought about the three of them—Dana with her truck and her beans and her ammunition, Tommy with his radio and his electricity and his silence, Luis with his backpack and his map and his ocean. They were not a group. They were not a team. They were just three people who happened to be in the same place at the same time, which in a world with no grown-ups was the closest thing to a community that anyone was going to get.

They established rules without writing them down. Dana would handle food—she knew where the supplies were and how to trade for more. Tommy would handle technology—he kept the radio working, fixed the refrigerator, and discovered that the solar panels on the Walmart's roof still worked. Luis would handle defense—he was small but fast and not afraid of anything, which made him useful for scaring off stray dogs and other teenagers who might want to steal their supplies.

And Jake would watch the sky.

Because watching the sky was what he had always done, and because it was a job that required nobody else, and because in a world where everyone had been taken away, watching the sky was the one thing that still felt like his job.

The crisis came in the fourth week. Dana found a group of teenagers at the Walmart—six or seven of them, ranging from 13 to 19, led by a boy named Carl who was 19 and had the aggressive posture of someone who had been in charge his whole life. Carl wanted Dana's supplies. He wanted her truck. He wanted her ammunition.

"I don't have anything for you," Dana said.

"You have a truck," Carl said. "You have a radio. You have food. That's something for me."

Jake stepped between them. He was not a big man, and Carl was bigger than him, but Jake had the advantage of not caring about Carl's size. He had stopped caring about size the day his parents died.

"Go home, Carl," Jake said.

Carl looked at him. "Who are you?"

"No one."

"That's your problem," Carl said. "You're no one."

Carl left. He did not take anything. He did not come back. But Dana looked at Jake with an expression that he could not read—fear, maybe, or relief, or both.

That night, the four of them sat in Jake's trailer and ate canned beans and listened to the radio. Tommy had fixed it so well that the emergency broadcast voice was clear and steady: "Remain calm. Do not leave your homes unless—remain calm."

Luis said: "I'm still going to the ocean."

Dana said: "You can't."

"Watch me."

Tommy said nothing. He was listening to the radio.

Jake said: "How long?"

Luis thought about it. "Two months. Maybe three. Maybe less if I don't stop."

Jake looked at Luis's map. The circle around "OCEAN" was drawn in red ink, and the letters were bold and precise, as though Luis had been planning this for a long time.

"Take this," Jake said, handing Luis a can of beans. "For the road."

Luis took the can. He looked at Jake for a moment, and in that moment Jake saw something in Luis's eyes that he could not name—gratitude, maybe, or determination, or the look of someone who had made a decision and was not going to change it.

"Thanks," Luis said.

The next morning, Luis was gone. His sleeping bag was folded. His backpack was gone. His map was gone. All that remained was an empty corner of the trailer and a can opener that he had used to open the can of beans Jake had given him.

Dana came over that afternoon with a case of soda. Tommy brought a battery. Jake watched the sky.

The sky was gray. The color of a penny left out in the rain.

OTMES Encoding: TI: 52.3 | theta: 270 deg | R: 0.10 M-vector: [5.5, 5.0, 5.5, 3.0, 5.0, 4.5, 3.0, 4.0, 3.5, 3.5] E_total: 13.2 Style: Dirty Realism Core: Comedy(M2=5.0) + Satire(M3=5.5) + Tragedy(M1=5.5) N: [0.55, 0.45] | K: [0.80, 0.20]