The quiet death happened on a Tuesday. Jake Morris found out on Wednesday, when he walked to the corner store and found Mr. Tan behind the counter with his head resting on the register, his eyes open and unseeing. Jake knocked on the glass. Nothing. He reached through the broken front window and checked for a pulse. Nothing.

Mr. Tan was gone.

Jake went home and checked on his mom. She wasn't there either. She hadn't been there for five years—she'd left when Jake was nine, packed a suitcase in the middle of the night, and didn't come back. Jake had learned not to ask where people went. Asking meant hoping they'd come back. Hoping meant being disappointed. Being disappointed meant sitting on the back steps eating cold beans and listening to the highway hum.

Jake was fourteen. He had been fourteen for eleven months. He knew this because he counted the days the way other kids counted money—reluctantly, and only when he had to.

Danny Kowalski came over on Thursday. Danny was Jake's best friend, which in Jake's experience meant Danny was the only person who didn't try to take his things or boss him around or pretend to care and then not care at all. Danny was fifteen, lean and sharp-eyed, with a mouth that was always moving and a brain that was usually two steps ahead of it.

"Nobody's answering their phones," Danny said, standing in Jake's doorway, looking into the apartment like he expected someone to jump out and yell boo.

"Nobody's home," Jake said.

"Everyone's home. I checked my building. Mrs. Kim's in her bed. She's not moving."

Jake nodded. He had checked his building too. Mrs. Kim was in her bed. She was not moving. Neither was the old man downstairs who played chess alone every afternoon. Neither was the family on the third floor with the baby who cried all night.

"What do we do?" Danny asked.

Jake thought about it. "We wait."

"We can't just wait."

"We can if we want to."

Danny didn't like that answer. Nobody ever did. But he came inside anyway and sat on the couch and ate the cereal Jake had in his cupboard and drank the milk that was two days past its expiration date and didn't seem to mind.

By the end of the week, Jake was pretty sure everyone over thirteen was dead. He didn't know how he knew—he just knew. The certainty sat in his chest like a stone. Heavy. Unmovable.

The first few days were chaos. Jake heard it from the kids who came through the apartment building—the screaming, the crying, the running up and down the hallways. He heard it from the street—the car crashes, the alarms going off, the sound of something burning that Jake couldn't identify. He heard it from Danny, who had walked every block in the neighborhood and come back with a face like concrete.

"Nobody's left," Danny said, sitting on Jake's couch, his hands shaking. "Nobody over thirteen. Nobody."

Jake sat across from him, eating cold beans from a can. "I know."

"What are we going to do?"

Jake thought about it. The stone in his chest shifted. "We do what we always do."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

Danny stood up. He paced the room—three steps to the window, turn, three steps back to the door, turn, three steps to the couch, turn. Jake had seen him do this a thousand times before. It was Danny's thinking pattern. Walk. Think. Walk. Think. If Jake had a thinking pattern, it would be sit. Wait. Sit. Wait.

"We should take the store," Danny said, stopping in front of Jake. "The convenience store on the corner. It's got food. It's got water. It's got everything."

Jake looked at him. "You want to rob a store?"

"I want to survive. There's a difference."

Jake thought about it. Danny was right. The store had food. It had water. It had things that would expire in a few weeks and then be useless, so they needed to take them now or never. And Jake was tired of eating cold beans from cans.

"Fine," he said. "But we don't rob it. We take it. There's a difference."

Danny didn't catch the difference. Nobody ever did.

They took the store on Saturday. Jake and Danny and—"Slick" Rick Martinez, who was fourteen and had been two steps ahead of trouble his whole life and knew which back door to use and which alarm to disable and how to look innocent while doing it.

The store was small—four aisles, a refrigerated section, a counter with hot dogs and coffee. Jake took the back. Danny took the front. Slick Rick took the register. They filled three shopping carts with food—cans, boxes, bottles of water, bags of chips, jars of peanut butter, boxes of crackers, bags of rice. Jake didn't think about whether they needed it all. He thought about whether they would need it all, and the answer was yes, probably, because the store was going to run out eventually and they needed to take what they could now.

They set up base in the store. Jake slept on a cot in the back room, next to the refrigerator. Danny slept on a mattress on the floor in front of the counter. Slick Rick slept in the stockroom, surrounded by boxes of cereal and cases of soda.

The first week was fine. They had food. They had water. They had the store. Kids from the neighborhood came through—some to help, some to take, some just to see what was happening. Jake let them in if they seemed honest. He turned away the ones who seemed like trouble. He was good at reading people. It was one of the few things he was good at.

Danny organized shifts. Slick Rick handled security. Jake handled everything else—the things that didn't have a category.

The second week, the power went out. The refrigerators stopped. The lights went dark. The coffee machine died. Jake stood in front of the store, looking at the dark coffee machine, and felt something in him go flat. Not sad. Not angry. Just flat. Like a tire losing air.

"Coffee's gone," he said.

Danny looked at him. "It's coffee, Jake. It's not a big deal."

"It's not the coffee," Jake said. But he couldn't explain what it was. He didn't know what it was.

The third week, the food started to run out. Not all of it—just the good stuff. The fresh food, the canned food, the things that didn't expire. The chips were still good. The soda was still good. The peanut butter was still good. But the cans were emptying, the boxes were thinning, and the water bottles were running low.

Slick Rick stole three bags of rice on the fourth week. He didn't tell Jake. He didn't tell Danny. He just took them, one night, while Jake was sleeping and Danny was on front duty and the store was quiet except for the hum of the highway.

Jake found out because the rice bags were gone when he went to check the stock. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He knew Slick Rick. Slick Rick would take things if they were available and nobody was watching. That was just who he was.

The fourth week, Danny left.

He didn't tell Jake. He didn't tell anyone. He just packed a bag—some food, some water, a flashlight, a knife—and walked out of the store at midnight. Jake found out in the morning when he came in from the back and Danny's mattress was gone and the counter was empty and the front door was open.

Jake stood in the doorway, looking at the empty street. The sun was coming up over the highway, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that Jake had never really noticed before. He had always thought the sunrise was just something that happened. He had never thought about it.

Danny was gone. Slick Rick was gone. The store was mostly empty. Jake was alone.

He went back inside. He sat on the floor in front of the counter. He opened a can of beans. He ate them cold, straight from the can, sitting on the dirty floor of a convenience store that had been a fortress three weeks ago and was now just a room with empty shelves and a broken coffee machine.

Down the street, he heard a child crying. It was Little Timmy O'Brien—ten years old, too young to understand, too young to have learned not to ask where people went. Timmy cried a lot. Jake had heard him cry every night for four weeks. Sometimes Jake went over and sat with him. Sometimes he didn't. Tonight he didn't.

He ate the beans. He listened to Timmy cry. He thought about Danny walking down the street in the dark, his bag over his shoulder, his knife in his pocket, his face set in a way that Jake had never seen before. Danny was fifteen. He was walking away from a convenience store because the store had run out of food and the world had run out of adults and there was nothing left to do but walk.

Jake finished the beans. He put the can on the counter. He stood up. He walked to the front door. He looked out at the street—the empty street, the abandoned cars, the sunrise painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that he had never really noticed before.

Timmy was still crying. Jake closed the door.

The coffee was cold. It had been cold for weeks. It would always be cold now.

Jake sat back down on the floor. He closed his eyes. He listened to Timmy cry. He thought about the beans in his stomach and the silence in his chest and the cold coffee on the counter and the empty shelves and the broken machine and the highway humming in the distance and the sunrise that nobody was there to see.

He was fourteen years old. He had been fourteen for fourteen months. He counted the days the way other kids counted money—reluctantly, and only when he had to.

The quiet death had taken everyone over thirteen. Jake was still here. Danny was gone. Slick Rick was gone. Timmy was still crying.

Jake closed his eyes. The store was quiet except for the highway and Timmy's crying and the hum of the refrigerator that was no longer refrigerating anything.

He sat there. He waited. He was good at waiting. It was one of the few things he was good at.

══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════ OTMES v2 Objective Tensor Code ══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════ Code: OTMES-v2-QWEN-03-9B2C4E-E07.9-6-T225-A7D5 E_total: 7.9 Dominant Mode: M6 (Realism) Theta: 225 (Nihilism) TI: 78.90 Variant: V-03 Cold Coffee Source: The Super Nova Era (超新星纪元) by Liu Cixin ══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════