I

The virus came in the autumn of the twenty-twenties, and Dylan Kelly watched it happen from the back porch of his house in Iron Creek, Ohio, a town that had been dying long before the adults died.

He was twelve, son of a former steelworker, and he did not cry when he realized no one was coming back from work. No one was coming back from anywhere.

II

The kids in Iron Creek discovered that the adults had left enough stuff to last a while if they were careful, and plenty if they were not. Emma Ross, thirteen, daughter of a community college teacher, said everyone must work or everyone dies. Most kids chose to play.

They tore apart abandoned factories for metal. They stole from neighboring towns. They drank beer they found in basements and danced in streets with no one to tell them to stop.

Mike, fourteen, Dylan's neighbor, a dropout who had been hanging around bars before the virus took the bar owners, joined Tony Salvatore's crew. Tony was fifteen, son of a mobster, and he decided he would be the boss of the new Iron Creek.

Dylan just wanted to tend his garden behind his house. A small patch of earth behind a chain-link fence, where he planted tomatoes and beans and a single apple tree his father had planted before he died.

III

Tony told everyone in Iron Creek they had to pay protection. Dylan said no. Tony's boys burned Dylan's garden.

Dylan did not fight back. He just watched his tomatoes turn to ash in the October wind.

Emma tried to reason with Tony. Rules, she said. We need rules.

Tony laughed. Rules are grown-up stuff. Grown-ups are dead.

Mike betrayed Tony, not because of justice or morality, but because Tony took his cat. The kids fought each other over nothing and everything, and in the fighting they used up all the food, all the fuel, all the things the adults had left.

IV

Dylan sat in front of the ruins of his garden, holding a tin can he had found in the abandoned factory. Emma's voice came over the radio: Iron Creek has no state. No games. Just living.

Mike left town with his cat. Dylan kept planting, but he no longer expected anything to grow.

A radio message came from Pittsburgh: the children there have built a new school. They are reading the Survival Manual.

Dylan did not reply. He just sat in the ruins, holding the tin can, watching the rust belt sky turn gray, knowing that nothing would be saved, nothing would be rebuilt, and the only thing left to do was to keep breathing until breathing stopped being an option.