Mick Underwood woke up on the morning everything changed and found his parents' coffee cup on the kitchen table. The coffee was cold. His mother always drank hers hot. That was the first thing he noticed.

The second thing was that the house was quiet. Not the normal quiet of a Saturday morning when his dad was still asleep and his mom was in the shower. This was a different quiet. The kind of quiet that comes when there's nobody else in the house. Nobody in the neighborhood. Nobody on the street.

He opened the front door and walked outside. The sky was grey over Grey Valley, the kind of grey that Montana gets in late autumn. The streets were empty. Cars sat in driveways with engines cold. A newspaper lay on the sidewalk, half under a bush. The headline said something about the stock market. Nobody was reading it.

"Sammy?" Mick called. His voice sounded wrong in the empty streets—too loud, too sharp, like a stone thrown into a well.

He walked down the block to number 42, where the Jones family lived. Sammy was fourteen, two years younger than Mick. They went to the same school, though Mick had stopped going a few months ago. There wasn't much point. The school was three miles away and the road was icy half the winter.

Sammy's front door was open. Mick pushed it with his foot and walked into the kitchen. Sammy was sitting at the table, staring at his phone. The screen was black. Dead battery.

"They're gone," Sammy said without looking up.

"Who?"

"My parents. Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Everyone."

Mick set his hands on the back of a chair and sat down. He was seventeen—tall, thin, built like his dad, who had been a miner until the mine closed and then a construction worker until the construction stopped and then just a guy who sat in the garage fixing things that didn't need fixing.

"How long?" Mick asked.

"Since last night. I think. I went to sleep and they were there and then I woke up and they weren't." He looked at Mick then. His eyes were red. "You think it's contagious?"

Mick didn't have an answer. He stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the street. It was still empty. The quiet was still there.

He went home. He made himself breakfast—eggs from the fridge, bread from the pantry. He ate at the table where his parents' coffee cup still sat. He drank a glass of water. He washed the cup and put it in the drying rack.

Then he went outside again.

By noon, there were twelve of them in the parking lot of the abandoned gas station on the edge of town. They were between ten and eighteen years old, and they were the children of Grey Valley. Mick was the oldest. He stood in front of the group and tried to think of something to say.

"We need to figure out what's happening," he said.

"Maybe they'll come back," said a girl named Kelly. She was eleven, with braids and a yellow jacket.

"Maybe," Mick said. It was the wrong thing to say, he knew it. Maybe wasn't an answer.

Kate Morrison was the next oldest at sixteen. She had been a teacher's assistant, and she carried herself like someone who was used to being in charge. "Okay," she said. "Let's figure out what we need. Food. Water. Heat. We have maybe two weeks of food in the stores. The gas station has diesel. The power is still on. The water's still running."

"Who's going to make sure it all keeps running?" asked Hank. He was eighteen, the oldest in the group, but not the smartest. He worked at the gas station before everything happened, pumping gas and wiping windshields. He was big and strong and had a smile that took up his whole face.

"Nobody," Kate said. "That's the problem."

The first week passed without anything dramatic happening. The children of Grey Valley went about their days in a way that was almost normal. They ate what they could find. They drank water from the taps. They slept in their own beds. But at night, in the dark, they cried. Mick heard some of them through the walls. He lay in his bed and listened to the sounds and told himself it would be okay.

The second week, the power flickered.

It was a small thing—a dimming of the lights, a pause in the hum of the refrigerator—but it was the first real sign that things were changing. Mick went to the electrical substation on the north side of town, a small building he'd visited with his dad a few times. The switches were still in the on position. The meters were still running. But the hum was wrong. It was thinner, weaker, like something was failing inside the generators.

Kate read the manual. It was a thick binder on a shelf in the substation, written in technical language that she could mostly understand. She brought it back to the group and sat them down in the gas station.

"The generator needs maintenance," she said. "Regular maintenance. Oil changes, belt checks, filter replacements. Nobody's been doing any of that. It's been running on autopilot, and the autopilot is running out."

"How long?" Mick asked.

"Days. Maybe a week."

Hank stood up. "So what do we do?"

Nobody had an answer.

The generator went critical on day seventeen. The lights in the substation building flashed, and then everything in Grey Valley went dark. The refrigerators stopped. The tap water stopped running. The heating in the houses stopped working.

It was cold for the first time in Mick's memory. Not the normal cold of a Montana winter—this was a new cold, the kind that came from inside the walls and through the floorboards and into your bones. The children huddled together in the houses they lived in, wrapped in every blanket they could find, eating cold food from refrigerators that would never cool again.

Mick went to Kate's house on day nineteen. The temperature had dropped to ten degrees Fahrenheit, and the children were shivering in the dark. Kate had read enough from the manual to know that the generator could be fixed, but not by her. She needed someone who understood mechanics.

"Hank," she said. "Can you fix a generator?"

Hank shook his head. "I pump gas. That's it."

Mick looked at the manual. He had helped his dad with small repairs his whole life—fixing the carburetor on the truck, replacing the starter on the lawnmower, welding a broken fence post. He wasn't an engineer, but he knew his way around a machine.

"I'll try," he said.

Kate showed him the manual. He read it. It was mostly pictures and diagrams, with short explanations in simple language. He understood most of it. The generator was a diesel engine coupled to an alternator. It needed new oil, a new belt, and a fuel filter. He could find oil. He could probably make a belt out of something. The fuel filter was the problem—he needed a specific part that wasn't in Grey Valley.

"Bozeman," Kate said. "There's an industrial supply store in Bozeman. Two hundred miles north. They might have the filter."

Mick looked at her. "Two hundred miles?"

"By truck."

Sammy was standing in the doorway. He had been listening. "I'll go," he said.

"You're fourteen," Mick said.

"I know. But I know how to drive. And I'm light. The truck won't use as much gas."

Mick looked at his little brother. Sammy had his mother's chin—pointed, stubborn, determined. He had been crying for nineteen days straight, and now he was standing in a freezing kitchen telling his brother that he wanted to drive two hundred miles to a city he'd never been to, looking for a part he'd never seen, in a truck that might not make it.

"No," Mick said. "It's me."

"Then we go together," Sammy said.

Mick looked at him for a long time. Then he nodded.

They left on day twenty-two. They took the truck—an old Ford pickup that had been parked in the gas station lot for as long as Mick could remember. Sammy had refilled the gas tank from the station's underground storage. They filled jugs with water from the well pump (which worked because it was manual). They took blankets and protein bars and Mick's dad's welding mask and a flashlight with fresh batteries.

They drove north on Highway 93. The roads were empty. The snow was deep on either side. The mountains rose up on both sides of the valley, grey and imposing and indifferent.

Halfway to Bozeman, the truck ran out of gas.

They pushed it to the side of the road and stood in the cold and watched the smoke from their breath curl up into the grey sky.

"I'm sorry," Sammy said.

Mick put a hand on his brother's shoulder. "It's okay. We're here. That's what matters."

He looked at the mountains. He looked at the road. He looked at the truck. He thought about the generator, and the cold, and the twelve children waiting in Grey Valley.

Then he started walking.

"Wait," Sammy said. "Where are you going?"

"Forward," Mick said. And he kept walking.

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