Raymond didn't have a last name that mattered anymore. Before, it had been Kowalski. Now it was just K., because the period after it made people stop reading, and Raymond liked it when people stopped reading. It saved time.

The gas station was off Route 66, or what used to be Route 66 before the world ended. The sign said SHELL but the H was gone and the E was hanging by a screw, so it just said SLL, which was fine. Raymond didn't need signs. He needed a roof and water and something to sit on. The gas station had all three.

He'd been in orbit for forty-two years. Not space orbit—orbital around Saturn, on a station that was supposed to mine ice but mostly just mined regret. When the calls came through—evacuate, evacuate, everyone evacuate—Raymond was three hundred thousand miles from home with a wrench in his hand and a bad knee.

He came back to a world that didn't need wrenches.

The sky was brown. Not grey. Brown. Like the inside of something that had given up. The ground was cracked and hard and covered with a fine dust that got everywhere—inside his boots, inside his mouth, inside the creases of his knuckles.

And there were things moving in the dust. Small things.

He watched them for three days before he decided what they were. They weren't animals. They weren't insects. They were small and humanoid and they moved on all fours most of the time, stopping to pick things up and put them in their mouths.

Scavengers, he decided. That's what they were.

On the fourth day, one of them climbed onto the gas station steps and sat down and looked at him. It was maybe eight centimetres tall, brown-skinned and thin, with large dark eyes that held no curiosity and no fear. Just looking.

"Hey," Raymond said.

The thing didn't react. It just sat there, picking at its nails with a small blunt finger.

Raymond went inside the station and found a piece of canned peach from some forgotten emergency stash. He put it on the step and went back inside. When he looked out, the thing was gone. But the peach was gone too.

So they ate food. Good to know.

He started leaving things out. Bits of protein bar. Drops of water from his canteen. A button from an old jacket that one of them tried to wear as a hat and failed. They came in groups now—maybe a dozen of them, always the same ones, always the same behaviour. Pick up. Eat. Move on. Repeat.

They had no language. He tried talking to them for a week, saying simple words, pointing at things. They looked at him with those empty dark eyes and went on picking at the dust.

They had no tools. He left a small screwdriver on the ground and watched them ignore it for two days before one of them picked it up, looked at it, and dropped it. Not out of rejection. Out of ignorance. They didn't know what it was. They couldn't have known what it was.

They had no society. There was no hierarchy, no structure, no organisation. There was a biggest one—maybe twelve centimetres tall, scarred and missing an ear—and it was the biggest and the meanest and that was its entire role in life. It would shove the smaller ones out of the way at mealtime and that was it.

Raymond tried to teach them to stack stones. He arranged a pile of small rocks in a tower and pointed at it. One of them knocked it over. Not aggressively. Just because. Then they all went back to picking at the dust.

He tried drawing in the dust with a stick. He drew a circle and a line through it—the universal symbol for no. Then he pointed at the brown sky and shook his head. They watched him with those flat dark eyes and one of them sat down and started eating the dust he'd disturbed.

That was the problem. They could eat dust. They didn't know it was dirt. They just knew it was something that was there, and if it was there, maybe it could be eaten.

Raymond stopped trying after a month.

He sat on the steps of the gas station and watched the scavengers crawl over the cracked asphalt like ants over a crumb. The sun was a pale disc in the brown sky, weak and distant, giving more heat than light. The wind blew occasionally, carrying dust from somewhere that used to be a city and was now just more dust.

He thought about the station at Saturn. The ice miners. The other forty-three people who had been there. Most of them had made it off. Some hadn't. He didn't think about that much. He thought about the ice instead—pure, clean, melting water that would have been worth more than gold on Earth if he'd ever gotten any back.

One of the scavengers climbed onto his boot. It was the biggest one, the one without an ear. It sat on his instep and looked up at his face with those flat eyes.

"What are you?" Raymond asked it.

The scavenger scratched its chest with a small blunt finger. Then it stood up, wobbled, and fell over. It didn't get back up. It just lay there, legs twitching, until it stopped twitching.

Raymond watched it for a long time. Then he got up and went inside the station and sat down on the floor and listened to the wind blow dust against the windows.

Outside, the scavengers kept crawling. They always would. They weren't smart enough to be hopeful. They weren't dumb enough to be despairing. They were just there, in the dust, eating whatever they could find until they couldn't find anything left.

Raymond closed his eyes and listened to the wind.

It was the same sound it had always made.

OTMES-v2 Code: 1E7D-C4B9-A8F3 Objective Tensor: M1=5.5 M4=4.0 M8=3.0 M10=2.0 | N1=0.55 N2=0.45 | K1=0.55 K2=0.45 | Theta=180 deg | TI=52.0 T3