The world had ended three days ago. At least, that’s what it felt like. Outside the boarded-up windows of the abandoned hardware store, the wind dragged something heavy across the pavement. It scraped. Stopped. Scraped again. None of them moved. Eighteen-year-old Marcus sat closest to the door, back pressed against the metal frame, a crowbar resting across his knees. He didn’t look eighteen anymore. He looked older—like the world had reached into him and pulled something tight and sharp. “We’re fine,” he said quietly. He didn’t sound convinced. Across the room, fifteen-year-old Hayley hugged her backpack to her chest. She’d stopped crying sometime yesterday, but her eyes were still swollen. She tried not to think about how dark it was outside. Tried not to think about how fast everything had changed. Three days ago she’d been worrying about a math quiz. Now she was listening for the dead. Ethan paced near the shelves of nails and rope, sneakers barely making a sound. He was sixteen, tall and restless, with nervous energy that wouldn’t burn out. He kept glancing at the boarded windows like he expected something to punch through. “You heard that, right?” he whispered. “We all heard it,” came Diego’s voice from behind the counter. He wasn’t gripping a baseball bat anymore. Instead, he was hunched over a half-dead laptop plugged into a bulky portable battery he’d scavenged from the electronics store next door. Wires, chargers, and a cracked tablet were spread around him like a nest. His glasses kept sliding down his nose as he typed furiously, trying to pull any remaining signal from the dying internet. “I’m still catching emergency broadcasts,” he muttered. “Most of it’s looping. Government messages. Evacuation points that are probably overrun by now.”