Apocalypse World

There has been a major catastrophe and everything that made modern life is now past. Here is the time of the barbarians and the savages ... except a few chosen people still have access to knowledge and are rebuilding using their brains and their skills, who will win this time?

1 - Waking up

Adam's eyes opened to silence.

Not the usual silence of early morning—the kind broken by the distant hum of traffic, the neighbor's dog, or the refrigerator's mechanical wheeze. This was the silence of absence, thick and complete, like the world had simply forgotten how to make noise.

He lay motionless for a moment, staring at the ceiling where his digital alarm clock should have been glowing red numerals at him. Instead, the display was black, dead as roadkill. The power was out. Again.

But as Adam shifted onto his elbow, something felt different. The air tasted wrong—metallic, with an undertone of smoke that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Through his bedroom window, the morning light had a strange quality, filtered through what looked like a persistent haze.

He sat up fully, joints protesting with their familiar fifty-five-year-old symphony of pops and creaks. His back ached from the cheap mattress he'd been meaning to replace for three years but never could quite afford on his government clerk's salary. Well, that was one problem solved, he supposed. He'd never have to worry about his salary again.

The realization should have terrified him. Instead, Adam found himself suppressing what might have been a laugh.

He padded to the window in his boxers and yesterday's t-shirt, the same routine he'd followed for the past fifteen years. Except today, the view that greeted him was anything but routine.

The street below looked like someone had taken a giant eraser to civilization and rubbed out all the important parts. Mrs. Henderson's Honda Civic sat in her driveway, but the front door of her house hung open, swaying gently in a breeze that carried the acrid scent of burnt plastic. No morning joggers. No delivery trucks. No signs of life except for a single cat picking its way delicately through debris that hadn't been there yesterday.

"Well," Adam said aloud, his voice hoarse and strange in the unnatural quiet. "I guess I'm not going to the office today."

The absurdity of the statement hit him, and this time he did laugh—a short, barking sound that seemed inappropriately loud. Fifteen years of filing permit applications, answering the same questions from the same irritated citizens, sitting through meetings that could have been emails about emails that should have been nothing at all. And all it took was the apparent end of the world to get him out of it.

His phone was dead, of course. Not just low battery dead—completely, utterly dead, as if it had never been anything more than an expensive paperweight. Adam held down the power button for a full ten seconds out of habit, then tossed it onto the unmade bed.

In the bathroom, the tap produced nothing but a dry wheeze, like the house itself was trying to cough up its last breath. The water had been cut off along with everything else. Adam caught sight of his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror and paused. He looked exactly the same as yesterday—graying brown hair sticking up in sleep-defiant tufts, stubble that made him look tired rather than rugged, the permanent squint lines of someone who'd spent too many years staring at computer screens.

"Morning, handsome," he told his reflection with mock cheerfulness. "Ready to survive the apocalypse?"

His reflection didn't seem particularly confident about the prospect, but Adam had to admit he felt oddly calm. Twenty-seven years in the Army had taught him a thing or two about functioning when everything went sideways. The skills he'd spent decades letting atrophy in his climate-controlled cubicle were still there, buried under layers of bureaucratic numbness but intact.

He dressed methodically—jeans, boots, a flannel shirt that had seen better decades. From the closet, he retrieved his old field pack, still olive drab and practical despite its age. The muscle memory of preparation came back easily: water containers, first aid kit, multi-tool, the small arsenal of survival gear he'd accumulated over the years and never expected to actually need.

In the kitchen, he inventoried his supplies with the same methodical precision he'd once used to count ammunition. Three cans of soup, half a loaf of bread going stale, a package of instant coffee, and—in what felt like a small miracle—a unopened bottle of whiskey he'd been saving for his retirement.

"Looks like retirement came early," he muttered, tucking the bottle into his pack. "With severance pay from the universe itself."

The front door opened onto a world that looked like a movie set between takes. Everything was in place but wrong, like someone had carefully arranged a normal suburban morning and then removed all the people. Cars sat abandoned, some with doors still open. A child's bicycle lay on its side in the middle of the street, training wheels spinning lazily in the breeze.

Adam stepped onto his porch and took a deep breath of the strange, smoky air. Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking—proof that at least some forms of life had survived whatever had happened. The sound was oddly comforting.

He looked back at his house, with its mortgage payments and property taxes and maintenance headaches, all of which had become instantly and permanently irrelevant. The absurdity struck him again. He'd spent so many years worrying about job security, retirement savings, health insurance premiums. Now none of it mattered. It was the ultimate performance review: the entire economic system had been terminated, effective immediately.

"Thanks for your service," he said to the empty street, offering a mock salute to his vanished career. "Your contributions to bureaucratic mediocrity will not be forgotten."

The silence swallowed his words without echo. Adam shouldered his pack, checked the knife on his belt, and started walking toward Main Street. Whatever had happened to the world, he was still here. Still breathing. Still capable.

For the first time in years, he had no idea what tomorrow would bring.

It should have been terrifying. Instead, as he walked into the aftermath of everything, Adam found himself almost smiling.

2 - What is happening?

The walk to downtown took Adam through neighborhoods that looked like someone had played a cosmic prank on suburbia. Every house stood exactly where it should, lawns recently mowed, newspapers still rolled up in driveways from a delivery that would never be collected. But not a single human being anywhere.

He passed the Hendersons' place, where Mr. Henderson had spent every Saturday for the past decade washing his pristine white Buick. The car sat there now, driver's door hanging open, keys dangling from the ignition. The garden hose lay across the driveway, still dripping into a puddle that had attracted a small congregation of sparrows.

"At least someone's having a good day," Adam muttered, watching the birds splash contentedly in what might be the neighborhood's last functioning water source.

As he walked, his trained eye catalogued details with bureaucratic precision. No bodies. No signs of struggle. No broken windows or obvious damage. It was as if everyone had simply gotten up one morning and decided, collectively, to go somewhere else. The only thing missing was a memo explaining the proper procedure for apocalyptic evacuation.

"Typical," he said aloud. "End of the world, and nobody filed the paperwork."

Downtown proved to be more of the same, just scaled up. The morning traffic lights blinked red in all directions—somehow they still had power while everything else had gone dark. Cars sat abandoned in the middle of intersections, doors open, engines off, as if their drivers had simply vanished mid-commute.

Adam approached the first vehicle, a Honda with a "World's Greatest Mom" bumper sticker. The radio was still on, producing nothing but static. He tried the other cars systematically, hope fading with each silent speaker. Whatever had happened, it had taken out the entire communications grid.

The bank's electronic sign, usually flashing time and temperature, displayed nothing but dead pixels. The coffee shop's "OPEN" neon sign hung dark in the window. Even the perpetually buzzing streetlights stood silent as tombstones.

"Well," Adam said to a stop sign that didn't seem particularly interested in his commentary, "I guess my credit card debt just became academic."

He was beginning to think his day couldn't get any stranger when he spotted it: a faint blue glow coming from behind the counter of Mike's Electronics. The shop that sold overpriced phone cases and promised to repair your laptop "sometime next week, probably" was showing signs of life.

The front door was unlocked, which in the old world would have set off every alarm in the building. Now, Adam walked in like he owned the place. The blue glow came from a tablet propped against the cash register, its screen displaying a battery icon that read 10%.

"Son of a bitch," Adam breathed, rushing toward it like a man discovering fire.

The tablet was top-of-the-line—the kind Adam could never have justified buying on a government salary. Now it was potentially the most valuable object in his new world. His fingers shook slightly as he touched the screen.

The device came alive, cycling through a few apps before settling on what appeared to be a news feed—the last update timestamped 6:47 AM. The headline made his blood pressure spike:

"GLOBAL ELECTROMAGNETIC EVENT CONTINUES - AUTHORITIES ADVISE SHELTER IN PLACE"

"Shelter in place," Adam read aloud, then looked around at the empty electronics store. "Well, I'm definitely in a place. Not sure about the shelter part."

The battery indicator dropped to 9% as he scrolled down. The next headline was even better:

"COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS WORLDWIDE AFFECTED - OFFICIALS STRESS 'NO NEED TO PANIC'"

"No need to panic," Adam repeated, his voice echoing in the abandoned store. "Right. Because nothing says 'don't panic' like every electronic device on Earth dying simultaneously."

He scrolled faster, skimming through fragments of information: "Unexplained electromagnetic anomaly"... "Global power grid failure"... "Transportation systems offline"... "Government continuity measures in effect"...

The last entry was a local news update, posted at 6:52 AM: "Downtown evacuation proceeding smoothly. All residents report to designated rally points. Military personnel on standby to assist with orderly relocation."

Adam stared at the screen, processing. Evacuation. Rally points. Military personnel. None of which explained why he'd woken up in an empty world, or where exactly everyone had been evacuated to.

"Designated rally points," he said to the dying tablet. "Let me guess—no one bothered to designate where those actually were."

As if responding to his complaint, the device's screen flickered, showing one final notification before the battery dropped to 9%:

"Emergency Alert: All personnel report to Regional Emergency Coordination Center - Riverside Community College - GPS coordinates follow..."

The coordinates flashed on screen for exactly three seconds before the tablet gave a tiny electronic sigh and went black forever.

Adam stood in the dark electronics store, holding a very expensive paperweight, and started to laugh. Not the bitter chuckle from this morning, but genuine, helpless laughter that echoed off the walls full of dead televisions and silent speakers.

"Of course," he gasped between laughs. "Of course the coordinates were on the screen for exactly three seconds. Because why would surviving the apocalypse be easy?"

He wiped his eyes and looked around the store one more time. Riverside Community College. He knew where that was—about fifteen miles east, past the industrial district. Walkable, if he paced himself. Assuming anyone was still there. Assuming the evacuation hadn't been a complete disaster.

Assuming he hadn't just watched humanity's last technical support ticket expire with a dead battery.

"Well," Adam said, tucking the useless tablet into his pack anyway, "I always said I wanted to see more of the world."

He walked back out into the empty street, shouldered his pack, and started east toward what might be answers, or might be nothing at all.

Either way, it beat filing reports about parking violations.

3 - Lost coordinates

Adam had made it exactly four blocks toward Riverside Community College when he realized he might not be the only survivor after all. The evidence came in the form of distant cursing—creative, multilingual cursing that cut through the unnatural silence like a chainsaw through meditation music.

He followed the sound around the corner of Maple Street, where he found a woman standing beside an overturned shopping cart, glaring at a pile of scattered canned goods with the intensity of someone personally betrayed by gravity.

"Goddamn piece of shit cart," she was saying, combining what sounded like English profanities with something that might have been Mandarin. "nine years of existing just fine, and you choose now to have a mechanical failure?"

Adam cleared his throat. "Excuse me."

The woman spun around, and Adam found himself looking at someone who appeared to have raided a sporting goods store with military precision. Tactical pants, hiking boots, a backpack that looked like it could survive nuclear winter, and the kind of multi-tool belt that made Boy Scouts weep with envy.

"Oh," she said, straightening up. "Another person. Well, that's something." She gestured at the scattered cans. "I don't suppose you've got any experience with shopping cart engineering?"

"Define engineering," Adam said, walking over to examine the cart. One wheel had simply decided to migrate to a completely different axle, creating what could generously be called an artistic statement about the futility of human transportation.

"I was trying to gather supplies," the woman continued, "when this thing decided to interpretive dance itself to death. I'm Eva, by the way. Psychologist, Taoist, and apparently terrible at basic equipment maintenance."

"Adam. Former government employee, current expert in apocalyptic bureaucracy." He crouched beside the cart, then looked up at her. "You know, there's probably a form for this. Cart failure during emergency evacuation. Probably needs to be filed in triplicate."

Eva stared at him for a moment, then started laughing. "A form. For the end of the world."

"Government covers everything," Adam said solemnly. "Except competent disaster planning, apparently."

She grabbed a can of soup from the ground and tossed it to him. "So, fellow survivor. What's your assessment of our current situation? On a scale of 'inconvenient' to 'completely fucked'?"

Adam caught the can and read the label. "Cream of mushroom. Well, we've got food that won't kill us, no immediate threats, and I just found evidence that there might be other people at Riverside Community College." He paused. "I'd say we're hovering somewhere around 'aggressively suboptimal.'"

"Riverside?" Eva's eyebrows went up. "That's what, fifteen miles? You planning to walk?"

"Unless you've got a functioning vehicle hidden somewhere, walking's about our only option." Adam handed the soup back to her. "Found some emergency coordinates on a tablet downtown before it died. Might be nothing, might be everyone. Worth checking out."

Eva nodded, already gathering the scattered cans with practiced efficiency. "Makes sense. Two heads, better than one. Plus, I've got medical training and you've got that whole 'seen some shit' military bearing going on."

"Veteran, yeah. Though most of my recent experience involves explaining to people why they can't park in loading zones." Adam helped her stuff supplies into both their packs. "Not exactly combat-relevant skills."

"You'd be surprised how transferable bureaucratic patience is to survival situations," Eva said, abandoning the broken cart entirely. "Both require dealing with systems that make no logical sense and people who refuse to follow basic instructions."

They started walking east, their footsteps echoing strangely in the empty streets. The morning sun was getting higher, and Adam found himself grateful for Eva's company. Not just because of the practical advantages—though her pack suggested someone who actually understood preparation—but because it felt less insane to walk through an abandoned world with someone else making darkly humorous observations.

"So," Eva said after they'd covered two blocks in companionable silence, "on a completely unrelated note, do you think whoever organized this evacuation remembered to account for people who sleep through alarms?"

Adam glanced at her. "You mean people like us?"

"I mean people exactly like us." She stepped around a abandoned bicycle lying across the sidewalk. "Because I'm starting to think we might be the B-team here. The people too stubborn, too stupid, or too unconscious to follow instructions properly."

"The backup plan nobody wanted to implement," Adam agreed. "Like being the emergency contact who only gets called when everything else has failed."

Eva pointed to a street sign ahead. "Riverside College, twelve miles. Think they left us a welcome wagon?"

"If they did, it probably broke down," Adam said. "But hey, at least we've got cream of mushroom soup and whatever the hell you've got in that pack that makes it look like you're planning to climb Everest."

"Trail mix, water purification tablets, and enough first aid supplies to perform battlefield surgery," Eva said cheerfully. "I may have slight trust issues with official emergency planning."

Adam looked at his new traveling companion with growing respect. "You know what? I think we're going to get along just fine."

"Famous last words," Eva said, but she was smiling as they walked deeper into their uncertain future.

4 - New beginnings

Three miles down the road to Riverside College, Eva stopped walking and stared at the McDonald's.

"Adam," she said slowly. "Look at the drive-through."

Adam followed her gaze. A line of cars snaked around the building—seven vehicles deep, each one sitting empty with doors hanging open like metallic mouths frozen mid-scream. The electronic menu board flickered weakly, advertising a breakfast special that would never be served.

"They were getting Happy Meals," Eva said. "When whatever this was happened, people were literally in line for Happy Meals."

"The last customers in human history," Adam observed, "and they ordered from the value menu."

They stood there for a moment, contemplating the profound absurdity of humanity's potential final transaction. Eva pulled out a granola bar and took a bite.

"You know what the really fucked up part is?" she said, chewing thoughtfully. "I'm actually disappointed they didn't finish making the food. I could go for some hash browns right now."

"Emergency situation protocol," Adam said in his best bureaucratic voice. "All McDonald's locations are required to maintain minimum hash brown inventory levels during catastrophic events. Someone definitely didn't read the manual."

Eva snorted. "Think we should check the kitchen? Maybe they've got something on the grill."

"Breaking and entering a McDonald's during the apocalypse," Adam mused. "I feel like there should be a form for that too."

They walked past the abandoned restaurant, but the absurdity lingered. Every few blocks brought new evidence of how thoroughly ordinary everyone's last moments had been. A UPS truck sat in the middle of the street, packages spilled across the asphalt like the world's saddest Christmas morning. Someone had been in the middle of walking their dog—the leash lay stretched across a fire hydrant, collar still attached but empty.

"Okay," Eva said as they stepped around a scattered collection of Amazon deliveries, "I need to ask the obvious question. Where exactly do you think everyone went?"

Adam had been dreading this conversation. "You want the optimistic answer or the realistic one?"

"Let's start with optimistic and work our way down to complete despair."

"Optimistic: mass evacuation to underground bunkers. Everyone's safe somewhere, and we just missed the memo because we're both apparently terrible at following emergency protocols."

Eva nodded. "I can live with that. What's realistic?"

Adam gestured at the empty street around them. "Mass casualty event. Whatever caused the electromagnetic failure also caused... other failures. We're looking at the aftermath of something that took out most of human civilization in about six hours."

"And complete despair?"

"We're the only people left alive, and we're walking fifteen miles to stare at an empty community college while arguing about McDonald's hash browns."

Eva was quiet for almost a full block. Then: "You know what? I think I prefer complete despair. At least it's honest."

"Plus," Adam added, "if we're the only people left, we don't have to worry about student loan payments anymore."

"Silver lining," Eva agreed. "I was three payments behind on my car. Guess that problem solved itself."

They were passing through what had been the business district when Eva suddenly stopped and pointed at a storefront. "Oh, come on. That's just insulting."

Adam looked. It was an H&R Block, and someone had left the lights on. The neon sign buzzed cheerfully: "TAX PREPARATION - MAXIMUM REFUND GUARANTEED."

"Maximum refund," Eva read aloud. "From who, exactly? The IRS building is probably empty too."

"You know what's really going to bother me?" Adam said, staring at the tax office. "I was supposed to file an extension this year. Now I'm technically in violation of federal tax law during the end of civilization."

"The apocalypse, and you're worried about paperwork."

"Twenty-seven years in the military, fifteen years in government service. You don't just stop following regulations because humanity might be extinct." Adam started walking again. "Besides, what if we're wrong? What if we get to Riverside and there's a functioning emergency operations center with proper documentation procedures?"

Eva caught up with him, grinning. "You're hoping the apocalypse comes with proper filing systems."

"I'm hoping human civilization didn't end with everyone's paperwork in disorder," Adam corrected. "There's a difference."

"And if it did?"

Adam considered this. "Then I guess we'll have to rebuild society from scratch. Starting with a decent record-keeping system."

"Our new world order," Eva said solemnly. "Founded on the principle that all catastrophic events must be properly documented."

"Form 1040-A," Adam said. "Apocalypse Edition. Standard deduction for total loss of infrastructure."

They walked in comfortable silence for another mile, past a gas station where someone had left the pump running from their abandoned car, past a school where a crossing guard's stop sign lay on its side like a fallen soldier, past a dozen small tragedies that would have been heartbreaking if they weren't so uniformly ridiculous.

"Adam," Eva said finally, "can I ask you something personal?"

"Shoot."

"Are you actually upset about this? I mean, underneath all the jokes about tax forms and hash browns. Are you scared or angry or... anything normal?"

Adam thought about it. Really thought about it, the way he hadn't allowed himself to since waking up in an empty world.

"You want the honest answer? I should be terrified. I should be having a complete psychological breakdown right now." He stepped over a child's tricycle, abandoned in the middle of the sidewalk. "Instead, I feel like I just got out of prison."

Eva nodded slowly. "Yeah. Me too. Is that fucked up?"

"Probably. But then again, we might be the only two people left to judge whether something is fucked up or not."

"The last psychologist on Earth," Eva said, "walking toward an empty college with a government clerk who's excited about reorganizing post-apocalyptic bureaucracy. We are definitely not the A-team here."

"Maybe that's exactly what the situation requires," Adam suggested. "Maybe the A-team would be trying to restore the old system. Maybe it takes the B-team to build something better."

"Or maybe," Eva said, pointing ahead to where the Riverside College sign was finally visible in the distance, "we're about to discover that the A-team got everyone killed, and we're inheriting the world's biggest cleanup job."

Adam looked at the college buildings on the horizon, their windows dark and silent under the afternoon sun.

"Well," he said, "at least we won't have any trouble finding parking."

5 - Empty promises

Riverside Community College had always been an aggressively beige institution, the kind of place where architectural ambition went to die. Now, with its windows dark and parking lots empty except for a scattered collection of abandoned vehicles, it looked like someone had built a monument to institutional depression.

"Well," Eva said, consulting the GPS coordinates on Adam's tablet one more time, "this is definitely the place. Building C, Room 127. Emergency Operations Center, according to this."

"I'm seeing a lot of emergency," Adam observed, "and zero operations."

They'd been walking for six hours, and the college's silence felt different from the empty streets they'd passed through. This wasn't the casual abandonment of people who'd left for work or school. This was the profound stillness of a place where something had gone very, very wrong.

"You know what's bothering me?" Eva said as they approached the main entrance. "Look at the cars."

Adam followed her gaze across the parking lot. Maybe thirty vehicles scattered across the asphalt, doors hanging open like surprised mouths. "What about them?"

"They're not wrecked. No collisions, no damage. People just... stopped driving and got out." Eva pointed to a Honda Civic sitting perpendicular across two parking spaces. "That car's engine is still running."

The sound was barely audible, but once Eva mentioned it, Adam could hear the idle rumble coming from several vehicles. "Six hours," he said. "They've been running for six hours."

"Which means whatever happened here happened fast."

The main doors to the college were propped open with emergency wedges, and a hand-lettered sign had been taped just inside: EMERGENCY SHELTER - BUILDING C - FOLLOW ARROWS.

"Someone was definitely trying to organize this," Adam noted, following orange spray-painted arrows down the hallway. "Question is whether they succeeded or just created a more efficient way to get everyone killed."

The arrows led them past empty classrooms, through a cafeteria where abandoned lunch trays sat growing cold, down corridors lined with motivational posters that now read like dark comedy. "TEAMWORK: Because Sometimes You Can't Do It All Yourself" hung above a pile of dropped textbooks and what looked like someone's entire purse contents scattered across the floor.

"Eva," Adam said quietly, "are you smelling what I'm smelling?"

She was already pulling a small medical mask from her pack. "Yeah. That's not good."

The smell got stronger as they followed the arrows toward Building C. Not quite decay yet, but the beginning of it. The biological reality of what happens when large numbers of people stop being able to take care of basic hygiene needs.

Building C's main hallway was lined with sleeping bags, backpacks, and personal belongings arranged with the desperate organization of people trying to maintain normalcy during catastrophe. Someone had set up a makeshift information station near the entrance, complete with a posterboard listing names and contact information.

"Jesus," Eva whispered, walking along the wall of personal items. "This is like a refugee camp."

"Emergency Operations Center," Adam read from a final sign pointing toward Room 127. "Let's see what operations they were running."

Room 127 had been the college's largest lecture hall, and someone had converted it into exactly what the signs promised: an emergency command center. Folding tables lined with laptops, radio equipment, medical supplies, and enough coffee-making apparatus to caffeinate a small army. Maps covered every available wall surface, marked with colored pins and evacuation routes.

And scattered throughout the room, slumped over tables and sprawled across makeshift bedding, were approximately two hundred people who would never need coffee again.

"Okay," Eva said after a long moment, her voice professionally calm in the way that meant she was processing something terrible. "So that's not encouraging."

Adam was already moving between the bodies, his military training kicking in automatically. "No obvious wounds. No blood. No signs of violence or struggle." He crouched beside a middle-aged woman who'd apparently died while updating a evacuation spreadsheet. "She just... stopped."

"Same here," Eva called from across the room, where she was examining an elderly man who'd been manning what looked like a ham radio. "No distress, no defensive posturing. Whatever killed them, they didn't see it coming."

"Plague?" Adam suggested, though he was already shaking his head. "No, too fast. Plague takes days, weeks. This is more like..."

"Mass poisoning," Eva finished. "But with what? And how?" She gestured around the room. "Look at this setup. These people knew what they were doing. Medical supplies, air filtration, sealed food and water. If there was a biological agent, they were prepared for it."

Adam was studying the radio equipment, most of which was still functioning. Multiple frequencies, emergency channels, even what looked like satellite communication gear. "They were in contact with other sites. Look at this log."

Eva joined him at the communications station, stepping carefully around a woman who'd died while apparently in the middle of taking detailed medical notes.

"'Day 1, Hour 4,'" Eva read from the radio log. "'Contact established with Sites Alpha through Hotel. All reporting similar electromagnetic failures but populations secure.' Day 1, Hour 6: 'Sites Delta and Echo no longer responding. Alpha reports medical emergencies.' Day 1, Hour 8: 'Site Alpha... Site Alpha, please respond.'"

"And then nothing," Adam said. "The log stops."

Eva was reading the medical notes left by the dead woman. "Look at this. She was documenting symptoms right up until..." Eva paused, studying the handwriting. "Sudden onset fatigue, disorientation, respiratory distress, and then... 'feeling of overwhelming peace.'"

"Peace?"

"That's what she wrote. 'Subjects report unusual sense of calm and acceptance before losing consciousness.'" Eva looked around the room with new attention. "Adam, look at their faces."

He did, and immediately understood what she meant. Every person in the room had died with an expression of serene relaxation. No terror, no pain, no struggle. They looked like they'd simply decided to take a nap and never wake up.

"That," Adam said slowly, "is the most terrifying thing I've seen yet."

"Airborne agent," Eva was mutating, moving toward the room's ventilation system. "Has to be. Something that induces euphoria before death. Which means..."

She stopped talking and pointed at the ceiling. The air filtration system was running, had been running all along, but the filters were a color that industrial air filters definitely weren't supposed to be.

"What color would you say that is?" Eva asked quietly.

Adam looked up at the filter vents, which were glowing with a faint, sickly yellow-green luminescence. "I would say that's the color of 'we need to leave right fucking now.'"

"Agreed. But first..." Eva grabbed a medical mask from the supply station and quickly collected samples of the whatever-it-was coating the air filters. "If we're going to survive this, we need to know what killed them."

"Eva," Adam said, his voice tight with urgency, "we've been breathing the same air for ten minutes."

"I know. But look around. We're not dead yet, which means either we're immune, or there's something different about the exposure." She sealed her samples in medical containers. "These people were here for hours, in a closed system, with whatever that is being pumped directly into their air supply."

Adam was already gathering supplies - water, medical kit, anything that might be useful. "So we get out, figure out what makes us special, and hope it keeps working."

"Or we get out, analyze these samples, and figure out how to neutralize whatever this is before it kills everyone else on the planet," Eva countered, stuffing her sample containers into her pack.

"Everyone else?" Adam stopped packing and stared at her. "Eva, what if this is everywhere? What if those other sites in the radio log..."

"Then we're looking at an extinction event," she said simply. "And we might be the only people left who know what caused it."

They stood there for a moment, surrounded by two hundred peaceful corpses and the quiet hum of contaminated air systems, contemplating the possibility that they were witnessing the end of human civilization.

"You know what?" Adam said finally. "I take back what I said about being glad to get out of the bureaucracy. At least government paperwork never tried to kill me with weaponized happiness."

"Come on," Eva said, heading for the exit. "Let's go find somewhere with better ventilation and figure out how to not die of terminal contentment."

As they left the building, Adam couldn't resist one last look at the Emergency Operations Center. "Think we should file a report about this?"

"To who?" Eva asked. "The Department of Apocalyptic Events?"

"I was thinking more like the EPA," Adam said. "Pretty sure glowing air filters violate several federal regulations."

They were halfway across the parking lot when the building's ventilation system gave a mechanical shudder and went silent.

6 - Ending

They didn't stop running until they were three miles from Riverside College, when Eva finally collapsed against a roadside fence post and started laughing.

Not normal laughter. The kind of laughter that happens when your brain runs out of appropriate emotional responses and defaults to hysteria.

"We're it," she gasped between fits of manic giggling. "We're literally it. The entire human race, and it's a psychologist with trust issues and a middle-aged bureaucrat who files tax extensions during the apocalypse."

Adam leaned against a stop sign, breathing heavily. "Could be worse."

"How?"

"Could be two middle-aged bureaucrats."

Eva wiped tears from her eyes. "Oh god. That's not even funny, but I can't stop laughing." She gestured wildly at the empty highway stretching in both directions. "Do you realize what this means? We're going to have to repopulate the planet. Just us two."

"I was hoping we'd find other survivors first," Adam said diplomatically.

"What if we don't? What if it really is just us?" Eva stood up, pacing in small circles. "I mean, I like you, Adam, but I don't like you enough to carry the entire genetic future of humanity. No offense."

"None taken. Besides, we'd need at least fifty people for a viable gene pool. I think I read that somewhere."

"Fifty people," Eva repeated. "We need to find forty-eight more humans who didn't die of terminal happiness. In a world where glowing air filters apparently kill everyone except us." She stopped pacing and stared at him. "Why didn't it kill us?"

Adam had been thinking about that myself. "Maybe we're special. Maybe we're immune."

"Or maybe," Eva said darkly, "we're just slower to die."

They stood in the silence of an empty world, contemplating their potential extinction.

"You know what?" Eva said suddenly. "Fuck this doom spiral. If we're going to be the last humans, we need a plan."

"A plan for rebuilding civilization?"

"A plan for not going completely insane while we figure out how to rebuild civilization." Eva opened her pack and pulled out a battered paperback. "Remember what you used to read when you were young? Before life got all complicated and bureaucratic?"

Adam looked at the book in her hands: "The Tao Te Ching." "You carry philosophy books in your emergency kit?"

"I carry everything in my emergency kit. But yes, philosophy books. Because sometimes the end of the world is exactly when you need ancient wisdom." She flipped through pages worn soft with reading. "'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'"

"Lao Tzu," Adam said. "I remember that one."

"What else do you remember? From before you became a government drone?"

Adam thought back, decades back, to the books that had mattered to him before mortgages and performance reviews and the slow death of bureaucratic routine. "Thoreau. 'Walden.' God, I haven't thought about that in twenty years."

"'I went to the woods to live deliberately,'" Eva quoted. "'To front only the essential facts of life.'"

"Well," Adam gestured at the empty landscape around them, "we're definitely fronting some essential facts right now."

"This is it," Eva said, closing the book but holding it tight. "This is our chance. Not just to survive, but to do it right this time. Build something better. Something that doesn't end with everyone dying peacefully while poison pumps through the air conditioning."

"A sustainable society based on Taoist principles and government bureaucracy?"

"Why not? Balance the ancient wisdom with practical administrative systems. The yin and yang of post-apocalyptic civilization."

Adam found himself actually considering this. "We'd need to establish basic infrastructure first. Water, power, food production. Then documentation systems, resource allocation protocols..."

"See? You're already thinking like a founding father. Except instead of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' it's 'life, liberty, and properly filed emergency procedures.'"

"'Form 1776-A: Declaration of Post-Apocalyptic Principles,'" Adam said solemnly.

Eva started laughing again, but this time it was genuine. "You know what the really insane part is? I think we might actually be able to do this."

"Find other survivors?"

"Build something worth surviving for." She shouldered her pack and started walking east again. "Think about it. No existing power structures to fight. No entrenched interests. No politicians arguing about whose fault everything is. Just us, some philosophy books, and whatever practical knowledge we can remember."

Adam fell into step beside her. "And if we die tomorrow from whatever killed everyone else?"

"Then at least we'll die trying to build something beautiful instead of just trying to maintain something broken." Eva pulled out her water bottle and took a long drink. "Besides, you know what I realized back there?"

"What?"

"We survived because we're the people who sleep through emergency broadcasts and show up late to evacuations. We're the B-team, remember? Maybe that's exactly what the situation requires."

"The people too stubborn to follow instructions."

"The people who think there might be a better way to do things." Eva pointed ahead to where the highway disappeared into rolling hills. "So where do we go now? What's our thousand-mile journey?"

Adam pulled out the tablet, checking their remaining battery life. "North, I think. Away from population centers, toward areas where we might find clean water and farmable land. Maybe other people who were too stubborn or too lucky to die."

"Our tribe of misfits and survivors."

"Led by a psychologist and a bureaucrat. Based on principles derived from Chinese philosophy and federal paperwork management." Adam shook his head. "Future anthropologists are going to have a field day with our civilization."

"Assuming there are future anthropologists," Eva pointed out.

"There will be. We're going to make sure of it."

They walked in comfortable silence for a mile, two people carrying the impossible weight of being possibly the last hope for human civilization, and somehow managing not to collapse under the absurdity of it all.

"Adam," Eva said finally, "can I ask you something personal?"

"At this point, what's personal?"

"Are you afraid?"

Adam considered the question seriously. "Terrified. But also... excited? Like, genuinely excited for the first time in twenty years. We might be walking toward our deaths, but we're also walking toward the chance to build something that actually matters."

"The chance to live deliberately," Eva said.

"The chance to make sure the next civilization doesn't end with people dying happy while poison filters through their air conditioning systems."

"Our sacred mission: build a society that's both spiritually enlightened and administratively competent."

"The bureaucrat and the philosopher," Adam mused. "Walking into the sunset to rebuild the world."

"Actually," Eva said, checking the sun's position, "we're walking into the sunrise. It's still morning."

"Even better. Nothing says 'new beginning' like walking toward the dawn with a Taoist and a stack of government forms."

Eva pulled the philosophy book back out and read as they walked: "'At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.'"

"What do we want?" Adam asked.

Eva closed the book and looked at the empty road stretching ahead of them, full of possibility and terror and the chance to start over completely.

"To not be the last humans," she said. "And if we are, to make sure we're good ones."

They kept walking toward whatever remained of the future, two unlikely prophets carrying ancient wisdom and modern bureaucracy into a world that might give them just one chance to get it right.