Back then, the technology had only been gone for about two months. I hadn’t been able to text my brothers, my dad, or my friends. I was stuck out in the country, just me and my mom. None of the vehicles worked, and the dirtbikes were out of gas. We started to make a plan on walking to town to figure out what was going on, but instead, I walked over to the neighbor's house through the woods. I spoke to them for about an hour, and they invited us over for dinner, during which they explained that an EMP was released and took out the country, and possibly the rest of the world. This was just the start of explaining all sorts of wrongs that were happening.

  My dad had driven two vehicles with his girlfriend to our home, which weren’t affected by the EMP since they were from the older years. They didn’t run on electronics. That was the day he brought the truck to me. He explained what he knew about the growing hostility between the people and the sicknesses that were striking everyone he knew. He had lost three friends in the span of five days. He told me to come see him once a month, on the last day of the month. He didn’t want me to travel often because of the danger, but knew I wouldn’t be able to live in peace if I wasn’t able to see him. My mom didn't like it at first, but that was before she had gotten sick. My dad also told me he had been talking to my oldest brother, Barret, too. The one that lived right outside of the big city. Barrett would come by once a week via planned visits. We would make this work.

  I went into town to get gas for my dirtbikes. It would be easier and much faster to move around town with. A big, loud truck was obvious on an empty road. A dirtbike, though, I didn’t even have to stay on the road. It would keep me safe.

  The gas station was right next to the fire department. It felt strange not to go there. I went every Wednesday of the week for training. I basically lived there some days. all of that time and training. I knew the building inside and out. I stood at the gas pump, trying to figure out how it was going to work. There was nobody inside the gas station, and there was nobody walking around town. Every blind was closed, but I could hear some kids laughing in the nearby neighborhood. It was weird seeing nobody driving around, but other than that, the behavior was normal for Hartland, and we were too small a town to have everyone running around all the time, end of the world or not.

  I pulled up to the fire department and knocked on the door. I could have let myself in, but with how on edge my dad explained everyone to be, I wanted to give them a warning. A few seconds later, someone came walking up to the door. It was my boss. His hair was whiter than ever, and he looked exhausted. He opened the door and stared at me for a second. “I’m surprised it’s you that showed up here.”

  “You know me,” I smiled. “I always defy the odds, right?” He snorted and stepped aside to let me in. I jingled the keys in my hand while I walked in to let him know how I got here. Nobody but the firetrucks were in here, each of them spotless and glimmering against the dull, stained concrete floors. I stepped down from the curbside and peered into the glass window across the garage. There were a lot of people there.

  “Come join us. I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you.” I wasn’t sure who he was referring to, but I followed him into the breakroom. The lights were almost blinding at first, as they always had been. When I scanned the room, it looked like twenty people. People I had seen before that worked with the department, and their kids, whom I had seen around school and the district. One of my teachers yelled my name, and all turned over to me. It felt weird, seeing all of them all at once. Usually, I saw roughly five people at a time on the scenes of fires or medical calls, but here they all were. It warmed my heart. I sat with them and talked, telling them about my dad and brothers, and mom, and being stuck at my house in the country. I felt like I had been speaking about myself for too long after that. I then asked them about their families and what they knew about the start of the end. They didn’t know much more than my dad, but they knew that hostility was starting to rise.

  Before I left, I made a deal with them. I would come into town every Monday and Friday, if not more, to run the ambulance with them. They had one very old ambulance that had a lot of equipment. They were bound to run out of medicine eventually, but they made supply runs to nearby stores. There was an Amazon facility right on the outskirts of town, too, just for their advantage. Nothing looked abandoned, but the grocery store and the dollar stores nearby were no longer occupied by anyone. I had always wondered what abandoned buildings were like when they just became abandoned, and now I knew.

  I rode in the ambulance every Monday and Friday as we had planned, and for three months, it didn’t seem terrible. It kept me from going crazy from the familiar walls of my house. We came across a lot of sick people, probably a couple of hundred people a month at least. We had more and more death calls the further we got into it. There were a couple of critical wound calls, but we only ever intersected with the middle-aged adults and the elderly, or very, very young kids.

  We knew the pattern was strange, but by month four, the teenagers started to show up in our ambulance. Injuries that they inflicted on each other. The group of teenagers that went around slaughtering started their usual routine in month four. The first personal death I came across was the boy from my class, and I held his hand until his last breath. That same day, we came across Blane.

  “I’m getting sick of canned corn,” I leaned back in the head seat of the ambulance. I spun it around to face the front window, dividing the back from the cab. A paramedic and EMT sat in the front. They were both on the younger side. The next generation, as the older men referred to them. They always had them doing the scut that they didn’t want us juniors to do. Sure, we could wash the ground, but we couldn’t be trusted with the more important jobs that sucked just as much. “Do you remember that one fire down on the river bottoms? I showed up after cheer practice wearing a skirt. Robert was so mad,” I laughed.

  “Yeah, how could I forget that fire? I fell down the bank,” Layne laughed too. The paramedic next to him, Calvin, always kept a straight face. No matter how funny he found something. I had only seen him live a total of three times in my life. He was training to be a police officer before the beginning of the end, but now he is stuck with being a paramedic three days out of the week. He brought his tattooed sleeve up behind his head and kicked his feet up on the dashboard as Layne took a corner. “Holding a chainsaw and everything, may I add,” We laughed again.

  “I was the one to drag you back up,” Calvin let out a slight chuckle. “Don’t forget you still owe me for that, boy. I got a hole in my uniform from those damn rocks.” He hit Layne on the shoulder. We turned the corner again, patrolling the street when we saw a bunch of kids speed by in a truck, the cops right on their tail. They were waving their weapons in the air, hooting and hollering over nothing at all, but that was when we saw another cop car down the way. We sped up, Calvin's feet almost slamming into the center console. My chair spun itself back around and clicked into place, so I was facing the stretcher. I held on until I heard the movement of Layne's gloves, then Calvin's. There was someone here. I unclipped my seatbelt and grabbed the pair of small rubber gloves I kept in my pocket, then jumped outside and opened up the glass cabinet. Inside was the bright red medic bag with everything we needed. It wasn’t as full as we would have kept it years ago, though. Instead, we’ve adapted to two bags: a blue one for illness calls with barf bags, oxygen, I-GELS, and the red trauma bag with tourniquets, three-sided bandages, burn kits, and more. I slung the red bag over my shoulder and carried the blue one before running to the group. There were two officers, one whom I knew and a female whom I wasn’t sure I had seen before. The one I knew, a 6-foot-5 burly man with a long curling mustache, stepped aside, taking the medic bag from me as I slung the red one over my shoulder and onto the ground. Layne and Calvin were already moving the victim around, carefully laying them on their side. I could hear them coughing and something gushing out of their abdomen. It splashed onto the pavement. The female officer ran to get the stretcher out of the ambulance. I ripped open the bag to grab gauze and threw it onto the ground, then started throwing out bandages and foam expanders, and anything we might need. We had come across those rowdy kids before, so we knew the drill of an injury like this.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I had become less and less bothered over the past months when we ran these brutal calls, and just two hours ago, we had lost that kid my age. I turned my head to grab some supplies, but my eyes locked onto the victim's face. I knew the victim. It was Blane. I couldn’t help but release a sound, a half gasp and a half call for help. I could feel the color draining from my face. I couldn’t choke out the words to say anything. “Amelia,” He smiled at me, blood between his teeth. He saw me, and he recognized me. “You gonna say hello?” I stared at him. I couldn’t say anything. I could hear my breath catch, and I could hear the sounds of him struggling to breathe.

  “Sir, we need you to stay still, alright? We’re going to patch the wound and bring you back to the station. How are you feeling?” Calvin was speaking to him, but he couldn’t stop laughing. With each laugh, more blood came out of his abdomen.

  “I can’t feel anything, actually. Is that okay, Amelia?” I grabbed Blane’s hand. I gripped it tightly, a tear falling down my face.

  “Yes, I'm still with us,” I laughed with him. “Remember when we used to play doctor? You were my patient?” I gave him a soft smile. My memory flashed to us in the living room. My brothers were off doing something crazy with their friends outside, while Blane would spend time with me inside. I was too young to hang out with them, but he would stay behind. I would patch him up with a fake doctor's kit after we made up some skits. “That’s what this is, but your acting needs a little work,” He laughed again, a smile on his face, but then it faded. He was coughing up red. He couldn’t feel anything, and he was bleeding into his lungs. There was nothing we could do, but we couldn’t give up. We would do everything we could and take him back to the station, but he wouldn’t last that long. Still, we wouldn't just sit here with him and let him pass. I wouldn't just sit here and let him pass.

  “You hear from Conner?” He looked back up at me. I moved closer to his side so he could see me a little better.

  “Yes,” I lied. I hadn't heard from Conner since the world started to end four months ago. His best friend was MIA. My brother was MIA. “He came back home yesterday. Gunner, too." He had Gunner was younger than him, but still older than me. Blane had tried to set an example for us from the very beginning. "Everyone’s okay. We still have our big happy family, I couldn’t wish for more in a world spiraling down the drain,” He smiled. His teeth were red. I could hear him cursing every couple of seconds, though he was trying to suppress it. “What about your sister and mom? Your dad's still around, too?”

  “Yeah, no, no they aren’t,” He held his breath for a second, releasing it with a painful grunt. Every part of my body hurts. It hurt so much to the point I felt like I was watching myself from the third person. I could barely feel myself grabbing his hand and holding it out of the way of Layne and Calvin so they could work. “Virus got to them a few weeks ago. I’ve been wandering around since then,” He coughed again. He started gasping for air. It took him longer to recover this time. His coughing fit lasted about ten seconds, then he relaxed, breathing with something catching in his throat. He was wasting too much energy. “I’ve got about three minutes, right? Something around that time?” I nodded. I saw some form of despair in his eyes, but he still smiled through it. “Of course it's you. I'm glad it's you,” He tried to clear his throat again. “Take care of our family for me." It took him a lot of time to speak legibly. Between each word, his throat was tensed. "Tell them I went out fighting?”

  “You’re a hero, Blane,” I smiled. I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. The hot tears poured down my face. I was smiling at him, but the weight on the sides of my mouth was pulling it down. I was half smiling, half sobbing. “We’re going to fix everything, alright? It starts with you. You mean everything to me.”

  “Couldn’t ask for a better sister,” He coughed. I looked down at the wound. With each cough, the gauze was forced out. Realistically, he should have been dead by now. He already lost a lot of blood, more than I thought was humanely possible. “Hey," I watched his body slowly relax. His eyes looked at something behind my head. Something I couldn't see. "I could use a Busch Peach.” He stared back into my eyes. I looked right back at him, but what once was his icy blue eyes against his blonde hair was a dull, almost metallic film. I watched it become prominent over his eyes. He wasn't looking at anything anymore. He was gone. I saw Calvin reach up to check his pulse, but nothing was there. He really was gone. I gripped his hand tighter, feeling the warmth of it. He was alive a few seconds ago. I had watched his soul vanish from his eyes. My brother. I gripped his hand even harder, the skin on my knuckles turning white. I let out a cry that sounded more like a scream. My chest felt like it was going to explode.

  “Hey, hey,” The officer I knew put his hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t hear him, let alone feel him. “Hey, we need to step away, let them take him,” He gripped my shoulder harder, but I wouldn’t let him go. Not yet.

  “I’m,” I could barely speak. It felt like I was hiccupping. “Blane, I'm sorry.” I lowered his hand onto his chest, then brought his other hand over the top of it. “The Lord is waiting,” I bent down and whispered in his ear. “Your family is waiting.” I pinched my eyes shut, then forced myself to stand. I wrapped my arms around my abdomen and squeezed. The officer was going to lead me away, but I walked past him, staring at the ground and climbing into the ambulance in the seat I was in before. The female officer had already unloaded the stretcher.

  “I can, uh," Layne didn't want to look directly at me. "Do you want me to ride back here?” He had opened the door to talk to me. I wiped the remaining tears from my face.

  “No, I’ve got it. It’s fine.” He lingered there for a while but didn’t say anything. They loaded Blane up on the stretcher, and we drove back to the station. I stared at him, but I was really just looking right through him. I climbed out of the ambulance and helped them move him to the room where we take the dead, then finally it was done. I closed the door and walked back to the bay. The firefighters were standing there, all of them joking around. My eyes were a little red, but other than that, there were no indications of anything that had just happened. We just kept living. There was nothing we could do about it. The officer came walking in and spoke to a couple of the firefighters, as well as my boss. I could see his eyebrows furrowing as I stood there amongst them all, my arms crossed while I stared at the ground. Occasionally, one of them would look at me, addressing me in the conversation, and I would look back at them, and they’d continue talking. A voice in my head was screaming. Screaming out of anger, and screaming at them to do something. There was nothing they could do, though.

  “You guys came back really quickly after your shift around town. See anything out there?” one of the women asked. She was sitting on the bumper of one of the firetrucks. Layne stood across from me, and Calvin was behind him, standing close to the officer, talking to my boss.

  “Yeah, we found another victim of those kids,” Layne spoke slowly. He stared at me the whole time until he finished his sentence, then looked at the woman speaking. The officer and the group he was talking to stepped over to join the conversation. One of them started walking towards me. “He didn’t make it.”

  “My brother,” I didn’t realize I was speaking. The words jumped out before I even felt the vibration in my throat. I didn’t have enough time to look up at them, to see who I was talking to. “It was my brother. He didn’t make it.” A silence fell over all of them. It wasn't a pity, though a small amount of it was due to my age. We signed up for this, but it wasn’t that either. We had all lost something in the past few months. Almost every single one of us has gone through a loss from the sickness or the crazy kids driving around. It was understanding. This was the silence we used to honor the fallen. Nobody said a word. It was kind of nice.

  “You’re relieved from your shift,” My boss spoke with a low voice. I nodded, thanking them all and saying goodbye. I walked outside and sat in the truck, my hand on the steering wheel, and a blank stare off into the distance. I sat there for two hours before I went back home.