I told myself I wouldn’t go inside any more buildings that look like they were made for children. Schools. Playgrounds. Trampoline parks. Places that were built around the assumption that adults would always be nearby, orbiting in the background like steady moons.
Today I broke that rule.
The building used to be called “Tiny Steps Academy.” The sign out front is still bright and cheerful, a rainbow of plastic letters bolted above a cartoon giraffe. The parking lot is half full of cars, all of them parked just a little crooked, as if the people who drove them had more urgent things on their minds when they pulled in.
The front door was propped open with a shoe.
Inside, the air was wrong. Not just the smell — though there’s no way to soften what happens when the adults die and the air conditioning stops. It was the weight of the quiet. No grown-up voices. No “inside voices” fighting with “outside voices.” Just the distant, high-pitched sound of a child crying in a room that was never meant to be this quiet.
There were four of them in the lobby when I stepped in. Toddlers, I mean. Not bodies. The bodies were farther back.
The four in the lobby were sitting in a loose cluster on the floor, surrounded by tiny backpacks and fallen artwork. One of them clutched a shoe that clearly belonged to someone much larger. Another kept staring at the glass door as if waiting for a parent to finish a phone call and come back inside.
They didn’t run to me. That’s the part that always gets to me. They look up first, slow, like animals checking to see if the shadow overhead is a cloud or a hawk. Then they stand, unsteady, and drift closer in these uncertain little steps. Toddlers are magnets without compasses now. Any upright figure is “grown-up” by default.
“Hi,” I said. My voice sounded wrong in the big, bright lobby. Too low. Too alone. One of them lifted their arms toward me. Automatic. That movement is older than language.
I picked that one up. I don’t remember deciding to. It happened the way breathing happens.
The crying I’d heard was coming from deeper inside, past a door with a hand-painted sign that said “Butterfly Room.” The kind of thing adults make to convince themselves that children won’t notice the fluorescent lighting and the plastic floors.
The handle was sticky. My hand left a clean print in the dust as I pushed it open.
There were six more toddlers in that room. There were also three adults on the floor.
It looked like they’d tried. Mats had been pulled into a clumsy ring, as if someone thought a soft barrier would hold the kids in place while the adults fought off whatever was happening to their own bodies. One of the adults had collapsed half on, half off a mat, arms still reaching outward. Another had their hand wrapped around a bottle of sanitizer, fingers locked tight even in death, as if that gesture had been too deeply carved into muscle memory to let go.
The toddlers had gone beyond crying and into something quieter. Their faces were stiff with the kind of exhaustion no one that small should know. Two of them sat pressed together, heads touching. A third was carefully stacking plastic blocks on top of a fallen adult’s arm.
I heard myself say, “I’m here now,” as if that solved anything.
They believed me, which made it worse.
I moved through the rooms like a bad ghost. “Ladybug Room.” “Star Room.” “Nap Nook.” Every one of them had the same layout: tiny chairs, tiny tables, bright artwork, fallen adults, surviving kids. Not many in each room, but enough that by the time I counted the last one, my arms and back were shaking from carrying and shifting and picking them up off the floor.
I counted twenty-two toddlers in total. Twenty-two living. I didn’t count the dead.
This is the part where I should write something about courage, or systems, or the importance of staying strong. Instead I’m going to write what actually happened.
I sat down in the middle of the “Star Room,” with three toddlers clinging to me and one asleep against my shoulder, and I realized I couldn’t take all of them.
I knew the numbers already. My vehicle can safely hold six, maybe eight if I pile them in and ignore every rule we spent a century inventing about car seats and safety and restraint systems. The shelter I’ve been using has space for maybe ten more, if I ration food and clothing and formula and sleep and my sanity.
Twenty-two living children. One adult. Do the math, Pat.
I tried to think like a planner. Like someone designing a triage system instead of someone drowning in it. Take the youngest? The ones who can’t walk yet? No, they’re the hardest to move and feed. Take the oldest? They’re easier to move, but they’re also the closest to the cutoff — the ones who will start expressing that cursed protein soon, if they haven’t already. Take the healthiest? The calmest? The ones who cling to me? The ones who don’t?
Every rule I invented felt monstrous the moment I thought it.
In the end, I chose by proximity and weight. The first children who reached for me. The ones I could carry without dropping.
That’s it. That’s the heroic system of the last adult on Earth.
I made three trips out to the vehicle. Each time I left, the ones I wasn’t carrying watched me with this heavy, exhausted trust. Kids that age assume adults always come back. We trained them to believe that. We taught them that if you cry hard enough, someone will walk through the door.
On the last trip, one little hand caught the cuff of my sleeve as I tried to leave. The child didn’t say anything. Just held on. Eyes wide, rimmed in red.
“I’ll come back,” I said, because everything in me refused to say, “I might not.”
They let go.
I don’t know if I’ll make it back there tomorrow, or next week, or at all. Fuel, time, food, distance, other clusters of kids calling from phones that ring until their batteries die — all of those things pull at me like chains in different directions.
Tonight, as I write this, twenty-two tiny shoes are lined up by the door of the shelter. Some came in pairs. Some did not. I keep thinking of the rows of hooks back at “Tiny Steps Academy,” stuffed animals still hanging by their necks from loops sewn into their backs, waiting for hands that will never reach up again.
People keep calling what’s left of the cities “ghost towns.” They’re wrong. Ghost towns are empty.
This is something worse. This is a world full of children who are still very much alive, and every daycare is a graveyard with a heartbeat.