It happened so fast, and no one saw it coming. Lucy Booth and her twin sister Lana were all that was left of their family, and Lucy remembered what happened like it was yesterday. First, it was the sickness that many of them got; her baby brother Jack went first. She still can picture the look on her parents' faces when they went to wake him up, but couldn't. The heavy, suffocating silence of the house was easy to remember; it was burned into her memory. Soon, it was the news with reports of the sickness that was killing many. Then there were the calls from family and friends about more deaths, and then her parents went to sleep and never woke up. The only thing she remembered from the sickness was that Lana and they had the worst headaches of their lives. She never noticed anything off about Jack, but it would have been hard for him to tell, as he couldn't talk. Then her mom had a light cough, and her dad had pain in his chest. She and Lana were all that was left after that. The sickness seems to affect everyone differently, and there didn't seem to be any way to see it coming.

Then, within weeks, there was no more news, no more electricity, and 90% of the human population was gone. Lucy and Lana, at the time, were only 12; they could barely take care of themselves, let alone each other. Now at 16, both girls were thin and awkward from the lack of food. Both Lucy and her chopped their black coiled hair into something very short and easy to manage, because they didn't have the time or products to upkeep their hair, and true be told, Lucy was too tired to try. Some of the neighborhood remained, but not many people. But they would meet twice a week to offer goods or see what others had to give.

Both Lucy and Lana knew how to sew and do basic repairs, so they started going to the empty houses and getting some of the bedding and clothes for not only themselves to use, but also for patching up clothes. So, they were always able to offer repairs, which was helpful when a band of men came into their town and stole a lot and threatened them a lot. They even stole from the wedding dress shop. The men set a fire to the shop after they left, and the smell of ash lingered in the air for over a week. There are still bullet holes that Bradley, who was a teen at the time and now 20, went around and filled in the holes with some caulk. She had never seen those men come back, but if she did, the truth was that if they did, Lucy would probably not remember what they looked like; she was not good with faces, and she had never seen them up close, so she just prayed they didn't come back.

So, it was pertinent that they were able to fix their own clothes and belongings. Right now, they were hand sewing Mr. Mark's jean pants and hoping that they would be done by tomorrow's meet-up at the park. But her fingers were aching and cramping from the thick fabric, and she was ignoring the growls that were coming from her stomach. Luckily, because there were two of them, she could switch soon. He was the one who taught them how to grow their own food inside and outside of their home, and get clean water. He taught everyone who came to the meetup how to. Mr. Mark was the oldest of them, and that scared her. He was looking smaller than normal, and coughing more than before, and while that could have been his late habit of smoking catching up to him, it could also be worse.

Lucy was doing her best to put it out of her mind and worry about it tomorrow.

The walk to Garrison Park took twenty minutes if you went the short way, past the Hendersons' old place with its caved-in roof, but Lucy and Lana always took the long way, around by the creek, because Mr. Mark had been the one to point out, years ago, that you never wanted to be boxed in between houses if someone attacked.

Lucy carried Mr. Mark's jeans, folded over her arm, the stitches small where she'd patched the knee with a square of denim cut from a pair too far gone to save. Lana carried the bag, full of what was left of the lentils, half a jar of dandelion tea, three eggs wrapped in a sock so they wouldn't crack, and the kit, needles and thread and the stub of chalk they used to mark which houses had already been picked clean.

Garrison Park had been a proper park once, with a rusted jungle gym and a baseball diamond gone to weeds, but now it was just the place. The place where four houses backed onto the same stretch of grass, their fences torn down years ago and replaced with a low stone wall that everyone had helped build, stone by stone, the summer Lucy turned thirteen. She remembered her hands blistering on that wall. She remembered Lana laughing at her for crying about it, and then crying about her own blisters two seconds later.

There were maybe thirty of them left who came to the Tuesday and Friday meets, give or take. Old Ruth, who'd been a nurse once and still knew how to set a bone and pull a tooth. The Alvarez boys, fifteen and seventeen, who ran trap lines out past the train tracks and always brought rabbit when they had extra. Mr. Mark, who tended the garden, and Bradley, twenty now, broad-shouldered and intimidating, making him useful for standing at the gate.

Nobody was in charge.

There was no mayor of Garrison Park, no council with a vote, no one who told anyone what to do. There was need, and what people had to meet it: you brought what you could and took what you needed. Lucy and Lana sewed because Mr. Mark had once been hungry enough, in those first bad months, that someone's torn coat in February had nearly killed him.

He was already at his usual spot near the old baseball backstop, sitting on the overturned crate he used as a stool, a row of seedling trays in front of him. He did look smaller. Lucy noticed his shirt collar gapped at the neck, and hands shook faintly when he separated the tomato plants.

"There she is," he said, when he saw her, and his voice had its usual rasp of good humor in it, which soothed Lucy a little. "And there's my pants."

"There's your pants," Lucy agreed, handing them over. "Try not to put a hole in the same knee again. I'm running low on denim that isn't already full of holes."

"No promises." He held them up, inspected the patch with a squint that told Lucy she was worrying about his keenness for nothing. "Good work. Tight stitches. You'll do."

"High praise," Lana said, dropping the bag beside him and crouching to look at the seedlings. "What's this batch?"

"Beans. And I want you two to take a tray home, see if you can get them started in that east window you've got. Sunniest spot in the neighborhood, that window, going to waste on nothing but dust."

This was how it worked. You took the seedlings, and in a few months you brought back beans, more than you needed, and somebody else got beans who hadn't had the window or the time or the knack for it. Nobody kept score. Old Ruth had explained it to Lucy once: that the old world had run on debts, on who owed who, on keeping track, and that the world had ended because too many people had spent too long keeping track of the wrong things instead of just helping each other. "We don't have the luxury of debts anymore," she'd said. "We barely have the luxury of being alive. Might as well make it count for something."