The Last Men Standing

The virus needed less than two months. It left one man alive in two hundred.

The world grinds to a halt: Oil stops pumping, crops rot in the fields, cities count the days of food they have left. The women who remain must learn to run a civilization before hunger finishes what the virus started.

Stephen survived. An ER doctor one week, one of the rarest human beings alive the next. Worshipped, claimed, trusted by no one, least of all himself. Every new world rising from the old offers him a throne. None offers him a way to stay the man he used to be.

Mary loses everyone. In the wreckage she makes herself one promise: she will never be powerless again. Keeping it carries her deep into the government’s repopulation machine, where the cause is noble, the work is necessary, and each compromise comes a little easier than the last.

Civilization didn’t end. It changed hands. Power, it turns out, doesn’t care whose hands it’s in.

For readers of Station Eleven, Children of Men, and The Stand.