He found a house on the outskirts of the city, miraculously intact. A Victorian terrace with a cracked foundation but standing walls, a roof that didn't leak, and miraculously a working generator in the basement, powered by a small solar array on the roof. The owners had been forward-thinking preppers. They were dead now, like everyone else.
Leo made the house his base. He cleared out the rooms. He found canned food, bottled water, medical supplies. And in the study, on a desk facing a garden now overgrown with weeds, he found a computer.
A good one. A desktop with a solid-state drive, plenty of RAM, a graphics card that had probably cost a fortune. He pressed the power button. It booted.
The internet was still there.
Not the web most of the servers must have gone down, the data centers destroyed or abandoned. But somehow, through a chain of miracles he didn't understand, a connection remained. Slow. Unstable. But there.
He opened a browser. He typed: news.
Nothing. The major sites were gone. He tried CNN. BBC. Al Jazeera. All dead. He tried smaller sites, independent news blogs, forums. Most wouldn't load. The ones that did showed only cached pages, frozen in time from three days ago before the meteorites. The last headlines were mundane. Stock market up. Weather forecast. Celebrity gossip.
No one had published anything since. No one was left to publish.
He sat back in the chair a comfortable leather thing, nothing like his old thrift-store wreck and let the realization settle over him. The whole world. Not just the UK, not just Europe. Everywhere. The meteorites had been global. An extinction event. And somehow, by dumb luck, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he had survived.
He was alone.
For two days, he didn't leave the house. He didn't want to. He moved between the kitchen and the study, eating canned soup, drinking water from the tap (still running, still clean, a miracle he didn't question). And on the computer, he did what he had always done: he scrolled.
But there was nothing to scroll to. No social media. No news. No videos except what was already downloaded. He found a folder of old movies the owners had good taste and watched Casablanca and The Godfather and Groundhog Day. He watched porn, because he was still human, still hungry for something he couldn't name. He watched until his eyes burned and his mind went numb.
And then, on the second night, an idea came to him.
Facebook.
The site was still up barely. The login page loaded after several attempts. He typed in his old credentials, not expecting them to work. They did. His profile appeared, frozen in time: Leo Vasquez, age 32, single, no posts in years. A ghost page for a ghost world.
He clicked on Create Post. He thought for a long time. Then he typed:
"Is anyone out there? I'm alive. I'm in the UK. Please respond if you can see this."
He set the post to public. He added a single hashtag: #Alive.
Then he waited.