“Patience, Max.” Total licked away the smudge from my grimy finger. “Just give it a minute.”

But after five minutes, the radio started to hum with the effort, and the light was still red.

“It’s not going to be enough.” I started to pace.

Then, just as the radio took its last, groaning breath, a welcoming note chirped from the speakers, and our reflections faded as the screen glowed to life.

11

NUDGE’S HANDS HOVERED over the keyboard, and the rest of the flock huddled around her. “What should I look up?”

“Whoa, you actually have Internet?” Iggy asked. “I’m guessing this guy probably hasn’t paid his wireless bill in a while.”

“Five G.” Nudge wiggled her magnetic fingers. “I know it makes no sense, but don’t question it.”

We tried all the major news sites. Over and over, we saw the same thing: a white screen with stark black type that read CONNECTION TO SERVER FAILED. Then Nudge started trying anything she could think of. We squealed when an actual site popped up, but saw that it was a shopping list for a homemade disaster kit. Gazzy found “antidiarrheal medication” particularly hilarious, while my stomach growled loudly over such delicacies listed as “canned fruit and meats.”

But no contact with an actual human. No clues.

Nudge was trying yet another website.

“Hey, this one works!” She grinned as the log-in field popped up.

“Seriously?” I smirked at her. “The world ends and you want to check your Fotogram? Here, I’ll give you another ‘like.’ ”

“Shh,” Nudge said, swatting at my hand. “I just want to see something.”

She typed #apocalypse into the search field, and the screen lit up with images—pages and pages of disaster pics taken with cell-phone cameras. Most of the scenes were beyond anything we could’ve imagined, and believe me, we have dark, twisted imaginations.

“Whoa,” I managed to croak.

Because what else could you say about a selfie of a woman clutching a Bible as, behind her, a two-hundred-foot tsunami obliterated Los Angeles?

Or a shot of silver fish flopping on marble staircases while the train tunnels in New York’s Grand Central Station flooded with water?

We saw the city of Tokyo decimated by earthquakes. The president of France speaking to the press, wearing a hazmat suit. A row of houses in Spain buried by a freak blizzard.

It was as if the world had been tossed in the air and all the puzzle pieces were jumbled.

A sea of blue-masked faces showed us Hong Kong under quarantine. We saw forests burning, buildings burning, and people burning. Dead birds rained from the sky in so many of the pictures, they had their own hashtag: #crispycritters.

This was the end of the planet, chronicled before us.

There were hundreds of thousands of images, but the events were so varied, the effects so utterly weird, that everything started to blur together.