That’s a lot of rats. I’m surprised there’s enough food—they should have emptied most of the human-created storage by now.

Fire safety tip that our MCs apparently need: Don’t build a campfire on a wooden floor if you can avoid it. Even if it’s well-saturated with water, it’ll eventually dry out and start to smoulder.

So there was still liquid fuel (diesel?) in that one bus. That supports my theory that it hasn’t been that long since the apocalypse—decades, and probably not very many of them, rather than centuries. I wonder if the glass-bottled soft drinks in those vending machines would still have been drinkable if they could have gotten them out? (Canned maybe less so, but glass is pretty inert and shouldn’t have reacted with the contents, although I’m sure anything carbonated would have gone flat.)

And it seems that there’s something a bit hinky even with the non-robotic MC. Maybe this is like Coppelion, and the reason they’re all alone on the surface involves bioengineering to resist radiation.