Monument 14

Monument 14 is a young adult survival novel by Emmy Laybourne, published in 2012. Fourteen young people, from small children to high-school seniors, are trapped together inside a big-box superstore after a series of escalating disasters makes the air outside lethal to breathe.

Six older students, two eighth graders and six little kids have to build a household out of shop aisles. Camping gear becomes bedding, the pharmacy shelves become a clinic, and the store's own stock is the only food anyone has. Laybourne gives each child a temperament that makes the improvised family hard to hold together, and she lets the situation change the group physically as well as socially, so the simple plan of waiting it out stops looking safe for reasons of their own bodies.

Adults are kept off the page almost entirely, which leaves the group's own arguments as the only authority in the building. The novel is the first of a trilogy, and its concern is less with the cause of the disaster than with who does the work of keeping fourteen people alive, who gets listened to, and how long goodwill lasts when the shelves start to empty.