Short post-pandemic story, the last adult gets trapped by feral kids

Question

A long ago read, maybe 1975 approx.; I read this short story in an anthology.

A disease (or space radiation) has wiped out all adults and the oldest survivors are aged about eight. Protagonist has been deep underground and thus survived.

For a while he lives in an American city and is doing some classes to educate the kids. However as they get older some of the bigger ones begin to resent him and he eventually goes into hiding.

He's living down in the sewers where the kids fear to go; he creeps up at night to scavenge for food. There are one or two tense moments where he's hiding in tall grass as packs of pre-pubescent kids roam past.

One night I think he gets distracted (something to do with flipping the glossy pages of a catalogue?) and he is surrounded. He's blazing away with a rifle as they close in on him but it doesn't scare them. They have lived long enough without seeing Westerns or war films to be afraid of a noisy stick, even as some fall the others charge forward and get him.

Answer 1

This is probably "Small World" (1957) by William F. Nolan, which you may have read under one of the variant titles "The Small World of Lewis Stillman" or "The Underdweller". Under the latter title it was collected in his mid-1970s collections Alien Horizons (US) or Wonderworlds (UK).

The story is much as you describe; the protagonist, Lewis Stillman, is the sole surviving person in Los Angeles. He was deep in the sewers doing some repair work when the aliens attacked and wiped everyone out.

The story follows him as he attempts to hide from an unspecified menace that roams the streets; it is only at the end as they surround him that it is revealed that they are feral children.

It is possible to read the original version of the story in the August 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe at the Internet Archive.

(Nolan is probably most famous as the author of Logan's Run.)