Dear Journal,

Guess who’s writing to you from a brand new, mostly not broken down house! Which, as you might have guessed, means that we actually did get a chance to run away! I was kind of worried that we wouldn’t get to for a while - Rex at one point mentioned all the food that was missing from the kitchens, and I got really worried that we’d been taking too much, but I managed to keep my mouth shut and I don’t think he ever suspected it was us. Well, he probably suspects it now, but I don’t think that matters.

They never told me the date we were actually leaving, which was probably a good idea since I would have been so nervous that it probably would have been super obvious that something was going on. But I also think they didn’t really know themselves - Garrett just came to our door one night, and after my mom threatened to beat him with the same board she’d threatened Rex with (I don’t think she realized who it was at first, which I don’t blame her for, because it’s always crazy being woken up in the middle of the night), he told us that Rex had left around dinner time to go look for more winter gear, and he hadn’t returned yet even though it’d been dark for quite a while, so he was pretty sure that he’d be gone for the night. And, as an extra benefit, he’d left in the opposite direction of the one we were planning on going in, so it’s not like we’d meet him on the road or anything.

So we all grabbed all of the bags that we kept hidden, threw on our blankets to help protect us from the cold, and headed out into the night.

It was so hard to walk in the dark and not trip on anything! I’d walked in the near dark a couple of times, but there was always at least a bright moon to light our way. But this time, there was only a small crescent moon, which gave us a little bit of light, but just enough to make sure we weren’t like walking straight into the river or something. In terms of dodging debris along the way, we were on our own, which made us move really slowly. We kind of just shuffled through the dark, all following Garrett’s lead away from the power plant, all hoping that we wouldn’t trip on anything and break our legs or something, and then get totally caught. If Hansen was scared of what Rex might do to him just for talking to me, I can’t imagine what would happen if he was caught running away with me.

But by the time the sun started coming up, we were far enough away from the power plant that I couldn’t see any sign from it, nor could I even really hear the river anymore. That was kind of disconcerting on its own - even inside the power plant, we’d been close enough to the river that hearing the roar of the water had become my constant companion, and now that was gone. But if it meant being free again, I was happy to lose it.

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Not long after dawn, Garrett led us to this house that was kind of crumbling on one side, and definitely had a lot of charring all around it, but otherwise was in pretty good shape. He said that he and Rex had come here on one of their scavenging trips, but he’d gone through the house and decided there was nothing good in it, and he’d never bothered to check it since. Garrett said that he agreed that there wasn’t much worth scavenging in the house, but at least it was a house that Rex probably wouldn’t check, and it was at least sturdy enough that it wouldn’t fall under the weight of all of us. While it wasn’t much, it was definitely better than nothing.

We all chose a place to sleep on the upper floor of the house in the hopes that, if Rex happened to choose the exact right way to go when he started looking after us (which hopefully wouldn’t happen because we’d been super careful to make sure that nobody was following us when we left), they’d have to actually come upstairs to be able to notice we were there. Garrett said that he’d stay up and watch to make sure nobody came in, but we told him absolutely not - if anything, he and Hansen needed to rest the most because they were going to have to go out running to see if they could find the next place for us to stay, and they’d have to be alert to make sure nobody saw them as they ran.

So instead, Jared and I volunteered to stay up. Bryce tried to stay up too, but she fell asleep pretty soon after everyone else did. Jared and I tried our best to keep each other up, though. And journal, you never would have guessed it, but I actually had a good time talking to Jared while we sat there waiting to see if we’d be found! Like, it’d been so long since I talked to him that he actually didn’t seem that annoying anymore. Don’t get me wrong, he was still annoying enough that I don’t know if I’d ever really want to be friends with him if we were in any other situation, but since we were a group of runaways after the apocalypse, I think we were bound to be friends, no matter what.

We tried to catch each other up on what had been going on as much as we could. He hadn’t known anything about what was going on between Rex and I, but he said that he had a bad gut feeling about the way that he looked at any of the women in the power plant. Apparently he even looked at Bryce that way, but he’d never bothered to approach her or anything. It might have been because she was like attached at the hip to Jared, though. He said that they’d basically been inseparable since the night that I’d seen them sneaking off, and he said he felt super lucky that there was someone he could actually relate to in the apocalypse.

I’d have been more jealous of that if Hansen hadn’t been sleeping right next to where I was sitting, and if his hand hadn’t been holding mine when he fell asleep. It was so cute, journal, you wouldn’t even believe it! But maybe, now that we’ve run away from his all too creepy dad, we can find something like what Jared and Bryce have. I wouldn’t mind being attached at the hip to someone either, at least once we’re out of this alright. I guess we’ll find out if we make it through tonight.

Jared went to sleep a little bit ago. I thought about trying to wake him up, but he was snoring so peacefully that I just couldn’t do it. I don’t mind being the one to stay up, though. I knew there was no chance of me sleeping tonight, anyway. I wish we’d thought to bring a coffee maker so we could at least have had some sort of caffeine, though. I did manage to snag a small bottle of instant coffee, but is it even worth it at that point? My taste buds don’t think so.

Love,

Kayla