Dear Journal,
Ben is back! And it’s been about a week and a half again, so I guess I’m not getting better about writing every day after all, but in my defense, with Ben gone, my mom has actually been letting Jared and I go out again! I don’t know if it’s just because she’s so depressed that she doesn’t care, or if it’s because she doesn’t want to go out herself if Ben’s not here to go with her, but one of the first days that Ben was gone, I asked her if Jared and I could go out because we were getting a little low on canned foods, and she just shrugged at me. I took that as a win and we headed off!
We did find some canned goods, too, if you’re wondering. Jared and I are significantly better at scavenging than my mom and Ben could ever be, considering we found about 10 cans of food in like 3 hours, and they’ve been gone all day without bringing anything back. Maybe Hattie was right about them after all - at least then they’d have a good reason to be distracted.
But today, when Jared and I got back from our scavenging, with enough canned and shelf stable foods that our backpacks were nearly bursting open (I don’t know how we missed them all when we first started going out on scouting missions - we must have gotten much better since we started), Ben was walking toward the door.
I dropped my bag for Jared to carry the rest of the way back and ran to Ben, giving him a big hug. He flinched back in surprise, which I guess is fair - I’d never paid her all that much attention before this, but I was just so glad he was back so we could learn more about Rex’s group and whether we should join up with them or not.
We got Ben in and gave him some food, although he said he wasn’t very hungry because he’d eaten plenty at the powerplant. He looked clean, too - he still had the same old clothes that were definitely now worn in a lot of spots, but they looked like they’d been freshly washed. So, as soon as he was sitting down, I asked Ben the most important question I had - did they have showers at the powerplant?
Ben laughed when I asked him that, but he said that, while they weren’t exactly heated or anything, yeah, they had showers! Which is great, but not as great as I had originally hoped. Like, you mean to tell me that you can run power for a full city (or at least whatever is left of it), but you don’t manage to run a water heater?? But then he said that they did have stoves, so if you wanted to, you could probably heat up water on the stove and have a hot bath like they used to do in Little House on the Prairie days. Which, no offense, but if I had to resort to living like that, you should have just taken me out in the blast, seriously. But even I couldn’t deny that the idea of a warm bath, even with 7 billion additional steps, sounded like it might be nice.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Really, Ben just ended up confirming most of the suspicions that I’d had about Rex’s powerplant while my mom just sat there looking kind of angry and stubborn, as though she had already decided a long time ago that she was going to hate anything to do with it. But as Ben was saying, they have running water (obviously), air conditioning, plenty of food, and they even have beds! Granted, he said the beds were made so that the people who were working in the powerplant could sleep if they were working a 24 hour shift, so there probably weren’t enough beds to let all of us sleep on them each night, but the way I think of it, it’s better to have a bed some nights than to just always sleep on old coffee bags on the floor, right?
The only thing my mom perked up about, though, was the food, which frankly I think we have plenty of currently, so I don’t know why she’s so concerned. We can always go out and find some new canned goods if we run out, after all. But Ben said yeah, they had a lot of food because they’re always out scavenging. The downside is that they’ve cleared out a lot of the stores and stuff that were near them, but the good news is that they’ve now got enough of a stockpile that it should last them a while. And, if they decide to go out a little farther and look for stuff there, they have Hansen and his other cross country teammates, who are both strong and able to run for long distances. I guess that explained how he was able to make it back to the powerplant so quickly after coming to see us!
Anyway, after Ben talked, I said that I was all for us going to live with Rex and his team, but my mom wasn’t quite on board yet. But Ben said it doesn’t matter, and that we don’t even really have to go and live with him if we don’t feel like it. Ben said that while we totally have the offer to go live with him (which is the option that I’m voting for personally), we also have the option to stay here and just join his team from afar. That sounds okay too, I guess, and while we wouldn’t get the perks like beds or running water, we could always make the trip to the main compound if we wanted to use those. But my mom really perked up when Ben told her about Rex’s idea of sharing resources - after all, they have a lot of food and people, and we have a lot of coffee, and Rex apparently LOVES coffee, but he hasn’t been able to make any since the bombs dropped! After he said that, I totally understood why Rex was so interested in us - if I went from having coffee as often as I do to not having coffee at all, I’d probably want to join up with the first Starbucks I saw.
My mom said she’d have to think about it before she made any decision, but I saw the twinkle in her eyes when sharing food was brought up. She’s totally going to go for it, and I’m super glad about that. If everything works out, maybe it’ll just be a little bit until I’m able to take a shower!
The downside is that my mom asked, if we ended up joining his group, does that mean Rex would be in charge? Ben said yeah, so that might be the only thing that keeps my mom from fully jumping on board. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries to negotiate some sort of bargain, where we get food and he gets coffee and then we go out separate ways. I guess that wouldn’t be that bad, either. Just as long as I get to have a shower first.
Love,
Kayla