Dear Journal,

I lied before - it’s actually the same day. Isn’t it so crazy that you would have never known that if I didn’t tell you? Like it feel like you should know that already, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been cooped up here for god knows how long with the same people, and it’s just making me want to talk to anyone new, even if they’re not actually a person. If I start hallucinating people, I think I’m done for, but at least I’d actually have friends again, so that’d be a plus!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I was talking about how the government telling us that we’re all going to die was a fucked up thing to do. It really is.

So all in all, we had like ten minutes before the bomb was supposed to actually drop, but they didn’t exactly give us a countdown in the alert or anything, so it felt like we were all just hunkered down, waiting for the end to happen. Some people left to go try to find loved ones before the end of the world. Some people left to go loot some of the local businesses (which doesn’t make sense to me at all because 1) you’re dying, so why would you bother to spend your last minutes trying to break into a Best Buy to get some TV that will definitely shatter even before impact, and 2) nobody even tried to loot the coffee store, which I kind of took offense to, because yeah, we may not have a lot of valuable stuff, but who doesn’t like coffee??). The rest of us just kind of stayed at the coffee shop, hoping that there was some horrible mistake and there wasn’t really a bomb headed our way.

That, obviously, wasn’t the case, but guess what, journal?? Those of us who decided to stay in the coffee shop were super lucky, because remember how I told you how my mom had chosen to open the coffee shop in an old bomb shelter because it was super cheap? Well, even though the bomb shelter was old enough that my great grandparents could have probably used it, somehow it had been kept in good enough condition that it still worked! So the bombs landed, and we felt this like giant long shake, like we were in the middle of an earthquake, but there never really were any earthquakes around here, so that can’t have been that. But it shook the coffee shop around enough that stuff fell off the shelves, and even some of the pictures fell of the wall. Somehow, most of it didn’t get broken, though - Jared even managed to catch one of the particularly heavy espresso makers, which seemed kind of ridiculous to me at the time (like why waste your time worried about espresso), but now I’m super glad about, because I don’t know how I would have even survived without having a little bit of coffee every day.

When the shaking was over, there was this giant sort of roar outside that sounded kind of like wind, but obviously none of us were going to go outside to check. But then it got super, super hot. Like, I’d been in the coffee shop in the middle of the summer before it even was a coffee shop, and long before the air conditioning was installed, and it was still nowhere near how hot it got in there. Part of me was definitely worried that we had survived the initial blast, but were not going to all cook to death inside of the shelter. But like, what were we going to do? If it was that hot in there, I definitely wasn’t going to go outside! I’ve seen the Chernobyl series, I know that stuff is not good for your longterm health, and it’s not like there was a doctor around there to help us! Granted, everything we went through probably wasn’t good for our long term health anyway, but I guess that’s a bridge we’ll have to cross when we get to it, as my mom always says.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

So, we were roasting, but thank god, eventually, the shelter started to cool down so we weren’t like dying anymore, which was great. And then my mom stopped crying and started to get back into business mom mode, which was even better because I think everyone in the coffee shop needed someone to step up and be an adult. But then she realized that if we weren’t all going to die in a firey explosion, that we should get some water gathered before the public utilities shut off, which was less great because I was pulled out of freaking out about probably dying and straight into having to work again with like no vacation whatsoever. But anyway, she plugged the sink and started gathering water (which was super disgusting - like, I know I wash the sink every time I close up, but I’m lik 1000% sure that Jared doesn’t, so it was probably filled with old germs from dirty dishes, but like my mom said since, slightly gross water is still water, just as long as it doesn’t give you dysentery like they were always getting in the Oregon Trail game they used to make us play in elementary school), and I gathered every cup I could find, including our disposable ones, and she started filling those up as well. We even filled up the mixing bowls and muffin pans that I used that one time there was a supply issue and nobody delivered us any baked goods! But we managed to fill all those up and put them all over every counter, and the water was still running so I’m not sure if the people who lived at the water plant were still alive or what. We even took the chance to drink and refill some of the reusable water bottles, just so that we wouldn’t need anything for a while. My mom was super paranoid about it, which is probably good, because it took us what seemed like years to find a grocery store that had been destroyed, but not destroyed enough to destroy everything inside it, including sooo many cases of water.

Anyway, but the time we had cooled down to like a normal ass temperature and we’d taken the time to collect as much water as we could, Jared was begging my mom to let him go out on a scouting missing, but my mom and I said no, because like, that was an absolutely terrible idea. Like I said, I saw Chernobyl, and I know my mom and Jared had too, and we weren’t having some crusty burned dude come back to the coffee shop and getting radiation over everything. I hadn’t spent like hours filling up everything with water just so I could be contaminated before I could drink it! But Jared was all like “oh, but if we don’t find food, then we’ll all starve to death anyway.” And I was all like “Yeah, eventually, but for now we’ve got food in the back, and we just got our shipment this morning to prepare for the Sunday after church crowd, so we can live for a while before you go out and get yourself all radiated.”

I mean, come on, we had enough food for close to 1000 people because the Sunday after church rush is always freaking insane. And there was nowhere near 1000 people in the coffee shop! I mean, after so many people had gone out for looting and whatever, there were like 5 people other than my mom and I! Jared, obviously, and then some girl who was in a different class in my school who I now know is named Bryce, and old man who was a regular that I always just called Mr. Williams, but now know his name is Keith and his wife, Hattie, and a man in a business suit who I don’t think had ever come to the coffee shop, but just ran in when everything started happening (his name is Ben).

Anyway, my mom’s calling me, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow! Bye!

Love, Kayla