Dear Journal,

It has been a super busy day today! My mom woke me up and was like “we have to inventory all the food and water we have”, which is something that we do like every other day, but honestly most days it’s just Jared and I doing it, and he leaves within like 5 minutes, so I always stop when I get bored. Mostly I think it’s just my mom looking for something for me to do, because she never gets angry that the inventory isn’t actually done. But today, she wanted to help out, so there was no way to not do the inventory, which was so stupid. But I guess it’s also kind of good, because now mom says that she has an estimate of how much food we can have on a daily basis.

Like I’d been saying yesterday, the food we had in the coffee shop lasted us for quite a while, because we were all prepared for Sunday rush instead of the end of the world. But soon enough, we started wondering when it was going to run out, or when we’d start getting some diseases from surviving solely on frozen breakfast sandwiches and the muffins I was able to scrape together from our mixes (which, even without the eggs they asked for, were still pretty amazing). Somehow, the electricity was still going, and still is going, which is a miracle that I don’t really understand. Jared said it’s because the cables are all underground, so they didn’t get affected by the blast, and he said that the power plant must have still had a ton of electricity stored up, and now no one was using it. Jared is kind of an idiot, though, so I don’t believe him.

But anyway, like I was saying yesterday, Jared was the first person to volunteer to leave the bomb shelter to go find us food, but we were all like “no, you can’t leave, because you’ll die, and if there’s only like 7 people left in the world, we shouldn’t start killing them off yet.” But then Mr. Williams was like “let me go, because I’m super old and probably going to die any minute anyway, so I might as well go see if we can even go outside.” His wife was super not happy about the idea, which I totally understand, but the rest of us agreed that that was the best option. He’s such a brave, sweet old man! I hope I’m even a little bit like him when I’m older.

But anyway, he left the bomb shelter, and we were all like 110% sure that we’d never see him again because he’d immediately get struck by the radiation, but can you guess what happened?? It was the weirdest thing! So a couple of hours after he left, we were just getting Hattie to finally stop crying when we heard a knock on the door. And let me tell you, when you think everyone in the world is dead, there is nothing creepier than hearing a knock on your door! But Jared put on a brave face and opened it, and there was Mr. Williams, just standing there like he was perfectly fine. He’d even found a vase somewhere, that he brought in for Hattie - he said that he’d been hoping to find some flowers for it, but no luck with that.

So obviously, we can’t tell exactly what happened because we were inside for the whole thing, but it seems like when the bombs dropped, they destroyed everything with the force and the heat, but either the actual nuclear part didn’t go off, or something happened to burn off all the radiation. Either way, that seems to have been what the heat was - everything around us was burning, but the bomb shelter wasn’t because it’s made mostly of metal.

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So instead of all being stuck inside forever, we all got a chance to go outside! But it wasn’t as great for my mood as I thought it would be, considering how many people were dead. I don’t know if you’ve ever played a violent video game where they just have skeletons around for decor, but it felt like that. The heat was hot enough that everyone on the outside burned to a crisp, so there were the charred remains of skeletons all littered on the sidewalks and in the roads and stuff. Thinking about it, I don’t know how we even managed to survive if it was that hot! Must have been the air conditioning.

Inside some of the building, the fire hadn’t gotten as bad, but it was apparently still bad enough that plenty of people died. They just weren’t as charred, so when we first went into a nearby grocery store that hadn’t been completely burned down, we were hit with this super bad smell, and my mom told me to get out before I saw anything. As I was leaving, though, I saw something that I thought at first was a store mannequin, so I went up to it to see if there were any clothes on it that I could steal, because up until that point, I’d been existing solely in my work outfit, which was super not comfortable. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a mannequin. They’re never mannequins, but I still keep checking.

Anyway, despite the grossness of it, it was definitely great that we left the bunker, because the grocery store where I found the dead body hadn’t been totally looted yet. Apparently when people had been out trying to steal electronics and stuff, they’d also left the grocery store alone, which made me feel better about the coffee shop. Personally, if I was going to be looking for the end of the world, I’d rather been looting somewhere with food, and maybe an extra outfit or two if I happened to see them. But yeah, where the shelves in the grocery store were still standing, there was still food on them! Some of it didn’t matter as much - their coolers were all destroyed, so the frozen food was all rotten, and the bread was so moldy that I didn’t even know what it was at first. But the cans looked pretty good, even the ones that had been on a shelf that had been knocked over! And when we looked hard, we were able to find some shelf stable food that was still looking pretty okay! So in general, not a great selection, but enough to last us for quite a while. I still think we have more than half of it left, and we haven’t even started to look through that many of the other nearby stores yet!

I started trying to look through some of the other stores with Jared when we had a free day, but I think that’s why my mom put me on inventory. I made the mistake of telling her that I’d run into too many dead bodies, which was true, but I still should have left that part out. Once I’d already seen one, and I’d seen all the skeletons, there really wasn’t that much more to be concerned about with me seeing a rotting corpse, even if they were super gross.

Eventually, though, you get used to anything if you’re around it enough. I was halfways considering just taking the clothes off one of the corpses so that I could have a different outfit to wear, because there are only so many days that you can wear polyester in a row before you go super crazy, you know? But I never ended up doing that because I knew there was no amount of times that I could wash it that would get the smell out, and I knew that mom probably wouldn’t be cool with me using all of our water to wash a shirt, even if our exploring had gotten us a ton more bottles. But luckily, before I was finally pushed over the edge and ended up stealing a shirt from one of them, Jared tipped up a broken shelf in one of the stores and we found a pile of folded t-shirts! They’re pretty ugly, but I’ve been wearing the one I grabbed ever since, as has most of our little crew.

Anyway, I’ve got to go to bed. Mom said that tomorrow, since we did all the inventory, we might actually go out tomorrow and see if there’s any more food we can find and/or preserve, and I don’t want to be yawning through the whole thing! I’ll let you know if we find anything good.

Love,

Kayla