Dear Journal,

I’m lucky to be alive! And not just from the bombings, because, duh, we knew that. But if you would have seen my mom’s face, you should have thought she was going to kill me, too.

So, sorry, but it’s been a couple of days again. I wish I was better at remembering to do this every day! But at the same time, if I actually did try to journal every day, it would probably get really boring. Most days are really just super repetitive around here, after all, and there’s only so many times that you want to hear about me doing inventory or whatever.

So, remember how last time, I was thinking that maybe Jared and I should sneak out and get some medicine for Mr. Williams? Well, my mom kept having him take the Nyquil or whatever, but eventually that ran out because like duh, it was a super limited supply. But then she had Mr. Williams just switch to using the painkiller, and he was immediately so much worse than he was with the cough syrup. So Jared and I actually worked together for once and we formulated a plan.

You see, what was going to happen was that Bryce was going to distract my mom as best as she could, and then Jared and I were going to sneak out with our bikes, and we were going to try to go to like super far away - far enough that we’d have to be out overnight. And yeah, we’d probably get in trouble with my mom when we got back and everything, but since she hardly pays attention to us when she’s not trying to get us to do stuff for her, we figured that she probably wouldn’t even notice that we were gone until it was always dark out, and at that point, there’d be nothing that she could really do about it. She didn’t bother to find a bike for herself, after all, even though she was the only one with a helmet. Besides, she’s also a strict follower of the whole “we don’t leave the coffee shop after dark” rule, which is probably fair because she’s so old that if she tripped over a body in the dark, it’d probably put her out of commission for a long time, and she’s the main one taking care of us, so if she were out, it’d fall all on Ben’s shoulders. While he seems kind of okay in terms of cooking and stuff, I’d still rather not find out what happens if he’s our sole provider.

So anyway, that’s what we ended up doing, and the first part went off without a hitch! Bryce called my mom back to the kitchen to ask for her help with prepping one of the muffin mixes, and as soon as she was out of sight, Jared and I snuck out of the coffee shop. I’m pretty sure Ben saw us go, but he didn’t say a word about it. Maybe it would be okay to have him as the leader of the group, after all.

So, we ran out of the coffee shop and got on our bikes, pedaling off before my mom came back and noticed that we were leaving. Honestly, I don’t think she suspected a thing - I’ve snuck out plenty of times back before the bombs dropped, and she never suspected anything then either. She’d just wake me up at my normal time and comment about how I’d forgotten to take my makeup off before bed again. So basically what I’m saying is that I had a lot of practice sneaking around my unsuspecting mother, which really still continues to be a valuable skill to have.

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Jared and I were riding so fast right up until we got to the farthest part of the city we’d explored. After that, we needed to slow down, because it felt like there were more bodies and debris everywhere. Which makes sense - I mean, if the bomb had dropped directly on the coffee shop, I doubt we would have survived even with the bomb shelter aspect. So we must have been getting closer to the impact site, because over by the coffee shop, while there were a lot of buildings that had been burned down, there were still the occasional ones that were still standing. The same was not the case here - even some of the ones that looked like they’d been made of brick had fallen down. It was really kind of dashing my hopes for finding any medicine for Mr. Williams. But as Jared said, we’d already come this far, so it wasn’t like we were going to turn around without even trying to look, you know? So we went a little farther out, until we hit the first building that looked like it might possibly stay standing for long enough for us to check it out. There were a few file cabinets and stuff that weren’t totally burned up, but looking through them was super weird. Before, we’d found a few cabinets in what I’m pretty sure was like a bank or something, and they were all listed as fireproof, so when we opened them up, the files there were mostly in great condition. In these, though, the files were still in great condition, but instead of being stacked in orderly rows, they looked like they’d been taken out and then crumpled back into the file cabinets. There were even some that were on the ground, which made no sense to me because if everything else in the building was burned up, shouldn’t those be too? But I called Jared over to look at them, and he said it was probably just the weird way that fire works sometimes. Like when you’re trying to have a bonfire, and it takes longer for some of the smaller twigs to start on fire than it takes for the big log.

It still felt weird, but what I’ve learned in my time since the end of the world is that very few things actually make sense when you think too long about them.

Anyway, that building was a bust, so we started going farther into the city, toward what had once been downtown. Part of me really didn’t want to go that way, because I had so many memories of exploring the shops downtown with my friends, and I didn’t want those to be destroyed by the fires, too. But, as Jared pointed out, even though it was uncomfortable for me, if some of those stores were still standing, we might have the easiest time searching there - after all, I’d been downtown enough that I could pretty easily tell if something was a clothes store or a drug store.

Or at least that was the theory. As we got closer, I realized that like all of the buildings looked different now (which, duh, obviously), so I was in part just guessing. Sometimes it was obvious, if we saw mannequins just standing there. But sometimes it was less obvious, like if the mannequins were lying on the floor, because often those weren’t really mannequins. But eventually, I guessed right, and we wound up in something that still had enough unburnt portions that we guessed that it was an old CVS.

It was just starting to get dark when we finally got into the building, so we figured that we would just sleep there and then we’d dig through the shelves tomorrow and put everything we could find in the extra backpack that I had brought. Jared had carried the heavy backpack with our supplies, so he pulled out a couple of old burlap sacks and a to-go container with a couple of the last muffins that Bryce had made the day before, and we settled in for the night.

Continuing this on the next page, don’t be fooled by the dates!!

Love,

Kayla