Dear Journal,

So like I was saying, we spent the night in the old CVS, which was super weird when we’d both gotten used to sleeping in the coffee shop (which had been super weird compared to sleeping at home, but it feels like it’s been so long that I can hardly even imagine that, which seems so crazy, right??). In the coffee shop, my mom can control when she turns the lights on and off, but in the city, there’s no way to do that for the few lights that have survived! We could even hear static I’m guessing is from like some store radio that doesn’t get a signal anymore. But after sleeping with just the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of other people’s snoring (I’m looking at you, Jared) for so long, the sound of anything else just felt super off. It made it hard to sleep, but honestly it’s been kind of hard to sleep since this whole thing started anyway. And now, we were waking up away from the coffee shop, and Jared hadn’t even bothered to pack a little bit of coffee with him! So when I woke up, I had one hell of a caffeine headache. Jared didn’t seem to really care, but also, despite him working in a coffee shop, I don’t think he ever really liked coffee all that much.

When we woke up, I was soooo sore, though! Like, we’d been sleeping on the floor anyway, so I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal to sleep on a different floor, but apparently the floor of the coffee shop was way more comfortable than the floor of the old, beaten down drug store. Or maybe it was that, as we used stuff up, we kept adding the bags as padding for each of our beds. I didn’t even think to bring my scavenged pillow! But even Jared, who had generally decided to forgo getting more of the bag for his bed because he said Mr. Williams and Hattie needed them more (which is probably true, but I’m tired too, you know?) seemed like he was a little more sore when he stood up out of the wreckage. He was super dirty, though! And when I looked at my own clothes, I was covered in ash, too. For some reason, we never really got that dirty when we were just out on scouting missions throughout the day, but I guess maybe at night all the ash settled down and then got caught on our clothes? I don’t know, I’m not an ash scientist.

But anyway, we got up and dusted ourselves off as carefully as we could, because while my mom might eventually forgive us for running off (especially if we get the medicine that Mr. Williams needs), there is no way that she would forgive us for fracking apocalypse soot into the coffee shop! I think she’s still convinced that the contaminants from outside is actually causing Mr. Williams to be sick, rather than just the fact that he’s so old. If it were the dust outside, Jared and I should be the sick ones, since we’ve been out in it the most, but I’m fine, and Jared somehow seems even healthier than before the end of the world!

But anyway, we got up and started looking through the shelves, trying to find anything that we thought might be useful. While there were definitely plenty of shelves that had been destroyed in the initial bombing, there were some shelves that were still full! They were covered in soot, which makes total sense, but we knocked as much of it off as we could so we could see the labels on the bottles (or at least whatever bottles still had labels - there were plenty of bottles where it looked like the label burned off while the bottle stayed perfectly fine, which makes no sense to me, but again, fire is weird). I didn’t recognize a lot of the names of the medicines, but Jared is a weirdo who apparently spent his free time memorizing medicines in drugstores, so he had a general idea about a lot of them. Any that we didn’t know, we shoved in my pack to bring home, because maybe my mom know what they were. Knowing about medicines feels like the first thing they would teach out in mom school, after all.

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When we got done going through all the shelves that were still standing, my bag was so full to bursting that I just about cried in joy, if you can believe it! We had plenty of things that would help a cough, and we’d even found a shelf that was still okay behind the pharmacist counter, and while I didn’t know what all of the drugs were that we picked up, there had to be something there that could function as an antibiotic. Having access to a lot of weird medicines and not knowing what they were kind of made me wish that my mom had gone into nursing or something rather than opening a coffee shop, but I guess without the coffee shop, we wouldn’t be here wondering about the medications in the first place. The butterfly effect, I guess.

Anyway, we got so much medicine that my back was all full up, and we ended up leaving the coffee bags that we’d taken for bedding behind because there were plenty more coffee bags at the coffee shop, and those were disgusting anyway. So, while we still had a little bit of food and water left in case we needed a break while we were traveling back, we filled the rest of Jared’s bag up with medicines, too. By the time we were done, the CVS was so empty that it looked like it had been hit just as badly by the bombs as every other building around there.

Jared and I switched packs because his was slightly lighter than mine when we were done, and he’s a little stronger than I am (probably actually a lot stronger, but I’ll never let him think that), and we wanted to make sure that the weight didn’t slow us down, because we only had enough food and water for one more night outside, and we didn’t really want to get dehydrated when we were trying to bike quickly.

We were about to head back to our bikes when we heard the weirdest thing we could possibly imagine - other voices. Can you believe it?? I wanted to go see if we could find them, because it’s crazy that there were other people that survived the blast (plus I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just that the store radio had gotten signal back or something like that), but as I started to leave, Jared grabbed me by the arm and shushed me. You know we definitely argued about that the whole way back! But his face looked so concerned that I stopped trying to go toward the voices, and joined him in hiding behind what was left of the pharmacy counter.

The voices kept going for a while, and they got louder and quieter as they moved, so I knew for sure it wasn’t the store radio. Why Jared wasn’t jumping for joy at the idea that someone else had survived the blast, I didn’t know, but for most of the time that we hid, he looked like he was about to shit himself. It got really bad when the voices got close enough that we could easily hear what they were saying - I was kind of worried that he was going to pass out by how white his face got, but luckily he didn’t, because I wouldn’t know what to do in that situation other than hope that he woke up. And if he didn’t, I would have even more explaining to do when I got home.

But it didn’t matter anyway, because we just heard the light crunch of a footstep on the broken walls, and then some guy said that the pharmacy was already ransacked anyway (which, yeah, we pretty well ransacked it, but it made me wonder about how many other buildings he’d found that had already been looted), and then he walked away. Nothing even for Jared to get so worked up about.

We stayed behind the counter for long enough that we couldn’t hear the voices anymore, and then we hurried and got out bikes and started riding back to the coffee shop. Even though we couldn’t hear them anymore, though, I saw them walking away in the distance as we biked off. I didn’t tell Jared, though, because I thought he might try to faint again. It was a group that wasn’t much bigger than our group, maybe 10 people? But they looked like they were all adults, and all of them were surrounding this giant man. I thought the giant man might have looked back at us when we were speeding off, but he didn’t make any move to actually turn, so he must have missed us. Either we’re very lucky that he didn’t see us, or we’re very stupid for not joining another large group who seem to know more about scavenging than we do. I guess we’ll never find out.

Either way, I should probably tell me mom that we saw other people, but she’s pissed enough at me as it is. I’m grounded for the foreseeable future, she said, and that includes not going out to look for food or water. I guess we’ll see how long it’ll take her to change her mind.

Love,

Kayla