We had to ditch the GPS straight away, as something was seriously wrong with the thing. In the space of five minutes it changed our location from Buffalo, to Dallas, to Waikiki. At one point it showed us driving through the North Atlantic ocean.
Luckily, Sierra is a good co-pilot. Unlike me, it doesn’t take her ages to find the right page in the road atlas, and she doesn’t have to twist her head and spin the map a lot to confirm we’re going in the right direction. She tells me she did loads of sailing as a kid. It’s surprising, but I’ll take it.
Darcy still hasn’t warmed up to her. He tends to groan whenever she talks and either huffs elaborately or rolls his eyes. He looks a lot like Mom, when she’s frustrated at Dad.
We drive through the outskirts of the city, it’s all industrial buildings, prefab houses and strip malls. Not exactly Buffalo at its best. We’ve decided to get onto the interstate in a few more miles and we’re hoping it will be clear. The accidents will be worse of course, with the higher speeds and all… But hopefully, the cars will have run off the roads before crashing.
It scares me, how quickly I’ve become accustomed to car accidents. We talk about them like we would traffic, or construction, or the weather. It’s a coping mechanism I guess. If we really stopped to think about it, it would be too overwhelming.
It probably makes me a terrible person.
“Ah, I knew it was out here somewhere. Turn in here, Evie.”
Score! Sierra has lead us to a strip mall containing a supermarket AND a camping store.
“Nice one! How did you know this was here?”
“My Grandma used to live out this way. I would come out on the weekends and help her with her shopping.”
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“She died last year,” Sierra says, “I miss her like crazy. She was awesome, we used to drink diet coke and read super trashy blogs together.”
“Your Gran was on the Internet?”
“Totally, she was on Instagram and everything. Why, isn’t yours?”
“No! She used to fax through my birthday cards though,” I say with a laugh, remembering Nanna’s scrawly handwriting. “But she died a couple of years ago. Cancer.”
“Oh, that sucks.”
“Yeah. I didn’t see her much, she lived in England — that’s where my Mom is from — but she was the best.”
I drive the car up and onto the sidewalk and park right next to the supermarket’s entrance.
Inside, it smells a bit, and it’s messy. It looks like we’re not the first people to pick the place over.
“Everyone, grab a shopping cart,” I instruct.
“Woohoo!” yells Darcy, as he kicks off down the candy aisle on a cart twice his size. I’m just about to tell him to slow down when I remember it doesn’t matter. I stand on the back of my cart and scoot off in a different direction.
Why is it that in disaster movies, they never stop for tampons? There’s always a scene like this, where the characters run through a grocery store or shopping mall, or they find an abandoned stash of Twinkie’s and there’s a montage of eating, laughing and euphoria.
Yes, I have every intention of stuffing my face with chocolate and drinking a gallon or two of soda. But first I want to make sure that for the remainder of the apocalypse (every 28 days), I am adequately supplied for all things menstruation.
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The Sleep Part I: The Fan & The Things That Hit It
General FictionAt sixteen, could you run the world? Could you look after the food, the water, the electricity, the government... the children? Evie Ballentrae isn't equipped to deal with any of that. But like everyone else her age, she doesn't have a choice. 'The...
