9/20
They closed the schools indefinitely today after it became clear that this madness wasn’t going to end any time soon. Being her paranoid CDC employee self, Mom has made it incredibly clear that I won’t be leaving the house. There was one case about fifty miles away, and I think she’s worried it’s coming for us now. My school held on longer than most districts, probably since it’s private and actually had the funding to do so. Most of the low income, inner city schools closed the moment it hit Florida.
They announced it a week ago, but that didn’t make today any better. It was so unsettling wandering the halls, wondering if I’d ever see any of these people again. Lunch was eerily quiet, devoid of all shrieking, laughter, and fights. I don’t get buy lunch, but the trays I saw consisted of only a sandwich and an apple, since there hasn’t been any food delivered recently.
None of the teachers tried to make us do anything, so I spent most of my classes sitting with my friends, even though none of us wanted to talk. On the way out of the school, no one seemed willing to leave, friends stood together by  the buses, and the overly public couples were even clingier. I took the bus home for probably the last time, like everything else, it was too quiet.
This whole thing began the same way as ebola, and probably every other pandemic in the history of humanity. It didn’t seem to stop, though. One person got sick, then more, then it just kept spreading until it finally got out of South America. They’re calling it Uruguay Virus, after where it started. Once it it hit Mexico, tourists started carrying the disease all over the world, and that was when things got bad.
I’m more scared by this than I’m willing to admit to anyone, especially not my mother. Mom hasn’t been talking much when she comes home. She’s always been a little closed off, but never like this.
With schools closed, the outside world supposedly too dangerous for me, and my two best friends shipped off to some mysterious safe haven, I’ve decided to write in an old journal that was laying around the house. Maybe it will make things less dull and hopeless.
9/21
I’ve only been shut in for one day and I miss my friends. Granted, neither of them were at school yesterday. Janet’s mother works for the CDC, and is even more paranoid than mine. Her family left before the school year even started, so I haven’t had anyone I can really talk to for a while. They went so suddenly that I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
My other best friend is Magnolia, our quiet draft-cross mare. She was a rescue from an auction. Janet’s family took her with them when they left, and I know my mother arranged it, and I don’t think I can forgive her for going behind my back like that.
My brother, Richard, has been away at college for a few weeks. Come to think of it, we haven’t heard from him in a while.
9/22
Dad’s been barricading the house, and the internet and cell service have gone out. Like I wasn’t isolated enough.
9/23
I got into a fight with my mother today. I was complaining about being stuck inside, and I got pretty rude.
“Hasn’t the CDC scienced up a cure yet? Are they even trying to stop this? I haven’t been outside, but I’ve read the articles online, people are dying and nothing has happened yet.”
“Katherine, I’ve been risking my life to go to work everyday, and all my coworkers are doing the same. So quit being fresh and give us some respect.” She said this so firmly and condescendingly that I just had to shoot something back.
“I haven’t seen the sun in nearly two weeks, and I don’t even know if my friends are alive, I think I deserve to know what’s going on!”
We carried on like this until she got fed up with me and left.
9/24
Richard is dead. Mom came home with a letter, and handed it to me wordlessly. I guess she gets to find out about these things because of her job. UV is running rampant through colleges. Richard was into prepping too, he might have been able to get away, or save himself. I’m almost mad at him, but at the same time, I could never stay angry with him. He was four years older than me, in his second year of college while I was stuck in high school. Still, we were close. I really don’t feel like writing right now. I want to be alone, and even my journal is too much company.
Richard left us some canned food and such from his prepper stockpile, but that’s starting to run out. After it does, we’re screwed.
9/26
Nothing has happened. Mom is working even longer hours, and she barely talks except to Dad, late at night. They leave the room as soon as I come in. The past few days have been like sleepwalking, except I’ll never wake up. This is reality now.
9/28
After four days of silence, Mom came home with the in-charge look she uses during meetings.
“We’re leaving”, she paused to let the news sink in. “When this started, even the CDC was scared it could turn into a worldwide pandemic. It spread so fast. Just in case, the government started buying land in remote, northern places. The closest safe zone is in Vermont, way up by Canada. That’s where Janet’s family went, and Magnolia is up there with them. These places are essentially heavily secured farming villages, where government employees and randomly selected people with useful skills can ride out the collapse. We leave tomorrow.”
I was speechless, but I knew there was no hope here. Richard would want the rest of us to survive, prepper nerd he is was, he’d jump at the chance to see this place. Plus, Magnolia is safe, and I need to get to her. When I can’t go see her for a few days if I’m sick, she acts like I’ve been gone for months. I can’t just leave her up there alone. Dad offered a smile, and I nodded to my mother. We’re leaving Georgia forever tomorrow morning.
9/29
Right now, I’m sitting in the car with about five layers on. Mom says that the virus can be spread in so many ways, we might as well be protected against all of them. She gave us all heavy duty gas masks too.
We’re just pulling away as I write this. This feels so symbolic, my house was my last connection to the civilized world, and now I’m leaving. We’ve completely given in to the collapse now.
The roads are so empty, it’s terrifying. Grocery carts are piled up abandoned by a store like a child’s forgotten toys. Come to think of it, that’s what all of this feels like, as if the whole world has been forgotten.
9/30
Turns out, there was a bit more to our journey. We pulled off into a residential area, and stopped near a house. My parents rushed me out, into the RV parked in the driveway. I barely had time to sit down before it lurched forward.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this sooner, but I knew you wouldn’t have liked it.” That’s never a good way to start an explanation. “We had to travel with another family, so I picked the Fords. Jessica is my closest friend, I know you and David don’t get along-”
“That’s what you were worried about? Mom, we didn’t get along when we were six, I don’t care who I have to put up with if we get to survive!” I couldn’t help but laugh, the things parents decide to remember.
A door opened, and David stepped out, adorable little sister in tow, his mother must be driving. I’m a little surprised to see him, he was a gangly eight year old the last time we met, he’s really tall now. I’ve never even met Rachel, the little girl that Jessica adopted a few years ago. Despite having a 16 year old son and being a single parent, she had always wanted a daughter.
We talked for a while, and it turns out that David has some friends in the CDC compound too. Apparently Jessica used to box, which the two of us agree might come in handy, given the things that happen in all the dystopian novels we’ve read. We’ve also learned that they name the compounds after religious and mythological places. There’s a Camelot, a Nirvana, an Olympus, and dozens of others. Ours is called Eden.
10/1
The RV moves slow, but we’re making progress. Under normal conditions, it would take about nineteen hours to get from the outskirts Atlanta to middle of nowhere Vermont, but this situation is anything but ordinary. The streetlights are out, so we can’t drive at night. Roads are blocked, so we have to take weird routes. It certainly doesn’t help that we’re driving a massive RV either.
We haven’t seen anyone outside since we left, but there are some signs of life. Rain barrels sit outside houses, disorganized gardens have sprung up in front lawns. There’s scary stuff too, we keep passing buildings with bombs spray painted on them. I remember gang violence being a big part of dystopian books, but I don’t want to think that we may actually encounter that.
On a lighter note, I’ve used the excess free time to get to know David. I don’t know if we would have even bothered to talk to each other before the collapse, we were so different, but none of that really matters now. He was in band back when school was a thing, and he plays a mean bassoon. I think he sounds pretty good, but Rachel claps her hands over her ears.
“You play too much!” she shouted.
10/3
Perhaps we were careless last night after the past yesterday’s high spirits. Maybe we could have prevented it. Or possibly, it was just horrible luck. Around two in the morning, a gunshot cut through the eerie quiet of the night. All of us were woken up in a panic, and Jessica barely had time to hide Rachel in the RV’s tiny bathroom before two men with guns broke in. They kept waving their weapons around, threatening us. They said we’d all be shot unless we gave up the camper and everything in it. We were in Delaware, we’d get infected and die long before we reached Vermont.
We had a gun, but I had no idea where it was. Time seemed to slow down as the two closed in. One of them reached for the bathroom door, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the look that crossed David’s face as he did. A breathless “no” escaped his lips. At that moment, time went from crawling by to recklessly flying as all h--- broke lose.
I screamed when the first gunshot went off, fearing the worst. I instead saw the man by the door fall to the ground, a little hole in his forehead. David was frozen, staring at the gun in his hand. Rachel began shrieking from her hiding place. Another shot went off, and I saw my father grasp his shoulder. Jessica came up from behind and punched the man hard enough to knock him out. Thank god for her former boxing career.
I couldn’t bear to look at the body or the unconscious man. A chorus of “what ifs” ran through my head as Jessica and my mother dragged them out of the camper. I couldn’t help but notice that they had matching tattoos on their arms, two poorly drawn bombs, just like the ones on the buildings.
We drove off immediately, lack of light be d-----. It was still the middle of the night, but none of us could sleep except Rachel. She sat next to David in the booth seats of the table and dozed off against his shoulder. David kept staring straight ahead, the same blank look on his face.
10/4
David hasn’t spoken, we are almost in Connecticut now, but no one is celebrating how close we are to safety. All it took was one rude awakening to realize that the world beyond our vehicle was broken and dangerous.
It doesn’t look like Dad’s injury is too bad, the bullet just grazed his left shoulder. Still, it could get infected, and the pain must be excruciating. Mom doused it in hydrogen peroxide before she bandaged it.
I can’t stop thinking about the two tattoos, there could be more of those people out there. We’re in New England now, so we must be long past them, but there must still be people like that around here.
Perhaps the only bright side to this is that we didn’t stand too much of a risk of being infected. The virus has such a short incubation period that Mom doesn’t think those men had been exposed. I want to ask her more about it, but I don’t want to bother her after a time like this.
10/5
I’m still shaking as I write this. Around one in the morning, I heard something coming from the bathroom of the RV. It was a sort of whimpering noise. I opened the door to find David hugging his knees on the floor, staring at the gun he shot the robber with. My whole body filled with dread, it didn’t take long to put two and two together.
He looked up at me, eyes red from crying. “I-I wasn’t going to-” I bent down and put my arm on his shoulder.
“David-” I begin, but he collapses into sobs before I can continue.
“I didn’t even know his name. He might have had a family, or kids, or something. Maybe he was a good person, before all this. He could have survived this mess if it weren’t for me. You saw what my mother did, no one had to die.”
“You were scared, they could have killed us all. David, you saved us, you saved Rachel.”
“But I killed someone. That man was alive, and now he isn’t, and it’s my fault. How can I live with myself after this?”, he started crying again. I sat with him until it started to get light outside, too scared to leave him alone. When she woke up, I told Jessica, who asked my mom to take over driving for the last leg of the journey and then hugged David so tight I feared she might crush him.
10/8
The trees are beginning to change up here, it looks beautiful, despite the apocalypse. We’ve been traveling through rural Massachusetts and New Hampshire today, mainly in areas that weren’t densely populated to begin with. It’s calming to think that these places didn’t change as much.
My mother has been more open with me during the past couple days than ever. She’s been telling me about the plans for setting up quarantine zones and stopping the spread of the virus, essentially cancelling the apocalypse. Just a few weeks ago, she would have brushed all this off as confidential.
Jessica hasn’t let David out of her sight, though he claims he’s fine.  Even though little Rachel is too young to understand why we’re all so on edge, she knows that her brother is upset, and has been clinging to him all day. It makes me much less worried to know that his family is watching out for him.
10/7
We have finally reached Eden. It isn’t so much a picturesque garden as a military fort, but it’s safe. We were thoroughly examined before they even let us through the gates, until at last the doctors confirmed Mom’s theory that we hadn’t been exposed. Dad was taken to another medical building to get his injury properly treated. I saw another doctor promising Jessica that they offered grief counselling.
An armed man in a uniform led us to our new house, a four bedroom, built to house two families. Everything inside is mass produced and uniform, but I’m sure it will develop some character.
We were barely given time to set our bags down before we were herded into an administrative building. There we were given our schedules and grilled on the rules of the facility, which pretty much boiled down to “no one enters or leaves without authorization”, and “if you leave you will get infected and die”.
After hours of orientation, I finally had a chance to go down to the barn. Magnolia’s old Amish training had been put to use for the past few weeks, all the fields are plowed with horses rather than machines in order to save gas. She was out in a paddock with a few other draft horses, and came trotting up to the fence as soon as I called for her. I stayed at the barn visiting with Magnolia until the sun started to go down, then went to the cafeteria for dinner.
After getting my food, I found my parents at one of the long tables, sitting with David and Janet’s families. I was overjoyed to finally see my friend again, and couldn’t wait for her to meet David. He seemed a little better now, after meeting with one of the counselors for a while.
We stayed in the cafeteria until they forced us to leave. Janet and I spent ages catching up, and while David stays quieter than the rest of us, he still seems happy to be here.
I felt more secure then, surrounded by my newfound family, than I have since we left home. The world outside is a shadow of it’s former self, but behind the walls of Eden, there is hope. In here, there is a future.