This is a note to anyone who happens to still be somewhere with supplies. Or maybe someday this shit will be over and I will be able to tell the world in person, but I have a very important announcement: I love tampons. The context for this is that you never really know you love someone until they're gone right? Okay. Same thing for things like flushable toilets, the weather forecast, and (most importantly) tampons.

You might expect things like food to be in short supply; water will be scarce; medicine will be your best friend. Well, my dear, you would be hella fucking wrong! Food, renewable. Water, everywhere. And I don't know about you but unless you're a sufferer of lycanthrope most people don't tend to get sick once a month for four days. While that stuff was a problem at the beginning, it stopped being so much of one later on, but we'll get to that. What never stopped being a problem was the fact that there was only so much room in my bag and I wasn't exactly thinking about my period and so I never got a stash built up of feminine hygiene products. There was a lot of other blood to think about at the moment, namely my own and my parents if I didn't get going fast.

"Rory, come on! We got a bunch of stuff from Doomsday Prepper, let's goooo," Alex muttered and kicked at me.

I scanned my room for something, not sure what I was looking for but definitely looking for something. Books? No, too heavy. Also useless. Makeup? Why would I possibly need makeup? Laptop? To use with the abundance of electricity I had at hand, of course. Finally I settled on a few shirts, jeans, and a couple heavier jackets.

"Alex, grab some blankets from my bed," I called out, shoving a hand under the bed's metal frame to rifle around for my first aid kit.

The kit was white and red, and had almost nothing that we didn't already have with the exception of some stuff I had added after my mom bought it for me. (Four tampons, it had four tampons I added. Did you know zombies can smell blood? Four tampons.) In a moment of ingenuity, I pulled out a small stash of unused glow sticks from my last birthday party and the bag with my lock picks and locks.

Alex gave me a look.

"What?" I asked her, frowning. "Might be helpful, fight me."

Weighed down with a teenager's idea of apocalypse necessities, we hurried out to the living room. Mom was holding a duffel bag open for Dad to stuff bundles of rope into, the two of them barely looking up when we came in.

"How much rope do we need?" Alex whispered in my ear.

I sighed. "Okay, is this everything?"

"Aurora, we need to make sure we have more food and... and...." Mom looked caught off guard.

"We have food and weapons."

"Oh."

"Who says we don't come back for more shit later, guns blazing, anyway?" Alex asked, laughing.

"Fuckin' hilarious," I muttered.

"Where are we going?" Mom asked. I was surprised when I noticed she was looking at Alex and me, and not Dad.

I hadn't thought about where we should go, not really, but I knew the one place I never saw people. My school, not the SAT hellscape but the one that I usually went to, was next to a wooded area. It wasn't a forest quite, not until you went a bit deeper into the trees, but it was a perfect place to go during lunch if you weren't in the mood to deal with teenagers being really extra about stupid things.

"School," I said, nodding. "The forest near it."

"Planning on making a treehouse?" Alex asked, frowning.

I shook my head. "A safe hold."