Wednesday, August 10, 3:30 AM. Brewer.

I got woken up just now by coyotes moving through the yard, giggling and yowling past the window. I don’t begrudge them. It’s another family doing their best to survive in what’s left of civilization.

I wasn’t sleeping well anyway. We have a tough decision to make.

Right now things are pretty stable. We’re alive, we’re adapting, we’ve got each other. God’s provided everything we need.

We’ve got enough canned food available to last…however long canned food lasts. Five years? A decade? More? Less?

We’ve got access to enough water to get us through the winter. Eventually, if we set up by a decent river or lake we’ll have all the water we need. A well would be even better, if we knew how to find one.

That’s one thing we lack: knowledge. I need to look up things on Google and YouTube thirty times a day, except there is no Google or YouTube.

People used to publish books about this kind of thing: purifying water, fixing cars, calculating wattage for power systems, taking care of cows and chickens, digging wells. I haven’t bought a book like that in twenty years. Do they still make them, or is everything online?

We’ve got all the gas we could ever hope for, and probably always will. Does gas spoil if it sits too long? Does it settle out, de-homogenize?

We’ve got one generator and can find bigger ones that will keep us in pretty good comfort at home. We’ll have electricity as long as I can keep the generators running. We’ll have cool and warmth, refrigeration and clean cooking, as long as I can keep the power going and the appliances in good repair. Our lives can be pretty civilized for a decade or two, if that’s what we’re looking at.

But what are we looking at? Are we all alone? Are there scattered families like ours dotted all over North America? Is the whole world like this, or just our little part of it?

There have to be people out there. There’s nothing special about us. If we’re still here someone else must be too. And if there are people we have to find them.

But what do we do first?

As I see it we have three options.

Option 1: Pile into the van and get out on the road. Go to Florida, up to New York, maybe cross over to California. Florida has got to be—I wish I had my Maps app—twenty hours away, and New York roughly twenty hours from there. California would be three or four days’ driving from New York, depending how often we stop. We’d have to switch cars or siphon gas every few hundred miles. Blocked roads could be a problem in places, although so far it seems like there weren’t many people on the roads when everything happened.

It would be three or four days back here from California. But do we even plan to come back here? What’s so special about Dallas now, with all our family and friends missing and our jobs defunct? Wouldn’t we stay wherever we find people? Even if, God forbid, we find no people, is this the climate, the weather, the soil that we want to settle in?

Option 2: Stay put. Get ourselves stable and secure. Get through the madness, the despair, the grief, and the bad decisions that come with them. Get some livestock together, as Garrett suggested. Settle the power and water issues. Start thinking about crops for the future.

Option 3: Split up. Garrett and I could get out on the road, figure out the lay of the land and be back in nine, ten days. Amy could stay with Claire and Trevor, maintain the water supplies, keep the electricity going, take care of Coolidge and Louis, make sure Claire’s ankle is all good, and be available in case someone comes looking for us. I don’t think she’s going to like that but in a way it makes the most sense.

Three options. All very different. None of them great. None of them terrible.

We’ve got some tough decisions to make.