Continued from chapter 1.1, here.

Axiom 1: Remain calm.

I’d done it!  That’s right, journal readers, whoever you may be – I managed to reach the Starbucks!

And even better?  The place was unlocked!

As I walked in through the front doors, I almost felt normal, at least for a second or two.  There was no Apocalypse, no end of the world happening outside these doors.  No, I was just strolling into my favorite coffee shop chain, here to pick up a boost of caffeine and brewed beans before heading back to work.

And for a moment, as I closed my eyes, I even smelled that classic scent of just slightly too burned coffee beans, the scent reminiscent of Starbucks everywhere.

But then I opened my eyes, and reality came crashing back in.

Looking around the interior of the coffee shop, I was happy to note that the building remained intact.  That, however, was about the only good thing that I could say about my newly chosen base of operations.

The tables were knocked over, with chairs lying everywhere – some of them broken.  No other patrons stood in line in the shop to buy coffee; no one sat at any of the little tables, hunched over a computer or a magazine.  I saw no hipsters with massively oversized headphones, no preppy college students pretending to study as they sipped their massively sugary concoctions, no groups of overweight mothers commiserating about why they couldn’t lose weight as they sipped their extra-large frappuccinos.

Behind the counter, I saw no bored barista, waiting to take my order and mess up my name.  Instead, I just saw spilled coffee beans and untouched espresso machines.  I stuck my head into the back room, still feeling a little like I was trespassing by going in a place intended for Employees Only, and saw that the back area was similarly deserted.  Some of the stacks of boxes in the back store room had toppled over, spilling out bags of sealed coffee grounds.

Heading back out to the main room of the shop, I grabbed one of the fallen over chairs, set it upright, and sat down on it.  Leaning on one of the tables, I gazed around and tried to figure out what I needed to do.

What do you do in an Apocalypse, anyway?  I didn’t have any prior experience in doing this.  I wondered if there were any books available on the topic.  Where was the nearest Barnes & Noble?

I dug out my phone, hoping to search the internet for answers, but tossed it away when I saw that it had no signal.  Somehow, I didn’t expect to suddenly find myself with any bars any time soon.  Not in the Apocalypse.

With little else to do, I dug out my notebook, pulled out my pen, and started writing.  Hence, this journal!  Maybe someone will find this one day, and they’ll discover what became of me.  Or maybe, if I somehow survive this, I can read from this journal to my children and grandchildren, telling them of the horrors that I endured.

Hah.  Somehow, I doubt that will happen, but I can hope, right?

After getting most of my thoughts down on the journal, I began to realize that I actually had no idea what was going on outside.  What exactly had happened?  My experience so far had just consisted of loud noises, seeing widespread destruction, and watching a winged, Heavenly being destroy a children’s toy.

I didn’t see any television sets in the main area, but I found a radio in the back room, and hauled it out to the front area of the Starbucks.  I propped it up on a table, murmured a brief prayer of thanks that it ran off of batteries, and began searching for a channel.

I prayed too early, it seemed.  After ten minutes of carefully scrolling through the different frequencies, I hadn’t found any channels, nothing but static.  I turned it off, hoping to conserve the batteries, and turned my attention back to the interior of the building – and my growling stomach.

Did you know that Starbucks has sandwiches and pastries?  And that they keep extras in a fridge and freezer in the back room?  I now know that fact.

The sandwiches actually aren’t too bad.  If there’s a chance to leave post-Apocalyptic Yelp reviews, I’m giving these Starbucks sandwiches five stars.  Well worth the addition to your underground bunker’s food stash.

After I’d put some food in my stomach, I turned my attention to my surroundings.  Prowling around the inside of the Starbucks didn’t reveal any cracks, and a lap around the outside of the building showed that it actually looked to have weathered whatever assault hit the area fairly well.  I headed back inside, feeling a bit more hopeful that the place wouldn’t collapse down on top of my head at any moment.

I found a broom in the back area and, feeling like a bit of a fool, tidied up.  I didn’t make it look exactly like the typical Starbucks – I turned most of the tables on their sides as makeshift barricades against the big plate glass front windows, which now seemed far too open for my taste.  But I swept the floor, pulled over one of the big couches to use as a makeshift bed, and even managed to produce a passable cold brew.

Cold coffee in hand, I settled into one of the stuffed armchairs, gazing out at the setting sun.  I needed a plan, I repeated to myself for the umpteenth time.  If I was going to survive this, I’d need a plan.

A plan.  Journal, do you have any idea how hard it is to sit down and think of a plan?  It’s bloody hard, I can tell you that.

But as the sun crept lower over the shattered mall across the highway from my hideout, I began to write down some ideas.

To be continued…

Continued from Chapter 1.0, here.

Axiom 1: Remain calm.

When I next opened my eyes, it took me a moment to remember why I was waking up in the back of an unmarked passenger van.  But as I lay back on the thin, scratchy carpet, I felt the wave of memories come rushing back to me.

The explosion at the mall.  The sound of people dying.  The angel, majestic and deadly, hovering in the center of the destruction.  That Furby’s wide eyes before it exploded into shards of half-melted plastic.

I briefly wondered whether I might be able to find a Starbucks that still had some coffee.

With a grunt, I hauled myself up, reaching out for the handle of the van’s back door – but I paused for a moment as my fingers rested on the plastic grip.  What if that angel was still out there?  I didn’t doubt for a second that his flaming sword would cut through me just as easily as it had sliced and diced that Furby.

So instead, I crawled to the front of the van, wincing and biting my lip as I stubbed my knees and toes against innumerable little sharp corners on the inside of the van.  Battered and bruised, I managed to haul myself into the front seat, looking out through the cracked but mostly still intact windshield.

The destruction of the world hadn’t stopped with the mall, I observed.

A few hours previously, the mall had been surrounded by parking lots, most of them empty. On the other side of the parking lots, the highway passed by, filled with zipping cars and trucks.  A couple of satellite shops sat in strip malls on the other side of the highways, each with a big, brightly lit sign to attract hungry, thirsty, or bored highway travelers.

Now, cracks ran all across the parking lots, turning the asphalt into rubble.  On the far side, the highway looked like broken teeth, the concrete pillars shattered and the road itself split into giant shards.  I saw cars caught in that rubble, crunched and smashed like crushed aluminum cans.  Dust from the broken roadway filled the air, obstructing my long distance view.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this new world, I realized, was the silence.  All of the sounds that I usually ignored as background noise – the rumbling of car engines, the humming of electricity through overhead power lines, the occasional honk of a horn or squealing of tires – were missing.  I could hear nothing, not even the cries of birds.

A little part of my mind still gibbered in fear, wondering what had happened.  Was this some sort of attack from a rogue nation?  Had North Korea finally snapped and gone around the bend, shooting missiles across the ocean at us?  Was this some sort of terrorist attack?

Somehow, I didn’t think so.  Despite the threat of a rogue nation, I couldn’t reconcile the opposing ideas of a terrorist attack and a floating angel.  Did North Korea even believe in angels?  Why would they send over Heavenly beings, and why would they tell said Heavenly beings to bother with destroying Furbies?

Maybe Furbies were the ultimate symbol of Western decadence and needed to be destroyed.  But that idea seemed purely silly.

In any case, I told myself, clamping down on my wildly fretting thoughts, I needed to do something.  I couldn’t just sit in this broken van forever.

I glanced over at the driver’s seat of the van.  Unfortunately, the previous owner of the vehicle hadn’t been kind enough to leave his keys in the ignition – and now that I looked at the crunched front hood of the vehicle, I doubted that the van would even start.

Looked like I would have to huff it on foot.

I peered forward, scanning the dark, stormy looking skies.  No sign of the angel, I noted, although those roiling storm clouds didn’t bode well.  If I wanted to move, to find a better hiding place, I ought to go now.

I reached out, opening the side door of the van, but then paused.  Where was I going to go?  I scanned the dusty view around me, searching for a possible shelter.

Not back into the mall, that much was for certain.  Even if the angel wasn’t still prowling around, I remembered how the other shops were destroyed, flattened under the collapsed roof.  I could head the other direction, away from the mall – but where?

My house – well, my parents’ house, but that minor little unimportant detail didn’t matter – was too far away.  Five miles between the house and the mall hadn’t seemed like much distance at all when I had a working car, but I didn’t want to walk all that way back, especially with those dark clouds looming overhead.  I needed to find someplace else, someplace closer.

And then I saw it.

Across the shattered highway, in the strip mall area.  Most of the lit signs had gone out, the buildings either dark or entirely destroyed, but I saw one sign still glowing, a savior’s sign through the swirling dust.

Starbucks.

The calming green and white reached out to me, a single familiar sight amid the madness around me.  Almost without thought, I climbed down from the van’s seat, starting across the sea of destruction between me and that faintly glowing sign.

I soon found the passage tough going.  I had to pick my way across the cracked and half-shattered parking lot, dodging around broken cars.  Thankfully, I didn’t see any dead bodies anywhere, for which I uttered a brief but fervent prayer of thanks – I didn’t know if my fragile mental state would be able to handle finding another person, injured or dead.

When I reached the highway, my progress grew even slower.  The concrete highway had been shattered into huge chunks, big spikes of roadway pointing up into the sky.  I found myself picking my way between the big boulders, occasionally having to turn sideways to scrape through narrow passages or scrambling up over flat boulders.  I felt my jeans tearing as I pulled myself across the rough terrain, but I couldn’t stop now.

And then finally, after what felt like ages, I stood on the other side of the highway, in the long grass.

My eyes were drawn up, as if by strings.  There it was, just ahead of me.  The glowing green-and-white sign still hung over the entrance.  I had one more parking lot to cross, although this one looked much more difficult to navigate due to a higher number of cars.  Still, I felt a surge of energy.

Nearly there.

Gasping for air, I stumbled forward, through the maze of cars in the parking lot.  My eyes remained glued to that sign, the one constant in a world that suddenly made no sense.

Please, I prayed, let there still be some coffee inside.

To be continued…