Right, so here we are, in the ‘present’. Killed best friend, fought with dad, writing a diary. What else would you like to know? No, not that. Not yet, anyway. Shall we do a ‘Day in the Life of Jay’? I am afraid that it won’t be very exciting.

Everything we do here, is to ensure our survival. Food, drinking water, shelter and not dying are the important things. Dad sometimes gets nostalgic. He can’t get over how much time he used to have to do whatever he wanted, in the old world, but he always says that now he feels more like he has a purpose. I am dubious. The threat of imminent death by starvation, sickness or being eaten alive? I wouldn’t mind taking my chances with experiencing his teenage hood.

Every morning (when not on watch) I get up. I check on my family. I pack my bed away. Quick wipe over with a washcloth, get dressed. Breakfast. We have food in the house. Some for now and some stored for an emergency. So we have the option to eat at home or in the Canteen. I usually eat at home for breakfast. Takes me a while to move from grunting and glaring to actual words and smiling.

You already know that doing a lap is a job, as well as look out. They come under security. At our age we do everything, and as people get older they gravitate towards a certain area. There’s farming, childcare, maintenance, infirmary, sanitation, the aforementioned canteen, laundry, storage, water, and trade. It is pretty full on – you can see why we don’t have a lot of time. Doing a different job a day keeps things from getting too boring. That is how it works at the moment, until someone pitches a fit and we change the rotation to something else until someone complains about that, and so on. Same thing with our weekends. That always changes. Can’t have everyone off at the same time. We do it in shifts – usually the whole family gets time off together. But then people complain if it doesn’t coincide with their friends’ time off. You would think after this long we would have this shit sorted, but nope. Dad does like to say this is a democracy. Gotta say that a dictatorship sounds tempting sometimes.

I bet you can tell which area I like most. It is the easiest and the hardest. Day to day, you don’t really get your hands dirty, but when shit goes down, as Hayley would have said, it is onnnnnn.

Under 18s get to finish a bit earlier than everyone else. So I might visit Dad or Dep, take a nap, read or like now, write. I don’t have heaps of friends. There aren’t a lot of kids of my vintage. As you can imagine, the beginning of the Apocalypse is not the most ideal time to be getting it on, let alone pushing out a kid. And even if you did get it on in an end-of-the-world-fornication-frenzy, the chances of general survival? Not huge.

Then it is home, food, free time – if there isn’t a meeting, and bed. Yup. As you can see, I am a total badass. But truth be told, living in a world that is so damn normal, yet can be tipped into terror at any time? It sucks.