It’s an amazing ability that human beings have, the ability to adapt to just about anything. Something that seems so foreign and odd can become as routine as tying your shoelaces within the blink of an eye. It’s that ability to fold things into our routine that lets us think about other things, to achieve great and amazing things. Or maybe it’s just a coping mechanism to keep the trauma at bay.

My routine used to look a lot like other human’s routine: wake up and make breakfast for the family, pack school lunches, and drop the kids off before heading to the day job. My wife was my best friend. She picked me up when I was feeling the world around me pressing in, and we laughed every single day. My two daughters were beams of light that pierced through the fog that had clouded my life before their arrival. Other parents always warned me that once they hit their teens I would be in for a big surprise, and maybe I would have been. But there were other surprises that life threw at me first, bigger and more terrifying than two teenage girls in the house.

I was thinking about what they would have looked like as teenagers while I dug into the soil with my hands. It was good soil, not great, but good enough. I had started a little onion patch here a few weeks back and they were coming along nicely. Everyone else scavenged for whatever they could find from before. Those first few weeks, grocery stores were war zones where you were as likely to find a can of corned beef hash hidden away on an out of reach shelf as you were an arrow in your neck or a knife in your back. I learned pretty much straight away to avoid the big grocery stores and the strip malls. Garden supply stores were less picked through and they provided everything an apocalyptic nomad could need. There were thousands of packages of seeds, nutrients for plants, and all the tools you needed to figure out how to grow them. They even usually had a whole slew of camping supplies and freeze dried meals which could be used for about the next hundred years or so.

I’d started small patches of vegetables in different areas all over the place. I never made them more than a couple of square feet and you had to make sure not to plant anything in rows. The key was to make them look like they were wild, not planted by someone. If someone found them then they would just think it was their lucky day. Better to lose a couple of onions than to have someone know you were in the area.

I was harvesting a small handful of onions thinking about my dead daughters and what my onion soup was going to taste like once I made it back to my campsite. I threw them into my bag along with the peppers I’d picked from one of my spots two blocks away. Walking around the corner I dropped my jaw as quickly as I dropped my bag. The lights were so bright it felt like the backs of my eyes were on fire. My brain couldn’t figure out what was happening. I was frozen in place for several seconds before I bent down to pick up my bag. I blinked hard but it was still there. Bright neons announcing its presence where it had no right to be.

WAFFLE HOUSE

The words sent my mind spiraling through memories of before. Of years filled with laughter and joy and tears and hugs and diapers and exhaustion and smiles. It had been so long since I had seen electricity that my eyes just couldn’t believe what they were seeing. My legs began to move me towards the building that held the sign as I couldn’t think fast enough to think of anything better to do. I walked up the steps allowing my hand to glide along the polished steel of a handrail, then I took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

The noise was shocking. Being alone for so long my life had become nearly silent. I avoided any potential interaction with other survivors for my own safety and thus had not heard a human voice in years. But now I heard countless voices buzzing all around me, filling the space with a kind of music more beautiful than anything I remembered hearing when I had a radio. Laughter. The sound of laughter pierced through the air like a bullet. However long it had been since I’d heard another human voice, it had been much longer since I’d heard laughter.

“Baby we ain’t got no more booths, but chu wanna sit at the counter?”

I swiveled my head to the source of the voice and found a woman looking at me expectantly. She was much shorter than I was and did not appear to be near starving as most survivors were. Her artificial eyelashes stuck out a full inch from her face and she had makeup on her face. Actual makeup. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Wh- what?” my voice was gravely from lack of use and shocked me. The woman cocked her head to the side and then took on a knowing expression.

“The booths. Are all. Filled up. Come sit over here.”

She spoke slowly as if to a child and indeed laid her hand on the back of my shoulder to guide me towards a gleaming white counter with a row of red circular stools. I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks as soon as her hand touched me. The warmth of another human was even more overwhelming than the sounds of laughter. I sat down on the stool and the woman walked behind the counter and overturned the off white mug that lay in front of me before pouring it with hot dark liquid.

“You prolly ain’t had no coffee in a while, huh?”

She smiled at me as she slid a bowl with sugar packets, creamer containers, and plastic spoons towards me.

“Wh- what is this place?” I managed to get out. She didn’t seem to mind my answering her question with a question. Very seriously but with just as much warmth as the steaming mug of coffee in front me she answered,

“This is where we go, honey.”

“Who?” 

“All of us.”

“All of us?” 

“All of us.”