The First 30 Days (PUBLISHED)

Four -Day 3

I was fairly certain that I had gone into shock at some point. Curled up in the bathtub, clothes stiff with dried blood, I had lost a significant amount of time.

When I had slammed the door shut and closed Evie on the other side, the flash of relief had been brief. Registering that my hands were covered in a cool, thick liquid, I had looked down. I was covered in blood, a lot of it. The slick substance that had caused me to fall turned out to be a huge pool of the stuff.

My shirt was covered, front and back. The ends of my long brunette hair were clumped together and stained red.

When Evie had said she threw up, she must have meant the pool of blood. Wiping my hands on my jeans didn't help much, they were already soaked in urine and spotted with blood. With Evie just on the other side of the locked door, screaming and banging like a crazed animal, I had wanted to escape the filth on the floor. Unfortunately, the pool was large, and had only been smeared around further when I slid and rolled in it.

The only clean space to be found was the tub. So I had crawled in there and held my hands over my ears to try to block out the sounds coming from the hallway.

The light that filtered in through the tiny window had slowly changed. At some point, when the glow of the setting sun had lit the bathroom up in hues of orange, Evie had stopped her assault on the bathroom door. Terrified to make any noise that would remind her that I was still there, I stayed curled up in the bottom of the bathtub all night.

In the dark of the night, sounds always seemed somehow louder. The muffled footsteps pacing the upstairs hall reached me through the closed door. A crash came from her bedroom, sounding like the lamp on her nightstand meeting the floor. But the sounds Evie made as she wandered our home weren't even the worst of it.

Inhuman screams echoed outside the house. The screams had the same animalistic quality that Evie had been making, and there were the terrified screams of people under attack. Tires squealed on the pavement, once I was sure I even heard gunshots. My normally peaceful neighborhood sounded like a scene from a horror movie.

Through it all, I stayed pressed to the bottom of the tub.

By the time the sun drove the nightmare inducing darkness back, I was stiff and sore all over. A day and night spent in a bathtub takes it's toll. I estimated that I had been crouched there for at least 17 hours. I couldn't stay any longer, and was becoming increasingly glad that I was hiding in a bathroom.

When I pushed myself unsteadily upright, my bloodstained clothes peeled from the tub with a startling amount of noise. I froze, waiting for any indication that Evie had heard. After a few seconds in which the indistinguishable sounds coming from the far end of the hall stayed constant, I gratefully slid from the tub to the toilet.

My next order of business was getting my hands on some water. Turning the sink on to barely more than a drip, the job of cleaning dried filth from my skin was torturous. Only once every trace of blood was clear from my hands did I use them to hold water to drink.

Stomach full of water and hands relatively clean, I began to feel slightly human again. Whatever Evie was doing at the end of the hall, she had been at it for some time. Outside the house, the chaos from the night before continued, though I thought that the screaming was slightly less frequent.

Edging my way to the window slowly, careful to stay silent, I pulled the ruffled curtain aside. My first glimpse of what had been happening outside of the house was horrifying.

A pair of bloodstained teens walked down the middle of the street with quick, almost birdlike movements. Their heads jerked this way and that. Down the street, almost out of my view, a house was engulfed in flames. No firefighters were battling the fire. Instead, at least a dozen more people who moved in jerks wandered dangerously near to the flames.

A dark stain covered a significant portion of my neighbors driveway. A similar stain spread out over the sidewalk. Sticking out from in between a pair of parked cars, jean clad legs and men's workbooks lay still on the ground.

Another of those haunting screams tore through the morning air. Bringing my gaze back to the teenage duo, I watched as they poised perfectly still in the street. Their sudden lack of any movement after their odd gaits from before, somehow seemed to only add to the creep factor. I felt the hair raise along the back of my neck.

In a burst of flying white fur and furiously running legs, a small dog catapulted into view from the direction they were watching. The shorter teen screamed again as the pair took off with frightening speed in pursuit of the poor animal. Attention drawn by the commotion, the others who had been circling the burning house also gave chase, a chorus of screams filling the air.

An answering scream from the hallway made me jump. Pulled from God-only-knew-what she had been up to in the hall, Evie began pacing again. Her excitable sounding steps passed the bathroom door. I held my breath and begged silently for her to just keep going, to ignore my hiding place.

Heart pounding in my chest, I listened to Evie pace the length of the hall several times. Now that she was riled up, she seemed inclined to stay that way. She bumped into things in the bedroom, skittered from one room to the next, and let out several short but hair raising screams.

What had happened to my friend? I didn't understand the events of the past 24 hours at all.

Sinking to the edge of the tub, I tried to come up with a plan. I couldn't just open the door and walk out into the hall. Evie had attacked, and I was pretty sure killed, Austin. By biting him. I shuddered at that thought. I did not want to experience that for myself. And if what I had witnessed outside was anything to go by, there were a whole lot more people out there who had been afflicted by whatever was making Evie sick.

I was going to have to wait until Evie left, or find some way to convince her to go, before I was escaping from the bathroom.

I was trying to think over the thumps and screams, to come up with a way to get Evie out of the house without getting myself murdered in the process, when an unexpected noise made my blood run cold.

A second voice joined Evie's as she screamed from the end of the hall.