The First 30 Days (PUBLISHED)

Twenty - Day 9

The stricken look on my face must have been enough to tell Shawn that something was very wrong.

"What?" He glanced over his shoulder, looked back to me, before finally realizing that I was looking at him, not past him. He looked down.

Reaching to pull his shirt further out of the way, the little bit of color that had started to return to his face faded out again. I moved closer, but stopped just short of being able to reach out and touch him. "Are they new?" My voice shook a little.

He didn't answer me, just continued to look at the lines scratched into his skin. But I didn't need an answer, anyhow. Tiny beads of blood welled to the surface of the scratches. They were fresh.

"Um, it's not a bite, so everything's going to be ok. Right?"

"I don't know." His reply was so quiet that I had to strain my ears to hear him, even in the near silence of the trees. "The news said that bites are contagious, but I can't remember hearing anything about scratches."

Suddenly frantic to do something, anything to help, I reached out and grabbed him by the hand. Turning around, I hauled him back the way we had come, pausing long enough to yank my knife from where it was still lodged in the zombie's skull. "Come on. We need to get that cleaned up."

I kept a firm grip on his hand as we wound our way through the trees, back toward the big building. We had left the door closed but unlocked. Shoving it opened violently, I kicked it closed just as violently and continued to pull my companion behind me. We stormed through the office and into the dark nurse's room. "Sit," I ordered, releasing the hand that I had doggedly been hanging on to. The squeaky material of the couch alerted me to the fact that he had listened to me. Not looking back, I was on a mission, I went to the closet where I had found the blanket the night before.

Inside, clear plastic bins held all of the basic first aid supplies that a nurse for a kid's camp was bound to need. Looking into the bins, I selected peroxide, antibacterial ointment, and the largest sized band aid on offering. Snatching a clean looking white towel from a pile, I took my arm load to the couch and dropped it next to Shawn. "Take this off," I gestured to his shirt. The movement brought my own hands into view, reminding me that they were covered in dirt and zombie blood.

Turning back to the closet, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves. We had no water for me to use to wash the filth off. Covering my hands with the gloves was going to have to do.

When I turned back around, Shawn's shirt was off. Under any other circumstances, I would have instantly become a nervous, babbling mess. I had not been wrong in my earlier assessment that the guy spent some serious amount of time in the gym. But right now I had tunnel vision, my eyes skipping over all of the good parts to land on the scratches that marred his skin.

I used most of the bottle of peroxide, insisting on applying it over and over, hoping that any possible infection would be carried away by the bubbles. A generous layer of the antibiotic ointment and one really large band aid later, I was out of things that I could do to try to fix the situation. Sitting still for the first time since starting my mission to clean those scratches gave me time for it to finally sink in. Both of us hadn't escaped our encounter with camp counselor zombie 100% ok.

I felt the familiar burning behind my eyes that told me that I was too close to crying for comfort. Pushing off of where I had been sitting next to Shawn, I walked quietly out of the room. I stopped when I reached the door leading outside, well aware that going out there alone wasn't the best choice, even if I was desperately in need of a few minutes of privacy. Leaning dejectedly against the wall, I looked up in an effort to get myself back under control.

At some point, I slid down the wall to sit on the hard floor, my back resting against the wall still. Inside those latex gloves, my hands had sweated profusely. When I pulled the first one off with a snap, I found that the mud and blood coating it had mixed together inside the wet glove. I wiped the mucky mess off the best I could onto my jeans, repeating with the other hand. The idea of having the zombie's blood all over me was making me sick to my stomach.

Footsteps approached as I was concentrating on wiping away as much of the gore from my second hand as possible. I heard a sigh, and then the slide of material along the wall next to me. Looking up, I found Shawn, torn shirt back on, sitting in nearly an identical position to my own. He had slid down the wall just on the other side of the door.

I watched him as he contemplated the floor for a while. As the minutes ticked by, I found that I couldn't keep quiet any more. "We don't know that anything bad is going to happen."

My voice sounded naively hopeful even to my own ears.

He finally turned his head my way, "No. We don't know anything for sure yet."

We lapsed into silence again for a while, both of us lost in our own desperate thoughts.

When Shawn spoke, enough time had passed that it startled me. "Have you seen it happen?"

I knew instantly what he meant. He wanted to know if I had watched anyone die from the infection before. I cleared the sudden lump in my throat as I thought about my dead friend. "Yeah."

He was quiet for a moment, and then, "I haven't."

I looked over in surprise. Wondering how anyone still alive at this point had managed to not see anyone be killed by that horrible virus, or whatever it was.

"I don't really have any family, or anything like that." He shrugged. "I heard the news reports the first day, but I didn't see any of it personally. I thought they must have been blowing the whole thing way out of proportion. I mean, who would believe this if they didn't see it? I decided to go to the gym late that night. There wasn't anyone around. When I went to leave, a zombie was waiting at the front door for me. He scared the crap out of me and I decided to go back upstairs and wait for him to go away. Obviously, I never made it out of the building until you and I went to the roof." He lapsed into another silence while I digested what he had just told me. Looking back to the floor, he mumbled, "What's it like?"

That lump in my throat was back in full force. Sliding sideways, I didn't stop until my shoulder rested lightly against his. "It shouldn't be long. If you're going to get sick, we'll know."