The First 30 Days (PUBLISHED)

Twenty-Two - Day 10

     I almost couldn't believe it. The sun was coming up and Shawn still didn't seem to be sick. "How do you feel?" I waited with bated breath for his answer.

"I feel ok." He rotated his shoulder again, and then grinned at me. "It's a little stiff, but I feel fine otherwise."

An answering grin spread across my features. All night long, I had been telling myself that if he made it to the morning without any symptoms, he was probably going to be ok, not daring to really hope that that would actually happen. But now it had. Light was beginning to filter into the room and I felt nearly giddy with optimism.

Impulsively, I bounded the few steps between us and wrapped my arms around him in a hug, my exuberance overriding my usual shyness for a second. I had a tendency to keep to myself, and my unusual display must have caught him off guard, because it took a long second before I felt his arms return the hug. By then my mind had already had plenty of time to regret my impulsiveness. Looking anywhere except at his face, I pulled back a couple of big steps and tried to cover my blunder. "Um, I'm really glad that you don't feel sick. I think that you would by now, if you were going to."

"I gathered that much," he was still smiling at me with humor. I couldn't blame him. He had just avoided what we had both been sure was a death sentence. He was allowed to be in a good mood.

Breaking eye contact, thankfully, because it was making me a little uncomfortable, he strode to the desk and picked up the bottle of water that we had allocated as his last night. It hadn't escaped my notice that he had only sipped from it all night, even though I knew that he had to be thirsty. Now, he unscrewed the cap and chugged the rest of the bottle without coming up for air. When he was finished, he wiped the trickle of water that had escaped down his chin with one hand, while handing me the remaining one with the other. "Here, you take this."

Shaking my head no was one of the hardest things I could remember having to do. One bottle of water in an entire day was not enough. I had tried to make it last, but I had run out in the middle of the night. Eyeing his outstretched hand, and the liquid relief he held in it, I forced my mouth to form the right words. "No, we agreed. That one is for both of us."

He grabbed my hand and placed the bottle in it. "I'm good, for now. Besides, I've been thinking about this situation all night. We are going to have to come up with a better source of water, today. I think I know where we should look for answers." When I just stared at him for a second, he continued. "There has got to be some sort of wilderness survival guide on these shelves." His hand swept out to indicate to loaded bookshelf on the far wall.

Swinging my gaze to the books, I felt like giving myself a good kick in the rear. Why hadn't it occurred to me that the books found in a wilderness summer camp for kids would likely be a treasure trove of information useful to our situation? I began scanning the titles on the spines. In only a matter of seconds, I pulled a likely candidate from it's place. Thumbing through the pages, another grin split my features. This was exactly what we had been looking for.

I grimaced down at the corpse of the camp counselor zombie. Despite neither of us being too excited to come back out here, we had made the walk down the wooded path, back to the last cabin that we checked yesterday. In my haste to get Shawn back to the office and clean up his scratches, I had totally forgotten about the bat that he had dropped in the grass. We were going to have to drive back into that hole in the wall that the locals called a town, and he was going to need it.

Flies buzzed around the crusty wounds that my knife had left on her skull. When I glanced up at the cabin door, still standing open, all I could picture was the moment when she came barreling out of the door and knocked Shawn off of the steps.

I couldn't wait to get away from here.

"Ok, got it. Let's go." Straightening up with the bat in hand, Shawn checked to be sure that I had heard him and started back the way we had come. I didn't hesitate to follow.

Scanning through the survival guide, I'd quickly found exactly what we needed. The chapter on purifying water had been simple. We either needed to boil the water for ten minutes, or drop four drops of bleach into a quart and wait for a half an hour. Either solution would be well within our grasp, provided we could come up with a few basic necessities.

Thoroughly searching the entire building, we had been surprised to not be able to find a single box of matches or bottle of bleach. There had been a closet stuffed full of all sorts of cleaning chemicals, but no bleach. I guess we'd used up all of our luck earlier when Shawn somehow didn't turn into a zombie overnight.

Luckily, even though it looked for all of the world like we were a hundred miles from anywhere, we were actually only a small drive from a bit of civilization. There had to be someplace there to find what we needed.

The drive back out of the mountains left me feeling edgy. I couldn't forget the gang of zombies that we had seen before. They would still be out there, along with however many more people had turned in the town. Just because there were less of them than we had faced in the city, didn't mean that they were less dangerous. Noticing my plummeting mood, Shawn tried to cheer me up. "There was a little store on the back of that diner, next to the gas pump. I'll bet we will find everything that we need in there. Won't take more than a few minutes, and we'll be back in the jeep and out of there."

I gave him a weak smile. A few minutes was a long time, long enough for the zombies to find us. But I wasn't going to say that, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

The trees ended and we were back in the open air of the main street. After only a little over a day, my eyes had already adjusted to the dimmer light in the trees. The midday sun felt blinding, making me blink rapidly. By the time my sight had cleared up, we were already pulling into the spacious parking area surrounding our destination.

There was a big truck that had been abandoned in the parking lot, but other than it, the lot stood empty. Shawn pulled right up next to the glass door leading into the store. He seemed to debate with himself for a second, before leaving the engine running. I had been eyeing the store with distrust, but scurried to climb out when I realized that I was the only one still in the jeep. I didn't like what we were doing at all, but I wasn't going to let him go out there on his own. Not when I had so recently gotten a vivid idea of how I would feel if I were to lose him.

The sign on the door read open. I could clearly see from outside that calling the room through that door a store, was generous. I was fairly certain that the living room that I had shared with Evie was larger. When Shawn pulled on the door, it swung open with a cheery sounding jingle. Eyeing the bells hanging from the top with my best death glare, I followed him inside.

My first impression had been spot on. A single shelf ran down the center of the store and was loaded with every kind of snack food and candy known to man. The outer walls of the store were also lined with shelves, these loaded with everything from cat food to windshield washer fluid. The upside to it, it only took a matter of seconds to find the shelf holding the cleaning stuff. Triumphantly, I pulled several of the pint sized bottles of bleach from the shelf.

Turning around, I found Shawn stuffing packages of beef jerky into the bag that he had brought along. When I stepped up to his side, he looked my way.

"Got them," I held the bleach in my arms, trying to hold onto all of the bottles and my knife.

"Good. I found matches, and a few other things that we might be able to use." He glanced behind us, back to the Jeep. "I think that we should get out of here."

I couldn't have agreed more. The edgy feeling that I had had since we decided that we would have to come back into town had gotten worse. Now that we had the means to make water from the stream safe to drink, all I really wanted was to go back and hide again. It felt way too exposed out here.

Those infernal bells loudly jangled again on our way out. I jumped at the sound. Muttering under my breath, I dropped the bottles of bleach into the back seat before climbing back in the front. Shawn had dropped his bag in the back too, and was behind the wheel ready to make our escape, when the woman came running around the corner of the diner.

Three zombies sprinted after her.