After 30 Days

Twenty-Three - Day 46

Our conversation had gotten so loud that the rotting zombie wandering the area had come back. It had banged and bumped and growled around the outside of the house until Bill and Shawn went out to kill it, a fact that I had spent nearly a week lamenting, seeing as the stinking corpse had been smelling up the whole house.

The community inside the fences was finally satisfied that Shawn wasn't going to get sick. We were going back inside.

Our stay in the little grey house hadn't been all bad, though. Alex, always accompanied by a couple of our friends, had come every morning to check on Shawn and scribble in his notebook. That had given me peace of mind that Shawn actually was healthy. It had also given me a chance to catch up with what was going on with the rest of our group every day.

Then there was the fact that we spent most of the day alone together, and all night curled up in the comfy queen bed, just the two of us. It hadn't taken much convincing to get Shawn to relent in his insistence that one of us sleep while the other stand watch. The lure of getting to act like a normal couple, having a bit of the privacy that had become a rare commodity, had helped me convince him that the dog would warn us if anything went wrong.

There was a small part of me that wished that we could stay right where we were. Just shut the world out and pretend that everything was ok. I knew that that wasn't a possibility, not anymore.

I sighed and tossed the last of my things into my backpack. I'd replenished my wardrobe out of one of the closets. Fall was rapidly making it's presence felt at night. After weeks of intense, unrelenting heat, the cooler weather was a relief. It was also worrying. Winter was going to be harsh without heated homes and grocery stores. I was going to make use of the couple of sweatshirts that I'd found on a hanger all of the way in the back of the closet.

Laying over on the big chair that he'd claimed as his own, Rex nibbled almost delicately at one leg of a stuffed bear he'd found somewhere. He'd come back in from one of his excursions to the yard with the ragged thing, and I'd been happy to let him keep it. It reminded me of the stuffed toy he'd liked to carry around when we first found him. He'd lost that toy somewhere along the way.

I zipped up my full bag. "Ready to go?" I asked the dog. He perked up those big ears. "Bring your toy," I hoped he wouldn't lose this one too soon.

His prize clamped firmly in his jaws, the dog trotted ahead of me and out of the room.

Shawn was already in the kitchen, a few belongings that he'd gathered in the last few days stuffed in a bag and waiting by the door. Alex, Maggie, and Ned were there too. It was the final checkup that the community required before they'd let us back in, and Ned had come out to see for himself that everything really was ok. I walked into the room just in time for Alex to put away the thermometer and take out his now seemingly ever present notebook.

"Temperature's normal. Everything looks great. The bite is already healing up," he said to the room in general, still writing enthusiastically.

"That's great!"

There was no mistaking the sincerity of Ned's tone. He really was thrilled that Shawn was going to be ok, even if, like the rest of us, he was still a bit confused. It sounded like, when Alex went back to the community and announced that he'd heard of another survivor, the group had exploded into a mix of volatile emotions. It had taken a few days for things to calm down, and there was still a good deal of uncertainty about the whole deal.

I was definitely glad that we'd missed the worst of the chaos. I was just hoping that everyone inside the fences would be as happy to see us come back as Ned appeared to be.

"Ready to go?"

"Yeah," I stopped next to where Shawn was seated and looked around the kitchen one last time. Other than the supplies that we had used, we were leaving the place much the same as we had found it. "I guess I'm ready."