After 30 Days

Thirty-Six -Day 57

No amount of yelling, shaking, or rudely jostling had been able to keep Maya awake. At first, we had all worried about moving her too much. She had smacked her head pretty hard and a large bump had raised on it. But as she became more and more sedate, I had resorted to getting rough, trying to keep her conscious.

It hadn't worked. Within a few minutes of her collapse, Maya's eyes drifted closed and stayed firmly that way. Her chest continued to rise and fall in that same slow rhythm, but I thought that her already slow heartbeat was getting even slower.

We stopped yelling at her when all of the noise drew a zombie. Luckily the zombie had started to slow down, and Marcus took care of it himself while the rest of us guarded Maya's prone body, but the threat of more zombies coming right then was enough to convince everyone to stay quiet. Bill, still crouched next to his wife and patting her face every few seconds, was swaying slightly like he was dizzy. The man was barely keeping it together,  both physically and mentally. His skin had taken on an unhealthy hue and he stopped patting Maya long enough to wipe at the clammy sweat that covered his face. He looked like he was only avoiding being sick by force of will.  

Stalking back to the group while wiping zombie gore off of his knife, Marcus hissed, "This is not going to work. We're sitting ducks out here. If too many zombies come, there's no place to get away..."

I took a second to glare at the man, my hatred of him roaring back. If he had continued,  suggesting that we leave Maya lying in the middle of the road, I just might have stabbed him after all. He didn't finish his thought, maybe because of my glare. Muttering under his breath, he walked a few steps away and took up watch.

"The idiot does have a point," Shawn said quietly from his position next to me. "Maya is down and Bill and I aren't exactly in top form right now."

"How are you feeling? Is it getting any worse?" I ignored the rest of what he had been trying to say because I didn't know what to do about it anyhow, and my brain was starting to feel like it was going to explode.

"It feels like I'm under water," he paused a long second to think. "It's like everything is muffled or something."

Sam was near enough to have heard us. "Yeah, me too," he grimaced. "What is going on?"

I wished I knew. At least the men were all still upright, but Maya was starting to really scare me. Fighting back the panic that wanted to bubble to the surface, I went back to pawing through the bags looking for anything that may be useful. I finally had to give up when I realized that there wasn't anything medical in them that struck me with inspiration.

Seeing that I had stopped looking through the bags, Bill looked my way. "There has to be something," his deep voice had an edge, angry. "We didn't all just suddenly get sick for no reason."

Helplessness nearly choked me. "I know. I just don't know what you've been exposed to. If I give her the wrong thing, I could make it worse." I wracked my brain, trying to come up with any idea. "Did you eat anything? Was there anything strange in the bathroom of the rest area?" It was the only thing I could think of. I hadn't gone anywhere near the bathrooms after Maya's warning the day before. Could there have been something in there that was making them sick?

"No. We ate the same stuff everyone else ate yesterday. And the bathrooms were disgusting enough that nobody touched anything in there," he went back to hovering over Maya. When Rex wandered over and started sniffing around the woman, he pushed the dog away from her face.

There had to be some reason that Maya was so much worse than the others. She was much smaller than all of the men. Maybe there had been something airborne that we had stumbled into? Maybe she was worse off because of her size?