After 30 Days

Forty-Eight Day 61

Shawn still wanted to try to make our way to whatever help may have been in DC. I did not. We had spent the second half of the previous day arguing over which direction we were going to go. It had started to rain sometime before dark and, unwilling to waste any more of the precious gas on our indecision, we'd pulled off the side of the road and parked for the night.

For once, I woke up first, some time after the sun had risen. Rex panted in my ear from the back seat while I thought about everything that had happened the day before. When Shawn started to wake up, I still hadn't figured out just what to say. For the first few minutes I stayed quiet, lost in thought. After a rough voiced greeting, he seemed to be content to let the quiet grow too.

I sighed. One way or the other, it was time for us to make a decision.

"Nothing good has come from our leaving the rest of our people," I started haltingly,  ready to continue the discussion from the night before. The rain was still pattering on the metal roof over our heads. The crack that we'd left open in one of the windows for fresh air wasn't enough to keep them from fogging up. The view out was obscured all around, except for the portion of the back window that Rex kept licking. Tiny drips of water occasionally made their way in through the cracked window, and the dog would lap them up.

The light that filtered into the car was soft and cast a grey pall over everything. It suited the somber mood. 

Shawn didn't answer me right away, just sat staring at the fogged up window ahead of him as if he could actually see out. Finally, he said wearily, "It feels like this has all been for nothing." He paused, "Like Maya and Bill died for nothing."

It didn't escape my notice that he included Bill in the counting of our dead, inadvertently giving voice to what we both feared. Wherever he had gone, whatever he had done, I knew deep down that Bill would not be ok without Maya. I glanced sideways at the thought, looking at the profile of the man next to me. Those two had belonged together, and I thought that I understood how that felt. With one of them gone, the other would be lost.

As far as I was concerned, our friends had died for nothing. That fact was a bitter thought that turned my stomach.

Marcus had convinced us to come out here with him on a lie. They were gone because of one twisted man's selfish desires. I honestly still wasn't entirely sure why he'd even done what he'd done. Maybe he'd feared some sort of retaliation for leaving us to die when Shawn had been bitten. Maybe he had believed he needed to get us before we could get him. I guessed we'd never know for sure now.

"I get that," I finally told him. "But is it worth the risk to keep going, knowing that there's probably nothing left in that city to find? I can't imagine that someplace as big as DC hasn't been hit even harder than all of the other towns and cities that we've been through. They're only getting more dangerous as time goes on. The people are all gone and the zombies are everywhere. There's nothing left in the city that's worth the risk we'd take going there."

Beside me, he sighed heavily and scratched absentmindedly at the scar on his jaw, a reflex that I'd noticed he didn't seem to realize he had developed. He did it when he was unsettled by something. "Yeah, ok," Shawn said. "I don't like being separated from the others either. Maggie and Charlie won't even know what happened out here yet," his voice was a little rough and he cleared his throat. "We can talk about what to do next once we are all back together again."

That was as close as I was going to get to permission to go home and I knew it. The conversation about a possible vaccine was probably far from over, but all I wanted at the moment was to get back to the rest of our family. "Do you have any idea where we are?" I asked, eager to get started, but not knowing which way to go. I turned on the car and pushed buttons until I found the right combination to defog the windows. "I don't really want to go back the same way." I didn't add that I wanted to avoid potentially running into Sam. The image of him standing along the side of the road, all alone, had bothered my sleep.

I couldn't ever trust him, but I still realized that I felt guilt for leaving him like that. The sensation was uncomfortable and unexpected, and I just wanted to avoid it as much as possible.

"No idea. We're going to have to try to find a sign or something to tell us where we are." He looked around consideringly, "But the sun is coming up over there, so I'd say we need to go in this general direction." He gestured away from the brightest part of the sky.

It sounded like the best plan we had at the moment. We could travel in the general direction that we knew we needed to go, and eventually we would wind up running into something that would give us a more specific idea of where we were. Once we made our way back onto major roadways I was sure we could find our way back to the settlement without too much trouble.

The car bumped it's way back onto the pavement and we watched full dawn arrive as we wound our way through the small, unfamiliar roads. Stopping long enough to switch spots in the car, it was a relief to let my burning eyes drift closed and let someone else take control for a while. My head was throbbing and I leaned it lightly against the cool window hoping for some relief. I didn't even realize that I had fallen asleep until Shawn lightly bumping my shoulder woke me.

"What?" I choked out groggily and blinked to try to clear my blurry vision. When the world outside of the car came into focus I saw why he had woken me up.

The rain had stopped but the sky was still dull and threatening.  A mountain ridge that had earlier been in the distance was now looming just ahead of the car. A few abandoned vehicles were scattered along the side of the road which had changed from the dirty little backroad to a wide highway. Overgrown grass and weeds whipped in what must have been a strong wind, and were starting to encroach on the pavement. Dead ahead, two black tunnels had been carved straight into the mountain. 

Shawn slowed the car and let it drift to a stop a hundred yards from the entrance to the tunnels. We both stared into the darkness, trying to decipher what might be out of reach of the meager sunlight. It was no use. Just inside the entrance, blackness took over and made it impossible to see more than a few feet inside. 

"Are we going in there?" My voice might have shook a little. I'd never really liked the dark, and the idea of venturing inside of the mountain was not a pleasant one. 

"Unless we want to backtrack, yeah." Shawn told me without looking away from the entrance. "You've been asleep for a while. I think that I have us going in the right direction now." He paused and looked at the  dash in front of himself and frowned. "I don't really want to go back and try to find another way if we don't have to."

I leaned over and looked at the gauges in front of him. The gas tank was low enough now that we were probably not going to make it all of the way back before we ran out. 

"There has to be another way," I looked around as I said it, but I already knew that there wasn't a third option. The little car that we were in was not going to be able to go anywhere that there wasn't a road, and the only road in sight was the one that we were on. "Yeah, ok." I conceded. "Let's do it."

The car began to slowly roll forward. As we inched cautiously closer, Shawn flipped on the headlights. From inside the mouth of the tunnel, the car's lights reflected back to us off of more abandoned vehicles. The wide entrance into the mountain was nearly completely blocked, but the small car that we were in was able to squeeze through. The darkness enveloped us as we drove in.

Rex had picked up on the tension in the car and jumped up from where had had been dozing sprawled across the back seat. He almost smacked me in the face with his long snout as he suddenly shoved his face into the front of the car and looked out the front window. A low whine sounded as he looked ahead of us, and then bounced back into the back seat to stare out the back window that was cracked open.