The First 30 Days: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

by Powell, Lora

  I grimaced down at Shawn and Carrie as I stepped onto the front porch. The three of us paused to look around before knocking on the door. Each of them was going to look in nearby windows. I tapped my knuckles lightly against the peeling paint of the door when they nodded at me, indicating that they were ready.

  Almost immediately, a crash sounded from within.

  “No good.” Carrie backed away from her window. “There’s one in there.”

  A face streaked with crusty blood pressed up against the window where she had just been standing. The zombie inside hissed and banged its forehead against the glass.

  “Let’s try the next one.”

  We followed Shawn to the next house over and repeated the process. This time, there was no activity stirred inside by my knock. The owners of this home hadn’t left a convenient spare key hidden by their door, so Carrie used a rock from their landscaping to break the window in the door. I flinched at the sound of glass hitting the floor inside, but there were still no alarming noises telling us to run. After carefully reaching inside to unlock the door, we finally were able to step inside.

  The house was much smaller than the one that we were using for our hideout. It took almost no time for us to decide that the house was empty.

  The single small bathroom didn’t yield the results we were hoping for, though I did scoop up a half of a bottle of prescription pain killers I found hidden behind a jar of Vaseline. I had no doubt that they would come in handy at some point, hopefully not anytime in the near future.

  Wandering back to the kitchen, I found Shawn had just finished dumping the contents of a cupboard into the duffel bag he’d brought along. We had agreed that, while searching for the medicine, we would also take any food we came across. It didn’t make sense not to.

  Carrie walked into the kitchen from where she had been looking through the bedrooms. “I found a pack of batteries that are the right size for our flashlights. There’s nothing else back there.”

  “I took all of the nonperishables. There wasn’t much.” Shawn zipped up the duffel. They both looked my way.

  I held up the bottle I’d taken. “They aren’t antibiotics, but these could come in handy.”

  “Good. Let’s keep moving.”

  The next house had its front door standing wide open, and we approached it with extra caution. After looking into windows and banging on the doorframe, Carrie decided it was safe to go in. In the upstairs bathroom, we finally found what we had been looking for. I held the bottle up triumphantly, and two answering grins bloomed on the dirty faces looking back at me.

  Slinging the backpack onto my back, I felt lighter than I’d been in a very long time as we descended the stairs and headed back toward the front door. Behind me, the other two were talking animatedly about the things that we had picked up while searching the houses. At the front door, I glanced through the window to check for zombies. It was all clear, so I swung the door open and stepped outside.

  But then suddenly, the tall hedges that ran between this house and the next rustled. I had just enough time to turn to the left before a zombie launched itself from their green depths and crashed into me with all of its weight.

  I shrieked as I went down hard with the zombie snarling on top of me. Its strength was alarming as it gripped onto my shoulders and brought its gaping mouth closer to me.

  Time slowed down. I recognized Shawn and Carrie yelling from somewhere out of my field of view. Using both hands to try to hold the creature back, I knew already that that was a battle I was going to lose. The zombie’s rancid breath blew across my face as its teeth gnashed and drool splattered across my chin.

  With a final pull, the zombie managed to yank my upper body close enough to bite when without warning, pain exploded in my shoulder.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  DAY 18

  Wide-eyed with horror, I looked down to where the zombie had sunk its teeth into my shoulder. Shaking its head like a dog trying to kill something within its jaws, the zombie reared back. The strap of my backpack pulled forward, pinched tightly in its teeth.

  Chomping down hard on the padded nylon, the creature focused its red eyes on my face and growled. Hyperventilating, I shoved it back with all of the strength I could muster.

  A hand clutching the knife that I dropped appeared from behind me and stabbed the zombie in the eye. It instantly went limp. I lurched to my feet, frantically kicking out from under its dead weight. A set of hands spun me around, and I was met with worried grey eyes. Muttering his most colorful expletives yet, Shawn pulled at the neck of my shirt to reveal the bite.

  Dazed, I looked down.

  An angry looking bruise was already growing where the zombie’s teeth had given me a nasty pinch, but there was no blood. Incredulous, Shawn grabbed the backpack strap and looked at the rips bitten into the tough fabric.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Is she bitten?” Carrie appeared next to Shawn and looked at what we were both staring. She started to laugh. “You have got to be the only person alive to be saved from a zombie by a backpack.”

  I must have been going into shock because I failed to see the humor in the situation. At least I still had enough sense to realize that my mouth was hanging open and so I shut it.

  I wasn’t the only one to fail to think it was funny. “We should get back to the others.” Shawn glared at Carrie over his shoulder as he turned me to go back.

  The walk back took less than a minute, and I felt like I was trying to move underwater. Everything seemed sluggish and a bit fuzzy around the edges. Maya had been watching for us, and she knew that something wasn’t right as soon as she opened the door. Her voice sounded like it was far away.

  “What happened?”

  “Bri had a really close call.” Shawn pulled out a kitchen chair and sat me down in it.

  “Is she ok?”

  That was genuine worry I heard in Maya’s voice, and it brought a bit of reality back to me.

  I had nearly been bitten by a zombie. The strap of my backpack was the only reason I was not going to become one of them. That was way too close.

  “She’s fine, just bruised.” Carrie huffed as she shouldered her way through the door carrying two overloaded bags: hers and the duffel that I just now realized Shawn must have abandoned three houses over.

  My arms felt chilly. I began rubbing my hands over them to try to warm up, but the heavy backpack that I still wore hindered my movements. Shrugging out of it, I fingered the bite mark.

  The rest of our group filtered into the room, and before long, everyone seemed to be talking at once. They wanted to know what had happened, and I couldn’t really blame them. But the conversation went around me as if I was insulated from anything beyond the torn nylon that was still in my fingers.

  A ragged stuffed monkey dropped into my lap.

  Rex stood with his nose nearly touching my knee, brown eyes intently watching my face. Reaching out slowly, I rested my free hand on top of his neck.

  When a blanket draped around my shoulders, I looked up. Releasing my grip on the strap, I grabbed Shawn’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Thank you.”

  ***

  I had decided to make a conscious effort to not be mad at Carrie. We had all been through unspeakable horrors. We weren’t all going to react the same way to every situation that arose. I knew that she hadn’t been laughing about me nearly getting bitten. Not really. The stress of the situation was enough to make any of us have odd reactions.

  After she had risked her own safety to look for the medicine that Devon needed, I knew that she was a good person. But I was still having a hard time being in the same room with her. This was my issue, and I was going to have to work it out, but it was going to take longer than one afternoon.

  “I think that we should stay here for the night. We can reevaluate in the morning.” Bill looked around to see if we all agreed.

  No one objected, so I jumped up off of the couch. It was my turn to keep w
atch, giving me a plausible excuse for a hasty exit.

  Roaming the house slowly, stopping to watch out of every window for a minute or two, took my mind off of the ache in my shoulder. When the fog of shock had finally cleared from my mind, I’d discovered that I must have banged my head when I hit the ground. There was a sore spot on my skull and a dull throbbing headache as proof.

  Following behind me was Rex, carrying his toy. He hadn’t let me out of his sight since we got back. Every time I stopped, he would drop his toy at my feet and sit. I started to pet his head lightly while looking out the window, and I quickly found the gesture quite therapeutic.

  It was when I was looking out of the window in the upstairs hallway when Shawn found me a little later into my watch. He didn’t say anything, just leaned up against the wall to wait with me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say exactly, so I kept quiet.

  Shawn, Rex, and I made our way around the house like that for several hours. By the end of my shift, I had realized something that, up until then, hadn’t occurred to me. The world may have effectively come to an end. Civilization had been thrust back hundreds of years and appeared to be tottering on the brink of complete extinction, but, for the first time in a very long time, I was not alone.

  Later on, when I was sufficiently exhausted that I thought I may be able to actually get some sleep, I dragged my feet back to the bedroom that I had used the night before. But when I cracked open the door, I found Fallon already asleep there. Closing the door, I tried the next room. Maya and Bill were there, and I shut the door quickly, feeling like I’d intruded. The couple seemed to never get any time to themselves, with so many of us all forced together like we were.

  I knew the last bedroom was probably already occupied. Carrie was on watch, and I’d passed Devon asleep on the couch in the living room. That only left one person who I hadn’t already run across in my search for a place to sleep.

  Hesitating in the hall, I thought about finding someplace else to curl up for the night, but that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I took a deep breath and lightly tapped my knuckles on the door frame.

  “Yeah?” Shawn’s voice was groggy.

  “Um, I don’t really want to sleep alone, so…” I trailed off. I was already feeling like some sort of idiot for even suggesting that we share a room. I was glad for the darkness to cover the burn I felt spreading across my cheeks.

  I then heard covers rustled in the room. “Come here.”

  Crossing to the bed before I could talk myself out of doing it, I climbed under the covers that he was holding up for me. His arms wound around me, pulling me back to rest against his front, and I felt his nose rest lightly against the back of my head.

  After a tense few seconds, I felt myself relax and before long, I was drifting into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  DAY 20

  When morning came, we were all preparing to leave our temporary shelter. When I carried the last of our bags into the garage, Bill and Shawn were already there, trying to figure out the logistics of fitting seven people, a dog, and the small mountain of supplies we had gathered into one van.

  We had rested long enough that everyone felt like they had at least some of their strength back. Devon’s leg wasn’t really any better, but at least it wasn’t worse, and we knew that we were out of options for trying to treat him here. It was time to move on.

  We were hoping to find a settlement of some sort. There had to be one out there somewhere. It seemed impossible that the only people left alive would be us, a small group that was barely hanging on by the tips of their fingers. There had to be people out there who were doing better. Maybe they would even have a real doctor, not a girl with limited first aid training and a few years spent observing the veterinarians in an animal clinic.

  “Good riddance to this place.” Maya walked into the garage with Devon limping along behind her. She had never gotten rid of her dislike for the creepy little town, not that any of us blamed her. Something about it was just off.

  In the end, the two largest members of our group took the seats up front. Fallon and I sat in the middle, with Rex taking up most of our floor space, even too thin the dog was big. Carrie, Maya, and Devon squished into the back seat. The hatch had barely closed on all of the stuff that we had shoved back there. I was really glad that we had found the keys to the van in the kitchen, instead of having to try to carry all of the heavy bags ourselves.

  We may have gone a little overboard with packing, but as far as we knew, we would be living out of the van for the foreseeable future. To that end, we had gathered jugs of water, all of the canned or boxed food for a several house radius, and a few comfort items such as blankets and hair brushes. We’d even made room for a giant-sized bag of dog kibble. Leaving Rex behind wasn’t really an option for any of us.

  The sound of the garage door opening must have drawn the zombies. There weren’t many of them here, whoever had gone on a spree with a gun had seen to that, but there were a few. Three of them, shuffling along and rotting to the point that strips of their flesh were peeling, met the van as Bill drove it out of the driveway. They offered no real threat to us. The doors were all locked and the windows rolled up, but I still flinched when one of them banged on the window by my face. For a second, I thought I felt the stinking, hot breath of the zombie, even though I knew that that was impossible. I rubbed my shoulder in reflex.

  Low growling from my feet pulled me back from my thoughts. Rex had climbed to his feet and was watching the zombie alertly, the hint of sound rumbling from his chest.

  “It’s ok, boy.” I patted his back in an effort to keep him quiet. That was going to be the only drawback to having a dog. We’d already talked about it. Sometimes dogs made noise, but a noise made at the wrong time could get us all killed. Rex was going to have to learn to be quiet when there was a threat nearby.

  The plan was simple. South seemed like the most likely option for finding a settled group. With no electricity, the north would be a harsh place to try to survive in the winter. If anyone was going to manage to eke out a living in this new world, it would be in the south. A road map found in the glove box had provided our route. We would go back the way we had come, get on the highway, and just keep driving.

  It may have taken us days to walk the distance between the camp and the town, but in what felt like the blink of an eye, I saw the turnoff for the camp up ahead. As we drove by, I craned my neck to try to get a view of the place that, for a short time, I had thought would be home.

  That wooden bridge that I hated flashed by. The brief view I had of it told me that we had made the right choice when we ran. Several zombies ambled across its surface. Their heads snapped in our direction, and I was sure they gave chase, but the trees stole my view.

  We were nearly back to the town just off of the highway when I noticed the thick black smoke trailing high into the sky. I saw the others looking at it too, but no one said anything. I had a feeling we would find out soon enough what was causing it.

  The last time I’d been in the other town, Shawn and I had been searching for supplies to make drinking water. It seemed like much longer than it had actually been since we’d saved Fallon and got the heck out of there. The town looked startlingly different than I remembered it.

  Windows in nearly every building had been broken, doors stood hanging open. There was a car abandoned by the fuel pumps that hadn’t been there earlier. And we found the source of the smoke. The row of trailers that were closest to the main road was all on fire.

  A crowd of zombies milled around the burning homes, some getting too close, their tattered clothing catching on fire.

  I looked behind me to check on Devon. This was his hometown that had been reduced to chaos. He stared out the window with a frown on his face but didn’t comment.

  We glided back up the on-ramp, and the miles passed quickly beneath the tires of our confiscated van. Devon and Fallon talked quietly back and forth, but the rest of us di
dn’t really have much to say. The journey ahead would be dangerous, and with no set destination in mind, or even a guarantee that we would find what we were looking for, everyone was troubled.

  The highways were still as silent and empty as they had been when Shawn and I first drove them together. The grass along the side of the road was a little taller, the abandoned vehicles dirtier, but the view was more or less the same.

  The decision had been made before we pulled out of the garage: we would try to siphon gas from abandoned cars along the way, instead of trying to get gas at a gas station. It seemed safer to avoid towns that we had no intention of stopping at anyhow, and Maya’s group had worked out a system when they were on the road before.

  We had been driving for a couple of hours when Bill announced that we needed to start looking for a likely place to stop. The first car that appeared ahead of us was stopped unceremoniously in the middle of the road. Three of the four doors, and the trunk, all stood open. Bill didn’t slow down, just swerved around the car and kept going.

  I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t stopped. He was the one who had just said we needed gas. Shawn must have been confused too because he looked curiously over at Bill.

  Bill saw the look. “That one was probably empty. We’ve found out that cars that are left the way that one was were left like that for a reason. We need a car that looks like it was purposefully parked. Like the driver intended to come back for it.”

  Barely a mile up the road, we found what he had been talking about. A beat up looking pickup truck and an SUV were pulled into the grass along the side of the road. Next to the vehicles, a makeshift camp had been set up. But it was obvious that whoever had been there wasn’t coming back.