The First 30 Days: A Zombie Novel

by Lora Powell

  Shrieking, I watched as the zombie flung herself back around. Toward the leg that Shawn had managed to grab, stopping her lunge to kill me.

  He had had to drop the bat and use both hands to grip her foot. Now, sprawled across the dirt on his stomach, he was in an even worse position than before, completely unable to defend himself in any way.

  Still hanging onto her limb, he managed to make it awkward for her to swing around and attack him. That split second, when they grappled for control on the ground, was all I needed. Adrenaline surging, I stopped my backward momentum and flung myself forward. This was it. If we didn't manage to kill this zombie right now, I knew deep in my bones that at least one of us would not be escaping this confrontation still alive.

  Raising the knife again, I plunged it with all of my strength down toward her filthy head. This time, the blade bit into the bone. The knife sunk into her skull, and the zombie fell instantly limp.

  Kicking away from the body frantically, Shawn scrambled backwards before managing to pull himself to his feet shakily. "Holy shit," he gasped as he leaned over, bracing his hands on his knees.

  "Are you ok?" I circled the body warily, afraid that it would somehow come back to life and come for me as soon as my back was turned.

  Standing up straight again, Shawn began searching his arms for any evidence of a bite. His shirt was torn at the neck, and dots of the blood that I had spilled with my first knife strike flecked the material. Grass stains covered his jeans and his hair stuck up wildly in all directions. He was paler than I'd seen him yet. But thankfully, neither of us found any evidence of her teeth having made contact with his skin.

  "I think I'm ok," he sounded understandably relieved as he patted his hands across his own face.

  I felt my shoulders sag at the words. I had no idea how we had managed to escape this time without any bites, but I was thankful.

  Turning, I looked at the zombie. She had been middle aged. A t-shirt baring the camp logo twisted around her shoulders. She couldn't have been dead more than a couple of days judging by the lack of decomposition that I had noticed yesterday while we drove through the masses of zombies in the city. "I guess now we know that there was someone here." We had been wondering since we arrived the day before if there had been anyone else hiding here. Now we knew. I wondered if there had been more than this one woman.

  "Thank you."

  The quiet words made me look to my side, where Shawn was still standing, staring at the zombie with an unfathomable look on his face.

  Finally breaking his stare, he turned in my direction, his eyes meeting mine.

  But those eyes weren't what drew my attention. Instead, I felt my gaze pulled toward where the rip in his shirt had shifted, giving me a glimpse of a trio of deep scratches that had been gouged into his shoulder.

  TWENTY-DAY 9

  The stricken look on my face must have been enough to tell Shawn that something was very wrong.

  "What?" He glanced over his shoulder, looked back to me, before finally realizing that I was looking at him, not past him. He looked down.

  Reaching to pull his shirt further out of the way, the little bit of color that had started to return to his face faded out again. I moved closer, but stopped just short of being able to reach out and touch him. "Are they new?" My voice shook a little.

  He didn't answer me, just continued to look at the lines scratched into his skin. But I didn't need an answer, anyhow. Tiny beads of blood welled to the surface of the scratches. They were fresh.

  "Um, it's not a bite, so everything's going to be ok. Right?"

  "I don't know." His reply was so quiet that I had to strain my ears to hear him, even in the near silence of the trees. "The news said that bites are contagious, but I can't remember hearing anything about scratches."

  Suddenly frantic to do something, anything to help, I reached out and grabbed him by the hand. Turning around, I hauled him back the way we had come, pausing long enough to yank my knife from where it was still lodged in the zombie's skull. "Come on. We need to get that cleaned up."

  I kept a firm grip on his hand as we wound our way through the trees, back toward the big building. We had left the door closed but unlocked. Shoving it opened violently, I kicked it closed just as violently and continued to pull my companion behind me. We stormed through the office and into the dark nurse's room. "Sit," I ordered, releasing the hand that I had doggedly been hanging on to. The squeaky material of the couch alerted me to the fact that he had listened to me. Not looking back, I was on a mission, I went to the closet where I had found the blanket the night before.

  Inside, clear plastic bins held all of the basic first aid supplies that a nurse for a kid's camp was bound to need. Looking into the bins, I selected peroxide, antibacterial ointment, and the largest sized band aid on offering. Snatching a clean looking white towel from a pile, I took my arm load to the couch and dropped it next to Shawn. "Take this off," I gestured to his shirt. The movement brought my own hands into view, reminding me that they were covered in dirt and zombie blood.

  Turning back to the closet, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves. We had no water for me to use to wash the filth off. Covering my hands with the gloves was going to have to do.

  When I turned back around, Shawn's shirt was off. Under any other circumstances, I would have instantly become a nervous, babbling mess. I had not been wrong in my earlier assessment that the guy spent some serious amount of time in the gym. But right now I had tunnel vision, my eyes skipping over all of the good parts to land on the scratches that marred his skin.

  I used most of the bottle of peroxide, insisting on applying it over and over, hoping that any possible infection would be carried away by the bubbles. A generous layer of the antibiotic ointment and one really large band aid later, I was out of things that I could do to try to fix the situation. Sitting still for the first time since starting my mission to clean those scratches gave me time for it to finally sink in. Both of us hadn't escaped our encounter with camp counselor zombie 100% ok.

  I felt the familiar burning behind my eyes that told me that I was too close to crying for comfort. Pushing off of where I had been sitting next to Shawn, I walked quietly out of the room. I stopped when I reached the door leading outside, well aware that going out there alone wasn't the best choice, even if I was desperately in need of a few minutes of privacy. Leaning dejectedly against the wall, I looked up in an effort to get myself back under control.

  At some point, I slid down the wall to sit on the hard floor, my back resting against the wall still. Inside those latex gloves, my hands had sweated profusely. When I pulled the first one off with a snap, I found that the mud and blood coating it had mixed together inside the wet glove. I wiped the mucky mess off the best I could onto my jeans, repeating with the other hand. The idea of having the zombie's blood all over me was making me sick to my stomach.

  Footsteps approached as I was concentrating on wiping away as much of the gore from my second hand as possible. I heard a sigh, and then the slide of material along the wall next to me. Looking up, I found Shawn, torn shirt back on, sitting in nearly an identical position to my own. He had slid down the wall just on the other side of the door.

  I watched him as he contemplated the floor for a while. As the minutes ticked by, I found that I couldn't keep quiet any more. "We don't know that anything bad is going to happen."

  My voice sounded naively hopeful even to my own ears.

  He finally turned his head my way, "No. We don't know anything for sure yet."

  We lapsed into silence again for a while, both of us lost in our own desperate thoughts.

  When Shawn spoke, enough time had passed that it startled me. "Have you seen it happen?"

  I knew instantly what he meant. He wanted to know if I had watched anyone die from the infection before. I cleared the sudden lump in my throat as I thought about my dead friend. "Yeah."

  He was quiet for a moment, and then, "I haven't."

  I l
ooked over in surprise. Wondering how anyone still alive at this point had managed to not see anyone be killed by that horrible virus, or whatever it was.

  "I don't really have any family, or anything like that." He shrugged. "I heard the news reports the first day, but I didn't see any of it personally. I thought they must have been blowing the whole thing way out of proportion. I mean, who would believe this if they didn't see it? I decided to go to the gym late that night. There wasn't anyone around. When I went to leave, a zombie was waiting at the front door for me. He scared the crap out of me and I decided to go back upstairs and wait for him to go away. Obviously, I never made it out of the building until you and I went to the roof." He lapsed into another silence while I digested what he had just told me. Looking back to the floor, he mumbled, "What's it like?"

  That lump in my throat was back in full force. Sliding sideways, I didn't stop until my shoulder rested lightly against his. "It shouldn't be long. If you're going to get sick, we'll know."

  TWENTY-ONE-DAY 9-10

  Thirst was what finally drove me from my position on the floor. The light coming in from outside, already weakened by the thick trees, had started to grow dimmer. We had spent hours sitting there, waiting.

  "How does it feel?" I gestured towards Shawn's shoulder.

  He hadn't said anything since asking me about death by the virus. Raising a hand, he gingerly touched over the bandage. "I don't know. I mean, it feels ok. A little sore."

  A tiny bit of hope bloomed in my chest. It had been hours since he was scratched. Maybe you couldn't contract the virus that way. "That's gotta be good."

  I had had plenty of time to think during those days I spent trapped in my own bathroom and then later in the office. Evie had not been bitten. I was sure of it. She would have mentioned it to me if something as noteworthy as being bitten by another person had happened to her. That meant that she had become ill some other way. And the only thing I had been able to come up with, after sleepless nights spent wracking my brain, was that Flu shot.

  I knew that Evie had gotten the shot over her lunch break. Early that evening, she had seemed perfectly fine. But not long after, she had become obviously sick. I figured that it couldn't have been more than eight hours from the time she got that shot, until Austin had half carried her stumbling form back into our apartment.

  It made sense. How else had so many people all fallen ill at the exact same time? They had to have all been exposed at about the same time, but without a bite. The long lines of people waiting for their Flu shot that day at the grocery store, haunted me. Had all of those people been somehow infected by the thing that was supposed to protect them?

  Stiff from the hard floor, I stretched, feeling the crack of my spine as it shifted. Feeling a tiny bit better, but still more thirsty than I remembered ever being in my life, I looked down to where Shawn still sat on the floor. "I'm going to see if I can find anything to drink."

  Nodding, he climbed to his feet. We had already searched the entire building and not found any water, but that didn't stop me from looking again. I just couldn't fathom how there could possibly be nothing drinkable anywhere. Especially in a building that was obviously designed to feed large amounts of people. By the time I had finished my latest search of the kitchen, disbelief had morphed into worry. We had already gone almost an entire day without water. We were going to have to find some really soon, or face dire consequences.

  Back in the office that we had claimed as our new home, I picked up an empty plastic bottle and twirled it in my hands as I tried to come up with an idea. We had crossed a small stream on our way in, but even I knew that you couldn't just drink water from outside. The risk of catching something was too high. The last thing we needed was to get sick. Going to a hospital wasn't really an option any more.

  "Um..." Shawn had been following me around as I searched. I found him staring at the bottle in my hands now. "Out in the jeep, I know I left at least a few bottles there that I didn't drink all of."

  My initial reaction was to recoil from the suggestion. I mean, sharing a drink with someone was kind of gross. But feeling like someone had stuffed a bone dry, dirty sock into my mouth had me reconsidering in a hurry. Water from a half used bottle had to better than water from a stream, and at this point, those were our only two options. And I clearly remembered that there were several half full bottles of water in the jeep. They had sloshed and rolled around my feet during yesterday's drive.

  Thank goodness he kept his car a mess.

  "Ok."

  The attack, from out of nowhere, earlier that day had left the camp tainted with the feeling of impending doom. The lack of light didn't help. Stepping back outside had my nerves jangling, afraid that at any second another zombie would come bursting around a corner. Luckily, nothing of the sort happened. I stood watch as Shawn rooted around in his car. When he finally stood back up, arms loaded with his find, we beat a hasty retreat back inside the building. Apparently, I wasn't the only one feeling the strain of being exposed.

  Back inside our office, we spread the found water out on the desk. In all, he had come up with seven bottles in varying stages of being consumed. I eyed the water, eager to get my hands on a bottle. I knew I couldn't be the only one that needed it badly. But both of us showed some restraint. We had already began to learn the value of rationing in this new world.

  "How should we do this?"

  I thought about my answer for a second. "Let's combine them so we know exactly how much is there." We worked together and in the end, came up with just under three full bottles of water. "Why don't we each take one bottle for today, and in the morning we will divide the last bottle. It will give us something for then, until we can figure out our next move."

  I didn't have to read his mind to know what he was thinking. Shawn didn't think that he would still be alive in the morning. But neither of us said anything about it.

  "Ok." He echoed my earlier answer and handed me a bottle. Logically, I knew that I needed to take it easy. That one bottle was going to be it for me until the morning. But, at that point, I was so thirsty. It only took a few swallows before my bottle was more than half empty. Screwing the cap back on with a resigned sigh, I set the water back on the desk. At least now my mouth didn't feel like the Sahara.

  The rest of the day was spent waiting. As time crawled by, I alternated between pacing and sitting stiffly in the uncomfortable office chair. My gaze inevitably always ended up back on my companion, watching for any sign of the virus. As the sun descended, leaving us surrounded by the darkness, my eyes started to get heavy. But I couldn't risk going to sleep. What if Shawn got sick while I was unconscious?

  Despite my worst fears, he didn't seem like he was ill. The strain of the day showed in the shadows under his eyes. Never a big talker, he was even quieter than usual, mostly spending his time watching out that window that was too high for me to see from. Occasionally, he would rotate his injured shoulder, as if trying to work out muscle stiffness.

  But there was no fever. I was positive that by now, anyone who had gotten the vaccine would have been terribly sick. Every so often, I made him let me take his temperature with a thermometer I found in the nurse's closet. It remained steadily under 100 degrees. Maybe slightly elevated, but by no means anywhere near as high as the temperatures that had ravaged Evie's body that first night.

  It was the longest night of my life, sitting in the dark with nothing to do but wait. Even worse than my first night spent huddled in my bathtub, covered in blood and listening to the world go crazy all around me. Then, I hadn't truly grasped just what was going on. Now I did. I knew that odds were that there was only one person left alive in the world that I knew, and waiting for that person to either live or die, and being completely helpless to do anything to save him, was a nightmare.

  When the first chirping from birds drew my notice to the lightening color of the sky, I almost couldn't believe it. It was morning.

  TWENTY-TWO- DAY 10

  I a
lmost 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."