The First 30 Days (PUBLISHED)

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.