After 30 Days

Thirty-Eight Day 58

"Bill is gone."

I shot to my feet before I was really awake, wobbling on unsteady legs in the predawn light. "Huh?" I asked as I tried to keep my balance while wiping at my blurry eyes. I hadn't been asleep for long, a couple of hours at most, and I was still out of it. 

"Bill is gone, " Shawn repeated, gesturing through the gloom in the direction of the fresh grave that we had just filled the day before. I couldn't really see to where we had buried Maya, but I squinted in that direction anyhow. "I went to check on him and he's not there. I've looked around. I can't find him anywhere."

Sam appeared next to us. "I didn't find him either," the guy said, looking around himself with a frown. 

"You didn't see him leave?" Shawn asked him.

"No. There hasn't been any movement out there at all. I thought that he was still sitting up there, you know... by the grave." 

Awake now, I felt the need to go see for myself. When I hurried off into the tall weeds, Rex jumped up from where he had been laying next to me while we slept, and jogged in ahead of me. The dog seemed to know where I was going, and led the way through the dark right to the flattened area around Maya's final resting place. 

I already knew what I was going to find before I got there, or rather, who I wasn't going to find. Abruptly, I felt silly for having to see for myself that Bill was no longer sitting by the grave.  Spinning around, I tried in vain to see our friend. 

"Where would he have gone?" I asked out loud. 

Down on the road, I could just make out three shapes moving around the area that we had camped. Standing there on that little hill, it struck me just how cold it had gotten over night. My clothes were so damp from the heavy dew that the cold was seeping through them and making me shiver. While I had been sleeping, with Rex on one side of me, and Shawn on the other, I hadn't noticed the temperature. But I was feeling it now. Rubbing my arms in an attempt to warm up, I followed the path that we had started to wear through the weeds back down to the road.

"It's cold," I said when I drew within earshot of the others again. "He can't have gone too far. Bill's stuff is still over there." I indicated where the bags that both he and Maya had been using were sitting on the side of the road. "Maybe he just needed some time alone?"

"Yeah, maybe," Shawn answered me, looking around himself with a frown on his face. 

There was no way that I was getting back to sleep even as tired as I was, so I went over to where we had been sleeping, gathering up  my things and stuffing them back into my bag. Pulling my dry shirt over top of the damp one helped with the shivers enough to keep me from feeling like hypothermia was about to set in, even if it wasn't the most comfortable solution. I didn't feel like stripping out of my wet clothes in front of two of the men who were present, and there wasn't any place to find privacy in the middle of the road, so it was the best that I was going to get.

I thought over the situation while I worked. Shawn and I had taken first watch, and we had checked on Bill before going to sleep. The man had still been sitting silently beside his wife's grave, ignoring everything around himself. Sam and Marcus had taken over then, and I'd already heard Sam say that he hadn't heard anything in the night. That had to be good news, right? If something had attacked Bill, surely someone would have heard the commotion. I glanced down at Rex. I was sure that the dog, at least, would have noticed. 

Deciding that Bill must have just gone for a walk, I wandered back over to the others. There wasn't much to say, and we stood around in uncomfortable silence as the sun slowly made it's presence known in the east. The vaguely ill feeling that had began in my gut only got worse as I tracked  the approach of morning. By the time that the fiery ball was full up in the sky, anxiety had me chewing on my dirty fingernails.