The farmhouse was well kept and the lawn looked to have been mowed in the last three or four days. The place was locked up and the people were gone, there were no signs of a fight or zombies anywhere. Surrounded by trees at the edges of the wide cornfields they could not even see the town that was less than a mile away over a small part of the North Platte river. This was a good thing. The sun was going down and Tom checked the house before going to the rocks near one side of the sidewalk. He was looking around, and eventually spied something the others did not see. Bending over he picked up a rock and reached underneath it to grab a small black box which opened easily to reveal an ordinary key.
“C'mon!” Tom called to the others waving them up onto the large wrap-around porch, “We can get in now.”
“Geez Tom, how many people are there in your family?” asked Stewart.
“Five kids, all spread out. I am the youngest. No one lives here except my mom and dad.”
“I am surprised they kept the place, it is huge.”
“Well the fields are here. Plus it comes in handy during the holidays. My brothers are in Lincoln and Laramie, one of my sisters lives in town here and the other is in Cheyenne, this is kind of a central meeting place. My mom loves it when all the kids and grand kids show up. The place is crowded then and things were worse when we only had two bathrooms. My dad put in a third one in the basement, so now we have one on each floor.”
Stewart nodded, trying not to let her eyes glaze over from getting too much unasked for information, “Well that does sound better. So we should be able to sleep here then?”
“More than enough room, there are four bedrooms upstairs and the master bedroom on the main floor. I would rather we didn't sleep in my mom and dad's room. There are two sets of bunk beds in the basement too, with the rec-room., but they are not in a room of their own or anything.” Tom unlocked and swung open the front door, the power was still on, but the air inside was only marginally cooler than the July heat outside the house. “Whew, it is hot, maybe you guys will want to stay out here while I get the air conditioning going?”
“Sure.” said Max, “I will take the kids over to the tire swing. Amelia why don't you come with me as an extra set of eyes?” Amelia agreed, but only after she took the girls to the bathroom.
Max and the boys went over to the swing and took turns watering the lilac bush close by. Kenny and Seth didn't seem to have any rules against peeing outside and had even more fun on the swing. Cory even took a break from his video games to take a turn, then Kenny discovered that the swing could be wound up tight one way and would then unwind when someone got into it. All the boys had to take turns getting spun around, liberally assisted by Kenny. Max stood between the house and the boys, so he could watch them play and keep an eye on the distant tree line by the river. If any zombies showed up, he was certain they would come from that direction. The girls rushed by him yelling for a turn so fast that he brought his shotgun up before he knew it.
“Scared you huh?” came Amelia's voice behind him.
“Yeah. I am jumpy. Too many zombies in that town.”
“I know. I am afraid we are too close, they could get out here in less than an hour, just following us on the road.”
The drive through North Platte had been uneventful, but slow. There were wrecked vehicles everywhere. Not just crashed, but vehicles that had been shot up and blow over by explosives, the place was a war zone. The bodies were everywhere too. Stewart was going to try and get into the Walmart in town to scavenge some more video game players for the kids and when they turned into the parking lot the plans had to change. It looked like the military had set up a line of vehicles to fire from behind, there was a line of bodies stacked literally five feet high in front of the barricade, the line was a good four hundred feet long and probably forty wide. There were zombies there too, not a whole lot, but a few in military uniform along with a dozen or so more in civilian clothing or undressed. The zombies had reacted to their presence in a strange manner, they looked the humans over, then looked towards the east, then slowly shambled towards the cruiser and minivan. Stewart pulled into a strip mall across the access road from the big box store and Cory yelled out that there was a 'GameStop' there, where they could stop and get the video game players like he had. Max, not thinking, had stopped the van while Stewart continued through the strip mall parking lot and out the other side to go back to the main road.
The pause in the van's momentum had been enough of an incentive to the slow zombies to put on a burst of speed and before Max got his head on straight and started the van forward again the vehicle was surrounded. Mini vans are not made for plowing over human beings. With every gentle thump on the front bumper Max was afraid the air bags would go off. Amelia had looked grim, but kept her window rolled up and gotten on the radio to tell Stewart what had happened.
After running over a couple more zombies they made it to the street, which was still clear down to where Stewart was backing up the police cruiser. She stopped when she saw they had driven clear and then continued on forward, sparing a moment to tell Max not to keep stopping every time he saw something interesting.
The rest of the trip was a blur, they came across a few other areas where the military had made a stand, but none were as bad as the first. It did not look like the military guys had made a last stand, it looked like they had fought for as long as they could and then retreated, there were no military vehicles left around, nor were there many guns or other pieces of equipment laying about.
When they got to the edge of town there was no evidence that anything was wrong, if not for what they had seen earlier, it could have just been another day in a small city. Turning towards Tom's farm had been a relief for Max, he kept checking the rear view mirror, he felt like something was following them, but he never saw anyone behind them. Still his feelings when it came to zombies were something he trusted implicitly.
“We were followed.” he said suddenly.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I didn't see anyone, I can't 'sense' them there, but I know the feeling.”
“You are pretty good at knowing where they are these days. I was going to ask about that earlier, now it seems like a better time. Did you know they were there at the Walmart?”
“Kind of, but not really. There were a lot of zombies in small groups or alone in town, that makes it harder for me to feel where they are at. I guess whatever this is I've got isn't able to pin the things down specifically.”
“It is better than what I have. What do you think happened?”
“Here? I guess the military gave the zombies a fight, killed a bunch and pulled back with only a few losses of their own.”
“I figured that out, I meant with you. Why do you know where the zombies are now? Why does Stewart move so fast when she gets in a fight? Why did that happen?”
Max shrugged his shoulders and smiled when the two girls started laughing together as the tire swing spun around faster. “I don't know. My guess is killing them does it. I mean what else have I done differently over the last few days? So it is killing them or eating really crappy food. One of those two things.” he said alluding to their less than nutritious diet of the past week.
They heard someone walking on the porch behind them and turned to look up at Stewart. She peered down at them and said “We have power, food, water and plenty of room. They left their kids a note too, in case they came by. It said they were evacuated to Lincoln by the Nebraska National Guard, it was mandatory. Most of the men volunteered to be in a militia and support the military, but the women and children headed back east. They said they would be at his brother's house and to meet them there if they could. Tom tried the phone, it works, the land line, but when he dialed his brother's number a message came on that all lines were busy.”