“See anything else?” Max asked a shivering Amelia. It was still warm out, however there was a slight breeze and that had cooled her off quickly.
She shook her head and said, “No. No other movement.”
“Nick you or Cory see anything?” the boys were also shivering and on the opposite corner from Amelia. The girls had gone to separate sides of the pool and shook their heads before Max asked them.
Cory answered, “No.” The same time as Nick and then both boys said, “Jinx!”, which set them off to laughing.
“Well then, get back to having fun!” The girl's smiles returned immediately and they dropped the clubs back by the pile of towels and jumped in with a quiet laugh.
Tom and Steward found them enjoying themselves like that a half hour later when they pulled in from town. Parking the van corner to corner with the patrol car. Stewart walked over while Tom loosened up a couple of gas cans off the top and started dumping the contents into the wrecker, which used diesel.
“That looks nice!” Stewart commented, eying the pool and the kids playing in it.
“Get your suit on and go in. I'll watch.” said Max.
“I bet you will! Looks like you've been watching Amelia already.” Max flushed and Stewart's voice softened, “Sorry Max, that was out of line. She is a looker though, no harm in that.”
“It's too soon Stewart.”
“Life goes on. No harm in looking.” she repeated.
“Get in, you lame-o, before it gets too dark.”
“You don't have to tell me twice, but I only will if you take a turn afterwards. You been downwind of yourself lately? Phew!” she said waving her hand in front of her face.
Tom came over as Stewart walking into the pool area behind Max's back, saying “Anyone not wanting to see a naked woman look the other way!”
Max stood still, looking at Tom, who was watching the pool area. “She isn't? Is she?”
“She is. The boys are going to have good dreams tonight. I know I will. A little tummy, but overall in good shape. You going in?” asked Tom. Behind Max he could hear the kids yelling and saying 'Ewwww!' followed by a splash in the pool.
“Not yet, not while Stewart is in the pool.”
“I'll take my turn then.” said Tom, sitting his rifle down against the fence, then dropping two pistols onto a chair, where he started tossing his clothing.
“Find anything in town?”
“Yeah, we did. You have any trouble here?” asked Tom.
“One slow zombie, nothing else. It is really quiet. What did you find?”
“A generator was running at the grocery store, we cleaned out the spam and we got hot dogs and steak to cook up. The dry ice freezer was still good so we filled the back seat with Styrofoam coolers, meat and dry ice. We'll eat good tonight.”
“Steaks? Any bread?”
“Prime cut steaks, corn fed Iowa beef. No bread, sorry, all of the good stuff was gone, we found the meat in back in the deep freeze, the display cases were empty. We did find a pallet of crackers in the back though, brought a couple of boxes.”
“I could kiss you Tom!” said Max.
“Maybe later, I'd rather kiss Stewart or Amelia though, no offense.” Tom finished undressing throwing his underwear on top of the pile.
“None taken. Go clean up. Amelia brought over soap, not sure where it got to, I know the kids didn't use it.”
Tom slipped into the pool without the fan fare of Stewart, after about half an hour, right as the sun was setting Tom got out and took over watching. Max undressed self consciously, trying to decide whether or not to go the full monty, when Stewart yelled at him to quit being a chicken and get in the pool before it was too dark to see. With a quick gesture he disrobed and dove into the water. Once in the safety of the pool being nude wasn't a big deal at all, Stewart kept to the deep end, up to her neck in water, which made Max feel more comfortable. Max did seek out the soap and soon had a lather built up as he cleaned himself off. Amelia sent the boys over to him and he supervised as they scrubbed off. Stewart and Amelia then handled the girls at the opposite corner and soon all seven of them were ready to get out of the pool.
As a general rule the group did not travel at night and tried to stop around an hour or two before sunset to find a place to sleep. It was not as if the zombies were more active at night, only that it was harder to deal with them then, the darkness did not seem to cause the beasts any problem and the living still could not see that well. So by full dark they were all behind the protective barricade in front of the motel room doors. They kept the coolers in the van for now, by consensus they would sort out where to stow the stuff in the morning. The steaks they brought were half thawed and the kids were okay with eating hot dogs instead of spam, even if there were no buns and only crackers to go with them. They did have ketchup and mustard and everyone had their favorite drink to go along with it.
“Do you think there was anyone alive in town?” asked Max.
“No, it looked like it was evacuated. People left in a hurry, but there weren't many bodies lying around.” said Stewart.
Bodies meant zombies who had been killed. A human killed by zombies got up and started eating others. The abandoned towns were something they started coming across this afternoon. Before they had come across plenty of evidence of fighting; burned buildings, corpses of the dead again, blood everywhere, shell casings. Today had been different, it was like there was a concentrated effort to removed the population before the zombies arrived. And arrived they had. Whenever Max and his group stopped there were tracks of thousands of people who had walked around on the shoulders of the road, all heading north east into Nebraska along highway seventy six. The mob of zombies seemed to be well ahead of them, Max was very worried about catching up to them. Sometimes he thought about just sitting tight in one of the small towns along the way, they were behind the zombie horde after all, so they should be safe. This town, for instance seemed like the best bet so far, few zombies, no people, a grocery store with a generator that was working and some food left in it.
“Any zombies?” Max asked.
“A few, none in the grocery store, where we heard the generator. But we had to put down three when we got the gas. Oh, we filled the generator too. It was almost empty. How long do you think it could run on a tank of gas Tom?” Stewart asked.
“I looked it over, it depends on the draw of electricity from what the instructions on the side said, with the highest demand it would last two days, if the tank were filled. With a low draw it could go four, maybe five days. There were a lot of freezers on that line, so I would says it's been closer to two days than four. And it has a manual switch too. Someone had to turn the freezers over to the generator, it didn't happen automatically.”
“We unplugged all the front freezers too, just left the deep freezes on. The engine idled down substantially after we did that. I think we should run by there tomorrow, let the kids stock up on food and drinks and refill the tanks before we go.” said Stewart.
“Yeah, we could use all the good karma we could get.” said Max.
“What's 'Karma'?” asked Jessica.
“It's kind of like luck.” answered Amelia before Max could, “It means that when you do good things for other people, good things will happen to you. And if you do bad things, eventually bad things will happen to you.”
The girl got real quiet for awhile, then said, “We must have all done something really bad then, huh?”
“Oh I don't know, we are still alive, right?” said Amelia.
Chapter 6
Bill was ecstatic, he had reached the solar company and found out his array had reached the trucking hub in
