The Sundown Kid stuck out a boot, intending to nudge the alien with his toe, but thought better of it and put his foot back down. Instead he just looked with the others for a moment. He wondered how they felt when they looked at this, but he didn't ask.

God, what a sorry way to die. On a world as pretty as this there was no point in someone ending up in this sorry state, and if that scan was right they might be looking at four more just like this. There was probably all sorts of fancy science he couldn't even begin to understand they could do on the ship, learn what these mushrooms were and how they got on this poor whatever this person was. That was all beyond him though. He came from a simpler time, so he decided to do something simple and leave the fancy stuff to smarter men. "This place have a basement?" he said, walking over the the window and staring out over the nostalgic waves of corn. "If not, I reckon we'll find the rest of 'em out there."

Despite his calm demeanor the cowboy's hand was resting on the butt of his gun. Maybe it was just the eerie atmosphere of the house, but the cowboy had seen too much strangeness in his life to believe that nothing was there just because you couldn't find it. This could just be a sudden sickness that wiped them out, that was true, but if the rest of the family weren't here with this one it meant they'd fled before dying. You didn't leave family behind without good reason.