To the right of the screen door was one of those Wizard of Oz storm doors cutting into the ground and part of the house. The door was open.

I glanced down into the cellar. It was dark, but leading in and out of the darkness, on the stairs, were bloody footprints. It looked like this cellar had seen a lot of traffic since the outbreak. I tore some fabric from a sheet hanging in the yard and made myself a mask to keep the smoke from getting in my nose and mouth, and then I checked my shotgun and started down the stairs.

I paused briefly about a step and a half down. There was a sound in the air, a distant flutter. It was either someone heading this way, or the wind. I didn’t give a shit which.

I walked down the stairs to the cellar, pausing briefly on the last step while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Once adjusted I could see that the basement was little more than a dug-out hole, with cement walls and floor, used to store the water heater and air conditioning unit. Over time a considerable amount of other junk had been added, including bikes, old exercise equipment, and bundles of newspapers and magazines.

On the far side, away from the stairs, I saw the smoke. Above the smoke, light broke through the hole in the ceiling.

I moved forward and stopped immediately. I heard shuffling coming from behind a stack of papers blocking my view of the area. I knew that shuffling. Nothing sounds quite like a dead man walking, the unnatural dragging and stomping as one limb is pulled ahead to support the other.

I stood my ground as a zombie appeared around the corner, moving away from the area around the hole I’d yet to reach. He was a middle-aged man, bald, and wearing an apron from the local market. Smoke rose from his dead eyes as he stumbled through the darkness looking for a way out or something to eat.

He spotted me. I let him shamble toward me. From six feet away, I guessed I had thirty seconds to study him before he reached me. He was slower than slow. I looked at his eyes and saw the smoke swirling in and out of the space between eyeball and socket. It was as if the smoke caused both the death and the zombification. I’d never seen this. I was intrigued.

Unfortunately, baldy got too close, so I had to remove his cranium with the shotgun. His headless corpse fell within an inch of my shoe tips. The same green tinted smoke rose from the bloody stump of his neck.

I stepped over the body and, as I reloaded, moved fast to the area below the hole in the ceiling.