There was a person there on the ground beneath the hole, an old woman with a white beehive hairdo. I saw now what had come through the house. It was a small glowing hunk of space rock; a meteor, I guessed. It was embedded in the woman’s chest, and from the looks of her twisted limbs it had hit her in the bedroom and dragged her clear down to the cellar. She wasn’t dead, but she should’ve been.

Though most of her old bones appeared shattered from the impact and fall, they still moved. Especially her head. It bobbed and writhed on mutated muscle and flesh. Her eyes were wide and green as fresh-cut grass. Her mouth, gummy with clear slime, opened and closed like a hungry baby bird. She was fucking disgusting.

I kept my distance. I was reasonably sure this was where the outbreak began, but now I had a hunch there was more to it. Somehow the old lady drew living people to her and sent them away as flesh-eating zombies. And that rock melted into her guts had something to do with it, but how or why was anybody’s guess.

So I decided to ask.

“You have two seconds to explain yourself,” I said, “before I commence blowing your head all over the room.”

The beehive bobbed and rolled. The neck was broken, but somebody forgot to tell the head.

After a second or two of drooling and slobbering (the old lady, not me), I lowered the shotgun at her head. There wasn’t going to be any explaining. The thing on the ground was just a freak of nature, a radioactive, zombie-making, freak of nature.

Then . . .

“Wait . . .” the thing said. Its voice was garbled, slimy.

I kept the barrel on the head. “Speak.”

“We . . . have . . . come . . . a . . . long . . . way.” The thing spoke as its eyes rolled and smoke puffed from its mouth like a sickly tugboat.

The thing went on to explain, in a voice that sounded like a speaker drowned in a barrel of snot, that they were a race from somewhere and a terrible disease took over their planet, or some such shit, and here they were.

“Spreading the disease on our planet,” I said. “Thanks a ton, asshole.”

The beehive bobbled and garbled. If it was an apology, I didn’t like it.

“So, where is this planet of yours?” I asked.

The arm of the spattered old lady rose out of the slime and rot like the limb of a mantis, and then dropped onto the meteor embedded in her gut. “Home . . . is here.”

Wow. I stared at the writhing body and the rock, the planet in her gut. What an unbelievable turn of events; an entire planet falling to Earth, hardly the size of a basketball. I’d seen some pretty amazing stuff in my time, but this took the cake. Absolutely astounding.

I almost felt bad when I blew its head all over the cellar.