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mutated again, or was the original virus still infecting people in this area?
    Stubs peered into the hallway from around the corner. I looked back at him and shrugged. "How do you feel about hanging here to see if our friend down there pops?"
    Stubs stared at me blankly as if to prove the point that he was just a dog and had no idea what I was trying to ask him.
    "Okay." I nodded and looked back down at the living corpse beneath me. "That's the plan then. Let's hang out and give this guy a chance to rot. I want to see if he pops or if he's a Grey."
    I knelt down and put my head low enough to be able to see to the back door where I'd thrown the first dog that attacked. I'd been confident that the zombie would eat the creature, happily willing to feed on animal flesh the way every zombie I'd encountered for the past two decades had been willing to do. Instead, I saw that the dog was wounded but alive, panting and bleeding on the floor near the back door. The zombie had no interest in him.
    "I've got a bad feeling about this, Stubs." I walked back to the dog and it did its best to wag its short tail. His whole rear end jerked back and forth with his effort. "I guess it's not so bad up here though. We've got enough food and water to last the week if we have to. Just don't piss on me."
     
    It took three days for the zombie to pop. It tried to leave a few times, but I was able to entice it back in by calling out to it from the staircase. The mindless creature scampered back like a moth to a flame, desperate to chew on me as I waved down from the hole in our floor.
    On the third day, it collapsed in the kitchen, knocking over a cast iron skillet and causing an echoing crash that woke me and scared Stubs nearly to death. The poor pup had been asleep at my feet and leapt almost a foot in the air when the pan hit the floor.
    I was careful not to assume that it was our friend that made the noise. I crept across the hall to spy through the hole in the floor. I could smell the creature's sweet, fetid odor, but that was nothing new. We'd been suffering through that obnoxious scent ever since he arrived and I'd been wearing a mask to avoid it.
    The mask I wore was a simple surgeon's mask that I wet with a vial of lavender oil I'd been carrying for a few years. Pungent perfumes weren't something I used frequently, but circumstances like this made me happy I'd brought one along. The world was filled with dead things, and it was always nice to avoid smelling them when you had the chance. I also owned a proper gas mask with an attached respirator, but the filters for those were hard to come by and I would've never broken the seal on a new filter just to avoid smelling a zombie, no matter how pungent the odor was.
    Chemical leaks were one of the leading killers of the early post apocalypse world. After the electricity went out, it only took a few weeks before chemical trucks and tanks began to explode. In the early years it was almost impossible to avoid the poisonous air, especially near any major city. Hardly a single day would go by that an explosion didn't light up the sky from somewhere nearby.
    The chaos of the first year was hard to fathom now, after the world had settled into its morose decay. I'd been taught how to handle the apocalypse, and even I was nearly swept up in the madness. The mission that my father left behind for me is what helped keep me sane. I had a plan, and it was the only thing that mattered. He'd left me gear, maps, and enough food to carry me through for several weeks. He even charted the path to my first destination in the panhandle of Oklahoma where I tracked down the second person on my list.
    My father's maps, and the path he drew for my first journey, seemed almost nonsensical. I was sent along a winding trek that avoided all major highways and seemed to curve around areas for no apparent reason. It wasn't until after I'd made it west that I realized what he'd done. The eastern United States was dotted with