They all said the nights would be the worst–all of them said it, Paul, Jess, Mel, Mike, LT, all of them. Being the only girl, they didn’t have to try and scare me any more than I already was. I was only there by accident anyway; I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t one of the damned like they were. It’d been curiosity, that was all, and who hasn’t ever been curious? Looked a little too deeply into the wrong dark corner of the world and fallen through one of the holes. And now was my first night here, and I was in a small gray one-room cabin with five tough-looking guys I didn’t know, wondering what was going to happen to me next.

There wasn’t any food. “We’re always hungry. There’s never anything to eat. You’ll get used to it,” LT said. He was probably my favorite. He was the skinniest, the cleanest, and the youngest, maybe twenty, and so I felt safest with him. I don’t know why. I was only sixteen, but I tried not to think about that because it only ever seemed more and more unfair.

LT started putting logs in the fire. I didn’t know why, because it had been hot all day. “It gets cold once it gets dark.”

The others were all playing some kind of card game I didn’t know. I almost asked if someone could teach me, but it seemed like such a mistake once I saw how the big fat one named Jess was looking at me. So I went and sat in a corner until someone told me not to get too close to the walls.

“You’ll want to be as far from outside as possible, missy,” Mel said. “They can dig their claws through the slats. Where the wind can reach, so can they.”

LT took his place at the table once the fire was going. There wasn’t a place for me, so I stood slightly away from the table, trying to seem like I had something else to do other than stand there and feel lost and afraid.

There was no getting out of this place. Whatever gate I’d fallen through was gone when I looked behind me. I’d been up high in the mountains, lost in the corkscrews of dark green stone. But then I got out of there when I started noticing all the chest-sized spiders, black with bright yellow lines down their bodies. I’d bolted down out of the mountains, and that’s when they caught me in one of their traps. They’d been looking for food.

“We’re always looking for food,” Jess had said. His reaction was hard to read. I couldn’t tell if he was happy to see a human in the trap or not. Any minute, I expected him to come at me with his knife and decide I was going to be dinner, but the others seemed to have some honor at least, and they kept him in check.

So night came, and I ended up sitting with my back to where they were all playing cards and laughing at the table in the center of the room. I was about to fall asleep just sitting there, lulled into a comfortable doze by the passing of time, when the call of the outsiders cut through the silence and everyone dropped their cards and stood up.

Then everyone got real quiet, LT looked at me with his finger to his lips to make sure I understood. Yeah, I knew they were scared, all right, but I was annoyed by this whole operation and I was still half-asleep and so my terror and disorientation seemed farther away.

The outsiders’ whining trill was haunting. It seemed to be coming from all sides of the cottage as well as from above. Whatever they were, they knew where we were, and they were coming.

My name is Esther Reed, and I was sixteen the night I stood up off the floor of that cottage, went past all those terrified men to the door, threw it open, and yelled, “Who’s out there, huh? Come on and show yourself!” and then cringed as I felt the wind intensify as Hell itself tightened and rushed forward.

The ones that came that night were tall. They were not friendly. It was the first mistake I made there. I only wish it had also been the last. You can always tell the fresh meat by its audacity; after awhile living here, you learn the value of cowardice.

Coming back across the frozen lake to my house, I squinted my eyes to see if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. Yup. I was. Someone had built a snowman in the middle of my yard. Classic-looking one, too: black top hat, coal eyes, carrot nose, stick arms, buttons down the front. I crunched my way through the hard shell of ice the previous night had dropped over the soft powder until I was eye-to-stone with the figure. Whoever had done it had done a damned good job. No one I’d ever known had bothered to make such neat, round balls for the body of a snowman.

“Ho, Frosty,” I said, because I’m the kind of guy that fills his empty life with conversations between himself and inanimate objects.

“Ho’s are for Santa,” Frosty replied, and it surprised me to see the crescent of rocks split apart and mouth the words. My mind expected to see jerky stop-motion animation, but the movement in real life was smooth. He pointed a stick-arm into my chest. “And you ain’t Santa.”

“Well,” I said, “color me clarified.”

“To color I would need crayons,” Frosty said. A harder poke. “And I ain’t got crayons!”

“Can you talk without moving your lips?” I asked.

“I can do anything,” Frosty said, “but I’d rather move my lips without talking.” He moved his lips all around. Opened to an O-shape, closed to a straight line, then undulating like a sine wave or a child’s picture of water. Then diamond shapes, spinning round. Then a wide half-moon grin. Then another frown, and the hardest poke yet: “So don’t test me, bitch!” He had a rather harsh voice, like the rasp of someone about to get laryngitis.

“Whoa,” I said, trying to grab the finger and move it away from my chest, which was sore from all the poking. “You really are frosty.” But the finger wouldn’t move. Frosty was strong.

Frosty seemed to feel he made his point, and he pulled his branch back. “Give me that!”

“Strong for a twig,” I said. “What exactly are you made of?”

Frosty froze. I saw one of the coals forming his dotted mouth turn almost imperceptibly, but nothing else moved. His arms were back to their upraised, default location of hey-how-ya-doin’-welcome-welcome common to stick figures the world over, as if all any barely-imagined form could think to do was enthusiastically greet people who came upon them.

Except on Frosty, those arms didn’t look welcoming. On Frosty, there was somehow an irony to the gesture; this was Frosty, “greeting” me, and “saying hello.”

“You’re not really made of snow are you?” I said.

“My veins are thick,” Frosty said. “My veins are blue and cold. I will wrap you in them and take you back with me.”

“Back where, Frosty?”

“Back to my home,” Frosty said, and his eyes turned upward to look at the sky. “It’s frosty out there,” he said. Pale blue cords moved under his chest like snakes, pushing out against the surface. The bottom edge of the sun hit the horizon, and the first stars of the night came out.

“Soooo frosty.”

The painting was dark green, sort of like what one might imagine the sea looked like at the end of a pier with the algae grown thick around rotting wood posts. Where it wasn’t green, it was deep black and mean shade of red.

But the colors weren’t why anyone was there. The four collectors were there because the painting moved, and it had been promised to them that they were looking through the murky veil of their world into the very plains of Hell.

Tristram, the British guy, was speaking into the ear of the trophy blonde he’d brought along while giving her ass a good squeeze with the hand he wasn’t using to hold his martini. The woman was giggling and trying to get him to see something in the left corner. She seemed to think she’d found a point of interest.

Karl the German stood still, unmoving, but to Frank’s eye he looked scared. Frank didn’t think the man would have the courage in the end to make a bid.

The one collector Frank was worried about was the other American, Yusef, who stood close to him and smirked whenever he caught Frank’s eye. Frank had lost too many lots to Yusef in the past; he didn’t want to lose this one, too.

“What do you think, Yusef?” Frank said. “You see anything in there worth bidding on?”

Yusef turned to him slowly and ran his tongue across the edge of his upper teeth. Then he blew Frank a kiss. “Don’t you?” he said.

Frank rolled his eyes. He turned back toward the painting. Karl was pretending his glasses needed cleaning and had his back to the work. Tristram and his whore were growing increasingly furtive. The martini had been set on a bookcase, and Tristram’s hand had disappeared up between the blonde’s legs. She moaned and threw her head back.

That was when Frank saw something in the painting stir.

Something huge. The canvas itself was sixty inches wide and forty inches tall, and whatever it was that was moving in the sea of paint was at least that big, if not even bigger.

Frank took a step forward to get a closer look.

*     *     *

The steward of the manor where the painting was housed stood still and silent by the door when a bloodied Frank came screaming and weeping toward him. Most of what Frank said was indecipherable. Something about “horror” and “death” and “put it behind a drape.” The steward couldn’t tell; the steward, in fact, didn’t care to tell.

He opened the door as the man scurried toward him. There was a large gash across the shrieking man’s face, and the iris of one of his eyes had turned bright gold.

“Thank you, Mr. Osgood,” the steward said as two large men came out of the shadows and grabbed Frank Osgood by the arms. He struggled to wrestle free, but it was little use. He was carried through the open door beside the steward. “Your offer will be considered along with the others. We will let you know in due course if the lot is yours.”

Frank was still screaming and babbling as he was dragged out of the manor and into the night, the steward closing the door gently behind him.

Just about the time Larry was going to give up, put a gun to his head, and blow his own brains out, something else happened that was not zombie-related at all: Larry discovered he now had the ability to fly. Why he should suddenly develop such an ability at the age of thirty-seven, Larry could not say, but in a land that had been overrun by the living dead for the last six months, he supposed anything was possible.

He found out about his new talent one morning when he woke up with his nose pressed against the ceiling, his body floating horizontally, and a sextet of hungry fiends swaying and moaning beneath him. They’d broken through the kitchen door during the night, and by all rights he should have been well-gnawed already. When he realized the nature of his predicament, he waved his hands below him, trying to get closer to the ceiling while also expecting himself to drop at any time into the rotting appetite beneath him like Wile E. Coyote into a chasm after his moment of perplexed suspension.

But that moment didn’t come. He stayed afloat, out of reach of the groping zombies, and he noted how lucky he was to have a house with high ceilings. Something cheaper or more modern, and even the miracle of levitation would not have saved him.

He walked himself with his hands across the ceiling toward the window. Below him, the zombies shuffled along, keeping pace. It presented a problem when they crowded around the window he meant to escape through. Fortunately, zombies were dumb and slow. He slapped them in their decayed faces, swatted away their hands, until he had successfully unlocked the window. He slid the upper half down, punched out the screen, and after a few more kicks and jabs, slid smoothly through the opening into the night.

He rolled around so he was facing forward with his stomach toward the yard beneath him, where a gaggle of the undead continued to work its clumsy way into his house. A few looked up when he whistled and foolishly tried to reach him, but he was well out of range. He gave the fuckers the finger and pushed on, moving his arms less like a bird and more like a swimmer.

It turned out, he could fly incredibly fast with a few gentle strokes. He flew over the suburbs, toward the city, noticing all the bombed-out, burned-out, terrorized neighborhoods below him–neighborhoods he was now free to visit or leave at will. No more fear of gas shortages or getting trapped in an alley. He was free. Free as a bird.

When he reached the city, he dropped onto the top of the tallest building, perching like a gargoyle. He heard a noise, and for a moment he was deeply annoyed. Damn zombies, could they get everywhere?! But then he saw it was just another person who’d discovered the gift of flight. She looked about thirty, and she smiled at him with a big grin as she stumbled to a stop on the top of the roof.

Not only was she not a zombie, not only could she fly, but she was also cute!

“You, too?” he asked her.

She nodded. “It’s amazing!”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and he looked back out at the world beneath him like a person seeing paradise for the first time.

I could totally get used to this, Larry thought.

I tired of dragging my girlfriend around in search of hidden messages from extraterrestrials, which were only proving to be not-very-hidden messages from a viral marketing team bent on exploiting my cell phone ownership to send me advertisements. Despite understanding the ploy, I nevertheless enjoy a good scavenger hunt, but my enjoyment of it only lasted for so many minutes before it was conquered by my depression and sadness at once again finding little mystery in the world. We walked over the grassy hills of Governor’s Island, and we found our way to other art installations, but all the real wonder seemed one reality away–as though there was another draft of the day written on some other Earth where all these offerings were less hollow in tone.

That’s when we came to the machine. It was a twelve-foot-tall octagon, made of black metal, held together at the sides with sheets of lobstered brass. The entrance was guarded by twin brunettes wearing all black. The line was short but curious. There was a frail older woman talking to the four people waiting. She held a basket of fruit on one arm, and she was extolling the virtues of a proper diet at informing the consciousness.

Might as well take a look at this thing, I thought. My girlfriend agreed, and we joined the line. When asked if we wanted any fruit, I took a green apple, and she selected a kiwi.

“Only one person at a time may enter the machine,” the old woman told us as we accepted our fruit. “Do not eat the fruit until you are inside. Once you are inside, you may begin eating. Eat at whatever pace you like, but once you finish your fruit, please exit the machine and allow the person behind you to enter.”

I wondered if I would try to drag the time out or get it over with quickly. How was it possible to know myself so poorly?

It came down to skepticism: what was this machine? What was the point of it? The first person who came out passed the rinds of an orange to one of the brunette guards, who dropped it into a paper bag by her feet. I heard her say, “Yes, we compost them.” Then the person nodded, gave a short smile, clearly approving of this whole composting thing, and left, without giving any clue as to the nature of the experience of eating a piece of fruit inside the black, octagonal tower.

The tower that the old woman had called a machine.

After several minutes of grimly tossing my apple into the air and catching, it was my turn. The door opened, a short balding man came out and courteously dropped a mango rind into the compost bag, and the brunettes waved me into the machine. I smiled, which I think was probably a very skeptical thing to do, and I went inside, expecting absolutely nothing save the modest pleasure of eating a free piece of fruit.

When the door closed behind me, it was completely black. I could see nothing. Eyes open, eyes closed–it didn’t matter.

“Hello?” I said.

There was no response.

I considered the apple.

Well, okay, then, I thought, and I took a bite.

I’m sure whoever had constructed this thing expected sensory deprivation to make the taste of that apple even more sublime, but the apple was mealy and not very good, and it was this slight rot that was, in the end, amplified by the machine. I was in oblivion, and I was eating something that was half-rotten. Had they tricked me? Had they meant to give me a terrible piece of fruit? One could only wonder at the intent of the machine.

After a few bites, I stood in the dark with the wretched apple at my side, wondering if I could go out without having eaten all that I’d been given. I reasoned it was only bad luck, after all; no one else had seemed to have a problem finishing. I was sure it was not intentional. It was just me, picking a lousy piece of fruit.

Or maybe this was all some tricky plot to get me to imagine that the Garden of Eden was really a giant black octagonal tower, and that eating a shitty piece of fruit was the only means of escape for Eve. Now, there was a thought to blow your mind: what if Eve had meant to get the hell out of that place? But she didn”t want to go alone, either, so she had to get Adam to commit the crime, too. Eat this worthless, mealy apple and we can get out of here. We can go get back on the ferry, get back to Manhattan, and watch that show you like on HBO.

At any rate, the point of the thing was obscure, the apple was horrible, and I didn’t finish it. When I’d had enough of the game, I stepped outside, threw the apple into the composting bag, and made the same blank face that everyone else had made when facing the people still waiting in line.