Henry never understood why what happened to him happened to him, but he was keenly aware of what it felt like: an itching neurosis, blooming in his brain, triggered a desperate need to climb out his window on the fifteenth floor of his penthouse apartment on 79th and 1st. His hands felt gummy when he opened the window, and for a horrible moment he couldn’t let go of the plastic molding. The pustules on his hand barfed more viscous glue as he gave another pull and freed himself to begin the climb.

Sun, he thought. I need sunlight. That’s the ticket.

He reached around the window and began to climb toward the roof a few feet above. For a moment he imagined himself to be Peter Parker, scaling his first building, until he pushed his face out of shadow into the warming plane of sun, and the urge to climb any higher dissolved. He gritted his teeth, pressed himself against the concrete above his window, and stayed there until the muck oozing out of him solidified and all hope of further movement was lost.

The itch was gone. In its place was a tranquility he’d rarely known in his thirty-five years. He finally felt he’d reached the place he belonged.

There was no way Henry could know it was merely the Ophiocordyceps humanis talking. A new and youthful form of fungus, recently mutated accidentally by a prominent pesticide company supplying a major farming conglomerate, the new species had made its way to Henry’s body through a potato he’d purchased from a vegetable cart on the corner. The fungus had spidered through his brain and triggered an autoimmune reaction from his skin the likes of which had not been predicted by the prominent pesticide company, whose researchers had never considered what their new product might evolve into, given exposure to bacteria found in farmlands downstream from slaughterhouse cattle pens.

Yet so long as Henry did what the fungus wanted him to do, it rewarded him with blasts of endorphins. It was, probably, the best he’d ever felt in his entire life, clinging like a smiling, hardening booger to the side of his Manhattan high-rise.

He wasn’t alone. The fungus by that point was rampant in the greater New York City area. It had, in fact, been making the rounds for a little over a week. In his peripheral vision, Henry noted the presence of many other people, all creeping toward the slants of sunlight striking the tops of the neighboring buildings. They crowded together, sometimes crawling over each other to steal space, yet all looked quite content.

Quite content indeed. It wasn’t so bad, dying outside in the sun.

Not until the sun set, anyway, and the fungus changed its tune. The itch returned, but Henry could no longer move, nor was there any sun to move toward. The lights of the city around him whispered a faint call, but he knew it wasn’t enough. Around him, he heard crying; he heard moaning and rage and sadness. The city was wailing. He was hungry and thirsty, and the fall night air bit through his mucus encasement.

He didn’t know why no one was coming to save them. He thought he heard helicopters in the distance.

Maybe we’re not worth saving. Maybe we’re as good as dead.

It seemed likely. If he’d seen people glued to buildings on TV, he would assume they had some terrible disease best left within a well-enforced quarantine. Not in his backyard, no way.

It occurred to him he would never again go to a backyard barbecue. Never eat another cheesehamburger or steak, or drink another beer. Even worse–he realized he was never going to finish the fantasy series he was reading. Such a shame–he really wanted to know what happened next.

Then he had The Thought.

As soon as The Thought happened, he tried to mentally brush it away. The Thought was such a cheesy thing to think, and no, he wouldn’t condemn his life that way. It was lazy thinking. It was too easy. It was wrong. He’d lived a good life. He had. Maybe he hadn’t accomplished everything he’d wanted to, but–

Bullshit. He’d accomplished nothing. Nothing of what he’d set out to do. He’d done a lot of nonsense, yes, and now–

Whatever. It was fine. He’d lived enough. Had he not? And what was achievement worth anyway at such a time as this, dying in a rigid-as-bone crust?

His tears came out gluey, and his eyes soon would no longer open. He spent so long in the cold, starving dark, he thought he’d finally died and was floating through empty space. Except there was a nail in his head. A thickening nail, and soon he was weeping with the pain of a throbbing headache that broke through all his delusions of death.

Death wasn’t this painful.

The pain lasted a long, long time. Each second of that interminable night felt like an hour, and when dawn came and the sun spread over Henry and the other flowers of the Ophiocordyceps humanis, his mind was quite broken. Yet it received the doses of endorphins just the same, and for the next day the mood inside the hardened shell was once again bright. Bright, until an early-evening thunderstorm blacked out the sun and brought an early return of the dark, and the pods moaned again. With their mouths sealed, the sounds were muffled and haunting, like a whimpering wind through hollow trees.

It continued like this for four days, until the spores emerged from the cocooned bodies, and the stalks of the fungus broke from the heads of the dead, rising in alien shapes above the silent streets, and burst, releasing their dust into the wind.

The case got the national news networks interested because the killer (or killers, as some speculated) kidnapped men rather than women–and not weak men, either; one of the victims was a professional bodybuilder. Another was a bouncer at a nightclub. These were men who should have been able to defend themselves against an average psychopath, but they all ended up skinned just the same.

Some writer at one of the less prestigious newspapers started calling the man Mr. Grim. It stuck. Don’t ask me why; I hate nicknames. I think it encourages the deranged.

My partner and I had the bad luck of getting assigned the case. That was until he went missing. Then they assigned me a new partner. It was my new partner who cracked the whole thing and ended the reign of that foolish nickname. After that, everyone could call the asshole by his real handle, Mr. Paul Leonard.

Didn’t they tell you to be wary of people with two first names?

He wasn’t anything to look at. He was short, stocky, clean-cut. But he was fast. He used a wire to garrote his victims first. He liked to target the big guys because of some Napoleonic thing. He would torture them for days, removing a bit here, a bit there. He said his greatest skinning job lasted fifteen days before the guy finally bled out. He’d recorded a lot of it. It was horrible to watch.

But he never told me or anyone else where my partner was. Most everyone else thought he was dead. But if that was the case, why not just tell me? Why not add another body to the tally? Leonard was proud of himself; I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t want another death out in the open. He’d already confessed to seventeen murders; what was one more?

“You’re better off never finding him, Detective,” Leonard said to me before they killed him off via lethal injection in front of a cheering crowd.”That’s one freak better left in the shadows.”

It took me three years to find him, and when I did, I realized Leonard had been right. Sometimes, things change people, and it’s no fun at all to look at the wreckage of what you once knew.

For three years, my partner lived freely in the farmhouse where he’d once been tortured. We found evidence that someone else had kept him supplied with the bodies of the recently deceased, but this third man has never been identified, let alone apprehended. Three local teenagers found my partner by accident when they were breaking into old houses in the area to break things. Only one of the teenagers lived to report the incident to the police.

I was the one who took the kid’s story; I was the first one into the room where my old partner was living. The walls were crumbling, and the window was broken. Bright fall light was coming in, and even though it was cold, my partner was completely naked. His flesh, if you could call it that, was patchy and pink from years of systematic flaying. I could see blood welling in the creases everywhere on him, the way blood will seep from a hangnail bitten too far down. He had pieces of himself draped over the windowsill, and another piece dangling from his mouth, where he was sucking on it. Even as I walked in and surprised him, he was deftly slicing off a quarter-inch-thick slab of his right thigh. When he saw me, he charged, and I shot him in the head. We found the remnants of the other two teenagers on a pile of corpses in the corner of the room.

Now I sit up nights, and I think about how one blade can sharpen another, and I fear the cost of every tragic report I see on the evening news–violence rippling out from one of us to the next, forever, and sometimes our corpses are more than the bags of meat and bones they put in the ground. Sometimes …what is that they say?

Oh yeah–to live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Well, my partner lives on in my heart, and, even though I never even say his name anymore, I suspect he always will.

I think it’s about time for another drink.

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.