Last Playground

by Geoff North

  I want to have a nice long talk with him about my son.

  Those had been the last words she’d spoken to her granddaughter before she left with them…with him. She never should’ve let the bastard out of her sight. He knew what had become of her son. She’d let him escape with Brinn and her friend. And then Logan went missing. That made him responsible for four missing people. Erin could’ve saved the last two with a bullet fired into the man’s chest.

  But she hadn’t.

  And like an old fool she had crawled out onto the veranda roof—into a strange world that shouldn’t exist—and rolled off it in one smooth move, almost breaking her hip in the process. Only dumb luck had saved her bones and led her off in the same direction Logan had taken. Luck had little to do with killing the first two creatures that were advancing on her grandson. Erin Stauch knew how to fire a gun. The first shell caught the thing closest to Logan between the spot where its eyes should’ve been. Her second shot had punched through another’s stomach. She wasn’t sure how much damage that one had done. It was still twitching out there in the sand.

  It had spooked the others far enough away so they could make a run for the rocks. It was a slow run—her hip had begun to stiffen up, and the little boy had to help her along—but somehow they had managed. Halfway up, another of the dog-things had made a lunge. Erin fired with one hand. She had missed by a mile, but the bullet had ricocheted off a rock and torn a good-sized chunk from the beast’s hairless hide.

  That left them where they were now. What seemed like half a night and a quickly dying day spent atop the rocks with one .22 caliber shell left. The creatures seemed to have an uncanny hidden ability that alerted them to their whereabouts—their every little movement. Would it eventually enable them to read Erin’s mind? Would they be brave enough to make a final charge if they knew only one more of their number could be killed?

  And the smell was getting worse.

  It wasn’t just rocks below them. They had climbed through a twisted mess of charred human remains on their way to the top. Erin wasn’t even sure if the corpses had been human. Those bodies that hadn’t burned badly were continuing to rot. There were gaping holes in some, and many looked as though their arms and legs and heads had been hacked off completely. Whatever had slaughtered those terrible-looking things hadn’t been there too long before Erin and Logan. She shuddered at the thought they might return, and felt sick to her stomach that her grandson had to see the remains piled beneath them.

  “I’m sorry, Gramma,” Logan said. “I didn’t know they were bad dogs.”

  “Quit apologizing, boy. There’s no way on Earth you could’ve known what those things really were.” She sighed. “If we’re even still on Earth.”

  “I wanna go home.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d said that either.

  She ran her fingers through his messy hair without taking her eyes away from the creatures below. “I’ll get you home, Logan. You hang tough, I’ll get you home. We just have to wait those ugly pooches out a little while longer.” Erin had a feeling the wait would be a lot longer than a little while. “Why don’t you tell me again what you were thinking when you left home and set off after your sister like that?”

  “Aww, Granny. Do I have to say it all again?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the third time she had made him tell the story. But it kept his mind off other things, and it kept both of them awake and alert.

  One bullet left.

  She didn’t think the faceless dogs would be able to climb up through the rocks even if they tried. If that were the case, they would be safe until help arrived. And why would anyone even think to look in the old farmhouse, she wondered? Erin had already spoken to Michael. The police wouldn’t consider searching there first because that angle had already been covered.

  Damn! Why didn’t I tell him? I could’ve at least left a note.

  “—and when they went in the old house, well, I got real scared ’cause I didn’t want to walk home all alone. I know now I shouldn’t have gone inside…I shoulda—Granny! You’re not even listening! Why make me tell dumb stories if you’re not gonna listen?”

  “I hear you, sweetie. Granny’s just keeping an eye on the poochies.”

  “They’re going to eat us, aren’t they?”

  “They don’t have mouths, Logan. They aren’t going to eat us.”

  And if they don’t have mouths, they don’t need to eat at all. There isn’t going to be any rescue, and those things aren’t going anywhere.

  Erin started down the rocks before she could think things through any further. If she talked herself out of it, the two would eventually drop dead from dehydration. It was now or never.

  “Granny! Don’t go down there!”

  “Stay where you are, Logan. I’m not going all the way.”

  She held her breath and stepped carefully over the stinking corpses. The wannasee dogs stopped circling. They formed into a pack and started moving in on the point where she was descending. Erin stopped halfway and knelt down behind a three-foot-high rock. She rested the gun barrel on top and took steady aim at the second one to the left. The biggest one. The easiest target.

  Maybe…just maybe taking the big one out will scare the rest away.

  The bullet punched through the center of its neck. A few inches lower than she had intended but the results were still good. It flopped over on its side with a twitch of its hind legs, and remained still. The other dogs started to run away.

  Go! Run you miserable things… Go!

  They ran until they were nothing more than three black dots on the horizon. Then they stopped.

  Keep going!

  They sat there for two full minutes and Erin watched. It was the longest two minutes of her life. Finally, one black dot started to trot off to the left. Another started off slowly to the right. The one in the middle stayed right where it was. They were setting up a perimeter once again.

  “Shit!”

  “Don’t swear, Gramma.”

  Erin rubbed the sweat from her brow and started back up to her grandson. “Sorry, Logan—Gramma’s tired.” She sat down next to him and sighed. Her shoulders ached and her throat was too dry. She was utterly dejected and exhausted. “Still not a good excuse to use language like that though, is it?”

  “Piss and shit,” the little boy replied.

  She didn’t have the strength to scold him. Instead, she laughed. She laughed so hard the ache in her stomach replaced the aches in the rest of her body. “Yeah… Piss and shit.”

  The dogs worked their way back in over the next few minutes. Erin gave the empty gun to her grandson to wave over his head, and the little guy made an impressive job of it. He yelled and stomped his feet, but the things kept moving in. The sun had almost set once again by the time they had begun a steady circle around the rocks less than ten feet out.

  Erin built up a pile of throwing stones. It would be a useless tactic. She was much better at firing rifles than she was at tossing baseballs. But it was all they had left. If the dogs decided to make the climb, she would at least bash in one of their heads with a particularly jagged one she had dug up.

  It was at that moment—as Erin was considering what one of the creatures’ brains might look like—when Logan spotted over a dozen new dust plumes rising up on the darkening western horizon.

  “Oh no, Granny! There’s more coming.”

  One of the dust plumes was unusually large. It started to fall back from the others. A few minutes later they were able to see more clearly. These creatures were more than just faceless dogs. The biggest animal lumbered along; each thunderous step it made could now be felt underneath the rocks Erin and Logan sat upon. Had it been an elephant at one time? There was a slight mound at the front of its face that may have been a trunk, but it was hard to tell. And instead of big flopping ears, there were malformed lumps of gray flesh on either side of its mammoth skull. They looked like giant heads of moldy cauliflower. Smaller creatures
ran between its tree-trunk-sized legs, skittering back and forth and around. They had no tails, no fur, just two little buds growing out of their heads. These had been cats, Erin thought. The little bumps that had once been pointed ears now resembled the beginning of devil’s horns.

  More creatures were running in from the south—many, many more faceless, furless, horrific creatures. There were more elephant-sized ones amongst them, more cats and dogs, and simian-shaped beasts rolling across the dust and dirt on malformed knuckles with blackish claws curled back up into their thick wrists.

  It was as if someone had opened the gates to the zoo from Hell.

  Behind the animals—another half mile in the distance—came the people. Or what once may have been people. There were thousands of them. They were slower than the animals. They stumbled and lurched, and tore away at one another like most humans do to get ahead. Erin had once been forced to sit through a terrible zombie movie with Nancy when the girl was a teenager. These things were similar, except that the zombies here didn’t have mouths to yell brains! And these ones didn’t wear filthy, shredded clothing. They all looked the same, without any distinguishable sex or recognizable body shape. There was no gender—just the same generic rotting brownish-gray skin and tiny holes in the center of their faces. The holes whistled and buzzed, sounding like the wail of a thousand ambulances going off at the same time.

  Logan was clutching his ears and screaming at his grandmother. “It hurts!”

  Erin threw the rifle down at the first gorilla-sized creature that had started to climb up into the rocks. It broke in two against the thing’s blockish head, barely slowing its determined ascent.

  “Come on, Logan!” She grabbed him by the wrist and started down the other side of the rock pile. A run for the old farmhouse a half mile away was their last course of action. She had considered it hours before when it was only the four dogs stalking them. Erin had decided against it then, choosing to stay up in the rocks where she thought they were safe. Now, if the monkey things didn’t get them first, the human zombie ones would.

  They reached the bottom and Erin pushed the boy ahead, almost causing him to fall to his knees. “Run, Logan! Get to the house! I’ll be right behind you.”

  The boy ran, kicking up a little plume of dust of his own. Erin jogged after him but the pain in her injured hip was too agonizing. She managed another four or five steps until something gave out in her side. The pain was so intense, Erin dropped on the spot, gasping.

  Through her tears and the sting of dust, she saw her grandson still running off ahead. A dog thing rushed by her and cut the distance in half before the boy had gone another ten feet. It would be on him in seconds.

  She sunk her face into the ground and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  A claw-like hand batted Erin over onto her back. The simian creature. A single hole in its face that may have been a nostril whistled and blew hot air in her eyes. It smelled like sour milk. Black nails the length and sharpness of skating blades curled back from its wrists.

  My eyes. It wants my eyes.

  Suddenly the hand was gone. In its place was a stump leaking beige-colored fluid onto Erin’s chest. There was a flash of silver and the thing’s head leapt from it shoulders and thudded into the ground.

  The barbarian woman she had seen with her granddaughter stood over her and offered Erin a hand. She kicked the simian body over to join its decapitated head. “Are we going to make a run for the house, or would you rather just lie there?”

  Erin looked ahead for Logan. Three other people—definitely not creatures—were helping him along to the farmhouse. “My hip…I think it’s broken.”

  She swung Erin up over her shoulder. “My name is Bertha. Brinn didn’t have the chance to introduce us because you had a weapon trained on me at the time.”

  Erin winced in pain as Bertha started to run, but it was preferable to moving on her own. “Sorry about that. I ditched the gun if that means anything.”

  Bertha didn’t answer. She was too busy balancing her load and hacking down wannasee dogs as they leapt through the air. Erin craned her head around and watched as a young man, barely more than a teen, helped Logan along. A girl, a very pale girl with short black hair, trailed a few steps behind, kicking out at the rushing creatures. Another girl—the friend she’d seen with her granddaughter?—was running off ahead of them towards the house.

  “Where’s Brinn?” Erin managed to ask as the blade continued to arc around them. An animal leg twirled through the air and a creature the size of a small car crashed into the ground, pushing a pile of dirt ahead with its rhinoceros-shaped snout. “And where’s that Oscar guy that took my son?”

  “We were separated,” Bertha panted. “I had hoped to find them when we arrived here.”

  “Was she safe? Did he hurt her?”

  Bertha’s feet got tangled up in the remains of a cat. It whistled and hissed through its face-hole as she kicked it away. Erin remained quiet and left the woman to her work. Logan and the others had reached the house. The pale girl stood in the doorway, waiting for them to catch up. Erin twisted in Bertha’s grip until she had no choice but to let her down. The old woman hopped on one foot the rest of the way and fell into the girl’s waiting arms. Bertha cut down two more dogs and squished a squirrel-sized animal beneath her heel. She backed in after the others and slammed the door shut. She drove her sword through the side paneling next to the handle. The blade scraped across the door’s surface and stopped when the hilt wedged against the panel. It wouldn’t hold for long, but at least they would have time to regroup and catch their breath.

  Logan hugged his grandmother and Erin wept into the boy’s head. “It’s okay…I told you everything would be alright.”

  “You said you would take me home.”

  Erin looked at Bertha questioningly. How were they going to do that?

  The warrior rushed past them, picking her way through the rotten floorboards and collapsed chunks of ceiling. “Esme and Selma, stay with these two. Paris, come with me.” She led him upstairs. The hole she’d fallen through halfway up wasn’t there. The steps—though worn and rundown—were as complete as she remembered them being with Oscar, Brinn, and Selma. She didn’t pause long to worry about it. “We went through a bedroom window into this world. Hopefully we can pass back through it.”

  They ran into Neal’s room and Bertha stared out the opening Oscar had crashed through. Her heart sunk. The sky outside was brown. An endless wave of wannasee was converging across the plains towards the house. “Damn!”

  Paris stood next to her and considered things. “Maybe to get back into Brinn’s world, you have to come back through the way you went out.”

  She gave him a puzzled look.

  He tried again. “The window acts like a portal. You enter a different world when you crawl through. No other windows or doors can get you back. You have to return through this window from the outside. Maybe the kid set it up that way to cut down the chance of people wandering in and out from both worlds.”

  Bertha winced. The idea seemed sound enough. Go outside, climb up onto the veranda ceiling and come in through the window they were now standing in front of. She could do that easily enough. So could Paris and Esme. They would have to fight their way through wannasee to make it, but it could be done. Unfortunately, hoisting Brinn’s injured grandmother and little brother would be difficult. In fact, it would be almost impossible.

  Then she had a simpler idea. She could gather the others and climb out onto the veranda roof from Neal’s bedroom and climb back through. Bertha had to test her theory first. Her head struck something soft on the way and bounced back. She tried pushing through the opening with her hands and met the same soft, unyielding resistance.

  “What are you doing?” Paris asked. To the wizard it looked as though the woman was enacting some kind of strange pantomime.

  “I can’t go through.” She pushed harder but the invisible barrier pushed her hands back. “Something’s sto
pping me.” Her arms began to shake and Bertha finally stopped trying.

  Paris felt the barrier next. He didn’t bother putting the same effort into it. “Yeah, that kid was smart. I’m betting he’s the only one that can pass back through.”

  Bertha shook her head stubbornly. “The android made it. And he led the rest of us into Neal’s world after him.”

  Paris held his hands up in defeat. “Maybe only Neal or one of his direct creations has the ability.”

  A thunderous crash shook the house. The little boy screamed in terror somewhere below. Bertha looked out the window as far as the barrier would allow and saw an elephantine-sized creature lumbering backwards, preparing for a second charge. It shook its monstrous head clear of siding, dusty plaster, and moldy insulation. Another hit like that, perhaps two, and it would crash through and trample everyone inside.

  They had run out of options.

  No one was leaving.

  She pushed by Paris and headed for the stairs. They would all die in this abandoned house, and Bertha would go down with her sword swinging.

  Chapter 21

  The subterranean levels of the S.S.I.A. building weren’t as terrifying as Brinn had imagined they might be. It was creepy looking—gloomy and dark with long shadows cast from strange machines, monstrous compressors, and miles of snaking pipes—but it was, thankfully, as far as they could tell, quite empty. They worked their way up floor by floor, following a single access ladder that ran straight up along one wall.

  Brinn whispered to the others, “How much further do we have to go?”

  “The power readings are coming from the top floor,” Oscar answered. “Five hundred floors above ground level.”

  Brinn was sorry she’d asked.

  They climbed past dripping plumbing and rusted generators that had long since quit running. One of the levels was crammed with molding crates. Most of the wooden sides and tops had been smashed open from the inside. The floor above that was stacked to the ceiling with black plastic storage containers that resembled coffins. Their ascent was quick. The steel trap doors that sealed each floor off above them had been left open, speeding their progress even more. Had they been left that way for people to clear out faster, or had something else opened them more recently? It felt like an ominous invitation to Brinn, as if whatever waiting above knew they were coming.