The Devil's Playground

by Ray Wil

  THE DEVILS PLAYGROUND

  written by

  Ray Wil

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Ray Wil on Smashwords

  The Devils Playground

  Copyright © 2014 by Ray Wil

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any part of this material that resembles persons alive or dead, any events, or locations is purely coincidental. The characters have been derived copiously from the fathomless imagination of the author and are entirely fictitious.

  Adult Reading Material

  * * * * *

  Part 1

  The Beginning

  I awoke from an alcoholic infused sleep to find the city inside an unbending mass of silence. That had been my pacifier for three days. Drinking rum and orange juice. Sometimes just orange juice and other times just rum. Yet as I stumbled towards my living room window to yank the curtains on the small stuffy one bedroom box on the third floor, I am greeted with a strange peculiarity. I was starving and knocked out too long to care much about the unusual ember of silence from the outside world. My sluggish peripheral vision had not noticed the lack of afternoon pigeons, who would be on the ledge just outside my window. The annoying grey creatures weren’t up to their usual throaty cooing, making a racket until I had to shoo them away.

  I lumbered into the bathroom, my mouth soon full of toothpaste humming a song without a particular melody until the grinding squeak of heavy wheels clicked inside my brain. I spat out then raced back to the window after tripping over a pair of running shoes, dirty jeans and a thick binder from work I had taken home. Scanning the calm streets from my limited view, I swallowed dryly, feeling a shudder in my abdomen. A confusion greeted my eyes the longer I leaned through the window consuming a large continuous snapshot of traffic and still figures as if taken from a children’s toy chest. No one and nothing was moving.

  Courtesy of the previous night’s boozing, my head pulsed from a splitting headache while a murky depression lingered about. Despite the hangover, understandable I was prone to episodes of exaggeration and thought I had either died in my sleep and was in hell or worst, fallen off into some weird state of lunacy. I left the apartment still under the haze of the loud packed dance club from the Friday night. My ears had a ringing and I could feel scratchiness in my throat. I washed my face and quickly dashed on a frantic change of clothes begging the reflection in the mirror for some mundane simple explanation.

  The unmistakable smell of cooked onions, curry peppers, spices and a plethora of exotic steaming meats always greeted me when I stepped out of my apartment. At times, I would grumble to myself about the pungent odor because I wasn’t much of a cook. Today however, there was no scent of chicken or homemade soup in the air, except of course a burning seethe coming from the apartment next to mine. But Mr. Henry was hardly home, always spending time out of town and after knocking for a minute, I moved on. I passed no one in the vacant hallway or the three flights of steps before pushing the thick front door to the outside. The old heavy glass and wooden entrance forever had a stickiness that I sometimes grappled with making it a vault for young children and elderly people.

  A humid early afternoon sun dimmed my eyes as I stepped out onto the front entrance. I noticed my neighbor Mrs. Hamden, a heavy-set senior woman, sprawled on the pavement by the walkway. I realized after running towards her that even more bodies by the curb were standing motionless or slumped to the ground. I paused for what seemed like an eternity looking, waiting and listening for the sound of a car engine or even an airplane. There was nothing. This didn’t make sense. A hot prickly heat crawled up the back of my neck like a giant swollen caterpillar.

  * * *

  I inched along the streets, my throat a numb tube while I moved around bodies transported to a world that resembled mine but could not be. My breathing was skipping causing me to stumble many times before I collapsed. Above me, the sky was a clear blue ocean of eternity with only a wisp of white. A faint purple mist though, I soon noticed permeated the atmosphere just above the high-rises. Gathering myself, I pressed fearfully forward.

  After an hour into my new horrifically twisted world, very little had changed. Not a breath nor a flinch of any sort came from the still alien’s lips. They must have been aliens because there was nothing on earth that looked like this. No sound or flicker of life. Their limbs while they stood in mid step and lifeless, were frozen as if they had been fixed with screws and tightened. I found myself shaking some creature vigorously before they would begin to topple over. I screamed at one apparition, a man about my age no older than thirty who looked as if he were returning from a gym wearing sweats and a gym bag. It didn’t make a difference. He remained immobile like a toy that had been taken out of its colorful shiny box. When I shook him from frustration he toppled over like a wooden log. While cars crumbled into each other on numerous roads as if no break was available to slow them. Traffic lights blinked and flicker in a strange pattern.

  Racked with insecurity from a young age I often told myself I wasn’t that intelligent. Neither was I someone who stood out from among the number of peers in my cramped cubicle at work. In the shuffle of all things, I fit in quite undistinguished. Or maybe undistinguished wasn’t the right word. The safe conformed background was where I stationed myself not assuming too much attention. I eyed the pretty girl who I was terrified of asking out. Greg, the good looking talkative workmate, who I watched and whom everyone liked, found myself green with envy and inconsolable jealousy over. I also loathed the boss who never appreciated my work effort or how much time was put into completing the assignments. So to a certain extent falling into the unnoticeable painful background came just as easily as the frozen people I was looking at. The unreal stiff plastic bodies that stretched farther than I could see. It was becoming dauntingly clear I was hallucinating and had lost my mind.

  The oriental man who owned the corner store stood statuesque behind the counter with a hand on a can of over-priced spaghetti sauce and the other on the old register. The heavyset Greek woman who owned the neighborhood deli was sprawled on the black and white tiled floor between two tables as if stricken mid stride. The old crosswalk attendant with the long silver hair named Mary, who aided the local public school children crossed the street was pinned and crushed between two cars in an intersection. I suppose I was in shock. After a few days, shock became routine.

  I recalled the old show The Twilight Zone, which featured an episode of the last man on earth who found himself alone because everyone on the planet had disappeared. Like in all the episodes, it ended with a twist or some form of irony where the story comes to fruition. The protagonist had so gravely disliked people but passionately adored books and yet eventually broke his one and only all important reading glasses. Thus denying him any joy of being alone with what he loved. Books. Hence the irony. This wasn’t that.

  I did not dislike people this much. I didn’t need any global life lessons to be learned. I d
idn’t need the world to be dead to learn how the appreciate it. There were people that I loved. I wasn’t a hateful person. And yet, a disturbing detach logic began to come into focus. This, whatever this was must be just a local phenomenon. Maybe it just stretched to a few more blocks. Some kind of terrorist biological attack. Maybe some government experiment or even an accident had gone horribly and inconceivable wrong. Maybe, I repeatedly told myself. Maybe that was all.

  There were no gulls, pigeons or smaller birds overhead. The air though was thick with flies and mosquitoes. However, the closer I came to them they seemed to disperse moving further away. I was a walking repellant, as if covered in bug spray and citronella. The insects whizzed around overhead for several minutes until I could no longer see them. Yet I knew they were still there. Invisible to my eyes the higher they went into the purple dust.

  I was diligently flipping over groups of bodies face down on the pavement who were no longer standing. Noticing very few were bleeding from the fall. I came upon a police car wedged into a street pole and two officers slumped over the front seats. Steam and a small flame had broken out from the engine while the cars lights spattered around continuously. I unbuckled the two men before pulling them several feet away dragging their limp bodies behind a nearby garbage truck. As I turned to walk away, the cruiser lit up with a brilliant explosion. I felt a sense of accomplishment knowing that I saved the policemen’s lives. If they were even alive at all.

  Before the collapsed I had been asleep for only a few hours trying to recuperate from the wild drinking binge my workmate had taken me on. It wasn’t something I did too often since I turn twenty-five. I threw up no less than five times after mixing my liquors or just downing too many vodka and cokes and at some point just vodka. My job had me depressed and ranting, plus the lack of a full time girlfriend didn’t help much. It was a simple life with simple needs but that was what I had.

  I was ready to kick somebody’s ass and get into some shenanigans I proclaimed to anyone who was listening. I never did kick anyone’s ass before. Drunkenness and bad behavior was the extent of my venting after leaving the club. The people though were all normal and walking about. The streets were bright and lively. I joked with my friend Henry and any passerby who was willing to listen to my loud liquor laden monologue. Henry even suggested I quit work and we start up our own business together. Making a splash in the advertising and online markets. He was a nut. He was always saying things like that. That was all I remembered. I was now alone and searching for anything or anyone to put some kind of sense into the world.

  After day two, I eventually convinced myself I wasn’t inside an alternative hell and there might be some benefit to my desolate situation of the last man on the planet. The local supermarket with exactly twenty standing people was my temporary reprieve from the outside chaos. My first instinct was to stock up on food and supplies until it became apparent I had no need to. Everything was at my disposal. Steaks that were ten dollars a cut. Fresh live or frozen lobsters if I desired and even the expensive organic milks and cereal aisle I rarely ventured to. No doubt despite the freeness, bananas, apples, lettuce and other vegetables would soon rot.

  The overly cautious person I was, shut off whatever machines or power that needed attention. I found a roomy Jeep that I could jump in an out of quickly for convenience. I was checking pizza shops, burger joints, coffee shops and the countless restaurants in my area to make sure their stoves and ovens weren’t still on. Many were. I couldn’t take the chance of dealing with a fire all by myself. There were a few. Thankfully, small ones I could handle with a fire extinguisher.

  The further I moved into the city I came upon an airplane that had broken into pieces between two buildings along a main street. I had never seen anything like it before. Dust and cement littered cars and the roads. The thick smell of jet fumes blanketed the streets. Smoke billowed in black plumes from the engines. Charred body parts littered the ground. I couldn’t go closer than a hundred feet. The heat pushed me back or maybe it was my fear of seeing the damaged and burned faces up close. I was terrified even from a distance telling myself the passengers weren’t even alive when they crashed.

  It became apparent this suspended stasis affected animals too. I didn’t see any. Where had they all gone? I walked through eerie ghostly malls and silent residential buildings hoping beyond hope someone else like me was alive. I found no one. I was certain I had lost my mind.

  * * *

  By day eleven, sleep was a rarity. I spent two beleaguered nights at my apartment building checking in on my neighbors. The small place felt strange and foreign as if I had never live there before. More a need to find some sort of normalcy than concern because much like everyone else, they were in a cocoon state. There was no decomposing to Ms Hamden by the curb or Mr. Fong the shop owner with his hands perpetually on the register and spaghetti sauce. Not even from the obvious mortal injuries. My landlord, a loud greasy Russian man, sat in a small sofa chair with a nasty unlit studded cigar still in his mouth and a remote in his hand. His, wife a friendly though frustrated woman stood in the kitchen wearing only a bra and slip. Her coy conversations came to mind many times bringing me her much loved cheesecake with her weekly visits to my apartment.

  But I moved about constantly unable to stay in one location. At nightfall, my maddening anxiety surfaced bridging a route to paranoia. I was seeing moving shadows and hearing distant voiced conversations. Some sections suffered a complete blackout so I avoided those like a child told not to venture beyond the end of the driveway.

  I tested my driving on large vehicles. I became quite adept at operating trucks and busses, moving the smaller crumpled cars out of the roads. Reluctantly I was learning a new skill or maybe it helped to tell myself that. With the help of an old garbage truck, the four plus blocks I found myself clinging to were relatively clean. I even came upon a front loader tractor from a construction site, using it for moving fallen poles and going through the crashed plane when the fires and smoke finally calmed. Instruction manuals were my salvation. I’m not certain where the strength came from.

  From the crashed site, a row of seats from the airliner ejected, half imbedded into a fourth floor window. Even more seating sections littered the streets. The buildings in its path were cut and charred. The smashed bones and exposed flesh made my efforts so much harder. I used the word efforts but that description was far from accurate. I was merely dealing with the horror considering. There were three survivors, I concluded because their injuries compared to the others were more scrapes and cuts but no broken bones.

  I removed a young red haired girl no more than twenty who was still in her seat by tying her to a single mattress I found at a nearby furniture shop and pulling her to safety. It was crude but her size made it impossible for me to manage otherwise. The same shop also serve as a holding place for other bodies. A short old man about seventy and a young boy no more than eight were also placed on the bed beside her. The boy, a black child I could see had a dislocated shoulder and I made sure to set it and wrap it courtesy of what I learned at a youth summer camp. I couldn’t be sure if I did it right but my camp councilor would be proud. Ironically the three survivors laid in a strange peacefulness on the expensive bare mattress as if dreaming of the most normal things.

  I discovered many more unlucky bodies caught underneath the plane crash that were simple sitting in their cars probably going to work listening to their favorite radio program. After finding an ambulance, I moved more of them to the City Sleep mattress store. A total of twenty. No question there was much more in need but I was exhausted. Frustrated, I eventually gave up after a day.

  Within a week I discovered a new objective with which to immerse myself. I was becoming the reluctant caretaker of the city pulling grandmothers and children out of cars wedged into each other. If it wasn’t the rolling blackouts at night that threw everything into darkness then it was the growing inescapable stench of garbage. Communication of any sort was nonexistent. M
y cell phone only captured static. The electronic department in the downtown mall was blanketed with snowy white noise TV screens.

  “Hey! Is anybody there!”

  I would call out when I entered a new space hoping beyond hope another human voice would answer.

  None did. Maybe the seclusion was eroding my sanity.

  I fell asleep in the furniture section on a comfortable bed beside a dark haired woman. Her black handbag rested comfortable on her stomach. She was already on the bed to what I figured, trying it out in hopes of buying it. An East Indian man and woman also stood between two beds caught within a conversation. I placed them on beds also finding them lying down easier for me to sleep. What a way to go, I thought. You’re already in bed and then the whole world goes dead.