The Devil's Playground Read online

  What made me different. Why did I wake up and not this woman with her flowery perfume. What made me who moved around taking showers in various peoples bathrooms, the lone human being to this ghost world. Even if I still wasn’t convince everything I was seeing was real.

  I slept that night continually twisting and turning before I realized my light spring jacket was hampering me. I felt warmth beside this unknown contented woman who didn’t move an inch the few hours I slumbered. At some point, I stripped myself down to my undershirt and underwear with my hands and legs draped across this poor soul. I hadn’t had any other kind of human contact in more than two weeks. I was like a starving man in the desert hoping for a hint of rain but finding the illusion of water adequate for the time being. She however served as my comfort. A teddy bear to a lonely, secluded desperate child. I called her Lisa. She looked like a Lisa. Lisa was also a girl from my middle school that I had a crush on. I dreamed of Lisa lying on the department floor bed like I was 12 years old struggling in a prepubescent body until she morphed into a coworker named Kay. I was of course in love with Kay and sadly could never bring myself to talk to her. Another thing I regretted not doing before the end of the world.

  The short sleep became restless and haphazard with bouts of sweat and turning. At some point, I was clinging to my bedmate Lisa with images of the airplane victims parading in my sleep and ultimately waking up with my lips locked desperately to hers. I must have carried on like this for several minutes before realizing it. But that wasn’t the most fantastic part. Lisa’s mouth and arms were moving with my own as the two of us took part in some strange odd embrace. This was too vivid to be a dream. Was I still dreaming? I felt hands moving down to my crotch grabbing and probing until I pulled away jumping off the bed.

  She sat up slowly turning towards me then looking down to her hands.

  “What is happening? What did you do? I can move. Oh my god I can move. Oh my god!”

  Despite the overwhelming desire to yell with excitement at not being the only human being in my new world I was also frightened. I grabbed at my clothes on the floor covering my protruding arousal.

  “Hi…” Was all I could muster.

  “Oh my god…thank you.”

  “OK. How…How did you…Sorry for kissing you…I was dreaming…”

  She came off the bed and hugged me, “It’s ok. I could kiss you a million times. Oh my god what is happening. One minute I’m lying down and the next I can’t move. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move. Oh my god, thank you!”

  “You’re welcome…”

  “My family must be worried sick. Where’s my phone. How long have I been like this?”

  I was putting on my two hundred dollar jeans and the rest of my newly acquired expensive clothes. I decided to be blunt with my assessment of our situation. It would require less explaining in the long term. I had rehearsed the words repeatedly inside my head, both excited and sad at the time when I’d have to use them.

  “The world is ah…it’s ah”

  Unable to finish, I simple sat on an adjacent mattress wanting to enjoy the look of another human being alive and moving. She was an attractive woman with a look of hard working mother. Much older than myself but her eyes were lit up like a child. She reached into her purse for a cell phone. I would think to call her family.

  “…The world is what?” She asked.

  “Ah…the world is pretty much gone. I haven’t seen anyone else for miles for weeks now. Except for you, waking up just now.”

  As I suspect those words hardly sounded believably.

  “What. What are you saying?” She said with her cell phone at her ear.

  “The world is dead. Everyone is just like you were.” I repeated.

  I’m not sure if she heard me. Her attention was still on trying to make a call. She moved about between the beds trying to get a signal.

  “Dammit. I can’t get a signal.”

  She then stopped abruptly after noticing the people on the beds.

  “You’re the only moving human being I’ve seen in weeks. The world is dead.” I said again.

  The dry reality enveloped the space like the sudden cold through an open winter door.

  “What…no. I was just…Am I dreaming? I thought something was wrong with me. I could see and hear things but…”

  “I’m sorry but, I don’t know what to tell you. Everyone is just like you were. Just frozen. Probably all over the world.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me…” She began again before I interrupted her.

  “I was hoping, I mean I didn’t know but I thought everyone was dead at some point. God…”

  The frightened woman surveyed the large store again walking between the beds and furniture looking towards the sparsely lit area. I had turned off many of the lights so the collection of bodies occupying them seemed eerie.

  “Is that…what happened to them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you do this. Did you do something to them?”

  “No. No. Like I said, this is how everyone is.”

  “What do you mean. Everyone like who?”

  “Everyone.”

  “What the hell are you talking about. Are you’re saying the whole world is like this. No, that’s impossible. How do you know this? What about…my god, my kids…”

  “The same. Just like you were. Everything is shutdown. No signals. No type of radio or television or phones. No broadcasting at all…”

  “No, no, no, no I’m still dreaming.” She quietly denied to herself.

  Unruffled, I continued, determined to relay all the information I thought relevant. “No internet signal. It’s like everyone just fell asleep all at once. Actually no. It’s like they are all frozen. In some state of suspension. There’s crashes and broken bodies all over the city and probably the world. I’ve been trying to clean up as best I could. Something to do. I don’t know.”

  “My god…”

  “I don’t know where god is right now.”

  She sat down on the soft arm of a sofa. Tears had welled into her eyes.

  “I have to see…”

  The woman jumped up, running toward the closest exit. I trailed behind her realizing I didn’t know her name and I couldn’t exactly call out. Thinking I could have simple looked inside her purse. I may have yelled out wait several times but we were two floors up from ground level. I had stopped the escalators days before not really seeing the need to have it continually running.

  When I finally caught up to her she was sitting on a bench by the entrance. Her body, motionless as if the shock of the street and broken light poles with cars still careened together were too much to digest.

  “Hey…” I called out.

  From behind she appeared calm and serene. I walked around the bench to speak and noticed a stillness. Too still.

  “Hey, are you…are you alright?”

  Are you alright, seemed so mundane and ordinary a question to ask in our fantastic situation. Yet it was the de-facto words to ask, even when faced with near death and life altering accidents. What else could someone say in this instance? There was no answer to my routine question though. She resembled the rest of the population that was once again as separate from me like the stars hanging in the night sky. Unmoving. I couldn’t with all my might make any sense of it. I sat beside her and wept in desolation for what felt like an hour. Tears wet my face while I hung onto her silent body willing her to awaken. But there was nothing.

  Her name was Lauren and she was forty five years old. Inside her hand bag there was a hundred and twenty dollars next to a wallet along with a blush capsule, lipstick, a cell phone and other various store receipts. I thumbed through actual photographs of children and what looked to be a husband. A happy family captured and frozen in a recent perfect memory. I was once again by myself unable to understand the strangeness that encapsulated my sanity.

  But I couldn’t afford to sink into self pity. There wer
e too many questions that needed answers. If Lauren could awaken then maybe this might happen for other people as well. I put her over my shoulder and brought her back carefully to the store bed. She mentioned she had some semblance of consciousness while she couldn’t move so I continued to talk to her. She wasn’t dead. The world wasn’t dead. That was a good thing. That was godly.

  “Ok, I’m gonna take you back to the department bed for now. It’s a nice bed. I don’t know what just happened. I’ll come back for you at another time and bring you to your home. Sorry, I wish I could do more. I was hoping I’d have someone around to help out, talk to but…even for a second isn’t all bad.”

  She gave me a breath of hope. A thin sliver to feel good about. An unfailing hitch though, lingered inside my head that I couldn’t ignore. Maybe just like me Lauren was one in a million of glitches. The same way I was a one in a billion possibility. What if what happened to her wasn’t going to happen to anyone else. I wasn’t being negative but realistic. Just as plausible, I could wake up one morning and the whole world is back to normal. Sure, there would be a lot of cleaning up. Similar to a hurricane or snowstorm or a large devastating fire but the people would handle it. The trained people and authorities would be awake gladly doing their part to clean up this huge mess of a catastrophe.

  I was tired and exhausted and there was no one around to recognize how hard I labored or how much blind effort I was putting in. The hopelessness was long, drawn and suffocating.

  I needed to reward myself so I ascended to a penthouse condo apartment just a block away from the mall in a upscale residential area. I found keys in a back office. The building manager, a tall slim man was laying face down on his office floor. I rolled him over onto his back before going through the room where they kept apartment keycards.

  “Hi. Never mind me I’m just looking for a key for your penthouse. Just pretend I’m not here. I’m rolling you over because being faced down for so long I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I’ll be outta your hair soon enough.”

  I felt somewhat better giving him an explanation after all he was face down on his office floor for over three weeks. That is a kind of hell I didn’t want to think about and yet it was a little humorous at the same time.

  The condo suite was luxuriously large complete with an elevator to the front door. The entrance was lined with ornate crown molding and accents over marble floors sitting beneath twelve foot coffered ceilings supporting a decorative chandelier. The walls a light pale yellow with white trims ran throughout the two bedroom and then into a large master suite. Poster sized black and white photographs lined the expansive living room walls beside custom made shelves bringing you to an exquisite stone tiled fireplace. My eyes surveyed the various photographs of exotic body parts splattered with small hints of color. A blond man not much older than me sat sprawled on a deep sofa wearing only a robe with dusty cigarette burns in the rug by his feet.

  Oh god, I was hoping this would be empty. I mumbled.

  Inside the bedroom ensuite, slumped on the shower tile floor was a naked young woman her head squished against the glass door. No water was running but a trickle of blood ran down the side of her face. I decided to move her to the closest bedroom putting her in a more comfortable position. For a moment, there was a flickering of the lights while I dragged her petit dead weight over the Italian marble.

  Moments later the lights steadied again. A thought rang into my mind of all the nuclear reactors that were now unattended around the world. All the power stations that needed someone to run them. What would happen to them. How were they being maintained for the past three weeks? I didn’t want to think about. For the time being, I wanted to pretend that the world wasn’t falling apart.

  I needed to eat and manage to find some steaks and frozen vegetables in the freezer. I had been feasting on store deli pastrami and ham sandwiches for the past week and it was a welcome change. Many of the fruits and vegetables or cakes in the fridge were beginning to turn. On the door panel, I discovered bottles of strong German beer that I immediately drank and after fumbling with the six-burner gas stove, I went about cooking. My cooking skills were rudimentary at best but I knew enough to take care of my grinding gnaw in my gut.

  I found the olive oil and spices I needed in the clean post modern red cupboards that didn’t seem to fit the front foyer and soon the penthouse smelled of much needed peppered beef steak sauce. I remained in the open double oven kitchen and ate, feeling somewhat uneasy about the body in the living room staring absently. Another beer calmed my nerves and I soon opened the balcony doors looking out over the dark lifeless landscape. Many of the office buildings lights were on. They were the ones I hadn’t gotten to yet. I thought conserving power was a good thing even cutting down air-conditioned spots despite the weather being hot and humid. Almost unnoticed, like a light wind, a strange benevolent voice eased into my ear.

  “How you doing soldier?”

  My hands trembled followed by trembling in my stomach. I blamed the two and a half bottle of German beer I consumed. I held on to the balcony but was unable to keep hold of the beer. The bottle slipped, tumbled downward spilling liquid before it plunged into the trees sixteen floors below. The big bright moon looked gigantic in the clear sky almost drowning out the resting constellations. A sort of slow motion euphoria washed over me. I fell backwards against the glass door. Voices erupted from above. Flickering from the assemblage of stars. I could hear the cacophony of noise speaking. Sounds even burst from the moon in turbulent surges. I continued sloshing about more frightened.

  What was happening. It seemed my sanity was finally lost because even the buildings were talking.

  “Man it’s hot isn’t it.” The faceless ghost uttered again.

  Voices were seeping, swirling from every direction. I was slipping into stark-loonytoon-isolation-bonkers. The loneliness had taken its toll. Sounds were madding, humming at first like the drone of a swarm of bees. Ultimately overwhelming, while I stumbled aside fighting to hold my balance. I crashed to the floor before picking myself up but fell again knocking over an expensive floor lamp and slamming onto the still body on the sofa. I couldn’t get the sonic bombardment to stop. The raining wave rang loud like wicked booms and explosions from a warzone busting inside my ears. I was twisting on the floor screaming until just as it began, it faded.

  Uncountable minutes later I was imbued by a misty silence except my deep short breaths. Was I losing my mind? Could it be whatever that caused the planet to fall asleep was slowly draining whatever rationale I had left. Thinking dryly, with a murmur of abandon that I could simply end my suffering and throw myself over the balcony. A struggling, bleak survival with no one to talk with wasn’t living. How much longer could I carry on moving from one location to the next being the lone caretaker. Another three months perhaps, a year maybe. But I recanted, holding on to the thought that if somehow someone could awaken once then they could come to life again. Even if it meant more painful episodes or even months being by myself.

  * * *

  I was laying in the bed beside Jennifer, the blond girl from the shower. A riffle through some envelopes revealed their names and credit card payments. Her boyfriend Josh, was placed inside the master bedroom. I thought it only fitting to put him in another area. I dressed her in a blue tank top from a closet and a striped flannel pajama bottom. The lights were dimmed slightly. I convinced myself that this wasn’t a violation of any kind. Something had taken place the first time I kissed Lauren in the department store. It was probably an exchange of bodily fluids or something inside mine had awakened her. I wet my forefinger inside my mouth before rubbing it between Jennifer’s lips and sat back. Not sure what I was expecting but there was no movement from her. Not one sparse flicker of an eyelash. She continued slumbering unmoving like a lifeless Snow White. I spoke, imagining she might be in some way aware of my presence.

  “Ok, I’m gonna try this saliva again. I have a suspicion it’s something to do with the mouth. So
ah just relax. Just relax, I’m just gonna kiss you.”