Last Playground

by Geoff North

  LAST

  PLAYGROUND

  Geoff North

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Geoff North

  Edited by Emily Nemchick

  Other books and stories by Geoff North:

  Live it Again

  Children of Extinction

  As the World Ends

  For more information, or to check on the progress of upcoming stories and novels, please visit

  www.geoffnorth.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  To my wife, Tamara,

  and children,

  Autumn, Jenna, and Colby

  Chapter 1

  The only contact Brinn Addam had with her dead mother these days was through her best friend, Selma Doudon. Brinn never had the chance to say goodbye to her mom. Her few friends and remaining family had assured her there was nothing she could’ve said during those final depressing days that would have made any difference. But Brinn had never believed in the power of words to change things. They were, after all, only words. There were other tools Brinn could call upon to make a difference, and she suspected her mother had known about them as well. She also suspected Nancy Addam knew how dangerous those tools could be and how they had to remain a secret—even between mother and daughter. When an unspoken secret is shared between two people it will inevitably fester after one of them passes on. Brinn never had the chance to say goodbye to her mom—at least not yet. That final moment still lay ahead of them.

  Brinn stared down at Selma’s still form lying on the bed. The girl’s eyes were rolled back up into her skull. Brinn called it the white eyes stage. Selma referred to it as slipping into the cracks.

  This peculiar contact had started two years earlier—right after Nancy Addam had lost her battle with cancer—the same day Brinn stopped playing with her imaginary friends. It had been time to grow up, time to let those friends rest and get on with her life. Brinn had less than a year to go before she graduated high school…if she graduated high school. Her grades had slipped substantially. The imaginary friends were gone, and even though she’d been through some awfully hard times, Brinn still had a lot of growing up to do.

  Selma’s eyes rolled back down. The pupils were large and black, almost overwhelming the dull green surrounding them. Brinn waited a few more impatient seconds. Selma blinked and Brinn shook her by the leg.

  “Did you talk to her? Did you see her?”

  Selma sat up. “I never see her… But yes, she spoke to me.”

  “And?”

  Selma retrieved a hoodie from the foot of Brinn’s bed and pulled it over her head. “And she said we should go smoke a big fat joint.”

  Brinn shook a fist at her. It wasn’t much of a threat. Selma was roughly Brinn’s size but her classmate was a lot tougher. Both girls were pretty; Brinn was just softer around the edges. Where Brinn had fallen in popularity at school and at home, Selma had already been unpopular for a long time. Both girls only had one parent. They made a good pair for all the wrong reasons.

  “Be serious, will you? What did my mom say?” She knew her friend well enough to see beyond the humor. Something wasn’t right—something even more unusual than talking to dead people.

  Selma left the bedroom and started down the hallway. She whispered back over her shoulder, “Someone’s coming after you, Brinn. She said he’ll be here soon.”

  They made it to the kitchen before Brinn could ask another question. Michael Addam looked up at his daughter as the two passed through. “I just put a pizza in the oven. Are you going to be home for supper?”

  Her father never asked Selma to stay. He refused to even make eye contact with the girl. Brinn saw the quick shake of her head. “We’re going to a friend’s place to watch movies. Maybe have a sleepover. That okay, Dad?”

  It wasn’t okay, but Michael didn’t protest. “You want me to save you some?”

  As hard as he tried to fill the role of two parents, her father was a terrible cook. “No thanks. See you tomorrow.” She hesitated between the kitchen and living room and ran back to her father. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “Everything alright, sweetie?”

  “I’m fine,’ Brinn answered with a laugh. ‘Can’t a girl kiss her dad?”

  Michael looked down at the floury mess on the counter, unsure how to respond. Selma broke the silence for him. “Come on, Brinn, we have to get going.”

  Six-year-old Logan Addam was sprawled out on the living room couch watching cartoons. “Where are you going?” he asked as the girls opened the front door.

  “None of your beeswax,” Brinn said. She winked and stuck her tongue out at him before shutting the door.

  She followed Selma up the path to the sidewalk and grabbed hold of her before she could take another step. “Hold on a minute. Who’s coming after me and where are we going?”

  Selma looked down the street both ways. Hamden was a sleepy prairie town. What was she expecting to see? Brinn started to get more nervous.

  “Your mom said a man was after you. She said he wasn’t from around here…not from anywhere around here.”

  Brinn looked back to the house. Logan was propped up on the couch, staring back at them. Something caught her eye at the east side of the house. A man was standing at the corner—the corner where Brinn’s bedroom window faced out.

  “Oh crap,” she said, shaking Selma by the sleeve. “Look.”

  Besides the fact he had been lurking outside her bedroom window for God only knew how long, there was something not quite right about him. He was between thirty and forty. Prime weirdo age. He had a corny haircut, parted straight on one side and slicked back like her grampa used to comb his. This guy had more hair than her grandfather though, golden brown and wavy with big square sideburns. He wore tight bell-bottom jeans and a matching denim jacket. The lapels of his white shirt beneath were pulled up over the jacket collar, the buttons done up only halfway.

  Selma pushed Brinn to the beat-up Mustang sitting along the curb. “Get in.”

  “I can’t leave like this,” Brinn protested. “That guy’s in our yard. What if he tries to go inside? What if he hurts Logan and my dad?”

  The man saw that he’d been discovered. He held a hand up, beckoning them to wait. He started for them and Brinn thought she could hear his knees squeaking. It had become more than just a question of who he was, but what he was.

  Selma shoved her friend into the passenger door. Brinn didn’t need any more convincing. She fumbled with the handle and jumped inside. The car fired up and the girls sped away.

  “Where are we gonna go?” Brinn asked. She was twisted around, looking out the back window. No one was following them.

  “Your mom said to go to the old farm outside of town where she grew up.” She barely slowed as
they rushed through an intersection. The tires squealed as Selma turned west.

  “The old farm? Why would she want me to go there?”

  Selma roughly shifted the car into fourth gear and shrugged her shoulders. “It didn’t make much sense to me. She’s your mom…was your mom. She said that’s where it all started and that’s where it would all end. She said you have to go there.”

  Brinn was shaking her head and watching out the rearview mirror as Hamden receded behind them. “I don’t think we should go there. My gramma still lives in a trailer not far from the old house. If she catches us…”

  “She’ll what? No offence, Brinn, but your granny’s an old woman.”

  Your granny is nuts. That’s what Selma probably wanted to say. Everyone in town knew Erin Stauch had started to lose it when her nine-year-old son disappeared from the farm back in the mid-seventies. And things had only gotten worse when her husband had passed away a few years ago and her daughter—Brinn’s mother—had died shortly after. A wave of guilt washed through Brinn. She hadn’t seen the woman since her mom’s funeral. With the exception of her father, no one visited Erin. “It still doesn’t give us the right to trespass.”

  “Who’s trespassing? We’re just going to poke around the place for a bit.” Selma pulled off at the end of a wooded lane. She got out of the car and Brinn followed. “Does this make you feel better? We’ll walk the rest of the way. She won’t even know we’re there.”

  They started up the quarter-mile-long lane. Brinn took one last look back towards Hamden. Not a vehicle in sight. They hadn’t been followed. She breathed easier. “It all started here and it will all end here. What do you think she meant by that?”

  “How should I know? Like I said, she was your mom.”

  Brinn had met Selma during the summer before the start of tenth grade. Selma was new to Hamden back then, alone with her mother in a small town that didn’t warm too quickly to strangers. The girls smoked pot that very first day by the river in Hamden Park. It wasn’t the smartest decision Brinn had ever made and it wasn’t the ideal way to begin a friendship, but she had been looking for anything in those days to ease the pain of losing her mother. She didn’t have the stomach for alcohol like most of the other kids in Hamden High, but weed seemed to do the trick just fine. It was a painless escape and coming down didn’t result in puking her guts out. Her father had smelled it on her clothes, he’d demanded she stop—the two had fought, naturally—but the drugs had remained a part of her life. Besides, Selma could only contact Brinn’s mother when she was good and high.

  “What’s it like?” Brinn asked.

  Selma gave her a look.

  “What’s it like talking to my mom? You always tell me what she says but you never tell me what you see…what it’s like.”

  Selma made another noncommittal shrug. “I don’t see much of anything. She just starts talking in my head.”

  “How can you be sure it’s my mom?”

  “Not this again. I don’t know why she talks to me instead of you. I don’t know why I have to be stoned to hear her. To tell you the truth, it’s gone beyond creepy and weird. I wish she would just…you know…get on with her life…her afterlife…whatever.”

  Brinn didn’t push her on it. Having any contact with her mother was enough. “Did you get a good look at that guy?”

  “He looked like a reject from the seventies or something.” They rounded a bend in the road and saw the old farmhouse in the yard. The trailer Erin Stauch now called home was set behind it another hundred yards or so. “Was it my imagination or did his knees squeak when he started to run?”

  “Well, he did look kinda old.” Brinn thought her friend might laugh at that. She didn’t even crack a smile. “Did he seem familiar to you?”

  Selma shook her head and kicked a stone from the road into the ditch.

  “I swear I’ve seen him before. Like in a movie or something.”

  “Nobodies like us stalk movie stars—not the other way around.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They reached the weed-infested front yard where Brinn’s mother had played as a little girl. She followed Selma through a trail of lilac bushes into an even weedier backyard. They looked up at the old house looming over them. There were rotting wooden steps leading up onto a sagging veranda. All of the windows not attached directly to the house had been long since smashed out. Above the veranda were two bedroom windows facing to the east. The window on the southeast corner was covered with a sheet of plywood; the one to the northeast was open. Brinn could see remnants of two-by-fours jutting out from the window frame. The wind hadn’t done that, she thought.

  It appeared as though the house was grinning at them. One bedroom window eye was shut, like it was winking. The other was open and black, staring at the two girls down in the grass. The bend in the veranda roof resembled a mouth, the worn shingles sticking up in places like rotted brown teeth.

  Selma reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out half a joint. She had smoked the first half in her Mustang minutes before entering Brinn’s house and communicating with her friend’s dead mother.

  She went to light it and Brinn took a hold of her wrist before the flame could reach its blackened end. “Please, Selma. Not here.”

  “Lighten up. I’m not going into that place without a good dose of giggles to back me up.”

  “Neither one of us are going in there,” Brinn protested. “This is crazy…all of it. The drugs, you talking to my mom…and now this… Jesus, if you get stoned out here, there’s a good chance you’ll burn the place down.”

  Selma flicked the unlit joint into her face. She punched Brinn’s shoulder a little too hard. “You’re the one that wants to keep talking to her. You’re the one that keeps on getting high with me. What’re you trying to say, Brinn? You wanna clean up your act? You wanna concentrate on bringing your grades back up and making new friends?”

  Brinn backed away a step. She was getting sick of being punched and poked with each mention of the words you’re and you. Selma was her best friend—her only friend. “Well maybe it is time we grew up a little bit. All this sneaking around…the lying…the pot.”

  Something rustled through the lilac bushes behind them. The man who had been lurking behind Brinn’s house stepped through the path. “I was his last creation…his final friend in the end.”

  Brinn spun around and stepped back into Selma at the same time.

  “I was nearby when it happened. I couldn’t stop it.” He seemed desperate to get this point across—to unburden some hidden guilt from his too-hairy chest.

  Selma stood between Brinn and the man. “Back off, creep. Just leave us alone.”

  The man nodded slowly. Did he realize how odd he sounded? Was he getting it through his head that chasing after seventeen-year-old girls wasn’t appropriate behavior? “I’m sorry, miss.” He was talking directly to Brinn. “I should explain myself a bit better. I’m Oscar Williams…I used to be an operative for the S.S.I.A. That’s the Super-Secret Intelligence Agency.”

  “Oh,” Brinn answered.

  “I’ve traveled some distance to find you.”

  “Did you say the Super-Secret Intelligence Agency?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “That’s what I thought.” This encounter was turning into a nightmare.

  “Your uncle, my creator—Neal Stauch—died accidently in the summer of 1977. He was nine years old.”

  Brinn inhaled sharply. No one spoke about Uncle Neal. Not only had this man specifically targeted her, but he’d done plenty of research. How long had he been stalking her? How long had he been planning this?

  And what did he know about her Uncle Neal? As far as Brinn knew, he’d disappeared as a child. Neal had wandered away from this very same farm he’d grown up on—was growing up on—a runaway child with a fifteen-minute grudge against his parents. Or so the story went. She had never spoken to her parents of it—not once had she asked her mother what became of her bi
g brother—she knew better. Neal Stauch had disappeared one summer afternoon, and that was that. For a stranger to suggest otherwise was wrong.

  A stranger like the one standing in front of them now.

  “I don’t want anything to do with you,” Brinn finally said.

  He scratched his forehead, troubled at how to continue. “I’m very sorry, Miss Addam. I know it all sounds very disturbing but I have to make you understand I’m not here to cause you any harm…I need your help.”

  There was a rip on the back of his hand. Not a cut, but an actual tear in the skin. The edges appeared dry and curled back, like dry, flesh-colored rubber. Selma saw it too. She caught a glimpse of metal beneath before he lowered the arm back down to his side. “What’s wrong with your hand? Shouldn’t you see a doctor about that?”

  He held it back up and studied the injury for a moment. “There’s no one left to fix it.”

  “Is your hand a prosthetic or something? Is that what they call it?” Selma tilted her head to one side for a better look.

  He took half a step back and offered the hand up slowly. “You could say that I suppose, but it’s a lot more advanced than anything your world’s working on these days.”

  Brinn’s eyebrows rose. “Our world? Are you telling us you’re a super-spy from another planet?” There was something about the way he tried to keep his distance, the innocence in his blue eyes that told her she could relax a bit.

  Had Uncle Neal let his guard down in a similar way? A kind gesture, a pleasant smile?

  “Gosh, no! That’s Commander Gunnarson’s thing. I’m from good old Earth, just like you... Well, an Earth…another Earth, I suppose.” He held the back of his hand up closer. “I’m an android. My whole arm is a mechanical construct.”

  “You’re a robot?” Selma grinned at her friend. “Am I still high?”

  “Not a robot…an android. Everything you see is artificial; only my brain is real. It’s the only part of me that’s all…human.” He rolled up the jacket sleeve on his opposite arm and Selma gasped. The skin beyond his wrist and all the way up to his elbow was gone. They could see a network of black, red, green, and yellow wires interlaced through a series of silver steel cables. There were tiny circuits and blinking lights of purple and blue. He flexed his fingers, made a fist, and the cables throughout his forearm contracted with the action. There were dark brown spots coating some of the thicker wires. Rust?