The Devil's Playground

By Ray Wil

What if the world fell asleep and only one person was awake. What would the last man on the planet do if everyone around him were like a still photograph. When Andy, a frustrated office worker awakens to find the world around him completely immobilized and in some kind of coma, he must find a way through the nightmare to survive and stay sane. He soon discovers however that in this new reality, there are also insidious forces lurking about more dangerous than he could ever imagine. Will he shrink as he has done in his former life, or can he muster the strength and courage to take on the numbered men who are responsible for turning the world into a comatose wasteland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ray Wil
• Release date: Apr 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310621512

Ray Wil

From a very early age I had a love of books. Actually, it was really comic books. Like many boys my age I loved seeing Superman the Krytonian, flying through the sky with the bright red cape or the incredible Hulk in his emerald green power smash through army tanks. I didn’t read the comics though, but simple marveled at the pictures and then tried to create them myself. I had no idea how to move from one panel box to the next. The minute I learned how to crack this cryptic puzzle was one of the happiest days of my life.I also developed and love all things artistic including poetry and storytelling, which are two important prerequisite for a writer.As a young man, like many my age, I had questions that needed answering and reading seemed to be the best way of quenching this thirst. How else would one find out how a heavy thing like an airplane flies or what the hell is shadow boxing. An encyclopedia.Credit also goes to some great teachers.My inquisitive mind led me to the interest of many things from sports, music, drama and art. Growing up with two competing brothers also I might have tried to carve out my own space within the household.Now a father of two great children I'm amazed everyday at the different world they grow up unlike the one I remember.One of my goals as a young man was to become an author and I feel privileged and incredibly appreciative to be pursuing my dream.

Book preview

THE DEVILS PLAYGROUND

written by

Ray Wil

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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

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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