Mark was late. Ginny frowned, glancing at the bank sign she could just see between the gaps in the buildings to her right. Every thirty seconds it showed the time, in between flashing the temperature, the date and a poorly programmed ‘welcome.’

She idly pushed herself on the swing she was sitting on, not letting her sneaker move on the ground. 

It was bad enough the bashful bouncer seemed to be using meeting to work out at the jungle gym as a date replacement, but she wasn’t planning to wait all day. She had work to do, her real work at her shared warehouse studio space before she had to come back for a night shift at the gentleman’s club where she and Mark had met.

Not that they couldn’t have met at home, they lived in small, dingy one bedroom apartments on the same hallway.

She couldn’t be late tonight. Keisha had somehow prebooked two different bachelor parties for the same Thursday night and she’d been reminding everyone it was all hands on deck tonight for over a week.

Ginny sighed again and refocused on her phone. Ten more minutes and she’d start without him. He was an ok dude for a strip club bouncer. He never seemed to make passes at the girls, unlike Rick and Kenny. Kenny was married so he should know better.

The first sign Ginny had that the world as she knew it was changing was her phone. The screen fizzled for a moment, it didn’t exactly pixilate, more rippled.

It happened quickly, so quickly that she thought her game was crashing. Then it restored to normal, only to glitch out in an entirely different way. The screen went from normal to completely filled with horizontal lines of different thicknesses. Then the whole world around her glitched too. 

It wasn’t exactly a flash of lights and sounds, but it wasn’t not that either. The sounds seemed to be entirely inside her own head though, and reminded her of casino noise.

Ginny felt dizzy and hugged the rusty chains of the swing she was sitting on to keep from falling off.

The sensation passed. She looked at her phone. Black screen. She lifted it to her face but it didn’t light up or unlock. 

“No. No no no.” She pushed the power button, she shook it. She barely stopped herself from throwing it into the bed of rubber mulch that had nearly completely sunken into the ground under the swingset.

She groaned and slid the device into her gym bag. She didn’t always carry a bag out to the park. Usually she would run home to shower between workout and studio time, but Mark had asked to meet mid morning instead of early morning. He’d worked the night before and she hadn’t.

The bag held her motorcycle gear. She didn’t need a van as much now that her work and sale spots were an easy walk apart. She’d bought the motorcycle with stripper money and put the van in the shop where it was still being rebuilt.

She looked around the play park. Parents didn’t bring their children here anymore. The grass was dry brown where there was grass at all. There were used condoms under the picnic tables and she occasionally used thick gloves and a sharps container to clear out the cache of used needles under the slide. 

Why anyone had ever built such a formerly nice play park in the same block as a strip club that boasted it had been in the same location since 1982 was a mystery to Ginny. However, the broken down playground had a mid 2010’s vibe. 

The cracked slide was made from that thick recycled plastic in that particular shade of green that had once been popular for playgrounds. Someone had once shot the slide or it wouldn’t be cracked, it was sturdy.

Ginny’s elementary school had the same kind of equipment. Plastic and metal piping that had once been red and brown, but now the thick paint had chipped off most everywhere. 

It was a big play park. Besides the slide with its tower and climbing wall there was an old fashioned merry go round, two broken seesaws, the set she was sitting on, and an all metal jungle gym with monkey bars, waist high parallel bars and three heights of high bars. The jungle gym was the best preserved of the equipment. 

Ginny herself had inspected and repaired all the elements of the thing before she started using it for practice and conditioning. There were four poles on the jungle gym suitable for practicing the strength moves Keisha preferred she didn’t do in the club.

Not only that, Ginny had replaced two of the swings with a set of used gymnastics rings she’d found at a swap meet.

The swings were easy to remove from the top bar if you could get up there. The spring loaded rings had been shielded by a once posh looking cover, back when the chains had also been covered to prevent the children from pinching their fingers.

Quite honestly, Ginny had begun using and altering the park months before she started working at CherryXXX, the strip club facing the main road. She had followed a flyer at the local scratch and dent grocery store. She’d never before seen that sort of community bulletin board outside an eighties movie. That led to her current apartment complex which was across the street behind the club.

The apartments were low rent, with everything that can come with substandard housing. They didn’t advertise online anywhere, as if it was the 1990s not the 2070’s. They weren’t looking for tenants who would complain about the broken laundry room or the cracked walls or the vermin. They wanted the kind of people who would pay the very low rents and never ask for anything.

They got strippers, drug dealers, thieves, and families barely making ends meet.

Half the girls at the club lived in the Gables with her. Many of them crowded together communally in the two and three bedroom units. 

They say that strippers fall into a few categories, the addicts, the mommies, the students and the hookers. Ginny didn’t consider herself any of those. She’d gotten a tech school welding degree while she was still a senior in high school, which she used to make recycled sculptures which sold for very little at the indoor flea market adjacent to her studio. The two buildings where she rented space were both owned by Gerald, a cousin of her landlady and her strip club boss. It had taken her some time to figure out that her landlords were cousins

She’d rented studio space first, then the overly convenient flea market space where she could literally move her sculptures on a dolly from fabrication to sale. Then she’d decided to stop living out of her uninsulated van last winter, which led her to the apartments and the club.

She made about enough to make her three rents off sculpture sales and not a lot more.

Exotic dancing was a much better money maker.

Like most of the dancers, all of the club bouncers also lived at the Gables. One with a room full of girls, one with a wife and kid, the last, Mark, alone.

Marlene, the retired dancer who owned the apartments, tried to group the residents together. The kids had access to the gated courtyard surrounded by the buildings where they all lived. The trashy side was right next to the club. Ginny’s place was the lone wolf building. It was a little quieter, a little cleaner and most of the repairs were done by the tenants.

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As she looked around Ginny didn’t see anything out of the ordinary for a weekday morning. The kids were all in school. The block was quiet. The lights and sounds hallucinations were gone.

There was a slight breeze ruffling the leaves of the one tree that still had leaves. It wasn’t winter, the other trees were just dead.

The creak of her swing as she walked it around to look in the opposite direction was the loudest sound in the park. There didn’t even seem to be any traffic noise coming from the main street, which ought to have seemed odd.

Ginny sniffed the air. There was something unpleasant and musky on the breeze. She let her swing unturn itself and froze.

At first glance she thought it was a dog. Then it seemed more like a boar. The tusks were part of that. The nose was wrong for a boar though, not very piggy. A tusked wolf? A big shaggy cross between a warthog and a hyena with a mane of hair down its back that made it look even more hunchbacked than it was.

The thing growled. 

Ginny fled. She didn’t run across the ground. She paused just long enough to sling her gym bag across her body and then she scrambled up the pole of the swing set, twelve feet up a smooth pole, to perch above the ground. 

It wasn’t as difficult as it sounded, she climbed poles every day. Her agility on the jungle gym was why Keisha had approached her from the back door of the club and persuaded her to try it out.

if Keisha hadn’t seemed so nice and normal she wouldn’t have done it, but she liked the work, even if she did occasionally feel weirded out that she was a stripper.

The bag threw off her balance a few times, but she was already used to that. The bag was important. Control of the bag was the difference between facing that beast with her bare limbs and facing it sheathed in her motorcycle gear.

When she thought about her new bike she glanced away from the beast at the abandoned dumpster coral behind the strip mall that was mostly vape shop, liquor store and mini market. Years before Ginny moved to the area the waste pickup people had made the shops move their dumpsters to the other end of the strip mall. Bolting a motorcycle shed to the pavement where the dumpsters used to sit and throwing a lock on both enclosures had been as easy as paying Marlene another $10 a month rent.

Unlike the ratty van she’d lived out of for a few years, her motorcycle was too new and too nice to park on the street in this part of town.

Keisha and Marlene were cousins and they, with the rest of their cousins, owned the strip malls on either side of the club, the apartments and more retail spaces on the other side of the apartments. They basically owned everything on this side of the main drag from the high school to the shopping mall. Their grandfather had passed the properties down to them.

Another growl brought Ginny’s attention back to her predicament. She was stranded precariously on top of the swing set. There were now three shaggy monsters in a wedge formation halfway across the basketball half court which no longer had a web under the hoop.

The pole was already slightly uncomfortable under her butt. The nearest better perch was twenty feet away. She had… she patted down her bag.

“I gave the pepper spray to Anna because that asshat kept following her out of the club.” She groaned. “Right. I probably should get dressed, but I don’t want to fall off either. Do I have a weapon?”

She held the pole she was sitting on with one hand while she searched her bag for anything resembling a weapon. 

“Right. No.” She wasn’t even carrying a pocket knife. She had a few in the top drawer of her nightstand, including a nice sharp machete, but that didn’t help her now.

Again she considered and rejected the thought of getting her motorcycle gear on while balancing on top of a four inch pole and rejected the idea again.

She even moved the bag so it was hanging on the ring bolt that held one side of the swing she’d been on.

A flash of inspiration hit. A chain could be an effective weapon. Detaching the swing chains wasn’t actually difficult, she’d done it before, and the spring loaded coupling was actually quite heavy, making a weighted end. 

Ginny shifted so she could reach the mooring and pulled down the covering. As she’d fully expected it was caked with grime and corrosion. It didn’t matter. There was enough grease in the mess to make the spring easy to use. 

Ginny locked both her legs around the bar and used both hands to detach the chain from the ring bolt. She took a deep breath and started pulling the chain up. She paused. How high could those things jump? Making herself a safer perch should be at the top of her list. Would half the length of the swing be high enough?

She could try it and see if the beasts could reach the swing. She threaded the chain through the ring bolt and kept the end while she continued lifting the seat. She attached the end of the chain to the triangular seat fitting and repeated the steps to make the other side the same height. 

By the time she finished, the three nightmare beasts had reached her refuge. One of them was even trying to jump up to her. It managed to jump about three feet, nowhere near as high as the six foot up swing, but she wouldn’t want to dangle her legs.

Satisfied that she had a viable plan, Ginny detached the second swing from both moorings.

One of the beasts shredded the second seat with its jaws and claws as she tried to haul it up.

Somehow Ginny managed to avoid being dragged off the bar and she coiled the two heavy, now separated, chains into one of the compartments of her bag. She put the bag on one of the bolts of her new perch and lowered herself slowly, ready to pull herself out of the way if the beasts had been smart enough not to jump as high as possible.

For the first time since the whole world glitched Ginny was able to relax. Standing on the swing was a lot more comfortable than balancing on the swingset pole.

She reached into her bag and pulled out her under armor shirt first. The garment had a moisture wicking fabric and made wearing protective gear a lot easier in the summer. 

Ginny ignored the three slavering beasts as she got dressed. She put the clothes on right over the sports bra, razorback shirt, bike shorts and loose shorts she’d worn to work out.

She had a pair of under armor leggings that matched the shirt. Black jacket, black pants, knee high boots, Kevlar gloves, all good quality and all qualified as road armor. However, the way that thing had chewed up the swing seat she wasn’t going to let them bite her boots, steel shin plates or not.

Finally she felt ready enough to pull out one of the chains. She idly wished she had a heavier weight of some kind as she made a knot in the clasp end. She swung the chain experimentally, but stopped. She wasn’t nearly stable enough.

She took out the second chain and anchored the end to a ring of the chain holding up her swing. She looped the other end around herself twice, anchoring a ring into the clasp on both passes. It wasn’t perfect. But she could slip out if she wanted to and she could brace herself against so she could have both hands free for her weapon. She would have liked to attach to both chains of her swing, but one was good enough.

As a last minute adaptation, she attached the ragged swing end of her loose chain to the same anchor clasp so she could not lose it. 

She swung the knot end of her weapon, very glad of her gloves as the links ground against her palms. She built up momentum and played out the chain until she could just reach the beasts who were still jumping and snapping under her feet.

The first impact of the chain against the shoulder of one of the hairy monsters was shocking. It jarred her whole body. There was a crunch of bone and a yowl of pain. The chain jerked in her hands. The other two beasts howled in angry sympathy and redoubled their efforts to reach her. 

The injured beast whimpered and limped back into range, no longer leaping around, but still attacking.

Ginny built her momentum back up, slightly surprised that the same tactic continued to work as she injured one beast after another. 

Once they were all injured she had to let out a little more chain and lean down some. The most ready targets were now their heads. They were more likely to dodge a head blow, but one or two impacts on the temple seemed more than enough to take them out.

The first impact on any particular target resulted in a thud and a crunch. The second hit to the same place invariably sent blood, skin and shards of bone into the air to splatter against Ginny and the ground.

She shook her head as another splatter of viscera flew into the air, trying to dislodge something from her hair without using her hands. She fervently wished she didn’t leave her helmet in the locker with her bike.

Unfortunately, just as she finished off the third beast, two more came running around the club building.

Ginny’s arms and back were screaming in exhaustion but she managed to keep her weapon swinging. She had used the first few beasts to teach herself how to fight with the chain and how to recover momentum after a blow so these two went faster.

She hit the first squarely on the head with a convincing squelch. It did not get back up.

The second interrupted her aim by twisting in the air unexpectedly, but only succeeded in exposing his own vulnerable underbelly to her swing. He took a second swing to end fully, although by then he could not get up. 

“What the fucking hell is even going on around here?” Ginny asked the air, letting her chain weapon rest on the ground. She stretched her aching arms out.