Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

Only Carlton Ray himself seemed full of energy. He ordered everyone to stay in the house. Zedekiah would need us to stay in close proximity to each other to pick up our Evolved Vibrations. At about noon, Carlton disappeared into a shed out on the grounds and returned a few minutes later, heaving an industrial can of glyphosate weed killer. It sloshed thickly, like syrup.

Jordan was entrusted to make a trip to the local store and buy orange juice and a pack of Dixie Cups. He asked if he could take me with him. It was the first time he had used my name in days, but Carlton told him I could not be spared. Zedekiah required my presence for navigation purposes.

When he came back with the juice, Jordan was slurring slightly. There was a bottle-shaped bulge in his pant’s pocket and his hair smelt of weed.

We watched in absolute silence as Carlton Ray poured a slug of weed killer into each cup of juice. I took mine and followed the others out in the garden.

Carlton toasted the sky. “Zedekiah awaits us! Let’s leave these de-evolved bodies and let our souls be airlifted to the comet.”

Some people were shaking. Randall, the man with the belly and the comb over slid to his knees, still clutching the cup in front of him. Next to me, Carlton’s wife was staring at her drink and shaking her head from side to side.

All I could do was stare at the red cup in Jordan’s hand, knowing with total certainty that if he drank his, I would drink mine.

As Jordan raised his cup to his mouth, Carlton’s wife screamed and threw her cup across the garden, knocking mine from my hand.

“I won’t do it, Carlton, I won’t!”

Carlton Ray gripped her arms. She was frozen, staring so hard at the ground that he had to crouch a little to get the trembling woman to see him.

“Baby doll, don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust your Carly Ray? Look at me. We are going to fly away from this doomed world and find a new life.”

She didn’t answer him. She couldn’t look at him.

“Don’t you love me?” he asked. He cupped her face in his hand and made her look him in the eye.

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you,” she said, eventually.

Carlton Ray offered her his cup. “Then trust me now, trust me in this.”

She stared at the cup for a moment and then took it with calmer hands.

“We are going to be together forever,” he reassured her, kissing her softly on the cheek.

He then turned to Jordon and told him to go prepare two more cups of Ascension juice. Jordan took the glyphosate into the house. While he was gone, Carlton insisted we all lay down in readiness and regaled us about the interstellar adventure that lay ahead of us.

The last thing I saw was Jordan’s face as he handed me a fresh cup of juice. For a second, as his head blocked out the sky above me, he gave the tiniest shrug and then he slugged down his drink and lay down beside me.

I drank down my juice in one. It tasted thick and metallic. I thought I might hurl, but I kept it down. I lay back on the lawn. The soft grass tickled my neck. I slipped my hand into Jordan’s. He surprised me by holding mine tightly in return.

Around me people started to moan in pain. It hadn’t occurred to me that the ascension might hurt. Jordan made a noise in his throat, his hand started to spasm violently in mine. But even as I started to panic, I felt my body start to relax, and then I didn’t remember anything else.

“Son? Son, can you hear me?”

Someone gripped my arm and shook me.

“He’s breathing. Get me some oxygen. Bob! Oxygen! Now!”

Something cold clamped down on my face and stale, dusty air billowed into my lungs. I lurched up on my side and coughed my guts up.

It was night. A bright clear moon illuminated the garden. There were electrical lights on stands. A few bodies were in black body bags, most were covered by blankets and sheets.

Jordan’s hand was no longer in mine. A body was next to me, covered in a blanket. I recognized Jordan’s sneakers sticking out from under the end of it. I tried to get up, to pull the blanket from him, but the paramedic held on to me, pulling me tight against his stiff windbreaker, telling me over and over that I was going to be alright, but I knew I wasn’t.

“I was supposed to go,” I yelled, “I was supposed to go with them.”

I looked up at the night sky, desperately searching for him. But if there was a comet with a tail amongst the stars, I couldn’t find it.

I was still crying when my Pa came. They’d told him that I had survived, but he still ran up to me, tears in his eyes, and held onto me.

“I could’ve lost you,” he kept repeating. “I could’ve lost you.”

There was orange juice and a whole heap of whiskey in my stomach, but nothing else. No trace of weed killer. Jordan had never believed that he was going anyplace but the grave. It took my father to explain to me that Jordan hadn’t abandoned me◦– he had saved me.

I was the only person to attend his funeral. Just me and an elderly preacher, with barnacle skin and a mean-ass spirit.

“Some people don’t the sense they were born with,” he muttered as we stood by the grave.

“No, he knew what he was doing.”

“Then he committed a mortal sin,” the preacher said.

“Jordan didn’t do nothing wrong,” I told him. “He stayed as long as he could.”

“There’s a harvest,” Paul says, so we draw straws and I am the unlucky one. We call everything new that’s outside a harvest, if it’s anomalous. There’s always something to salvage.

It is a ten-minute process at this point: actually trying to get myself dressed to go out there. The things we have to consider◦– rads, rays, whatever you call them◦– we haven’t got anything to guard against fully, so we’ve been forced to adapt. We have fragments: old suits from the nuclear plant nearby that we’ve pulled apart and repurposed. Better that ten of us can share the wealth than one. My headpiece was originally another suit’s thigh. I have attached goggles to it, sealing them; split the end so that it stretches over my entire head, my shoulders, even. You try to make sure that there are no gaps of skin showing through. I’m sure that a doctor would tell me that what I was attempting was pointless: that if something out there was going to get to me, it was worming its way in whatever I did. But we don’t have a doctor, so.

We’ve made our own airlock into the basement. There are three doors between us and the outside; two that are meant to be here, another that we brought down and fastened to the walls. We have soldered the gaps where we can, and we’ve run carpet along the inside of the door seams. Anything extra that we can do. It’s a heave: open one door, close it; open the next, close it; then the last, and you are outside, in the sunlight and the glare and the haze. We call it an airlock, but we don’t know how tight it is. We’ve stayed mostly healthy so far.

There’s a harvest. That’s all I’ve been told. Could mean anything.

Whatever they’ve found is three miles away from base camp, so that means I have to cycle. I pick one of the old BMXs, because I’m heading towards roughage, and I need the rugged stuff. There are jumps out there, and rocks. Sometimes you’re told to just get on the motorway, head down towards Junction 10 or 9, and then you can take a road cycle, one with thin tires and curved handlebars. But in the roughage, the tyres would be wrecked in seconds, and we’re running out of repair kits. No sense in playing games now.