Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
The entire city, maybe the entire world, is on a comedown. I sit down on the edge of the building Rick walked off, and then fell up from and I put my face in my hands. I’m feeling an intense sadness and loss. Rick was a fucking monster, but he was a monster I knew, and I have the feeling he’s never going to return. I don’t know what happens when you get sucked into the sky, but I know he didn’t have an oxygen mask on when he got pulled up there.
After a few minutes of listening to the world go bananas around me, I pull out my phone and see five hundred pictures of a glowing sky populating my feed. Then there’s a thousand pictures of people being snaked up into the sky on unseen hooks. A lot of them are holding weapons. None of them look very happy. They all have particularly feral expressions on their visages, hostile, aggressive, abusive, angry. None of these people were up to any good. Ten thousand Ricks just got removed from the planet, and I have to think we’re all better for it.
ALIENS HAVE INVADED
An alert hits my phone from a trusted news outlet. I roll my eyes. Aliens haven’t invaded. They’ve hovered and had a little something to say about people engaged in vicious aggression.
It’s fascinating how long it takes for anybody with any kind of authority to do anything. I am sure there are plenty of meetings going on in the world, but most people are just losing their shit. Every religion has an immediate and completely wrong take. I know it’s wrong, because I saw what happened for myself. The aliens came, they made me feel all cozy and safe, and they took my abuser away.
Kind of sounds like that’s what happened across the world, one way or another. You’d think this would please people, but for every grateful person who was about to get stabbed, there are a dozen people who think that the assholes who got sucked up into the sky were just misunderstood people who deserved a second chance.
I watch through the lens of my phone as the most incredible, transcendent, and in my case, life-saving extra-terrestrial intervention is re-imagined to be everything from an invasion to evidence that (insert preferred political or religious leaning) was right all along.
Some people are suggesting that the Rapture has happened for real, that it wasn’t aliens, it was God, and therefore those of us who are left must be the damned, and this must surely be the end of days. Looting breaks out. Some people start setting cars on fire. The police and military are deployed to restore order to the streets. I watch all of this from the corner of my building and I wonder how this is all going to turn out.
Back at the best coffee shop in the world…
“You think you’re an angel, but you’re no angel,” the lady who threw the shake says. “You’re just an alien freak and we’re gonna fight you and your kind. You took my boy! My sweet boy! He never hurt anybody!”
I was already well aware that Rick wasn’t the only asshole to be alien raptured. It later turned out that everybody who happened to be engaged in wanton violence or acts of hate at the time the Cupid arrived was sucked up into the sky. Every single war in the world ended in an instant, and every crime in progress was stopped. But not every single soldier or every single criminal or asshole was taken. It was only the people being actively aggressive at the time of invasion, and that means a lot of assholes were left behind to continue jerking it up on Earth.
A lot of people are having a hard time coming to terms with having lost someone to the rapture because cruel and violent people rarely get by in life without a good number of apologists who think they’re either justified, or not actually that bad after all.
“Your boy was probably a piece of shit,” I say, remembering Rick and how close he was to killing me. The people who got sucked up off this planet’s face fucking deserved it, and being angry that they’re gone is the act of a moral-less enabler. People like Rick don’t get to be people like Rick without other people like this woman making excuses for them, that’s what I think.
“He was my SON!” The woman shrieks with all the protective mama bear don’t give a fuck instincts of thousands of years of evolution coming to the fore.
“Jessica,” Arlo says. “Get back into the ship.”
He says it in the same tone you’d use to tell your barking dog go to back inside the house, with a stern edge to his tone that makes an invisible tail I didn’t know I had go down and between my legs.