Patreon Exlusive Fiction: Float by Jim Horlock

Float

By Jim Horlock

“When was the first time you saw someone Float?” Nadia asked me.

I resented her for pulling that memory out from under the pile where I kept it.

We didn't have a universally agreed term for it back then, but everyone had seen the videos. More showed up every day, from grainy CCTV footage to crystal clear livestreams. It was getting harder and harder to call it a hoax. Christians were quick to call it "the Rapture" with all the fire and brimstone preaching that entailed. Spiritual types settled on "Ascension," though they couldn’t agree what that meant. Ufologists opted for the much more ominous "Taken," in equal parts jubilant and terrified at the connotations. Mrs. Lister, my parents’ neighbour, called it "being carried off" which prompted me to ask: "by what?" She didn't have an answer. No-one did. There were no beams of light nor conspicuous angels to lift people. Bodies just went limp, intangible as smoke, and floated upwards until they vanished entirely.

That’s how it was with the kid at the street fair, the first time I’d ever seen it happen. He went slack but didn’t fall, ice cream cone splattering on the ground. His mother was slow to notice, chatting away to a friend. She realised what was happening when he got to about shoulder height, and grabbed at his ankles, but her hands passed right through, like was already a ghost. She screamed and screamed until long after he was a dot in the distant sky.

I always asked myself if there was something I could have done. The logical answer was always “No”. No-one had worked out a way to prevent Floating. They still hadn’t.

But that dark voice in my heart asked, “Why didn’t you try?”

I shook myself, tried to bring my focus back to the present, to my date, worried that I’d been rude in not replying. Nadia didn’t seem to care. She struck me as someone more interested in talking than listening. I’d started regretting this meet-up about five minutes in.

“My brother works at NASA.” Nadia’s eyes gleamed as she shovelled salad leaves into her mouth. She didn’t pause her chewing to talk, eager to demonstrate this illicit knowledge. “And he says that even they don’t know what happens to them. They get to a certain height and just vanish.”

She leaned back a little, a proud magician displaying the flourish of their act. I poked at my potatoes. The NASA stuff wasn’t news to me. Everyone knew someone that claimed to know something, but the truth was that nobody knew anything. The world was full of Nadias, treating ignorance like it was sensational and trading on secret falsehoods.

*

She Floated about a week after that first date.

I wasn’t going to call her back anyway; I only knew about it because I saw her name on the daily lists. A part of me felt guilty for not caring more but all I could think about was the way she chewed with her mouth open. I only went on the date in the first place because my Dad pressured me to “do something with my life.” The latest in a life-long series of lectures he provided unprompted and gift-wrapped in disapproval. He'd never understand that I didn’t want marriage or kids or more friends. I didn’t want to “put myself out there.” I wasn’t him. I wasn’t my brother. I just wanted to be left alone.

I started avoiding the lists after Nadia, switching off the news to escape the rising count and steering clear of the webpages. Still, the absence of people was impossible to ignore. The streets grew more empty and the skies grew more full. There was no queue when I picked up my groceries. Traffic sounds grew quiet. There was less shouting and less loud music. People drifted in the air like lost balloons.

I felt guilty for relishing the peace of it. No pressure. No-one forcing me towards unwanted social engagements. The more people Floated, the more space there was for me.

Scientists had figured out a pattern, a daily wave of Floating that swept the world, starting at one side and slowly sweeping to the other, like a great tongue licking the planet clean of humans. Not insects, nor fish, nor birds—just us. The fanatics called it “the Golden Hour” and waited outside for it, their hands raised to the sky, waiting to be chosen by whatever deity they believed was to blame.

Other people holed up in basements or under stairs, waiting in sweaty desperation for The Golden Hour to pass them by, following the government guidance to still to stay indoors as much as possible and “remain tethered.” As if tethers helped anyone. People sold them on every street corner, in every shape and size and with every kind of guarantee. Everyone knew that, once you were Floating, nothing could touch you. People still bought them. I saw people walking around with five or six on their belts.

There was still no unified theory as to the cause. Everyone was just guessing, screaming their hypotheses, ramming them down the throats of anyone who’d listen.

It turned my stomach. I spent more and more time indoors, not because I thought walls and a ceiling would protect me, but because I couldn’t stand the fervour of other people. The longer we went without answers, the more justified I felt in my isolationist behaviour.

The streets became wild. There were people outside my apartment waiving genuine The end is nigh, repent! signs. There were gunshots and car alarms, but police never came to investigate. I read about riots and looting. Arsonists burned down half of London. Las Vegas was one big drug-fuelled orgy. All communication out of Pyongyang ceased completely. A cult in Norway staked people out under the sky as sacrifices. Someone streamed footage of a street in Tokyo where people hanged from their apartment windows in their hundreds, heels knocking gently against the concrete walls.

Every night, I fell asleep listening to the crying of someone in one of the other apartments.

My mom joined one of the New Age groups. She moved out of the house after a fight with Dad and went to live in a commune. She didn’t bother to say goodbye to me and left her phone behind. Dad’s response was to work his way steadily through his bourbon collection. I wondered who he’d take it all out on with the house empty. I imagined he must have broken his knuckles against the wall by night three at the latest.

My brother kept asking me to come stay at his house. “We should be together as a family at a time like this.”

I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less.

Politicians called for unification, for a great rallying of humanity, but for every person showing acts of kindness to their neighbours, there seemed to be ten who were stealing from the Floated or trying to profit from the panic or doling out mad, blind violence. Humanity was a cornered animal, and it acted accordingly. I wish I could say I was surprised.

I logged out of my socials, deleted the apps. Dad stopped texting—I wasn’t sure if he was gone or just too mad or too drunk to talk anymore.

A young woman Floated right past my window, close enough to reach. I didn’t try to grab her. I closed my blinds instead.

*

The crying from the other apartment stopped. I didn’t know if it was because the person Floated or if something else had happened to them. I was just glad it stopped.

There were no more sirens from outside. No more gunshots or screaming or sounds of violence.

I breathed in the silence and felt more peace than I had in years. I didn’t even have to feel guilty about it. There was no-one left to make me.

*

I didn’t open my blinds again until the night of the storm, and I wasn’t sure how much later that was. The thunder woke me, loud enough to rattle the windows. As my brain stumbled into waking, I pieced together the sensations around me. The lights were off. Maybe the power was out. Maybe the grid had finally collapsed under the weight of missing workers.

Lightning flashed outside, cutting the room into segments through the blinds. Empty takeout cans, scattered blankets, and dust. I hadn’t realized how bad I’d let things get, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad about it.

The thunder rumbled again, and rain threw itself against the glass. Drawn by the power of the storm, I moved to the window.

With so many people gone, the city was darker than I’d ever seen it. So many lights switched off for good. It made the sky seem bigger somehow. A thrill caressed my skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps. I was the last one left. I knew it in my bones. My time had come.

As I looked up at the cavernous sky, all mine now, something unseen brushed my arm and sent lightning rioting through my nervous system. My brain lit up with the pain of it and my throat closed on my scream before it could get out.

Then came numbness, total and complete.

I couldn’t move. I was locked in place, rigid, my bones immobile as steel rods. What had happened? Was it some kind of seizure? As the reality of my paralysis took hold, something in the clouds caught my eye.

There was something huge up there. A dark shape, so big that my eyes struggled to take in the scale of it. It somehow held qualities of enormous mass and spectral etherealness all at once. Beneath its domed body, innumerable tendrils drifted lazily, brushing through buildings and across streets, carried on currents beyond comprehension. Those dark specks that I’d long ago stopped thinking of as people were borne skywards by those tendrils.

And so was I. I drifted up out of my apartment out through the wall, out into rain that I could no long touch, up towards the great mass.

Floating was the work of a god after all, and alien, too. What else could you call something like that? This was a thing from somewhere outside natural order, something real and unreal, sitting just outside of perception until it touched you.

It had picked our planet clean of human life, a geostationary predator, a cosmic jellyfish catching us in its idle limbs. There was no greater purpose to it, no reason other than the simplest primal urge: hunger.

The tendril bore me up under the translucent shimmering bell beyond the storm. Scale lost all meaning against its dimensions, as a mouth the size of a continent received me. It was then I heard the screaming, like waves crashing of a high wind. I’d never heard a billion voices crying out at once before.

The tendril passed me into the great cavity of its stomach, into the writhing mass of half-digested human prey. I fell into the slime of former people, an ocean of partially digested humanity, their screaming ringing in my ears as I sank helplessly beneath the surface. Bubbling flesh filled my mouth and eyes. Hands grabbed at me, limbs tangled with mine in the crushing chaotic melee.

Released from the grasp of the tendril, the numbness faded quickly, and I willed my limbs to move again. I kicked, thrashed and fought my way to the surface, peeling sheaths of sloughed-off skin away from my face and gasping for breath.

All the people taken, everyone who Floated, they were all still here, still being digested. Slowly. Agonisingly. There was no way out. All I’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Instead, I was going to be joined to everyone in the worst possible way.

I opened my mouth and added my screams to theirs.