Author’s Note:
The following short story was written
for the April Fool’s Challenge at Absolute Chaos, which was
to write something completely unlike what you normally write – different style,
different genre, etc. During the month
of April, those who participated had to post their story under a new penname on
AC to disguise their entry, and then we had to try and guess who wrote what to
see if we could still recognize each other’s writing. Most of us sucked at the guessing, which
means we did a pretty good job at disguising our writing for the challenge!
Anyway, for my entry, I decided to write sort of a sci-fi, which isn’t a genre
I usually tackle, and I incorporated a couple of other “genres” I would never
seriously write either. I wrote it in
first person, which I rarely do, and in the present tense, which I almost NEVER
do, and the style I used is a little more flowery than how I usually write in
my novels. It’s a pretty “out there”
fic, but I had fun writing it as a challenge, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as
such! :)
Genesis 2014
“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before
the great and the terrible day of the Lord come.” Joel 2:31
And so it happened, that on the dawn
of a winter’s day in the year of our Lord, two-thousand thirteen, a great comet
blocked the sun with its icy tail and plunged the earth into darkness. The moon still hung red in the sky for a few
more hours, until the moment of impact, when the dust and debris from our
ravaged planet shrouded it, too, in deathly clouds.
From our vantage point on the space
station, we could only watch, as on the surface of our planet, some two hundred
miles away, life as we knew it was slowly suffocating. A mass extinction the likes of which hadn’t
been experienced since the dinosaurs.
The end of all human life.
Except there we were. And here we are still.
There were nine of us on board the
station when the mighty comet struck. Quite possibly the only nine humans left
alive… or at least we will be, when the dust finally settles and we can return
to our home.
And we are all men.
There are the two astronauts and one
cosmonaut who regularly manned the station, along with the commander and flight
engineer from the shuttle which had carried us here, all gentlemen. And then there are the four of us: AJ, Nick, Howie, and myself. It seems cruelly ironic that we were hailed
as the first “boyband” in space. Now we
represent nearly half the entire human population, all of us “boys.”
The realization didn’t come to us at
first. In the days and weeks after
Doomsday, as we call it, we were too wrapped up in our state of shock and
grief. We mourned the loss of the
families we would never see again: wives
and girlfriends, children and parents, brothers and sisters. We mourned for our friends… all those people
we had known in our brief lifetimes, those lives we had touched, never to know
or to touch again, until we reach the place where their souls had gone, or
would soon go.
Though my faith has been tested, I
still believe there is such a place and that we, too, will go there one
day. In the midst of my grief, I realized
that that day, when the last of us passes from this life into the next, would
mark the end of the human race. The day
the last human being takes his final breath.
When that realization surfaced, I
couldn’t help but question the Lord. How
could the Creator who gave us the gift of life allow it to be taken away so
suddenly, and yet, for the nine of us, so slowly, and so cruelly?
For many months, I grappled with anger
and skepticism. I forsook all that I had
been taught from the Bible and fell into a state of depression, depravity, and
sin. The space station, once thought of
us as a one-of-a-kind vacation destination, became our prison, our hell. We were condemned men. Below us, life had been snuffed out, and
though we had survived, we were living on death row. And like prisoners, deprived of all worldly
pleasures and women’s touches, we turned to each other for comfort and
satisfaction.
The first time I let Nick sodomize me,
I felt utterly vile. My guilt trip
lasted days, during which I wondered how God would ever let a sinner like me
into Heaven to be with Leighanne and Baylee again. After that, I just stopped caring. For awhile, I even stopped feeling.
It was Nick who taught me to feel
again.
I have always loved him as a friend, a
brother, but there on the space station, the love between two doomed men grew
into something more. I no longer cared
about being a sinner; being with Nick felt good. He was all that I had left, and so I let our
relationship blossom.
And rather than punishing us, the
Lord, my God, so forgiving and compassionate and kind, gave us a miracle.
I have always been taught that He
works in mysterious ways, and now I know this to be true. For whatever reason, He allowed his creations
to be destroyed, but not completely.
Through His power, life will continue even after we are gone.
This I know, without a doubt. I can feel it beneath my fingers, as they
caress my swollen belly. There is
movement within it. A kick.
I gasp. “Nick!”
He turns to look at me, his two perfect
brows arching above his questioning gaze.
A smile stretches across my face, as I beckon him over.
“She’s kicking. Feel.”
I don’t know for a fact that I am
carrying a girl, but somehow, I am sure of it.
Maybe the Lord is whispering it to me.
Somehow, I can feel it.
When Nick comes, I take his hand and
guide it to the spot where I felt the pulse of her tiny foot. His palm feels warm on my skin, and I smile
again at the pleasure of his touch. He
smiles too, as I replace my hand over his, and we wait for her to kick again.
She does, and the expression on Nick’s
face is priceless. I’m reminded of how I
felt when Leighanne was pregnant with Baylee.
Now I am in her shoes, experiencing this miraculous sensation from the
inside out.
Our daughter is strong, I can
tell. One day, I hope, she will use
those feet to walk across our Earth. It
will be a changed place, but we still hope to raise her, and the next
generations, there. We are heading back
now. Howie is also pregnant with AJ’s
baby, only a few weeks behind me, and we both hope to give birth at home, where
there is fresh oxygen and gravity. What
we will find when we make it back inside Earth’s atmosphere, we do not know. We can only hope to land on a planet ready
for new life.
Nick and I already have a name picked
out for our baby girl when she is born.
We’re going to call her Eve. It
means life. It’s only fitting, seeing as how she will be
the first woman on this new planet.
Howie floats up beside us, stroking
his own belly, which is beginning to rival mine. Maybe he’s carrying her Adam. We can’t be sure.
Nothing seems certain, as we hang
there side by side, gazing out at our planet.
When the comet hit, it seemed so small, so vulnerable. Now that we are getting closer, it looks bigger,
and we see it again as the majestic planet it once was. The dust has settled there, we can tell – its
reddish glow is gone. It looks as it
once did, a beautiful, swirling orb of green and blue, and despite our
uncertainty, we are eager to return. And
rebuild.
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Genesis
18:23
Genesis 2014 Ó 2008 by Julie
