15. George – The World Has Literally Turned Upside-Down

George stood in mid-air. He’d never done that before, not in all the years Holden had known him. As visuals went it was worth a snap from Wendy’s camera. The only problem was George wouldn’t stand still. He kept rising away from the Earth.

Holden flung the winch at him and George grabbed at it, snagging the rope between his fingers and pulled. It garnered enough force to arrest his ascent until the winch snapped back before he could get a proper grip, leaving George hovering around the apartment. At least he wasn’t going anywhere.

Holden reeled the rope back in. As he tied a lasso, a dozen mass detonations roared through the city.

“George!” Wendy shrieked .

She reached out, faith in the laws of physics shattered. After the past few days, exploding loved ones could just as well be on the apocalyptic menu. To her relief, though, he was still there, curled into a ball, but intact.

“Get me back in!” George’s muffled voice screeched at her.

He peeked out between splayed fingers. Wendy leaned out to see what he was watching. From the center of the city, a ring of skyscrapers blasted into the air. They sprouted up, impossibly thin in their growing length. Their shadows cast a Freudian nightmare across their faces and didn’t stop extending until they’d grown ten times their original length, and even then didn’t stop rising. Each tower grew taller than the mountains of the coast, spears of glass sailing into the sky with impossibly small rockets pushing them faster each second.

“George, grab on!” Holden yelled.

He leaned out beside Wendy, both holding on to whatever they could as if they too were in danger of slipping out. George looked down. The window was below him again, the hot updraft of the explosions lifting him away. Holden hurled the lasso and once more George made a grab for it, and once more his fingers slipped shy. Yet the rope didn’t fall, suspending itself in mid-air with him while the resulting spin of his grab looped the noose around his head.

Wendy and Holden cheered, or at least began to, stopped mid-celebration by another lurch rippling through their guts. They and Zeke yelped, fell backwards out of sight and the rope pulled taut around George’s windpipe. He choked and spluttered, continued to float away, pulling at the knot squeezing his neck, tearing at it to disentangle the loop and get it around his waist.

“What the hell was that?” he screamed.

“Sorry.” Holden said, reappearing at the window.

“Are you trying to hang me?”

Holden cocked his head and gave him a puzzled look. He shook his head and gripped the rope. “Testing the world’s first antigravity gallows, inadvertent as its design may be, was not my agenda.”

“You could have killed me!”

“A accident in which I happily failed. And since you’re still alive, and will continue to do so for as long or short as the time we have left before our promised certain demise, you may wish to show a little gratitude.”

“Gratitude? Fuck you very much!”

George held onto the rope, squeezing hard while he wrestled the drummer in his chest for control. He almost had it until he looked up. The sky was not above him. He blinked and looked again. He was staring at the street.

“Um, Holden, what’s going on?”

“We’re dealing with your preposterous situation before we acknowledge the next.”

“But–“

“One preposterous situation before the next.”

George shut his eyes. Maybe Holden was right. His heart returned to a less dramatic beat. Adrenaline would be no help here. George was sat in a lasso tilting his head back, facing ground instead of sky and it didn’t feel wrong. Holden secured his end of the rope despite the odd angle and George ceased falling in either direction. He breathed a sigh of relief and decided it was better to freak out later.

That hiatus lasted a record ten seconds, breaking when a naked man floated across his field of vision, shouting for help. George, too overloaded to be surprised by the newcomer, followed the direction of the man’s call. In the alleyway between Rhea’s house and the chapel, several clamouring naked men and women clung to drainpipes or fire escapes. The tableaux they made was impossible to ignore.

They climbed over each other, holding onto anything solid. Four lost their grip and followed their friend into the sky, a sky that was under them. The four sank into the air in a slow motion freefall, no deadly speed, yet with nothing to arrest their descent. One shot George a surprized look of recognition on the pass.

The world had turned upside-down.

Literally.

The weekend scientist headed the group, what remained of the survivors from the beach. He grabbed a loose drainpipe that had bent across the alley, clinging on with all his failing strength. When someone called him from below, he monkey swung to the rear door of the chapel.

“What were they expecting from the chapel, a safe haven?” Wendy said, appearing at Holden’s side. “Wait, are we on the ceiling?”

“Your brother once told me pastors had to provide sanctuary for anyone who requests it.” Holden said. “Maybe one of them watched the same movie.”

Wendy’s eyes widened. “Rhea could be in there!”

George shook his head. “The roof’s gone. Nothing fell out. If anyone’s in there, they’re statues.”

A handful of nudes copied their leader. Half made it across the alleyway before the drainpipe snapped. The latter half fell into the sky feet first, leaving the remainder of their friends trapped on the other side.

Then another bang echoed across the island. George looked up or down as the ships they’d passed before, the ones cemented to the streets, broke free from the roads. Their sheer weight had overloaded the brittle stone encapsulating them. Cars then followed, along with heavy debris and loose fixings. Anything not stuck down fell skyward, whipping up a storm of sand as the entire beach dispersed into the jetstreams. Then a different sound. A roar deeper than anything he’d heard before. George Travers looked past the beach and his pants overflowed.

The ocean. It fell. Bubbles the size of the island burst into showers of rain, enough to drown a city in seconds. Then a country. Continents. The sea churned and stretched skyward, pulling in a typhoon as air rushed to fill the vacuum it left behind. The waters didn’t just fall, they spread, finally free to expand across everything. It was a storm in reverse, with George and a handful of naked city dwellers dangling over it.

The wind picked up speed, and then grit and detritus. It rose from a whistling gale to a full blown maelstrom in half a minute. Then it picked up the last of the people left outside.

They screamed and clawed for footholds or handrails, anything to save them from the endless fall, but the flurry tore their nude forms free, whipping them into George before plunging them into the swirling abyss. Holden and Wendy hugged the window ledge and yelled at George to hold on to his rope as he was batted by spray and stones and raging wind.

George did exactly that. He held on, eyes squeezed tight, screaming for someone to save him, and knowing with dead certainty not a single person could.