Paradise [Draft 1]

Chapter One: Genesis (2822)

Chapter One: Genesis (2822)

Johnny Frost was too stoned to drive, but he got in the car regardless. Three of his friends piled in, slamming the doors, violent actions that made his head vibrate. Joe got in the passenger seat, the leader of this outfit, Ellie and Wasp got in the back.

It was late at night, past midnight and they had spent a long evening smoking, talking and watching TV. Eventually Joe had gotten restless and wanted to go out for a drive, to clear his head or whatever it was that got into him on nights like this. To see the streets, to see something different than the four walls of the flat, he never really went into the forces that drove him. They weren't going anywhere, just driving around, they might stay in the city, or they might go down to the Delta. It was Joe that decided when they drove and it was him that decided where they went. It was Johnny's car though, and it was him that paid for the petrol. Already the car was filling up with smoke. Johnny didn't mind, the cops didn't go out much these days, the roads were always quiet and he was too wasted to care much about anything. He was hoping that they could swing by his girlfriend's later and see if she was still awake.

Joe was the only one equipped to make decisions, and Johnny passively took the turns he was instructed to, going with the flow, his brain thoroughly disengaged.

'Down there,' Joe would instruct in his husky chain-smokers voice, and Johnny would swing the long car round in a wide arc. Most of the time though, no one was in charge of the direction they were taking and it was as if Beryl was driving herself, a long yellow beast moving slowly through the night, with four people asleep in her belly.

They were south of the river now, meandering through the deserted night-time streets. What little traffic remained in Evermarch had long since ceased, the buses had stopped running before it had even got dark, sticking to the times from when there had been a curfew in place. The only people that went about at this time of night were running furtive errands, or spivs, or heretics.

'Are we going to the Delta?' asked Johnny.

Ellie and Wasp were having a stupid sounding giggling conversation in the back. She was a big solidly built teenage girl, Wasp was a short and narrow fourteen-year-old boy, his growth stunted by a mother that had smoked all the way through her pregnancy.

As always Joe was in the front, either smoking a joint, waiting for it to be passed to him, or rolling another one. This was another reason Johnny liked to drive, Joe rolled much better than he did, Johnny found it all but impossible to do while in a moving car and wasn't particularly good at it when sat in his own home either.

Barely doing thirty, they cruised through . Joe finished rolling the joint he had been working on, using an old newspaper on his lap as a table, lit it and took a draw.

'You want to hit the Delta?' he asked, scratching at the scraggy beard that grew patchily on his sunburnt and freckled face.

'Not been there in a while, I suppose,' murmured Johnny. 'How hot is it down there now, do you know?'

'Why don't we find out?'

Johnny nodded, and when the joint was passed to him, he took a couple of long draws then passed it back. He felt better now, with a destination to aim for. He'd not long filled the tank of Beryl, the old Splinter that she was, and he always liked visiting the Delta. To him, it felt like going on holiday.

The only thing he didn't like about it was that when they headed south, he could see Wormwood. The others didn't have to look at it and Joe would turn to talk to the others, but there in the sky hung Wormwood, a vast lazy red star, the size of a penny piece, but giving off little more than reflected light, an angry pustulant wart on the face of the cosmos. Like a negative after-image from looking at the sun, that burned into the soul, or rather through it, like a jet of flame through a sheet of tissue paper. People could go crazy looking at it for too long, but when Johnny drove, every so often his eyes would flick up to look at it, as if checking it had not moved closer, or grown larger. It was a reflex action, like a tongue probing at a rotten tooth or a nervous tick.