The End of the World Stoners

My drug binge started on Friday night. Now, at 3:30 am on Monday all the competing chemicals were finally beginning to level off and I was facing the start of my sober work week again in less than four hours. A few green lights, psychedelic tracers probably, still drifted past my eyes. That was the last of my three day high though and now Skeeter and me were fast closing in on stone sobriety.

Two hours earlier I'd hit the Dark Web to see if I could order up one last party blast to desperately try and keep my high going deep into next week.

The RV I lived in rocked gently as I felt my roommate wake up and climb down from the loft above the cab.

“Hangover is killing me,” Skeeter said as he pulled down the tiny jump seat across from me at the table and sat.

“Suck it up son, we gotta stagger across this parking lot into the Mart and do our shifts in about four and half hours,” I said.

“Damn. Will they kick us out of the parking lot too if we don’t show again?”

“Don’t know, “I said as I continued scrolling through the Drug Boutique’s website.

Everything was either too much of a cheap Meth and Fentynal type high for my taste or way too expensive for the Coke euphoria feel I was looking for.

“Can’t go in there this hungover. No way. Gotta figure something out to get me through it,” Skeeter mumbled.

I watched Skeeter desperately trying suck the last few drops of beer from a crushed beer can. I turned back to my phone and saw it, End of the World: Everyone’s Final High. Just a picture of a square black box sitting on a white sheet. No product description either. But for $25 it was in my price range. For an extra $7 I could get expiated drone delivery and it would be here in forty-five minutes, plenty of time for me and Skeeter to get high before our shift started.

“Got be something here to get me off,” I heard Skeeter say as he climbed back up into the loft to look for any resin left in his bong.

“At least I won’t need to change to get ready for work,” I thought as I sniffed my rank work shirt/ The same shirt I’d been wearing since last Wednesday. “I smell like a randy Tom Cat,” I thought.

Exactly forty-five minutes later my phone chimed to let me know the drone was outside with my delivery. I opened the creaky door of the RV. I signed the little drone’s pad and it dropped a palm sized black box into my hand before buzzing off.

On top of the box in silver lettering it said,

“This is the END OF THE WORD HIGH. If you open this package you will get high, but it will be the LAST high EVER for you and the rest of the world. “

I went back inside the RV and sat down in the kitchen. My small framed picture of Hunter S Thompson was askew and I righted it. His scrawling signature covered half his face. It was one of the few things of value I still had that me and Skeetter hadn’t pawned for drug money yet. I set the little box on the table in front of me.

The End of the World High sounded appealing in some ways, assuming it got us really high. But if the “end of the world” part of it wasn’t just bull shit, well then it might suck.

Skeeter came down from the loft with his bong.

“I got some of these detergent pods I skanked from the Mart the other day. Do you really think they’ll end us if we vape them in the bong?”

I shook my head as I stared at Skeeter’s pathetic form. I reached for the little black box and ripped the top off.

“Probably doing us and the fucking universe a favor.”