After the Fall: The Complete Collection (Taboo Erotica)

by Anya Merchant

  There’s only one bathroom, one bedroom and living room, and the kitchen. Privacy is a thing of the past.

  Jack walked over to the storage totes and began digging through the one with the spare clothes. He was a little surprised, again, at how far his father had gone to prepare. All of the clothing looked as though it had been bought new, and all of the men's clothing was close enough to his size. He picked out a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and pulled them on.

  He walked a slow lap around the emergency shelter, again looking over the food stores and water tanks. It was hard for him to guess at exactly how long the two of them could survive off what they had, but at the least, they were in no danger of starving or running out of water immediately.

  Rebecca came out of the bathroom looking completely refreshed. She had washed her face, and it was hard for Jack to tell, but it looked as though she’d put on a light layer of make-up.

  Why would she need that? It’s just me down here, her son.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on our water usage, and how fast it’s draining the tanks.” She walked over and stood in front of Jack, crossing her arms and smiling. “I think that we could potentially take one shower every three days, and still save enough to get by.”

  “One shower each, or one shower… for the both of us?” Jack had meant the question as a joke, but the way his mom smiled back at him sent a hot chill down his back.

  “You wouldn’t mind sharing that tiny stall with your dear old mom?” She stared into his eyes and held the tension for as long as she could before giggling. “Relax, I’m joking. At least I hope I am.”

  Jack sighed and shook his head.

  “Wait a second, though,” he said. “How can that be? We’ll go through the water stores too fast if we take showers, won’t we?”

  Rebecca smiled and shook her head.

  “I heard enough about your father’s construction projects to guess how he set this one up. It’s powered by solar panels and probably uses rain collection to supply its filtration system and give us additional drinking water.”

  “Mom, after the earthquakes, and everything else that’s happened, we can’t count on that stuff to still be working, can we?”

  Rebecca held up one of her hands, as though shushing a young boy’s interruption.

  “There are more solar panels in one of the totes, I already checked.” She gestured to the boxes stacked along the walls. “And I’m sure that we can clean the water collectors up without having to be outside for too long.”

  Outside… I didn’t even think to check and see what it was like today.

  Jack glanced at his mom and saw that she was thinking the same thing.

  “We should…” he started. “At some point, we should try opening the door again.”

  Rebecca nodded slightly, almost grimly.

  She’s afraid of what we’ll find, afraid of having any hope of going back to normal pulled away. She’s afraid for me, for my future.

  “I’m going to get started on breakfast.” His mom’s voice had a forced cheeriness to it that both put Jack at ease and made his heart ache. “I saw some granola bars that looked pretty good.”

  “Alright,” he replied.

  Jack felt as though he had too much energy and not enough to do with it. He paced around the main room aimlessly, a mild claustrophobia working its way into his thoughts. The TV was the only thing of note, and he turned it on after a minute and began tapping through different options and menus.

  The list of movies and TV shows downloaded to the screen was more substantial than Jack had initially thought. Still, if it were all they had to do, they would run out of new media in a relatively short amount of time. He thought about what people did in situations like this, stuck inside, fighting boredom with nothing to do.

  I guess there is one thing that a man and a woman could resort to. Why would I even think that, god?

  He bit his bottom lip and sat down on the floor. Rebecca was taking her time in the kitchen, slowly digging through one of the food containers and looking for something in particular. Jack walked over to the door that led up to the stairs and began meandering up them.

  I shouldn’t open the door until mom can be there to take a look with me, but… maybe just a crack.

  The main hatch looked exactly as it had the night before. Jack reached for it slowly, letting his hands grip the door handle and feel the cold metal before beginning to turn.

  Almost as though on cue, like a static shock jumping through his hand, a loud beeping noise came from the TV in the main room. Jack turned around and headed back down the stairs quickly. His mom was still busying herself in the kitchen, but that wasn’t what caught his attention.

  Flashing across the screen in bright red, urgent letters, were the words “EMERGENCY CONNECTION REQUESTED”. Jack practically ran across the short distance between him and the TV, tapping several spots on the touch screen before hitting a big bubble that said “ACCEPT”.

  A woman appeared in the image, her long blonde hair flowing freely, as though there was a strange breeze in the air. She was at an angle, too, and moved within the frame erratically, slowly shifting from left to right, up and down. Jack blinked a couple of times, unsure of whether or not the connection was real, or if he’d accidentally clicked on a movie instead.

  “Uh, hello?” he said, weakly. The woman clapped her hands together and began to laugh as though she’d won the lottery.

  “Yes! Yes! Oh my god, yes!” She jumped up, or rather, pushed up, floating through the air and then pulling herself back into frame. “Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying? Don’t disconnect, okay? Please, stay on the line!”

  “What’s going… on?” Rebecca had heard the commotion and walked out into the main room to find the source. She froze when she saw the screen and dropped a butter knife on the carpet.

  “Mom,” said Jack. “I… I think I made contact, with…”

  “With Molly!” The woman was grinning and giggling. “You made contact with Dr. Molly Campos!”

  “Molly…” repeated Jack. “Jesus Christ… You’re alive. There are still people left alive!”

  Jack glanced at his mom and saw that her reaction was mirroring his own. She rushed over to him and pulled him into a tight, bosomy hug, and then held his hands tightly and began swinging his arms up and down.

  “It’s going to be okay!” yelled Rebecca. “I told you, Jack! Everything is going to be okay!”

  They laughed and hugged each other again. It took a second for Jack to pull his attention back to the screen. Molly was smiling, but behind it was something else, something that Jack wasn’t sure that he liked.

  “Where are the two of you?” asked Molly. “I have my communications satellite trained on the northeastern United States.”

  “We’re in New Hampshire,” said Jack. “In an emergency shelter, underground.”

  “That… makes sense,” replied Molly. “But still… I’m not sure the two of you realize just how lucky you are.”

  Rebecca stepped forward and shook her head. She looked unsure of where exactly to look in order to meet Molly’s eyes, with the web camera hidden inside the TV’s frame.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “Where are you?”

  Molly didn’t say anything. She moved in a little closer to her own camera, and again, Jack was a little unnerved by something in the motion.

  “What are your names?”

  “I’m Rebecca, and this is my son Jack.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said Jack, with a laugh. “Molly, it is beyond nice to meet you. We haven’t heard from anyone on the outside, or heard anything about what the situation is.”

  Molly smiled again, the same sad one she’d managed before.

  “Jack, Rebecca… I think the two of you should sit down for this.” She sighed, and then floated backward a little further. “I would too, but as you can see, there is no gravity way up here.”

  “Are you… on the space station?”
asked Jack. “Like, NASA, or something?”

  Molly nodded, and then curled up into a tiny ball and executed a perfect, slow-motion back flip.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I arrived up her a couple of days ago. The astronaut I was relieving left early on the morning of the asteroid impact. It’s quite a shame.”

  Jack glanced over at his mom. She was chewing her lower lip, staring intensely at the screen and waiting for Molly to continue.

  “There’s no easy way for me to say this…” Molly furrowed her brow, and then slid both of her hands down across her chin. She had an attractive face, long and slender, along with skinny arms and modest breasts.

  “Just tell us,” said Rebecca. “We can handle it.”

  Molly nodded and then took a deep breath.

  “The two of you are the only survivors I’ve made contact with, so far,” she said. “Now, that doesn’t mean that-“

  “Wait, you mean the only two survivors in New Hampshire, or the northeast?” Jack struggled with what she was saying, his mind unwilling to make the connection.

  “No,” she said softly. “That’s not what I mean. Here, this might be easier for you to understand.”

  Molly floated in closer to her webcam. Her hands disappeared for a moment and tapped away at what must have been a keyboard offscreen. Suddenly, the image switched, and Jack and his mom were looking out from the perspective of a new camera, directly at the planet Earth from the space station’s orbit.

  Oh my god…

  CHAPTER 6

  The planet was almost unrecognizable. The space station, along with Molly and the camera’s perspective, was passing across the eastern seaboard and over the Atlantic Ocean. Thick clouds of gray smoke and smog covered everything, an apocalyptic caricature of the Earth’s normally white atmospheric swirl.

  The North American continent was completely mangled. Jack could see where the asteroid had struck at a glance, deep in the heart of northern Canada. The crater that had been left was the size of Wyoming, with an oozing orange glowing center that made it look like an inverted volcano. Long cracks extended from the impact point throughout the country, looking like exposed geological veins.

  In fact, there were cracks everywhere. Several cut through the United States, as though the strength of the asteroid’s blow had been enough to jostle the tectonic plates loose. To the north, where the frozen Arctic ice had once been, there was now nothing but water, and scattered islands. Jack suddenly realized that dozens of miles of the coast had been swallowed up, with all of the water that had once been locked away in ice now free to join the ocean.

  Wherever there had once been green grass, forests, and vegetation, was now replaced by black and gray wasteland. The Earth looked like a battlefield, as though extraterrestrial invaders had given it a shelling, followed by napalm. There was nothing left that looked unscathed, with even the outlying Caribbean islands smoldering in ashes.

  “This can’t be… happening.” Even as Jack spoke the words, he knew that what was on the screen was a fact. Rebecca stepped over to him and pulled him into a soft hug, running her hand through his hair.

  “Is anything left, Molly?” asked Rebecca. “Europe? Asia? The Southern Hemisphere?”

  The monitor flicked back to the inside of the space station, with a frowning Molly center frame. She shook her head no, and then shrugged her shoulders in a fashion that was more depressing than Jack had thought possible.

  “I’ve been watching from up here for more than a dozen orbits and haven’t seen anything,” she said. “Every communication system on the station has been operating at full capacity, sweeping the planet for anyone in a position to respond back. Your receiver is the first one that my message has gotten through to, let alone given a response.”

  “There must be people left, somewhere,” said Jack. “We need to start looking immediately, start helping.”

  He took a single step towards the stairs leading up to the shelter’s main hatch.

  “No!” Both Molly and his mother shouted in unison. Jack felt frustration brewing in his chest as he turned to look at them.

  I can’t just sit here. There has to be something I can do!

  “Jack, I know we just met, but you need to trust me.” Molly had pulled in closer to the camera and was making eye contact with him through the screen. “I wasn’t expecting there to be anyone left at all. If you had watched it from up here, like I did…”

  Jack glanced over at his mom, wishing that she would come to her senses and back him up.

  “If we stay in here, how is that not just giving up?” The question came out angrier than he would have liked it to, but he wanted an answer.

  “Jack, the entire planet was an inferno. I’ve never seen… never even imagined anything like what I saw. It looked like somebody switched Earth out for a ball of fire. Everything was caught up in it, the ejection debris from the impact heated the atmosphere to the point of combusting every inch of the surface.”

  Jack shook his head, still determined to find another option.

  “No, no, we can… we can find a way!” He was shouting, unable to contain his emotion. “There must be something else!”

  Molly nodded.

  “There is. Just wait, for now.” She tapped on the keyboard again, and the screen in front of Jack and Rebecca shifted to what almost looked like an online weather report. “I can use my equipment up here to get a sense of what the conditions are down there. Temperatures are still in excess of 65 degrees Celsius. That’s 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and hotter in some locations. But it’s been steadily dropping over the past few hours.”

  Rebecca reached her hand out and set it on Jack’s shoulder.

  “We just need to be patient, sweetie,” she said. “If we hang on for just a while longer, maybe…”

  Maybe what?

  Jack still felt hopeless, but with his mom and Molly watching, he did his best to not let it show. He smiled and then nodded to them.

  “Sorry, you’re right,” he said. “I just am a little sick of this. Not having any control.”

  Molly laughed and then winked at him.

  “Aren’t we all,” she said. “The NASA training manuals didn’t have a section devoted to what should be done in the event of the apocalypse.”

  The apocalypse.

  Molly coughed into her hand awkwardly to break the silence, and then pushed off into another part of the station. When she came back, she had a sealed drink with a straw poking out of it in her hand.

  “Anyway, I can keep trying to contact people from up here. Now that I have a general idea of where you are, I can try to find others who could be nearby.”

  “Are you expecting to find anybody other than us?”

  Molly scratched her head and hummed slightly.

  “No,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not. But I’ve found you, both of you. That’s the most uplifting thing that’s happened to me in the past 12 hours, by far.”

  Rebecca squeezed Ben’s shoulders and then leaned in close to him.

  “I’m going to grab those granola bars from the kitchen.” She walked away slowly into the other room.

  “So…” Jack looked at the screen and stared at the cute astronaut on the other side of it. She was smiling in a way that made him feel like she was sizing him up.

  “I’m 26,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”

  Jack opened his mouth in surprise.

  Is she… trying to flirt with me?

  Molly laughed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve just been up here alone for a while. Even before this mess began, the only conversations I was having were with the other astronauts and ground control. Very professional, and very boring.”

  “That’s okay,” said Jack. “I totally understand. I’m 18, just finished my last year of high school.”

  “Really? You look older than that…”

  “Really,” said Jack. “And I could say the same thing about you. That you look younger than
you are, I mean.”

  He had never realized before just how intense eye contact could feel through a screen, a thousand miles distant in real terms. Molly licked her lips and slipped her fingers through her weightless hair, and started to say something else.

  “Here you go, sweetie.” Rebecca was back, and she stood a little in between Jack and the TV as she handed him the granola bar.

  “I should… probably go back to searching for other survivors, now,” said Molly.

  “Hold on, will we still be able to get in touch with you?”

  The astronaut nodded.

  “My connection address should be saved in your computer’s history,” she said. “Just find it and initiate a video chat. Solar panels power the station, so I don’t have to worry about the electricity it uses.”

  “Okay.”

  Molly waved to Jack and his mother, and then the screen went blank. He continued to stare at the wall for several empty seconds, doing everything he could to make sense of all the information she’d just dropped on him.

  “Mom…”

  Rebecca turned to him, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “What are we going to do if…” Jack paused, trying to find the words. “If we don’t find anybody else.”

  His mom sighed. She walked over to him and pulled him into a tight, warm, motherly hug.

  “We’ll do the same thing that we’ve been doing,” she said. “Just keep on living.”

  Of course we will. I shouldn’t have even asked.

  Jack slowly brought his head up against the side of hers. Their cheeks rubbed together, and for a brief instant, their lips almost came into contact.

  “I should probably take a look outside, once Molly gives us the okay to head out there,” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re still getting water, and take a look at the situation up there.”

  I’m already planning on this being permanent.

  “Okay honey, I’ll help you.” Rebecca smiled at him and stepped towards the kitchen. “I took a look at our food supplies. We should be all set for at least two or three months if we don’t rush to eat it.”