After the Fall: Close and Confined (Taboo Erotica) (Eden Harem Book 1) (4 page)

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 almost 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 certain places. 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.”

What happens after that? If everything has been destroyed, burned into nothingness by the asteroid’s fire, there won’t even be any food for us to scavenge.

Jack swallowed his doubts and walked over towards the storage area in the main room. He was trying to think of something, anything, productive that he could do to distract himself, but ideas refused to come to mind.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?” Rebecca looked at him with patient, caring eyes.

“I… I love you.”

“I love you too, Jack.”

The two of them smiled at each other. Jack felt emotions welling up in his chest that were both comforting and confusing.

She’s all that I have now, and I’m all that she has. I really do love her, more than anything.

The two of them spent the next few hours acting as though it was a lazy Sunday morning. Jack ate the granola bar that his mom had brought him, along with some dried fruit, and then spent some time picking through the supplies that they still hadn’t looked at.

Rebecca acted exactly like the busybody, perfectionist mother that she was. She took stock of everything in the shelter, sorting through what they had as though expecting to discover something new.

She found a hand held broom and dustpan in the kitchen and slowly began sweeping the floor of the main room. Jack was sorting through a box full of extra blankets, wondering if they had enough to make a second sleeping mat out of. He turned around and saw her down on all fours, moving along the outside edge of the wall, dusting as she went.

If it were anyone else, I would be a little worried.

Rebecca was humming a tune of her own creation as she went. She was the same mother that Jack had known back in the real world, on the surface, back when things made sense. She gave off an aura of ease, as though her very presence was enough to assure him that everything was going to be okay.

Nothing will ever really be the same again, not like it was. But she’s here with me.

The hardest part of being stuck in the shelter was the way that it changed his perception of time. It didn’t matter anymore whether it was 1 PM or 1 AM. Every hour felt the same, worked in the same way. There was no reason to live according to any schedule other than the natural rhythm of their bodies.

Jack also couldn’t resist the pull of the TV, the one object in the shelter that held the promise of novelty. He scrolled through the list of downloaded movies and shows for the umpteenth time, finally settling on a series that had several seasons downloaded, one that was ironic to be thinking about watching, given the circumstances.

“Mom, do you mind if I throw this on?” Jack had the remote in his hand, waiting to press play on the thumbnail for a post-apocalyptic zombie TV show that his dad had been particularly fond of. H was expecting Rebecca to chew him out for picking something so inappropriate, but she only shrugged her shoulders.

“No, I don’t mind,” she said. “If anything, it will probably give us a couple of major things to be grateful for.”

She’s got a point. But then again, at least in this fictional scenario, there are other people left alive.

Jack hit play, and then took a seat over on the edge of the bed. His mom was finishing up with her sweeping, drawing the dust pile into the pan, and then walking over to the corner of the room to dump it in the empty box that they’d turned into a garbage can.

She walked over and took a seat next to him. Without really thinking about it, Jack reached his arm out and wrapped it around her waist, pulling her in a little closer.

I like having her this close.

He’d already seen the first few episodes of season one, but starting from the beginning felt like the best way to settle into such a plot-centric show. The series began just before the world fell apart, with the main character, a sheriff, getting into a shootout with a suspect.

“I was doing laundry, right before it happened.” His mom spoke in a whisper, almost too quiet for Jack to hear her over the gunshots in the show. “Taking clothes and sheets off the line, and bringing them in to fold. I thought it was going to rain, last night.”

Jack squeezed the hand he had around her waist against her.

“The movie I saw last night, I guess it’s the last one I’ll ever see.” He smiled. “In a theater, I mean. Even if things get back on track, I doubt that kind of thing is going to be high on the list of priorities.”

Rebecca turned her head towards him slowly. Jack could still hear the show, but his mother had all of his attention. There was so much that the both of them had lost, so much that they’d never get back. So many things that he would now never get a chance to experience.

“Helllooooo? Anybody home?”

The TV show cut out, and in its place was Molly. A broad smile adorned her face, and she blew the two of them a kiss as they turned their attention her way.

“Molly, hey.” Jack stood up from the bed and walked in towards the wall monitor. “What’s up? Did you make contact with any other people?”

The female astronaut frowned slightly and shook her head.

“No, unfortunately. But I do have a little bit of good news.”

Rebecca walked over and joined the conversation.

“What is it?”

Molly waited a moment, drawing in the anticipation of her tiny, captive audience.

“I’ve been monitoring the temperatures on the ground,” she said. “By tomorrow afternoon, they should be low enough for the two of you to be able to go outside.”

“That’s amazing!” Jack laughed and pulled his mother into a hug. “We’ll be able to get out of this tin can, explore, maybe even find people on our own.”

“Well, there is a bit of bad news to go with that.” Molly furrowed her brow. “I’m not sure if the atmospheric oxygen levels have held steady. We don’t have any sensors for that anymore. The fire was enough to burn, well, essentially everything made of carbon. It may have used up too much oxygen in the process for the air to be, well, breathable.”

That would mean…

“Let’s hope that’s not the case,” said Rebecca. “And if it is, we’ll find a way to cope.”

Jack’s initial reaction was to disagree with her, to explain just how totally doomed they would be if there really was no hope of taking back the surface, but instead, he held his tongue.

“Anyway, I just wanted the two of you to know.” Molly smiled as cheerfully as a person could after sharing something distasteful. “Well, that, and I was really bored. I can totally relate to what you must be going through. There isn’t much to do up here, either.”

The three of them were quiet for a long moment. It was the kind of empty silence common to sad situations of all types, funerals, hospital rooms, and memorial events. Finally, Jack let out a sigh and took a step closer to the monitor.

“How did you end up in the station, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, I know you probably took a space shuttle, or whatever, but before that? How did you end up as an astronaut?”

Molly looked as though she’s been waiting for him to ask since they’d first met.

“I was always fascinated with space as a kid. I remember learning about the planets, dreaming about traveling off to them, and exploring them. You can imagine my disappointment when I eventually learned just how uninhabitable they were, and how impractical they would be, at least to live on the other ones we have here in the solar system.”

Our planet might be just like the rest, now. A place where humans are not welcome.

“Anyway, I got really good grades in high school, and then in college, and started out at NASA as a sustainability intern, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t shut up about wanting to become an astronaut, and eventually the brass took notice. This is actually the first time I’ve gone up into space for real… Lost my orbital virginity, as we used to say.”

Molly’s eyes were locked onto Jack’s through the screen, and even over the distant connection, it was enough to make his body feel a little hotter than it should have. He heard his mom cough over to the side and move in closer to him.

“That’s very impressive, Molly. For both of our sakes, we’re glad that you were so committed.” Rebecca reached her arm over to Jack and ran it through his hair.

“Anyway, what about the two of you?” Molly gestured to the edges of the screen. “And what about the one of a kind bomb shelter that you guys are in? I feel like there must be a story behind it.”

Jack shrugged.

“It was one of my dad’s projects.” He suddenly felt a little embarrassed, even though he knew that pride would be a much more appropriate emotion. “He was a little paranoid… I guess rightly so. We always knew that it was down here, below the cellar, but he put a lot more work into it than either of us ever realized.”

“You can say that again,” said Molly. “The earthquakes and the firestorm combined were literally enough to change the landscape of the planet. Part of it was positional luck, the region you’re in wasn’t hit as bad as a lot of other places, but structurally, your shelter must be top of the line.”

“My husband started his own construction company after we married, back when Jack was only a little boy.” Rebecca smiled, as though recalling long lost memories. “This type of project came naturally to him, I guess. More naturally than a lot of other things did…”

Molly looked as though something that Jack’s mom had said had peaked her interest.

“Wait, did you say that you married Jack’s dad when he was a kid?” She paused, and raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean…?”

“She’s my stepmom,” answered Jack.

Molly leaned back, away from the webcam and away from the screen. It was an odd gesture in zero g, made only odder by the way she held one of her hands to her mouth, thinking intently.

“What’s wrong?” Rebecca waved to the webcam, trying to pull the astronaut’s attention back.

“I uh, hmmm….” Molly continued to think. It looked like something was on the tip of her tongue, and after a second she shook her head and let out a conflicted sigh.

“Molly, what’s the problem?” asked Jack. “You can tell us.”

Molly floated back over to the webcam and brushed a couple of loose, freeform strands of hair out of her face.

“The two of you might want to sit down for this. I would, too, but zero g evironments aren’ exactly chair friendly.” She smiled, but her attempt at humor was lost on Jack and his mother. “Okay, so… wow, this is going to be a really hard topic to bridge.”

“After all that we’ve been through, I think we can handle it.” Rebecca reached her hand over and squeezed her son’s shoulder. Molly continued to squirm in her skin. She bit her lower lip and then continued.

“I’m just going to come right out and say it. I still haven’t found any other survivors. It’s just the two of you, at least so far.”

“What about you?” Jack pointed at the screen. Molly held her arms out, as if gesturing to the space station itself.

“I’m still in orbit, remember? I can’t even think about returning to Earth, not with the search for survivors as my priority. That works best from up here.”

I get that much, but where is she going with this?

Jack glanced over at his mother and was surprised to see that her face was bright red. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her blush before.

“I think Rebecca has already figured out what I’m trying to say,” said Molly, softly. “And trust me, it’s not an easy thing to be said, especially given that it’s coming from me, someone who is essentially still a random stranger.”

“Just say it already,” said Jack. “All of this dancing around the point is making me feel stupid.”

“Jack… you and your mom aren’t related by blood.” Molly paused, and then continued when she saw that it still hadn’t clicked in his head. “And, well, you’re a man… and she’s a woman.”

Wait, what? She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying… can she?

Jack was still shaking his head when he felt his mom’s hand come to a rest on his knee. She was looking at him strangely, with a gleam in her eye that he had never seen before.

“This is crazy…” Jack felt a strange tension settling into the room, as though he was out on a first date with a teenage girl. “There must be some other way!”

“Well, if I can find some other people, there obviously will be. But I just want you both to be clear that it’s an ‘if’ at this point, not a ‘when’.” Molly looked at them seriously through the screen, holding herself against part of the station’s frame and emphasizing her words. “I just want to get the two of you a bit more comfortable with the idea, and with each other, if such a thing can be possible.”

“Mom!” Jack couldn’t help but raise his voice. “Aren’t you going to say something? She’s suggesting that we-“

“I know, sweetie.” Rebecca rubbed slightly above his knee and smiled at him, determination and love bleeding together and forming something new on her face. “And… I think she’s right.”

“Jack, just listen to me.” Molly turned her attention to him, seeing that his mom had was already convinced. “The world that we knew, that you grew up in, it doesn’t exist anymore. Everything has changed. I know how weird it must be, even to just think about it, but you have to understand how important it is right now, of all times, to keep an open mind.”

Keep an open mind? To fucking my own mother? This is insane!

“Look, let me put it this way. The old social standards, the judgments and traditions of society, those don’t apply if there is no society!” Molly ran her hand across her face and shook her head.

“Molly, this is my mother that you’re talking about! I’m her son!” Jack desperately looked over at Rebecca for backup. “Mom, say something! You know what she’s suggesting! Things would never be the same between us again. Hell, even just thinking about it makes me…”

He trailed off.

Makes me what?

“I should have waited a while longer before bringing this to discussion,” said Molly. “I’m sorry for making you uncomfortable Jack. Just keep in mind that from where I’m sitting, yes, I see the two of you as mother and son. But I also see a man and woman, an attractive man and an attractive woman, both of breeding age. I see… potentially, the future of the human race.”