After the Fall: Close and Confined (Taboo Erotica) (Eden Harem Book 1) Read Free Page B

voice followed out the door after him, more concerned than afraid. The cellar was still essentially intact, but there was no house above it anymore, and the building’s remains layered every inch of the foundation.
    Jack climbed onto a beam that was leaning at an angle up to where the living room had once been and pulled himself up to ground level. One glance around the neighborhood was enough to confirm what he’d already expected.
    Jesus Christ…
    Nothing was left standing. The houses that had once belonged to his friends and other families were in just as bad, if not worse shape than his was. It looked as though a tornado had swept through town, except the damage was even worse, more severe and with more finality. The asphalt itself had been split by several foot high cracks in a number of spots, as though a giant had pushed too hard on it at either end.
    “Oh my god…” Rebecca had followed him out and was peering across the street from a pile of lumber in the middle of the cellar. “We have to find someway to help!”
    “Hello?” Jack acted on her suggestion immediately, raising his voice and shouting off into the ruins. “Can anybody here me? Does anybody need-“
    “Jack!” His mom yelled his name with more terror, more urgency than he’d ever heard before. He looked over at her and followed her eyes, noticing all at once the danger that they were still in.
    The sky was a scene of smoldering chaos. Burning streaks of red and orange were slowly descending all across the night horizon and above him, like dyed contrails, or the marks of a celestial surrealist painter. They were multiplying even as Jack tried to make sense of them, and the wind had an unusual upward pull to it, as if being sucked in by the brilliance of the flames.
    “It’s… ejection rock,” whispered Jack. “From the asteroid’s collision. It must have been big enough to knock debris above the atmosphere, and now it’s all falling back down.”
    “Jack… We need to get back inside!” Rebecca walked across the cellar and reached her hand up to where he was, only barely managing to grab the back of his shoe with her fingers. It was enough to bring him back to his senses, and he only stared down at her tiny, gorgeous, nightgown glad body for a second before lowering himself down.
    “You’re right,” he said. “We need to…”
    His words began to trail off as the flames in the sky became even more vivid. Paradoxically, it began to grow harder to see rather than easier, the air warming around them and slowly filling with a strange fog.
    “This is bad,” said his mom. “We can’t stay out here any longer…”
    Jack nodded. The temperature was rising fast, like a sauna after being refilled with hot coals. He followed his mom as she walked through the shelter’s heavy door, closing it and the outside world off behind him.

CHAPTER 3
     
    The silence of the shelter’s main room was eerie and almost deafening in its emptiness. Jack’s heart was pounding in his chest, the only noise audible to him against silence. Rebecca had taken a seat on the bed, sitting with her legs crossed and hands folded, as though she was waiting for a kitchen timer to go off.
    “There wouldn’t have been any way for us to avoid this,” she said softly. “Or even really prepare for it, even if we had known ahead of time.”
    Jack looked around at the heavy steel walls and double reinforced roof.
    There was a way, and it’s the only reason we’re here right now.
    “Dad built this, all of this, because he wanted us to be prepared,” said Jack. “Mom, he saved our lives.”
    Rebecca stood up slowly and walked over to him. The bottom half of her nightgown was dirty, and a small streak of soot ran across one of her cheeks. The thought of washing up in the shelter’s tiny shower stall, stripping naked and soaping herself up, floated shamefully into Jack’s awareness. He did his best to push it out of his mind as his mother pulled him into a close