Darkness Descending

Chapter Five: Come Together

Donnie just smiled.

He was pretty sure she'd practiced this speech more than a few times over the past few years.

And, seriously, fuck sex. Even with her.

Especially with her.

He never thought he'd think that and mean it, but, from the second he heard he was supposed to go to her, he had to play this out from every angle, and 86.9 percent of the time, sleeping with her got one or both of them killed. Sometimes, not right away, but it never fucking failed. It messed everything up — for good, this time.

Forever. For, like, all of fucking eternity...

Yeah, for once, he was happy to keep his dick in his pants.

From there, things — important things — moved quickly, though, why they were important was often unclear to both of them.

Soon after the terms were established, in front of the cast iron, Art Nouveau parlor stove in her living room, over a game of cribbage, they pinky-swore to listen to their intuition and to discuss whatever made their Spidey Senses tingle, the minute they started buzzing.

And they stuck to that oath. Pinky swears are serious shit, and they both sensed this was no joke.

No matter how crazy, how out-of-left-field the idea, they proposed whatever they suddenly felt compelled to do. They discussed it, weighing the pros and cons like they were buying a car. And then they decided whether to act, together, though they both knew, ultimately, Eve had the only vote that mattered.

And once they decided upon a path, it seemed the universe cleared out the brush and lit the way.

There was luck, and there was serendipity. But this was an alignment of such unconnected parts — a synchronicity of events on a level that often made the two laugh.

They knew they were being guided, and they committed to going with it.

One night, Donnie, with an almost giddy face, knocked on the door and, once welcomed, burst into her kitchen like Kramer from Seinfeld.

"An ark!" he yelled, sliding in his socks over the tile they'd laid together more than a decade before. "It's an ark! We're supposed to build a muthafukkin badass ark! How big's a cubit?"

Her jaw dropped, hanging open as she tried to decide if he was serious.

"WE'RE GONNA BEDAZZLE THE SHIT OUT OF THAT BITCH!" he hollered before calmly stealing a hot cocoa package from her coffee drawer and returning to his side of the duplex.

Eve heard him laughing for five minutes straight.

The following week, they started clearing ground for a lead-lined, concrete bunker, to be carved into the terrace above where Eve's greenhouse stood, just to the side of Donnie's bedroom window.

Eve's inheritance from her parents — a tidy sum of savings that, if managed properly, along with the continuing royalties from a steamy romance novel she penned under a pseudonym one very stoned weekend in '25, meant Eve didn't have to work if she didn't feel like it.

Now everything in her was screaming at her to buy the things she needed - or thought she might need — the big-ticket items she really, really felt she should secure, before it was too late.

A nuclear fallout shelter, able to sleep twelve — Eve insisted it had to be twelve, and Donnie trusted her — with enough room to keep a dozen cramped people fed and breathing for up to two weeks. There'd need to be a toilet and a sink and space for water and supplies. And it would have to have air circulation, backups, generators, and probably a lot of shit she hadn't thought of yet, so this wasn't going to be a weekend job.