Eve didn't just roll over and hand the t.v. remote and all her progress to her ex.
She had boundaries. She had conditions.
For starters, he wasn't getting his socks anywhere near her dresser.
Papa's side of the duplex had been empty for years. It took Eve one full year to be able to go through a lifetime of memories and treasured belongings and, after selecting those things — photos, mostly — that she wanted to keep close, she carefully packed the rest away and rented a storage unit in town for the rest.
She wanted a storage unit built on her property, and she wanted to turn the now unused unit — connected to her place via a shared laundry room — into an organized space to keep the things she couldn't stop thinking — even as food was federalized and hunger in the States became for most a shameful memory — would someday mean the difference between survival and certain death.
Donnie could help her with a lot of the projects that were increasingly needling Eve's sense of complacency. And the vacant bedroom would feel like the Taj Mahal to him after years in shared motorhomes and makeshift tents.
The day he'd shown up, he was, she confirmed, meth-free. He had been for 90 days — the amount of time he'd spent in county lockup on what must be his hundredth misdemeanor trespassing charge. When they decided yet again that meaningful mental health help was just too much damn trouble for a county low on resources, they swung the bars open and turned him loose with a monthly remittance schedule for fines he'd never pay and a single bus token, good for anywhere within a 30-mile radius.
It got him within five miles of Eve's front door, and he casually walked the rest in few hours, stopping only to examine some rocks near the rushing river that forked at the neglected road that led up to her place.
Trust, but verify...
Eve called the jail and got his arrest date and release time. It tracked. And, after he peed on command and came up clean — she kept a couple of tests in the back of her closet for moments just such as these — she believed he was telling the truth.
He hadn't used in at least three months. The drug was well out of his system, and, for the most part, he was, she thought, thinking clearly.
She also believed him when he said that, for a week, something in his gut had been telling him he had to get his ass over to her house the second they let him go.
Thoughts of Donnie had been gnawing at her gut, too. She wasn't surprised in the least to see him on her porch. On some level, she'd been expecting him.
In the two months that had since rolled by, much had been accomplished and the bond between them was becoming almost telepathic.
It reminded Eve of the first year they were together. It was the dragon she'd chased ever since... minus the sex.
Sex, she firmly told him, was out of the question. As was "just snuggling" and walking around naked. He would knock before he entered her home — every single time, without fail.
And forget about bringing bitches onto this property.
No one, and Eve meant no fucking one, was allowed to spend more than ten minutes on her land without her express permission. Period. So if he planned on wooing the ladies, he better just keep on walking. This was a no-drama zone, and he was not going to fuck that up for her.
And, as she almost never left her property, Eve assured Donnie, he'd forever regret trying to keep something from her. She'd know, and her revenge would make jail look like a sanctuary.
To that end, he would submit to her drug tests once a week and whenever the fuck else she wanted him to take a leak.
"Zero tolerance, Donald," she told him. "And I mean, zero. Do not make me throw you off this land a second time."
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.
She called Brady first, and he headed for her property in his converted van. He'd know all the tin-foil shit: how to hide its true purpose on building permits, whose palms to grease, and all the prepper stuff, like "analog coms" and surviving "off the grid."
He parked his van down by the greenhouse, alongside the creek, where it was hidden from pretty much everything, and he hasn't left since.
And dontcha know, that's about when a family of educated hippies — mom, Patty, a self-taught "herbologist" with an unused PhD in something to do with rocks and tectonic plates; dad, Chuck, an engineer professor at a community college in Sacramento; and their twin 12-year-olds, homeschooled Samantha and Jacob — broke down in front of Eve's property, on their way back from a musical festival at the Gibson's event center down the road.
You'd never know that place was out there, but, every year, it attracted scores of free-spirited, fantastically creative potheads. It was one of the things Eve loved most about her quirky little community.
Over a handblown bong repeatedly filled with homegrown weed, Chuck rattled off bunker requirements and scribbled a surprisingly doable, remarkably detailed blueprint on a scrap of paper, below Eve's running cribbage score.
The Johnsons' conversion van and collapsable yurts joined Brady's van on the lower terrace.
It was then that Eve reckoned she'd better invite Steve, her easy-going neighbor and only constant friend in the town, over for a chat. His property backed up to hers on the other side of the creek, and he needed to know — he deserved to know — what was happening.
As his son, 13-year-old Trevor, gabbed easily with the twins about whatever teenagers gab about these days, Steve learned of Eve's new friends and their big bang bunker. Donnie, he already knew from before the split, and the two instantly clicked once again.
That inevitably led to "why we're building it" discussion, and Eve was relieved when Steve didn't look at her like she'd lost her mind.
Steve knew everyone and everything that was either happening now in their community or did happen a hundred years ago. He spoke like a surfer and a biker had a baby, and he was the easiest guy to talk to about pretty much anything.
He was a walking historian who'd been raising Trevor on his own. The kid came to live with him when he was seven or eight, after Baby Mama killed herself during the second round of lockdowns.
By trade, Steve was into construction and was known around town as one of the few handymen you could trust to do shit right. He and Trevor, a notably bright kid who was usually reading when he and his dad weren't out hunting, fishing, or racing their dirt bikes, had been living off the grid for years.
Steve said he'd been hearing "crazy shit" going on all over the place. His nephew, Chet, a 21-year-old rookie cop in nearby Jackson, had been warning him to "get ready, 'cause shit was gonna hit the fan soon" for months.
That night, with a handshake, Eve and Steve, for all intents and purposes, joined their land and resources, and the group grew by two acres and two more people. They were, each of them, all-in, but couldn't tell you why if you put a gun to their head.
Two weeks later, Chet retired from the force and joined Steve on his land. He was down helping Donnie and Brady dig trenches the next morning.
The weather was kind to them that winter, with only a few dustings of snow and just enough rain to keep the creek running.
Everything, everything, flowed like a well-oiled machine — so much so that they stopped talking about it for fear of jinxing their good fortune.
By Donnie's birthday on New Year's Day, the skeleton of the "Forever Place," as Samantha had dubbed it, was taking shape. It would, everyone agreed, survive the next Hiroshima.
Eve and Patty devoted themselves to canning and dehydrating foods, bottling water, and trimming the pounds of marijuana that was still hanging in Eve's "Weed Wagon," once home to her and Donnie when the duplex was being built,
Donny and Brady went through the collection of military knives, swords, and handguns left to Eve by her father. They'd send the whole group to jail if they were discovered, but out in these parts, that was unlikely to ever happen. The local sheriffs, deputies, and business owners were, like the residents they served, primarily libertarians, and the Second Amendment still meant something to them.
Everything was coming together, and slowly Eve began to suspect she knew what had drawn this group together.
Patty's knowledge of everything that grew from the ground soon produced a natural medicine cabinet that could handle most any emergency. She was almost Middle Earth in her depth of knowledge.
Jacob and Samantha were straight-up witches. Not in the Harry Potter sense. Those two were schooled by mom in medieval grimoires, forbidden alchemy, and the natural sciences, and they already knew how to take what Patty foraged and turn it into calming tinctures, powerful "cleansing" smudges, and "conscience-raising" grown-up teas.
Chuck, meanwhile, could McGyver goddamn near anything mechanical into doing his bidding. Anything but cars. Car engines, he explained, "bored the shit out of him."
For the most part, the Johnsons kept to themselves. Not in a reclusive way. They were just happiest when they were meditating together or doing yoga or inventing an organic cocktail that would blow the door off a '57 Chevy if heated to the proper temperature.
Brady was a plain-talking bottomless source of reliable information about secret societies, Deep State conspiracies, and ancient prophecies. And he was, to the core of his being, a passionate American. He didn't give a rat's ass about politicians, but he believed in his country like a Southern Baptist believes in the Holy Scripture.
He knew the way this country was supposed to work, and watching it "all get twisted" damn near killed him.
Steve, Eve knew, was sensitive to bad juju. He reacted to negative energy like a red-lined Geiger counter. And Trevor... well, young Trevor first started having out-of-body experiences about a month after his mother's suicide. Now he's a surprisingly accurate "viewer," capable, like those long-employed by the CIA, of projecting his conscious mind out of his bed and into the county's only strip club, almost at will.
They were building a compound, Eve realized one night, and filling it with old-school rebels — rebels who each brought a unique gift to the communal table.
And then there was Luka.
Eve opened her computer one January morning to a Facebook press release from the Amador sheriff about the arrest of a 17-year-old girl, a runaway, who was caught up in a raid on an illegal pot grow. In all, four were arrested, but Eve was drawn to the unnamed teen, who was being held, as far as Eve could tell, while they figured out what to do with her.
Chet made a few calls and learned she was being released, her charges dropped. She was, authorities decided, a working kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had no folks to call, Chet learned. They'd both been murdered in a Halloween home invasion in Merced.
Less than six hours later, Luka Makaly was sitting in Eve's kitchen.
She was important, Eve somehow knew.
And then, they were eleven.
But they weren't done yet.
One more would join their group. She didn't know who or when, but Eve knew there'd be one more and then no more.
She knew it, just like she knew Darkness was watching her every move, even pushing her to the next step toward wherever it was they were all going.
She'd come to believe it was Darkness that stopped the Johnsons in front of her home and led her like Pavlov's dog to Luka.
She knew, as irrational as it was, Darkness had some interdementional hand in all of this. Something supernatural had to have for it to all coalesce so effortlessly. And, as much satisfaction as the developments had brought her, she knew this wasn't all leading to a happy ending.
This, she knew, would all end in tears