Eve took the empty bottle of Jack from the nightstand and smiled at the two little scrolls, bound with two pieces of dental floss, resting at the bottom. She made a mental note to be sure all those bottles made it into the Forever Place.

She felt grounded. Hungover, but grounded and strangely at ease.

They had an actionable plan to get them through what needed to be done now, and what to start them working on for the next seven months.

Eve wanted everything ready, that shelter good to move into, at least two months before Luka’s due date. And with what she knew now, adjustments needed to be made. She was planning for a nuclear attack, not a string of natural disasters. That changed things, though she wasn’t entirely sure what those changed things were.

As for how to tell everyone, how to get them up to speed, Eve and Donnie ultimately decided to just make copies of what Eve had written in her journal and let them ingest it quietly, at their own speed. Tonight, they’d build a bonfire and they would all be on the same page to talk it out.

They would delegate tasks to everyone — projects that would keep all of them focused and busy. Eve was afraid if anyone had too much time on their hands to think about what was coming, panic could set in, and there simply wasn’t any room for that.

It was also decided that the children would sit tonight’s bonfire out.

That one took a lot of trips around the Monopoly board to get to.

Donnie was against keeping the kids out of any of this, because “there wasn’t time to pussyfart around.”

Trevor, Jacob, and Samantha are older than he was when he was handling his cracked-back mom’s business, Donnie stated, so he was pretty sure they could handle the straight truth now.

But Eve felt strongly that their parents were the only ones with the right to have this conversation with their children.

“There are some things you don’t talk about with kids who aren’t yours,” she finally snapped back with a tone that made it clear Donnie wasn’t going to win this one.

But before anything else, Eve would sit down with Chet and Luka and do her very best not to break their hearts more than she had to.

***

The bonfire was lit by eight,

“So that’s just fucking it, okay?” Luka proclaimed sharply to the assembled group, the orange and yellow flames dancing with the shadows behind her.

Her eyes blazing, she forced, one at a time, Chuck, Patty, Brady, and Steve to meet her defiant glare and agree.

“Okay then,” she said, as Chet stood like the Rock of Gibraltar by her side. “This baby is going to come into this world knowing love. I don’t give a fuck if the San Andreas fault opens up right in front of us, this baby’s first emotion will NOT be fear, do you all understand?”

“And until then, I don’t want any fucking pity, okay? I don’t want that near me, because I know he will feel it, and I will be FUCKED if my baby is going to be born with a guilt trip.”

Everyone nodded and mumbled things like, “Of course!” and “Whatever you need.”

Luka’s shoulders relaxed. Her ragged nails released their grip on her palms. “Alright then,” she said, her voice quivering. Tears clouded her vision, and suddenly, the fierce Mama Bear was a seventeen-year-old girl again.

She reached for Chet’s hand and dug the toe of her scuffed boot into the gravel.

“I’m gonna be a mom, y’all,” she said, a shy smile forming behind her tears.

Patty was the first to respond. With a beaming smile, she rose from her lawn chair, her arms outstretched. “Congratulations,” she said, as she embraced Luka tightly. “Don’t you worry, okay? I’m a midwife, so we got that covered, and I’m going to make you tinctures for morning sickness and we can make baby clothes and—“

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Luka whispered back, squeezing her tightly.

And for the next thirty minutes, it was a celebration.

Eve’s heart swelled with gratitude as she watched Steve, Brady, and Chuck rush to clap Chet on the back and shake his hand. Donnie ran inside and came out with two shopping bags.

Earlier, as Eve sat with Chet and Luka and slowly, calmly told them all she knew, pausing frequently for tears and questions and reassuring words, Donnie snuck out for a quick trip to the town’s family-owned liquor store.

From the bags, he pulled two bottles of sparkling wine, one bottle of sparkling apple cider for Luka, a bunch of plastic Red Cups, and a handful of the most expensive cheap cigars the store had on hand.

It surprised Eve as much as it did the expecting couple. She’d put away the tobacco, replacement bottle of Jack, and frozen pizza he’d said he went out for, but she had no idea he’d done this, too.

I could kiss him for this, she realized. That could actually happen.

“I love you guys,” Luka said, raising her cup of cider as Chet topped off everyone else with the remaining bubbly. “I can’t think of a better bunch of crazy aunts and uncles for my son.”

The group toasted her back with table thumps and claps.

“Now, let’s figure out how we’re gonna keep those assholes from fucking up his world,” Luka stated, squaring her shoulders. “Eve?”

Eve drained her cup, took a deep breath, and stepped forward.

“Okay, so you all now know everything I know,” she told them. “I know there are probably a thousand questions — I have them, too. But we aren’t completely alone with this. Gabriel told me that each of the seven Elohim has been ‘encouraging’ seven groups like ours to form around the world.”

“Encouraging?” Brady asked.

“It’s complicated,” Eve answered. “They can only — will only — present humans with knowledge and opportunities — like a broken down minivan,” she said, eyeing Chuck and Patty. “What we do with that is up to us. Free will is an immutable law.”

“Then why are they getting involved at all?” Steve asked. “Aren’t they changing things by telling us any of this?”

“I think they feel the game has been rigged,” Eve tried to explain. “What has happened in this turn goes against the natural order of things.”

“Then why didn’t they stop it back when it started? Right after the flood?” Chuck wanted to know.

“Seems awful passive-aggressive to step in at the last minute,” Patty agreed.

“Because, at the last minute, anything could change,” Eve said. “The ghouls who are doing this — the ‘elites,’ the ‘globalists,’ the ‘transhumanists’ — call them what you want —“

“‘Ghouls’ works,” Chet interjected.

Eve nodded. “Well, the Ghouls could, in theory, decide they don’t want to give God the finger after all. Or, in giving God the finger, they could trigger a spiritual uprising among the survivors, and their ‘Pinky and the Brain’ plan could backfire.”

“You have to remember,” she said, “the Elohim aren’t trying to prevent the deaths of billions of people. That’s going to happen, no matter what. They are only trying to make sure that, going forward, human souls have the ability to ‘grow’ from the experience. They play the long game. But if the Ghouls make sure the only survivors are their handpicked sheep, that the only information available is their narratives, the whole path to enlightenment gets a permanent detour.”

“Paradise Lost,” Patty mused aloud.

“Exactly,” Eve said.

“So what’s our move?” Luka asked.

“Well, first, we need to get the shelter ready,” Eve stated. “Look, I keep running this in my head, and if I’m the Ghoul Grand Poobah, and I know Mother Nature is going to be doing the heavy lifting on the depopulation angle, I’m not sure I’m going to want to leave the culling completely up to her unbiased random selection process.

“I’m going to want to be absolutely certain specific targets are taken out before she gets pissy, and the people left standing are somehow funneled into containable, controllable corners of the continents by the time she lets loose,” she said. “I’m going to want to know that their communications are unsalvageable, that information supply lines are completely cut off, and anything left is in my hands when the dust clears.”

“You’re thinking they’re going launch a preemptive strike?” Brady asked. “Before the turn?”

“It’s what I’d do,” Eve nodded. “And I can only think of a few ways they could swing it.”

“Nukes,” Donnie said. “Drop a few in the right places, and you can herd a lot of people into your barns and slam the doors.”

“Right,” Eve said. “So, Chet and Brady, I need you guys to start identifying the likeliest targets, the places that would force the most people into the biggest corrals. And we need to know where the Ghouls plan on riding this out. Keep in mind, they’re going to want to be online as soon as it’s over. They’ll have guarded their gear against EMPs. How are they going to manage to reboot? We need to know."

“And the shelter,” Eve continued. “Steve, you and Donnie have to figure out how to store as many supplies as we can in the smallest amount of space. We don’t know how long we’re going to have to be in there, because even if we don’t get nuked, we could be hit by tornados or rocked by quakes or anything else Mother Earth can throw at us. And we’re going to have a newborn, a dog, and two cats in there with us.

“You two need to binge every tiny house, ‘organize your shit’ show you can find and get really, really clever with space,” she said. “Donnie is like a damn savant when it comes to storage.”

“I’ll Tetris the shit out it all and get it in there,” he said, grinning.

“I know you will,” Eve said, shooting him a smile. “Everything we’re going to need, we’re going to have to make sure is protected. And we’re going to need security all over this property. Chet, Chuck, Donnie — that’s on you guys, too. It’s going to ALL have to be low-tech. We have to plan on no power, no gas, no running water, no internet — we’ve got to go old school on everything.”

“And, if volcanos start blowing their stacks,” Brady noted, “the ash will block the sun, so don’t count on solar.”

“Damn,” Eve groaned. “Good point.”

“Steve,” she said, “you know everyone and everything around here. We need to know what resources we’ll be able to count on — big supplies of water, weapons, food, gas, propane, medicine, fallback shelters, backroads in and out of places. We need to know where survivors will head first, where we can restock after it's over, and what we can scavenge if we have to. We start with what’s available locally and we’ll go from there.”

Eve turned to Patty. “We need the biggest, baddest medicine cabinet you can put together for us. Everything Luka and the baby will need, and a way to treat everything from hemorrhoids and headaches to broken limbs, fevers, whatever gets thrown at us.”

Patty nodded. “On it.”

“Brady,” Eve said, “we’re also going to need to suck out every bit of ancient lore, Illuminati, sacred knowledge, UN agenda crap you’ve got crammed in your gorgeous conspiratorial brain. I want to know the name of every Inquisition queef and Davos dickhead who would be into world domination.

“Remember,” Eve said, “these fuckers figured out how to reincarnate directly back into their cults, so it’s likely we’re dealing with people today who made history in the past. I want to know their names.”

“Can do,” Brady answered.

Eve then reached out and took Luka’s hand. “You and me? We need to put on our digger hats and jump down some rabbit holes. Seven months isn't far away. There has to be chatter happening now, money changing hands, preparations being made. We need to connect those dots so we know who and what we’re up against after the turn.”

Luka squeezed Eve’s hand. “Color me fucking Alice,” she said.

“Good,” Eve said, looking at her little family. She took another deep breath and blew it out in one quick blast. “Good,” she said again, her body filling with a love for each of them she'd never felt for humans who weren't her blood.

“Let’s do this.”