“I’ll try,” I say with another sniff.
“No, you fucking will not try!” He narrows his blazing eyes at me. “You are going to do everything I say. Got it?”
I stiffen, but it’s not from his touch this time. He hasn’t
spoken like this before, and I don’t know how to react. He huffs out his nose and tosses his arm over the couch cushion.
“I’m not trying to scare you, ma’am,” Eckhart says. His voice is calmer now. “I don’t know what’s going on here either, but in order to figure it out, I have to be able to focus. I can’t have you falling apart on me. If you do, you’re going to be dead, and I told you I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
I take a deep breath. Everything he says makes sense, but there’s a big difference between understanding the reason for doing something and actually being able to bring yourself to do it.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll stay calm.”
“Thank you.”
I look to his eyes for a moment.
“Will you at least call me Hannah now?”
“Yeah, I suppose I could do that.” He cracks a half smile.
“And I can call you Falk?”
“That would make sense.” He pushes himself off the floor and heads toward the kitchen. “Let’s get something to eat and then sleep. We’ll go out tomorrow and see if we can find any other survivors.”
I stand up just long enough to sit on the couch. I feel like I should offer to help him, but he seems pretty confident as he starts taking things out of the refrigerator to determine if they are still all right since the electricity has been out.
“At least the gas works,” he says, testing the stove. “I’m not much of a cook, but there’s plenty to keep us going here for a while.”
“Falk?”
“Yeah?”
“What do we do if we find someone?” I ask. “I mean, we can’t exactly bring people back here, can we? You wouldn’t have enough supplies for a lot of people.”
Falk laughs.
“I have no fucking idea, Hannah.”
Chapter 4
I wake disoriented.
It takes only a few moments of glancing around the sunlit bedroom to remember where I am—Falk Eckhart’s apartment and doomsday preparation center. The brightness in the room tells me I’ve slept late into the morning. After a pretty decent meal, Falk had insisted I sleep in the bed, and he had stayed on the couch. I’d passed out almost immediately after crawling under the blankets.
I hear the water running in the bathroom and realize that Falk must be taking a shower. I remember how it felt to have him hold me, and I’m more than a little embarrassed by my reaction to the circumstances I have found myself in.
Then again, I don’t suppose there is a handbook to follow when the city has been flattened and virtually everyone has been killed.
I shiver as I untangle myself from the blankets and drop my feet to the floor. I’m wearing the underwear Falk bought in the hotel shop along with the thin, white T-shirt supplied by the airline. I change into the Atlanta-themed sweatshirt and pull my skirt back on.
I’m going to need more clothes.
Staring out the window, I notice there are no bodies in the little green area behind Falk’s apartment, and I wonder if we should go door-to-door to see if there is anyone around. The water shuts off in the bathroom, and I turn away from the view out the window.
I open the door from the bedroom into the living room just as Falk steps out of the bathroom, wrapped only in a towel.
My eyes probably bulge out of my head. I knew he didn’t quite fit into that suit jacket, but seeing him like this—mostly naked with water still dripping from his hair, over his shoulders, and making a trail right past one of his nipples—I can see exactly why. The guy is built. Seriously, majorly built. Not in an over-the-top-I-never-leave-the-gym kind of way, but with a chiseled and sculpted sort of look.