The Hatching: A Novel (9 page)

At a full run, he could make it from their house into the shelter in less than three minutes, but he didn’t have to run: he just drove his truck down the tunnel. The hardest part of the whole project had been getting the series of doors installed to specifications that would keep out radiation. Other than that, it was mostly a big shopping spree: shelf-stable food and water, iodine tablets, radiation tablets, a Geiger counter, a spare Geiger counter, books and manuals on building everything from windmills to basic firearms, knives and shovels, first-aid kits, medicine, handguns and rifles, ammunition, and, with the aid of the Internet and some of his reserves of gold, high explosives.

But then, once they were done with construction and moving, once Gordo had planned everything he could plan, he realized all there was left to do was wait for the worst to happen. And wait. And wait.

He and Amy had met when he was still working for the hedge fund and she had come in as one of the junior analysts right out of college, freshly moved to New York City. Despite their youth, they were married within a year. By the time Gordo was twenty-six, he was making plenty of money trading currency, but they were spending it just as quickly. Amy had given up the markets
for writing technical manuals, and their apartment had been broken into four times in a year. That was the price of living in New York City, and for Gordo, it felt like the premium was too much. Whether or not Amy agreed with him, she’d agreed to leave the city. Before Gordo turned thirty, the shelter was finished, and they’d been living in Desperation, California, for more than four years. It was a perfect setup. The house was right next to the entrance to the mine, and they had clear sight lines in every direction. If it was nukes, they could disappear down the maw of the tunnel, and if it was zombies or biological weapons, they could wait in the house until they saw trouble coming.

But it was the waiting. Gordo had been living on high alert since they’d decided to skedaddle from the city, and after seven years of it—three building the shelter, and four waiting to use it—he was exhausted from being prepared at any minute. And Amy, who was a good sport, had been hinting that they couldn’t wait much longer if they wanted to start having kids. He was thirty-four now, and though that wasn’t exactly old, it wasn’t exactly young anymore, and they’d been together long enough that it was time. Time for what? Gordo wanted to ask. Didn’t she understand that the entire reason he’d made them move to Desperation was that he thought it
was
time, that it was actually well
past
the time that things were going to go to shit? He wasn’t sure he wanted to bring kids into a world that he knew was about to be destroyed. And yet every novel he’d ever read about the end of the world included children. Sometimes they were there just to tug at your heartstrings, but mostly the children were there for a reason: to repopulate the world. So maybe it was his duty; maybe, he thought, he could make Amy happy and do the right thing as one of the few men who were prepared to outlast the end of the world.

Plus, trying to have a kid sounded like more fun than waiting for
it
to happen.

He was thinking about all this when he drove into Desperation and parked in front of LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer. Amy had been feeling under the weather and was taking a nap, but she’d insisted they not cancel pizza night. Gordo was pretty sure Amy knew how much he depended on the excuse to head into town and have a beer or two while he was waiting for LuAnne’s hairy-knuckled husband to make their pizza. He supposed he could have just gone to one of the bars instead, but he was afraid that option sounded too appealing. There were maybe forty or fifty couples and families like him and Amy, who’d come out here because they were expecting things to go to shit at any moment, regular folk who were just realistic about the state of the world, but there were also a lot of single men who were off their rockers, who thought the government was out to get them, or who claimed they’d been probed by aliens, and those were the ones who hung out in the bars. Them and the bikers. For some reason that Gordo had never figured out, Desperation was a regular stop on the motorcycle circuit, and there were always bunches of bikes parked in front of the bars. There was some sort of pattern, understood rules about which bikers went where, but Gordo had never bothered trying to figure it out. Motorcycles seemed dangerous to him. Nope, give him a good, solid truck any day of the week and he’d be happy.

Inside LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer it was busier than he expected. He saw the Grimsby family sitting at the long banquet table, seven girls, four boys, the balding father, who always looked as if he had gone a few days without sleep, and the mother, who was impossibly good-looking for the mother of eleven homeschooled kids. The rumor was that Ken Grimsby had made a killing in computers before moving to Desperation, and had come, at least partly, be
cause he was terrified somebody else was going to try to sleep with his wife. Gordo let his gaze linger on Patty Grimsby for a second, and realized Ken probably had good reason. There was something unaccountably sexy about Patty. It wasn’t just that she’d been a model—nineteen years old and almost that much younger than Ken when they got married—but also something else, a sort of availability, and though she’d never done or said anything that had led Gordo to think she actually wanted to sleep with him, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she did actually want to sleep with him. Pheromones. Something like that, he thought. Maybe it was just that with the eleven kids sitting at their table, there was something about her fertility that sparked lust in men. Or the appearance of fertility: two sets of twins, two single births, and five adopted. But whatever the provenance of her kids, she looked a lot more like an ex-lingerie model than the wife of a semi-crazy survivalist and mother of eleven. And while her sexiness might be an interesting question, it was not one he could really talk with Amy about. He knew there were lots of men who, even if they didn’t cheat on their wives, liked to fantasize about it. He wasn’t one of those men. He’d never wanted anybody other than Amy since the moment he first saw her sitting in her cubicle at the hedge fund in the heart of Manhattan. But that didn’t mean it was a good idea to talk to her about the perceived sexual availability of Patty Grimsby.

He could talk to Shotgun about it, though. Shotgun wasn’t much into women, but despite his being gay, his marriage, to Fred Klosnicks, was a heck of a lot like Gordo’s, and the two couples had become good friends the last couple of years. Gordo supposed that Shotgun probably had a real name, something benign like Paul or Michael or even Eugene, but nobody in Desperation had ever heard Shotgun called anything else. Actually, as Gordo looked at Shotgun sitting at the bar, for the first time he realized how appropriate
the name was. Shotgun was tall and thin, several inches taller than Gordo, who was not a short man himself. Shotgun reflexively ducked when walking through doorways and constantly banged his head on the light fixture hanging above the pool table in the corner. He was lean and hard, like the barrel of a shotgun, and even the prematurely gray hair interspersed in the thick coat of black hair on Shotgun’s head gave the impression of gunmetal. Shotgun was probably in his late thirties, and like a lot of the survivalists out here, an autodidact. There were three kinds: the plain old morons, who hadn’t learned much of anything anywhere and seemed to blow themselves up on a regular basis; the guys like Gordo, who’d gone to good universities—in his case, Columbia—and trained as engineers or in some other field that leaned toward problem solving; and those like Shotgun, who were just smart as hell and able to teach themselves anything they needed to know. Shotgun was always building something new up at his ranch or working on some new project that sounded impossible and quixotic and always worked out. A lot of the families and men in and around Desperation were broke, jury-rigging houses out of discarded plywood and plastic, making survival shelters out of buried culverts and construction debris, but some of them had money. Gordo and Amy were relatively wealthy, and would be considered rich in most places other than New York City, and the Grimsby family had to have ten or twenty million in the bank, but of all of them, Gordo was sure Shotgun was the only one who was, without question, rich. As in
rich
rich. Wrath of God money. Shotgun held at least twenty-seven patents that Gordo knew about, and a couple of those were for high-use devices, kicking back serious money to Shotgun on a regular basis.

You wouldn’t know it from looking at the man, however. Every time Gordo saw him, Shotgun was dressed the same way:
sneakers, a pair of dark cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. He drove a beat-down truck, and his house, from the outside, looked like it could be blown down by a stiff fart. Of course, once you got to know Shotgun, everything was a little different. First of all, once you passed through the front door of his house, you realized it was built on top of an abandoned mine. What you saw from the outside was just a shell. While Gordo had built a shelter near his house, Shotgun had done one better and built his shelter
as
his home. From the outside, it looked like a Sears kit house with an extra-large garage, but underground there was close to twenty thousand finished square feet of living quarters and workshops. The living space consisted of four bedrooms, and an open kitchen and living room/dining room combo that would have looked at home in a swanky New York City high-rise, but it was the workshops that left Gordo drooling. High-tech stuff as well as every power tool you could think of. If Shotgun didn’t want to wait for something to be delivered—or if it didn’t exist yet—he could machine it himself. And in the garage, bigger than a basketball court, aside from a few toys like a Maserati and a vintage Corvette, Shotgun kept a couple of heavy-duty pieces of construction equipment, and, most impressively, a six-seater airplane.

Of course, none of that was as truly surprising to Gordo as the simple fact that there were gay survivalists. When the two couples got together, while Gordo and Shotgun talked about engineering problems or the quality of a certain kind of knife, Amy and Fred talked movies and books and cooking. In New York City, Gordo wouldn’t have thought twice about being friends with a gay couple, but out here in Desperation, it was a little odd. There just weren’t that many gay survivalists that Gordo knew of. Not many people of color either. Mostly it was white, crazy, straight single guys or families. He supposed he and Amy fit into that category.
Well, Gordo corrected himself, Shotgun and Fred were married, so they were a family, and they were white, and you had to be a little bit crazy to move to Desperation. But no kids. He’d asked Shotgun about it once, said he figured he and Amy would go about repopulating the world while they were shut away in the bunker, but that he wasn’t sure what Shotgun was in it for.

Fred and Amy were sitting in a booth, but he and Shotgun were at the bar when he’d said it. Shotgun had tilted the bottle of lager back and finished it before speaking. He wasn’t pissed off, but he was taking his time answering. They’d known each other long enough and had enough goodwill banked that Gordo knew he could say something stupid and Shotgun would take the time to explain why it was stupid. And right then and there, he was pretty sure he’d said something stupid.

Shotgun had put the beer back down, held up his hand to LuAnne to order another, and then stared at Gordo. “Well, buddy, what do you think I’m in it for? I
could
give a shit about humanity as an abstract concept, about repopulating the world and all that. But I don’t. Not really. I’m here for Fred and me. I’m here because when the nukes start falling”—and Shotgun was sure it would be nukes, not zombies or a flu pandemic—“I’d like to live out the allotment of my natural life span.”

Unfortunately, it looked like Shotgun was right about the nukes.

Gordo took a seat at the bar and ordered his pizza, shooting the shit with Shotgun while he drank his beer. Turned out Fred was feeling under the weather, same as Amy, and had sent Shotgun on a pizza run of his own.

“We should just put Fred and Amy on a couch together so they can be miserable with company, and you and I can be nerds together,” Gordo said.

“Speaking of which, I wanted to show you this.” Shotgun had
been working on a new sort of water filter, and he pulled out one of the drawings of a piece he’d come up with to bypass some of the constriction in the pump design. It was an elegant solution, and Gordo suggested a small modification. They were going back and forth, ignoring the television and the table behind them as Patty and Ken Grimsby tried to feed their eleven children. It wasn’t until the young woman behind them had spoken twice that they stopped talking and looked up.

“I said, do either of you know anybody looking to rent out a piece of land around here? We’re new to Desperation,” she said, as if the fact that Gordo and Shotgun had never seen her or her boyfriend before wasn’t enough of a clue. She was young, barely twenty, if that, and the young man standing behind her was only a few years older. Gordo didn’t have to glance for more than a second to take a dislike to the guy. He recognized his type. Angry hippie. Pretending to be in it for love of the environment and all that sort of stuff, but really he was just too scared to give real life a go. Plus, angry hippie men always ended up with idealistic hippie girls like this. And sure enough, her name?

“Flower,” she said. “And this is Baywolf. Spelled like it sounds.”

“Ah,” Shotgun said. “The kings who ruled them had courage and greatness . . .”

“No,” the man said, cutting Shotgun off. “Not like the poem.”

Gordo tried to smile, but he could feel that his face had turned sour. He’d had to read
Beowulf
for a class when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, and it had immediately turned him off English lit, but still, there was something undeniably dickish about this guy. “So, like bay and wolf,” Gordo said. “You come up with that on your own?”