The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(19)
“You were right,” Amy said.
Gordo straightened up and put one hand to his ear. “What was that? It sounded like . . . no. I didn’t quite catch that.”
He could see Amy trying to keep her face still, but it didn’t work, and her small smile got bigger. She shook her head. “I said, you were right.”
He stepped over to her and put his hands on her waist. He leaned down so that his chin was resting in the nook between her shoulder and her neck. “The score, my dear, is now eighteen million, six hundred and forty-eight thousand, three hundred and two for you,” he said, “and eleven for me.”
“Gordo,” Amy said, and he could feel her relaxing into his body, “you are the strangest fool I’ve ever married, but I’ll say it again. You were right.”
“And what was I right about, my sweet little bride?”
Amy moved back so she could place her palms on his chest and then gave him a gentle shove. “Right about moving out to this godforsaken little town. Right about building a bomb shelter. Right about the fact that sooner or later things were going to go to hell.” She walked over to the television and turned it on. “But you were wrong about it being zombies.”
“Well, that still remains to be determined,” Gordo said, but he figured he’d probably lost that one. No zombies. Yet.
He’d gone into town to pick up pizza, their weekly ritual. It was more for him than for her. To their mutual surprise, Amy had adjusted quickly to the move from New York City to Desperation, California, or, as Amy sometimes called it, “Desolation.” She had grown up on a horse ranch in Wyoming, and went to college at Black Hills State in Spearfish, South Dakota. Compared with Desperation, Spearfish was a decent-sized city, with a population close to twenty thousand when the university was in session, but her upbringing meant she was a lot more ready for small-town life than Gordo was. He was a born and bred New Yorker, and though he’d been the one to push for the move, the change had been harder for him.
In terms of their jobs, it didn’t make much of a difference. Amy was a technical writer, which she could do from anywhere, and Gordo was a day trader. He worked market hours, hunched in front of his computer and running the program he’d written himself to exploit minor variations in the currency markets. He was consistent in his returns, and he’d have made a lot more money if he’d let everything keep riding, but he didn’t have any faith that the digital zeros at the end of his balances would be of any worth once the apocalypse came. No, he much preferred keeping at least two-thirds of their money in a form he could hold. Right now he felt pretty damn good about the safe in the back of the shelter: one hundred thirty-one pounds, four ounces of gold. At current prices, near eighteen hundred dollars an ounce, it was worth close to three million, eight hundred thousand dollars, and he figured that with the nukes coming down and the inevitable collapse of paper currencies, gold would skyrocket.
No, it wasn’t the work that had been an issue. It was the day-to-day reality of living in Desperation. It was an aptly named town, and Gordo was afraid Amy was going to realize how relieved he was that the world as they knew it was finally coming to an end. He’d been so excited when she first agreed to leave New York City behind that he’d thrown himself into the planning. First, he’d researched all the places they could move to, trying to determine where they would best be able to ride out the apocalypse. Fortunately, the Internet made things remarkably easy. It was easy to rule out some places: anywhere too close to a military installation was sure to be hit if it was nuclear war, and anywhere too close to a major civilian population was going to be overrun if it was zombies. Their refuge had to be easily defensible, close enough to some sort of small town and basic infrastructure that they could build the house and the shelter, and ideally, have some like-minded folk already in place who could help mount a defense after things had collapsed and the ravaging hordes were at their worst. Gordo knew it would be every man for himself, but he also knew there were certain situations when it could be good to have allies. If he and Amy were going to rebuild humanity, it would be nice to have a few helping hands.
He had immediately ruled out survivalist places that were settled with some sort of philosophy that he or Amy found distasteful, like the white supremacist compounds that seemed to dot the mountain states, or even worse, the hippie, vegan, peacenik, environmentalist survivalists who built their shelters out of sustainable materials and refused to stock even basic weapons of self-defense. When he found Desperation, however, a place already popular with independently minded survivalists, he knew it was the place. Next, he’d thrown himself into building the house and the shelter. They’d found the plot easily enough, just three miles outside of town. Or, as Gordo still thought of it, outside “town,” the quotation marks necessary for a town that consisted entirely of four bars, Jimmer’s Dollar Spot—a business that served as convenience store, gas station, grocery store, gun shop, post office, hardware store, clothing store, and coffee shop all in one, and despite its name, sold very little for a dollar—and lastly, LuAnne’s Pizza & Beer. Which, Gordo realized, meant you could also argue that Desperation had five bars instead of four.
Gordo and Amy had bought one hundred and twelve acres at three hundred dollars an acre, and immediately started digging. One of the reasons Desperation was so popular with survivalists was that the land around it was dotted with abandoned mines, and with a little bit of planning it was easy to make use of the already hollowed earth for building a shelter. Most of the work was already done for them. The passage into the mine was big enough to drive a cement truck through, and the hollowed cave they built the shelter in had enough leftover space for Gordo to park a backhoe, “in case we need to dig our way out,” he told Amy.