The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(20)

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, because 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.