The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(21)

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.