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.
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.