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?”
“My parents named me Flower,” the girl said. “They were hippies.” She smiled and had the good sense to be embarrassed about it, even though she’d clearly had to explain it her whole life.
“They aren’t hippies anymore?”
She shook her head at Gordo. “No. Mom’s an investment banker and Dad’s a tax attorney. They aren’t exactly thrilled that I dropped out of school, but you know, they did it and then went back, so they don’t have a lot to really complain about.”
Gordo decided Flower might be okay. And then, when Baywolf spoke, it reinforced his opinion of the young man.
“The old man’s an asshole. Won’t help us out with cash at all.”
“You try working?” Shotgun said. “That tends to help out with the cash situation.”
“Hey, fuck you,” Baywolf said, and he grabbed Flower’s wrist. “Come on.”
She shook him off and looked at Gordo again. “So, you know any places to rent?”
Gordo finished his beer and glanced at LuAnne. She flicked her hands twice. He’d already been there for twenty minutes, and it was going to be twenty minutes more for the pizza. Her husband was slow as shit in the kitchen, but particularly since it was the only restaurant in fifty miles, the pizza wasn’t bad. He nodded for another beer then looked at the couple. Baywolf was glowering, but it was clear he was going to follow Flower’s lead. Fair enough, Gordo thought. She was cute and this airhead thing seemed like it was a bit of an act.
“What brought you and Mr. Wolf to Desperation?”