They started calling her “Doomsday Diane” the week the cement trucks arrived.
In Pine Hollow, Wyoming—a town of barely 1,200 people where gossip traveled faster than the wind across the prairie—there wasn’t much that qualified as breaking news. So when Diane Harper, a 42-year-old widowed nurse with quiet eyes and a habit of minding her own business, began excavating her backyard in late August, it might as well have been a celebrity scandal.
Three days in, half the town had driven past her property at least once.
“She building a swimming pool?” asked Trina from the diner, squinting across the street as she refilled coffee mugs.
“In Wyoming?” laughed Carl, a rancher with sunburned cheeks. “She’s building a bunker. I heard it from Pete’s cousin who delivers gravel.”
The word bunker stuck.
