William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“Did what?”

“Got a place for Beth and me at the Hercules Project.”

Larkin couldn’t stop his eyebrows from climbing pretty high. He said, “Really? I thought Beth was completely opposed to the idea.”

“She doesn’t know.”

You poor, dumb son of a bitch , Larkin thought. But he said, “Come on in and have a beer.”

When they were sitting on stools beside the kitchen island with beers in hand, Huddleston said, “I went out there and had a good look around the place, like I told you I was going to.”

Larkin nodded and said, “Yeah, sure.” He hadn’t given the Huddlestons much thought, since he’d had his own work on his mind.

“That guy Moultrie is really impressive. Definitely smart and dedicated to what he’s trying to do.”

“And he has a good-looking wife.”

Huddleston laughed. “Well, yeah. But that’s not enough to make me plunk down a hundred and sixty grand.”

“You got one of the silo apartments?”

“That’s right. Silo A, Apartment Three.”

“That’s right below us,” Larkin said. He wasn’t sure he wanted Beth to be that close by, but hey, he told himself, they were next-door neighbors now, so things wouldn’t really change that much. “You didn’t tell your wife?”

Huddleston took a long drink from the bottle, as if fortifying himself, and said, “I’ll tell her tonight when she gets home from school. She won’t like it, but damn it, Patrick, this is important. Especially after what the North Koreans did today.”

Larkin frowned. “I’ve been in my office, working. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The attack on South Korea.”

Larkin looked blank and shook his head.

Huddleston took a deep breath and said, “Seoul has been nuked.”

Larkin rocked back on his stool like he’d been punched.

“And they’ve warned us to stay out of it,” Huddleston went on. “They claim they have missiles armed with nuclear warheads that can reach the West Coast. There’s no proof of that, but—”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. There hasn’t been any official response yet, but the Russians have told us to butt out… So I imagine that’s what we’ll do.”

Larkin figured as much, too, given the timidity that seemed to run from top to bottom in the administration. Still, if anything was going to shake Washington out of its lethargy, it seemed like an actual nuclear attack might be the thing to do it…

Something penetrated his consciousness as he was thinking that, something that made him frown and lift his head. He frowned and said, “You hear that?”

Huddleston said, “No, I… Wait a minute. I do hear something. Is that… the tornado sirens?”

Larkin turned his head to look out the kitchen window, saw the bright fall sunshine spilling over everything, telling him there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and said with a hollow note in his voice, “No. Not tornadoes.”

Jill was working on a prescription when one of the clerks came over to her and said quietly, “People are saying the North Koreans dropped a nuclear bomb on the South Koreans.”

Jill’s hand jerked a little, causing some of the pills she was counting to scatter across the counter in front of her. “What?”

“It’s true,” the clerk said. “Well, I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, but they’re really saying it.”

Jill swallowed hard. Eighty years had passed since anyone had dropped a nuclear bomb in anger. Her parents hadn’t been born the last time it had happened. Her grandparents had barely been teenagers. It had happened countless times in fiction, but in reality it was the stuff of history.

As Jill’s heart slugged in her chest, she wanted her kids. She felt an instinctive need to put her arms around Bailey and Chris and draw them to her. She thought about Trevor, too, mere seconds after that, but the kids came first.

“What are we going to do ?” the clerk asked, her voice a nervous whisper.

“We can’t do anything,” Jill said. “Even if it’s true, it happened on the other side of the world.”

“The fallout—”

“The fallout from one blast won’t get this far. It might have some effect on Hawaii. And of course, Japan, Taiwan, the other countries over there, I don’t know what will happen in them.” Jill stiffened her back. “But right here, right now, we have people waiting on their prescriptions, Mandy, so we’re going to go ahead and fill them.”

Despite the fact that what she really wanted to do, more than anything else, was to run out of the store, jump in her car, and head for the kids’ schools.

“Oh,” the clerk said. “Okay. It’s just… the whole thing makes me scared.”

“Me, too,” Jill said. “Me, too.”

It was about five minutes later when a man ran into the store shouting that the storm warning sirens were going off. Jill knew good and well, though, that no storms were in the forecast for today.

Trevor was hunched forward in his chair, squinting at the monitor. Bad for the back, bad for the eyes. He knew that. Occupational hazard, he sometimes told Jill.

A little chime announced that he had gotten an email just as the notification sound came from his phone. He hesitated for a second, unsure which to look at first, then went with the phone. There was a text from Jill. When he tapped it, at first he couldn’t quite comprehend the words he was reading.

Nuclear attack on South Korea.

What? A nuclear attack? By who? Well, North Korea, of course, Trevor thought with a little shake of his head. Although he supposed it could have been some other country besides the usual suspect. But not likely.

He was about to respond but decided to check the email first. It was a news alert from one of the sites he subscribed to, and a click took him right to their front page, where there was a bulletin about the same thing, the nuclear bomb that apparently had gone off in Seoul. It was still uncertain whether the bomb had been dropped from an airplane or delivered via missile, although the latter was considered the most likely. Trevor took in that much at a glance.

He saw, as well, that North Korea was also threatening the United States, and so was Russia. Trevor didn’t know if the Koreans had any weapons that could reach the U.S., but the Russians did. Russia was still a credible threat.

A very credible threat.

Trevor picked up his phone again to respond to Jill’s text, but before he could do anything, another message from her came in. It was just one word.

Hercules?

Trevor’s thumbs moved swiftly as he answered: Now? You think?

There are sirens going off.

The pit of Trevor’s stomach suddenly felt cold. He swallowed hard, looked around. He was alone in the office right now. Most of the people who worked for the company did so from home. He did, too, most of the time, but he liked to come into the office some days. It made him feel more like he had a real job. He was alone today, though, as far as he knew.

Jill had better survival instincts than he did. He knew that, and he trusted her gut. If she thought it might be a good idea to head for the Hercules Project, then maybe that was what they ought to do.

I’m closer to Bailey’s school , he texted. I’ll get her.

I’ll get Chris. Bug-out bags in car?

Yeah. We’re good.

He wondered how long it would be before he could say that again and actually mean it.

The sudden commotion that ran through the mall made Adam Threadgill take hold of his wife Luisa’s arm and pull her behind one of the big pillars next to the entrance of a store. She said, “Adam, what—”