William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

She pulled into the open space next to his SUV. He had already opened the back gate and was piling the bags inside. She got out of her car, opened the trunk, and took out the bag she kept in it. Larkin took it from her and added it to the cache in the back of the SUV.

“Is this it?” she asked, tense but calm.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to the kids?”

“Figured we’d call them on the way.”

“I’m not going in without them, Patrick.”

“I know,” Larkin said. “Neither am I.”

He slammed the SUV’s gate closed.

Jill could hear the sirens continuing to wail as she drove toward Chris’s school, counterpointed by the screech of tires as she took the corners as fast as she could without rolling the crossover.

She had to do a lot of dodging, too, because people weren’t paying much attention to things like stop signs and traffic lights. In this crisis, everybody had somewhere they wanted to be right now . And she was the same way, gunning through intersections if there was enough of a gap in the chaos for her to make it.

The incessant honking of horns assaulted her ears, too. People were just driving down the streets leaning on their horns. What good that was going to do, she didn’t know, but obviously they felt compelled to do it.

She veered around a wreck that had the edge of the road blocked. Somebody had lost control of a pickup, jumped the curb, and slammed into a fire hydrant. A plume of water shot into the air, splattering Jill’s windshield as she went by. She hit the wipers to clean it off. She had to be able to see.

Chris’s school was only three blocks away now, but the road was getting more clogged with traffic. Everybody with a kid there wanted to reach their child or children. Jill had to slow down, then let out a groan as the vehicles in front of her shuddered to a halt.

This wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. She couldn’t reach the school, and if she stayed here, she’d be trapped in the traffic jam.

But there was a cross street just a couple of cars ahead, and she knew if she could reach it, she could circle around and come up behind the school. A drainage ditch blocked that side of the campus, so she couldn’t drive right up to the rear of the school, but she could get close enough to retrieve Chris. She hoped the smaller street back there wouldn’t be blocked like this main boulevard was.

That plan formed in her mind in an instant. She wrenched the wheel over and jammed her foot down on the gas. The crossover bumped up over the curb and tore across somebody’s front lawn at an angle. Jill was sorry for any damage she did, but every instinct in her body told her it no longer really mattered.

As she jolted off the curb into the cross street, she checked the rearview mirror, worried that other people would follow her example and flock to the back of the school, creating a logjam over there, too. The idea didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else just yet, though. The street was clear of vehicular traffic, although panicked pedestrians ran here and there.

Jill took the next two corners hard and fast. She rammed the crossover ahead on the street that ran next to the drainage ditch. When she could see the school on the other side of it, she hit the brakes and skidded to a stop on the side of the road. She was out of the vehicle in a flash, although she paused just long enough to lock it. One thing an emergency always brought out was the lawless element interested only in looting.

The sides of the ditch were concrete, the bottom covered with a couple of inches of mud and scummy water. Jill slid down, splashed through it with no thought for her shoes, and bounded up the other side. A high chain-link fence separated the ditch from the school’s playground. She hit it on the move and scrambled up it, grateful now for all the hours she had spent working out. Thankfully, there was no barbed wire at the top. This was a school, after all, not a prison.

She landed, running, in the playground.

The first door into the school she came to was locked. Of course it was, she thought. As soon as the sirens went off, the place had probably gone into lockdown. Since this was a fairly new school, it had been designed to make it difficult for intruders to break in. She couldn’t shatter a window or kick down a door.

Muttering bitter curses, she ran around the building to the front and found chaos waiting for her.

Dozens of parents had made it to the school and demanded to be let in so they could get their kids. From the looks of things, the principal was maintaining the lockdown, though. Men and women yelled and pounded on the glass doors at the entrance. As Jill forced herself into the mob, she peered through the glass and saw several terrified women inside. They had to be able to recognize at least some of the parents, but they still didn’t know what to do. The threat of a lawsuit hung over so much of modern life, including the educational system, that anything out of the ordinary tended to paralyze bureaucrats.

Behind Jill, someone screamed and a man shouted, “Get out of the way!”

She looked back and saw the crowd scattering in a frenzy as a van plowed through, picking up speed as the path cleared. Jill scrambled out of the way. The van flashed past her and crashed into the locked doors, blasting them open, shattering glass, spraying shards everywhere. The vehicle came to a stop in the school’s foyer.

People fought their way past it, ignoring the carpet of broken glass on the tile floor, and scattered through the school in search of their children. The principal and other administrators screamed at them to stop, but no one paid any attention to them.

Jill certainly didn’t as she wedged her way into the school and then dashed along one of the corridors toward Chris’s classroom. She knew where she was going, knew this school quite well from all the Meet the Teacher nights, the Open Houses, the field trips, and the special days when the parents could come and read with their kids or eat lunch with them, and she felt a sharp pang of loss as she realized she would probably never experience any of those things again.

There was Chris’s room. The door was closed. Jill appeared to be the first parent to reach it. She grabbed the knob and twisted it. Still locked. She slammed her palm against the glass and shouted, “Mrs. Fletcher! Mrs. Fletcher! It’s Jill Sinclair. I have to get Chris. Let me in!”

A middle-aged woman with eyes so big they seemed about to pop out of her head appeared on the other side of the glass. She looked past Jill, maybe to make sure no one was forcing her to do anything, and then reached down to throw the bolt on the door. She stepped back quickly as Jill flung it open.

“Is it true?” the teacher said. “Is it a nuclear attack?”

“Maybe. We don’t know yet. But you have to let me take Chris.” Jill thought about the Walther in its holster inside the waistband of her slacks and had a crazy vision of her sticking the gun in Mrs. Fletcher’s face to force her to back off and give her her son.

It didn’t come to that. Mrs. Fletcher turned her head and said, “Chris! Grab your things and go with your mom!”

Jill’s heart pounded hard in relief as she saw Chris hurrying toward her. Then she looked at all the other kids, who were scared out of their minds, and wished she could take all of them with her.

But the only thing she could do was grab Chris’s arm, look at Mrs. Fletcher, say, “Good luck to you,” and then run along the hall toward a door that led out onto the playground. Like most of the school doors, it would open from the inside even though it was locked from the outside. The two of them burst through it and started at a run toward the drainage ditch.