William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“You’re gonna have to climb, kid,” she said as they approached the fence.

“Mom…” Panting a little. “Are we gonna be all right?”

“You bet.”

The sirens still howled. Jill looked at the sky. Clear, blue, beautiful. No sign that devastating, fiery death might lurk up there.

Behind them, the cry of the mob mixed with the sirens.

In the third-grade hall, Jim Huddleston thought he saw Larkin’s daughter Jill going out the back door with her son, but he only caught a glimpse of them as he started hammering on the door of Beth’s classroom.

“Beth, open up!” he shouted through the glass. “It’s me!”

She jerked the door open while he was pounding on it, so suddenly that he stumbled forward and bumped into her. He grabbed her, held her to him.

“Thank God! Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “What is it, Jim? I heard people yelling, and those awful sirens… The principal said something about an attack—”

“The North Koreans and the Russians are threatening to nuke us,” Huddleston said. “We’ve got to go.”

“But… but surely the President will do something… This can’t be happening…”

“The President is an incompetent asshole! He always has been. You just can’t see it with those blinders you wear!”

“Jim! Everyone has a right to an opinion, but talking like that isn’t productive.”

Huddleston wanted to rage at her, but he caught hold of his surging emotions and put his hands on her shoulders.

“We have to go,” he said again, trying to stay as calm and reasoned as possible because that’s what Beth responded to.

“Go where?”

“The Hercules Project.”

Her eyes got big in a way that even the threat of nuclear annihilation hadn’t been able to accomplish. “You went against what I told you to do?”

“Damn right I did, and now I’m glad. We’ve got a place to go. We can live through this, but you’ve got to come on, now!”

“But I can’t…” She turned her head to look at the children huddled against the far wall. “I can’t leave the class.”

“Their parents will get them.” Huddleston couldn’t help himself. He gave her a little shake. “If we stay here, we’ll die !”

For several seconds that seemed like an eternity, she just stared at him. Whether she didn’t understand or just refused to accept what was happening, he didn’t know. Finally, she said, “I’m sure if we just try to talk to them—”

“The Russians and the Koreans?” Huddleston laughed and heard the hysterical edge in the sound. “They don’t care! This is the excuse they’ve been waiting for to blow us off the face of the earth!”

All the children were crying in terror now. Huddleston knew he was scaring them, but he didn’t care. He damn well wanted to scare his wife right now.

“Oh, God!” Beth cried in a broken voice. She threw her arms around his neck. “We’re going to die!”

“Not if we get out of here now,” Huddleston said grimly.

She pulled back a little and asked, “There’s a chance?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Then let’s go!”

She shoved him out the door, followed him from the classroom, and never looked back, even though several of the children were screaming her name.

Trevor was halfway to Bailey’s school, fighting crazed traffic and looking for shortcuts every foot of the way, when his phone rang through the car’s Bluetooth system. He saw Jill’s name on the dashboard display, although he would have recognized the ringtone he had given her anyway. It felt like his heart was at least halfway up his windpipe and trying to crawl the rest of the way as he thumbed the button on the steering wheel and said, “Jill! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” her answer came back, stopping his heart from its ascent, at least for the moment. “I have Chris, and he’s okay, too.”

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Trevor said. He had never been much of a religious person, veering from agnostic to atheist and back again, but right at this moment he believed every word he said. Today, the whole world was a foxhole.

“We’re on our way to the project,” Jill went on. “I heard from Mom and Dad. They’re heading out there, too.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can get Bailey. The traffic is insane!”

“I know. I went through the same thing around the elementary school. Just be careful, okay? People are getting more panicky by the minute, and when people panic, they get desperate.”

“Yeah. It might help if they’d turn off those awful sirens. Surely everybody knows by now what’s going on.”

In point of fact, though, nobody knew what was going on, he realized, and that made things even worse. It was still possible this crisis could blow over. The President would find the right words to say to the Russians and the North Koreans, and things would calm down. It was a shame about Seoul and all the South Koreans who had been killed, of course, but even so, that wasn’t sufficient reason to plunge the entire world into a nuclear holocaust…

“Trev.” He shoved those hopeful thoughts away as he realized she was still talking to him. “Trev, you’ve got the Shield in the car, don’t you?”

“Shield? What—Oh, the gun! Yeah, I have it. It’s in that little case under the seat.”

“You should have two loaded magazines with it. I put them in there. Get it out and load it. Release the slide.”

“But then it’ll be ready to shoot.” He remembered that much from the trip to the range.

“That’s right. Keep it handy in case you need it. But don’t act like you’re going to use it unless you’re really ready to use it. You don’t want to start waving it around just to scare people, because they’re liable to get scared and start shooting at you . So be sure of what you’re doing.”

He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “I don’t like this, babe—”

“Nobody does. But you bring me my daughter, whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

Trevor swallowed. “I understand.” He’d been driving while they were talking, gunning the gas, slamming the brakes, trying to take advantage of every opening in the traffic he could find. “I’m getting pretty close to the school now—Oh, crap.”

“What is it?”

“Looks like traffic’s at a standstill up ahead.”

“I encountered the same thing. Go around, Trev. Find a back way. Get as close as you can, stop somewhere it looks like you can still get out, and then go the rest of the way on foot if you have to.”

“All right. I understand. Once I have Bailey, I come straight to the project?”

“That’s right. Don’t stop for anything—or anybody.”

Trevor swallowed again, even harder this time. That was maybe the most difficult part of this whole terrible thing. Knowing that so many people would be left to whatever fate had in store for them. Logically, he knew he couldn’t save anyone except his daughter, but at the same time, that knowledge gnawed at his guts.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too. Get our daughter.”

“On my way,” he said. “I’ll call you when I have her.”

He broke the connection, then yanked the wheel hard to the left and roared along a side street. He didn’t know these roads around the school as well as he should have, considering all the times he and Jill had been here for various activities. He didn’t have the greatest memory for directions and landmarks, though.

Frustration was mounting in him when he spotted the school between two houses. Somehow, he had managed to get close to it. He stopped and stepped out, leaving one foot in the car. All he had to do was cut through a side yard, climb a fence, and he’d be on the school grounds. He reached back into the car, cut off the key, and was about to head for the school when he remembered what Jill had said about the gun.