William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“Well, that doesn’t make me feel the least bit better.”

A humorless grin stretched across his face. “Another couple of miles and we’ll be there. Then I’ll feel better.”

“I won’t. Not until Jill and Trevor and the kids are there with us.”

Larkin nodded. She was right about that. As long as their loved ones were out there, unaccounted for, he couldn’t rest easy. And just because Susan had talked to their daughter didn’t mean they would all make it safely to the project.

Another vehicle was stopped on the side of the road ahead, this time a pickup. At least, with everyone trying to get away from the city, there was little if any traffic coming the other way, so there was room for the cars to get around the ones that were stopped.

In this case, though, three men ran out into the road just as Larkin started to go around. They were yelling and waving their arms, and Larkin had no choice except to hit the brakes unless he wanted to run over them.

One of the men hurried around to the driver’s window. All of them were in their thirties, dressed in jeans and work shirts. The pickup had a sign on the door for a landscaping company, and a zero-turn mower and other pieces of equipment were in the back.

“Thanks for stopping, man,” the one who came to the window said. Larkin had lowered the glass a few inches. “You wouldn’t believe how many times we had to jump out of the way of people who didn’t. We need a ride.”

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Larkin said. “We’re not going very far.”

“Not going very far?” the man repeated as he stared in disbelief. “You need to get as far away from the Metroplex as you can! They’re gonna nuke the place!”

Larkin wasn’t about to tell this man about the Hercules Project. The fewer people who knew about that, other than the residents, the better. He was starting to wish he’d kept going and made these guys jump out of the way again.

“We don’t know that they’re going to nuke anybody. Anyway, you’ll have to get a ride with somebody else.”

“You got room in there, man. We can see that.” The man’s face twisted angrily. “And we’re gettin’ tired of bein’ ignored. We got a right to live just as much as anybody else.”

“Patrick,” Susan said in a low, worried voice.

Larkin glanced in her direction. Through the glass on her side, he saw that the other two men had taken shovels out of the back of the pickup and assumed vaguely threatening stances. This was just a standard SUV. A few swings with those tools would break the windows out.

Larkin turned his head back toward the man on his side and started to say, “Sorry—” when the man reached his hand in through the gap, fingers clawing at Larkin’s face.

Larkin hit the button that raised the window, pinning the man’s arm. He howled in pain and outrage, the sound blending with the impatient honking that came from the vehicles stopped behind the SUV. Larkin’s foot came down hard on the gas. The SUV leaped forward, and the man whose arm was caught in the window had to run and try to keep up or lose his balance and be dragged. At the same time, his two companions lunged at the SUV and swung the shovels. Larkin’s quick move had caught them unprepared, however. Instead of hitting the windshield or the passenger window, the shovels clanged off the vehicle’s top.

Larkin kept accelerating. The man just a few inches away on the other side of his window was screaming now. Larkin pushed the button again, and as the window lowered, the man’s arm came free and he fell and rolled on the asphalt, out of control from his momentum. Something banged off the back of the SUV, and when Larkin checked the rearview mirror he saw a shovel lying in the road. One of the men had flung it after them in fear and rage.

The man who had tried to grab Larkin through the window was still on the ground. One of his friends ran up to him and started trying to haul him to his feet. Both of them had to scramble to get out of the way of an accelerating car.

Larkin couldn’t see any of them after that and turned his attention ahead again.

Susan was breathing hard. Her eyes were wide. “They were going to hurt us,” she said. “They were going to hurt us and take the SUV.”

“Yeah,” Larkin said. “They would have tried.”

He glanced down at the Colt 1911 .45 lying on the seat between them. He hadn’t reached for the gun back there… but he would have if he’d needed to in order to shed themselves of the would-be thieves.

What was troubling was that a few hours earlier, those guys probably weren’t thieves at all and wouldn’t have been so quick to grab tools and try to turn them into weapons. They were just guys who’d gone to work that morning not worrying about anything other than getting through the day and then going home to their families, if they had them, or spending their evening however they usually did. Nobody got up thinking, Well, the world’s going to end today and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

After the brief stop, Larkin had caught up to the traffic in front of him. Now the vehicles ground to a halt in the road. Susan, recovered a little from her fear, leaned forward and asked, “What is it?”

“Don’t know,” Larkin said. “I can’t see.” As he watched, though, peering up the line of cars, he spotted figures reeling back and forth between some of the vehicles. Men flailed at each other with fists. “Oh, crap! It’s a fight. Somebody else must have tried to take somebody’s car.”

“There’s no way around this, is there?” Susan asked, her voice tight with anxiety.

“No, this is really the only road in. Moultrie probably didn’t think about that, since everything else about the site is perfect.”

“I didn’t mean that, necessarily. I meant… there’s no way to keep people’s worst nature from coming out in a crisis, is there?”

Larkin grimaced. He had thought the same thing, but he said, “That’s not always true. It depends on the person. Think about all the disasters, natural or man-made, where people rise above what they usually are and perform great acts of heroism. Sometimes they save a lot of lives, even at the cost of their own.”

“But even in a hurricane or something like that, people know it’s not the end of the world.”

“If you don’t make it, it’s the end of your world. That doesn’t stop most people from pitching in to help.”

“But some don’t. I mean, look at all the looters every time there’s a riot. Some people are always out just for themselves, and that just gets worse when there’s an emergency.”

Larkin couldn’t argue with that. He just said, “That’s why we’re prepared… and why we’ll do whatever it takes to save our family.”

Susan sighed. “I wish they were all with us right now.”

“So do I, babe. So do I.”

A few minutes of tense silence went by while Larkin watched the brawl up ahead. If the violence spilled in their direction, he wouldn’t take any chances this time. He would grab the 1911 and be ready for trouble.

More men got out of their vehicles and shoved a stalled car out of the way as the battle moved onto a grassy hillside next to the road. Larkin wondered if the stalled car was what had started the fight. The traffic began to move forward again. Overall, the clog was getting worse, though. They measured their progress now in feet. At this rate, it might soon be inches.

And it might take too long to reach the Hercules Project. Larkin glanced up at the sky, wondered what was up there. What might be speeding toward them at this very second ...and the news on the local radio stations was scrambling to stay on top of the different scenarios, some accurate, some fake… but it was impossible to know the difference.