William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“The hell with this,” he muttered. “There’s gotta be another way.”

“Can you get around on the shoulder?”

He shook his head. “Too many stalled cars. The ground drops off too much on this side, and there are too many culverts. We’d get stuck if we got too far off the road.”

“Maybe the other shoulder?”

The lack of traffic inbound toward Fort Worth made that a possibility, Larkin thought. There was a double line of outbound traffic now, but as far as Larkin could see, the far shoulder was at least partially clear. If he took off over there, other people were bound to follow him, and that would just create three lines of traffic. It wouldn’t be long before that third line stalled for some reason, too.

But it wouldn’t matter if he and Susan could get close enough to the project before that happened. They could get out and carry the bags and guns if they had to. He’d been stashing extra food and supplies in their apartment for the past few weeks, ever since the place was close enough to completion for him to do so, so they hadn’t had to bring too much with them on this last mad dash for safely…

This mad dash that had turned into a crawl.

Larkin checked his side mirror, saw an opening, hauled the wheel over. Somebody honked as he veered left, but nobody ran into him, so he didn’t care. Let ’em get mad. It didn’t matter anymore. When he got over in the second lane, he could see the other shoulder even better. It was empty.

He hit the gas and popped out, still only moving about ten miles an hour, but it seemed faster as he passed the other vehicles. In the rearview mirror, he saw others following his example, as he had known they would.

“We’re on the wrong side of the road now,” Susan said. “I guess we should have thought of that. We’ll never be able to get back over and turn into the gate.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Larkin said. “We’ll ditch the SUV and go in on foot. We can take everything with us that we really need. If things get as bad as it looks like they might, we won’t be driving anywhere for a long time anyway.”

“You’re right.” Susan took a deep, shuddery breath. “Oh, Patrick, I’m so scared. I keep thinking that at any second there’s going to be a bright, blinding light, and then… and then…”

“Try not to think about it,” he told her. “I know that’s hard, but we’re alive, the kids are alive, and nothing’s really happened yet—”

The windshield exploded inward, shattering and spraying glass at them.

It wasn’t a bomb, because he was still alive. Some small part of Larkin’s brain knew that. The blast wave from a nuclear explosion would have killed them, possibly even vaporized them. But other than shock and some stinging pain on his face and hands where flying slivers of glass had cut them, he seemed to be all right. Instinct and reflexes had closed his eyes in time to protect them.

Susan was screaming, though, either in shock or pain or both. He forced his eyes open and reached over to grab her, fear making his heart pound as he saw the blood on her face.

Before he could get his hands on her, something else crashed into the driver’s side window and sprayed him with more glass. Larkin flinched away from it, but something made his hand drop to the seat and scoop up the Colt.

He twisted toward the window, bringing the gun around and shoving down the safety with his thumb as he did so. A man stood there, a long tire iron gripped in both hands as he swung it back to strike again. The window was already broken out, so this time that blow would be aimed at Larkin.

Larkin shoved the Colt at the man and fired twice. The shots were deafening inside the SUV.

The two rounds struck the man in the body and knocked him away from the vehicle. He landed on his back and slid down into the ditch. Larkin jerked his head around to look for any other threats but saw none. He turned back to Susan.

“I’m all right!” she cried before he could ask if she was hurt. “Just drive! Go!”

Larkin punched the gas and lurched ahead before any of the other vehicles could pull out in front of him. He gripped the wheel with his left hand and kept the pistol in his right.

“The blood—” he said without taking his eyes off what was in front of him.

“The glass cut me in a few places, that’s all. You have blood all over your face, too, Patrick.”

He did? A glance in the mirror told him she was right. He looked pretty gruesome, too. He lifted his right arm and sleeved some of the gore from his face. Susan found some tissues and wiped at her face, but he didn’t care about getting his shirt blood-stained.

“Why did that awful man do that?”

“I guess he wanted a ride,” Larkin said. “Or to kill us both and steal the SUV.”

“You… you killed him.”

“We don’t know that.”

But the chances of anybody surviving two rounds from a 1911 at close range in the midsection like that were pretty damned small, Larkin realized. It was almost a certainty that he had killed the guy with the tire iron. He knew that he’d been acting in self-defense, and in defense of his wife, too, and he had killed the enemy during wartime…

But this wasn’t a war, and that guy hadn’t been an enemy, at least not when the day started. He’d just been another Texan until terror had driven him to lash out.

Dear God, was this what they were all doomed to become? Animals rending and clawing at each other?

Larkin shoved that thought out of his head. This was no time to debate morality, even with himself. The only thing that really counted was survival. His survival, and that of his loved ones.

Everything else could be hashed out later… if there was a later.

A couple of times he was forced to swing far enough out that his left-hand wheels were off the shoulder and coming dangerously close to either a drop-off or a culvert. But they had covered at least half a mile this way before people ahead of him saw him coming in their mirrors and began to pull out, following his example even though they were in front of him. Larkin glared futilely.

“You can’t blame them,” Susan said. “They just want to get to somewhere safer, too.”

“I know, I know.”

She had slipped off a shoe and used it to brush broken glass off the seat between them. Little trails of drying blood gave her face a striped look. She leaned over and reached toward him. “You’ve got a little piece of glass stuck in your cheek… hold still…”

She plucked it free. He said, “Ouch.”

“Don’t be a big baby.”

“Yes, ma’am. You’re a trained medical professional, though. It shouldn’t have hurt.”

“Just be thankful I’m not picking broken glass out of your butt. I’ve had to do that at work, you know.”

“Could be interesting, depending on whose butt it was.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t the least bit interesting.”

Larkin grinned tightly. It said something for the human spirit that they could banter like this when they’d been under attack just a few minutes earlier—and when the ultimate doom could fall on their heads at any second, with no warning. But what good would it do to curl up in a ball and cry? Wasn’t it better to keep fighting?

One of the cars up ahead got too close to a culvert. Its left front wheel fell in with what must have been a bone-jarring thump, and the car came to a dead stop, tilted so its right rear tire was off the ground.

“Oh, hell!” Larkin said as he smacked his left hand against the steering wheel in frustration. Enough of the car was still on the shoulder that no other vehicles would be able to get by.