William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Someone else yelled, “They must know where it’s safe!”

“Follow them!” a third voice chimed in.

“Shit,” Larkin muttered. He told Susan, “Come on, fast as you can.”

Ahead of them, with a faint rumble of its motor, the gate started to open, the two halves sliding apart. Larkin and Susan broke into stumbling runs. Behind them, angry shouts and howled curses filled the air. Larkin heard footsteps rapidly slapping the ground as people ran after them.

Graham Moultrie appeared from somewhere, a weapon of some sort in his hands. He shouted, “Come on!” to Larkin and Susan, then the gun he held began to chatter and spew flames.

Moultrie was off to one side, so he was able to fire through the iron bars past Larkin and Susan as they hurried toward the gate. Larkin threw a glance over his shoulder, thinking that surely Moultrie wasn’t mowing down the people from the road. They were all fellow Americans, after all.

The slugs from the automatic weapon chewed up the asphalt in front of the charging mob and made them all throw on the brakes. Some of them might have been hurt by ricochets or chunks of flying asphalt, but at least it wasn’t wholesale slaughter.

Larkin and Susan reached the gate, which was open barely wide enough for them to get through, one at a time. Larkin hung back a step to let Susan go first. She slipped through the gap, one of the bags she carried catching for a second before she tugged it free. Larkin was right behind her. The machine gun had fallen silent, but Moultrie still stood there pointing it at the crowd, and the grim look on his face made it clear that if he had to pull the trigger again, it might not be for warning shots.

The gate began to rumble closed. Moultrie hadn’t moved, so Larkin figured someone else was probably close by with the remote control, probably Deb. She could easily be hidden in the brush close to the entrance.

A man yelled, “You son of a bitch!” and the next instant a shot blasted from the crowd. Larkin looked around to see that the press of people had scattered, leaving one man holding a revolver. Larkin wasn’t surprised that somebody else on the road was armed. There were probably plenty of guns out there in those stalled cars.

Larkin didn’t know where that lone bullet had gone, but he knew where the burst Moultrie fired in return landed. The handful of slugs punched into the gunman’s chest and knocked him backward as blood sprayed from the wounds. Screams came from the crowd as they scattered even more.

“Get in the Jeep and go,” Moultrie snapped at Larkin and Susan. He swung the machine gun back and forth, menacing the crowd outside the gate.

Deb raced from the brush and jumped behind the wheel while Larkin and Susan were piling their gear into the back. Larkin hung on to the AR-15 and told Susan, “You go with Deb! I’ll stay here and help Graham!”

Deb looked around from the driver’s seat and told him, “No need! Help’s on the way!”

Larkin looked along the road leading to the project’s buildings and saw several more Jeeps heading toward the gate, each with several armed men in it. Rifle and shotgun barrels bristled from the vehicles, and on the back of one of them was mounted…

“Good Lord!” Larkin said. “Is that a .30 caliber machine gun?”

It certainly was, he saw as the first of the Jeeps raced past and then slewed to a stop with a screech of brakes. The gunner on the back fired a long burst over the heads of the mob. People scrambled to get back in their cars and started driving again, closing up the gap that had opened while they were trying to get into the Hercules Project. There were plenty of curses and angry shouts hurled at the gate as the vehicles slowly rolled past, but nobody was willing to face the threat of a dozen armed men and a high-powered machine gun.

A thoroughly illegal machine gun, Larkin thought, but right now he was glad Moultrie had broken that law.

With society falling apart around them, the law of the gun might soon be the only one that counted for anything.

Susan was in the Jeep’s front passenger seat. Larkin swung into the back, and Deb punched the gas. She handled the wheel expertly on the winding road.

“Are you two all right?” she asked as she drove. “You look like you need medical attention.”

“Just cuts and scratches from broken glass,” Larkin said. “A guy busted out our windshield and one of the windows trying to steal our SUV.”

“You stopped him?”

“Yeah,” Larkin said, thinking about the way the guy had flown backward when those two rounds from the. 45 struck him. He was stopped, all right.

“I never dreamed people would act so crazy.”

“They’re crazy with fear,” Larkin said. “I suppose I can’t blame them… too much. Who were those guys in the other Jeeps?”

“Our security force. They’re all residents here. Cops, military, ex-military like you, Patrick. Graham was going to ask you to join, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. And then this happened…”

“We knew something like it was coming. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any need for the Hercules Project.”

Susan said, “Our daughter and her husband aren’t here yet, are they?”

Deb shook her head. “No, I’m afraid not. I’ve been trying to keep track of everyone checking in. It went pretty fast at first, before the traffic got backed up so badly on the road. Nobody even seemed to notice that some of the cars were turning in here. What happened to your SUV?”

“We left it on the other side of the road,” Larkin said. “Couldn’t get through with it, and well, we don’t really need it anymore, do we?”

“Not unless this is a false alarm. God, I hope it’s a false alarm!”

“We all do,” Larkin said. But whether the bombs fell or not, right now the world was an immensely more dangerous place than it had been earlier today, and now that Susan was safe, all he could think about was Jill and her family.

Jill wanted to know what was going on, but she kept the radio in the crossover turned off because she didn’t want to scare Chris even more than he already was. He bit his bottom lip and kept looking around like he expected some sort of monster to jump at him without warning.

But monsters weren’t real… unless you wanted to count the human race. On this day, Jill thought, at least some of humanity definitely fell into that category.

Impatience made her want to bang her hand on the steering wheel. She suppressed that urge, too. It wouldn’t make the traffic in front of her move any faster. It had been bad enough on the Interstate and then on the loop around Fort Worth, but once she had gotten off onto the country road that led into the hills west of the city, her progress had slowed down even more.

Trevor and Bailey were somewhere in this mess, she thought. She hoped her mom and dad had already made it to the bunker, but given the geography, it was too much to hope that her husband and daughter were there by this time. They probably weren’t even ahead of her. Their cell phones were useless—the wireless networks were likely overloaded.

“We’re going to that underground place, right?” Chris asked.

“That’s right. We’ll be safe there.”

“Dad and Bailey will be there?”

“Of course.” Jill managed to smile reassuringly—she hoped—as she said it.

“And Grandma and Granddad?”

“Yep. We’ll all be there.”

“Good. Maybe it won’t be too bad, then.”

“It won’t be bad at all,” Jill said. “It’ll be fine.”

Chris was quiet for a minute, then he said, “You know, this is the first time I’m glad you didn’t let me get a dog after all. Because if you had, we were in such a hurry we’d have had to leave him behind in the backyard to get blown up along with all the other dogs and cats and people.”