William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“You don’t know if you can even get in where you are.”

“They’re not going to keep me out,” Jill said. “Please, Trevor, do like I asked.” She paused. “We don’t know how much time we have left.”

She hated to say that in front of Chris, but it was true.

“Oh, all right,” Trevor said. “I’ll look for the broken gate—What’s that?”

She heard the alarm in his voice. Her hand tightened on the phone. “Trev, what’s wrong?”

“The warning sirens… they had stopped, but they started again just now.”

Jill opened her door and stepped out. She could hear the sirens’ howl floating over the hills. She didn’t know what they meant, but it couldn’t be anything good.

“Hurry, Trevor,” she half-whispered. “Please.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he promised, and then the connection went dead.

Panic tried to well up inside Jill, but she forced it down. She handed the phone back to Chris and said, “Come on. We need to get moving.”

They grabbed the bags from the back of the crossover and started walking at a fast pace toward the wall. As they did, Jill thought she heard several bursts of gunfire in the distance, but that wasn’t possible, was it?

Of course it was. On a day like today, anything was possible.

Deb drove around the administration building to the bunker’s main entrance. Scores of vehicles were already parked back here on the wide grassy area to the left, and people were moving back and forth between them and the concrete building housing the stairs, as they unloaded personal belongings they had brought with them. Steady streams of worried-looking men and women came and went from the building’s open door.

“The two of you can go on in and unload your gear,” Deb told Larkin and Susan as she turned halfway around in the driver’s seat. “Don’t worry, Patrick. Graham’s got everything under control. We’re monitoring developments constantly—”

She stopped and lifted her head as the sirens in the nearby housing developments, which had gone silent, started their keening wail again.

“That can’t be good,” Susan said.

“Wait a second.” Deb picked up a walkie-talkie from the console between the seats and keyed it. “Talk to me, Andrew.”

“England’s been hit!” a man’s frenzied voice replied. “Russian missiles! At least five nuclear blasts!”

Susan moaned in horror.

“More missiles launched at our west coast from Siberia and North Korea,” the man continued on the walkie-talkie. “Our anti-missile defenses will try to stop them, and we’ve launched strikes of our own, but this is it, Deb!”

A death-like pallor washed over Deb’s face, but her voice was still composed as she asked, “What’s the time frame?”

“Not sure. If they do fire any at us, it’ll take approximately twenty minutes after launch for them to reach us.”

Alarms inside the project began to clamor, and the people unloading their vehicles started moving faster.

“So we have a twenty-minute minimum window,” Deb said.

“Yeah. I’ve advised Graham. He’s going to start withdrawing from the main gate. Deb… we’ve got an encroachment along the eastern boundary of the property.”

“What kind of encroachment?”

“A woman and a little boy, approaching on foot. Looks like they’re carrying go-bags, like they know what they’re doing.”

Larkin leaned forward sharply when he heard that. He touched Deb’s shoulder and said, “Is he watching them on surveillance cameras?”

She turned her head slightly and nodded.

“Ask him what they look like,” Larkin urged.

“Description on the two?” Deb said into the walkie-talkie.

“Woman’s mid-thirties, brown hair, little boy around ten, blond hair.”

Susan said, “That could be Jill and Chris!”

Deb told the man in the command center, “Send a screen cap of them to my phone.”

“Will do.”

Mere seconds later her phone chimed and she held up the screen so Larkin and Susan could see it. Susan said, “Oh, my God!”

“That’s them,” Larkin confirmed. “Our daughter Jill and our grandson Chris.”

“They must have taken one of the old gas company roads to get close, then tried to get here on foot,” Deb said.

“Can they… can they get over that wall?” Susan asked.

“The ground inside it is mined.”

Susan groaned in fear and desperation.

Larkin gripped the back of the seat in front of him, hard. “Can the mines be deactivated?”

“I believe so. They weren’t activated until Graham turned them on earlier, when things started to go bad. The pressure sensor in them sends a signal to the computer in the command center, and that sends a detonation signal back.”

“Turn them off!” Susan cried. “For God’s sake, turn them off!”

Deb hesitated. “I don’t know… I wish Graham was here…”

On the walkie-talkie, Andrew said, “Deb, the woman and the little boy are on the wall. The woman’s about to jump down inside… There she goes!”

Jill’s feet hit the ground. She stumbled a little as she nearly lost her balance. She threw out her arms and caught herself.

There was a little clump of cactus close by. Wouldn’t want to fall on that.

She turned back to the wall and said, “Okay, Chris, toss the bags down to me, one at a time.” She had left the bags balanced up there until she was down on the inside of the wall.

Chris dropped the bags to her. She caught them and set them aside, then said, “All right, you can turn around and slide off of there. Hang by your hands and then drop. I’ll catch you.”

“Are you sure, Mom?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve never dropped you, have I?”

“Dad said you did once when I was a baby.”

“That’s because you were as slippery as a little eel. Now come on.” She didn’t like the way those sirens had gone off again, and now some alarms inside the Hercules Project had added their clangor to the racket.

Looking pretty dubious about the whole thing, Chris turned around, slid backward off the thick wall, and hung for a second before letting go. The wall was only eight feet tall, so he didn’t have far to fall before he landed in Jill’s arms. She was braced for his weight, but she still had to take a quick step backward to compensate for it.

From somewhere not far off, she heard what sounded like a car horn honking. She turned and saw that it wasn’t a car but rather a Jeep, bouncing as it came across country toward them.

Was that…? Yes! Graham Moultrie’s redheaded wife Deb was driving, but Jill’s mom was in the passenger seat. And peering anxiously between the two women from the rear seat was her dad. His rugged face was as drawn and haggard as Jill remembered ever seeing it.

“Grab one of the bags and come on,” she told Chris. “They’ve come to meet us for some reason.”

The Jeep’s tires threw up a small cloud of dust as it came to a stop. Susan was out of the vehicle in a flash, throwing her arms around both Jill and Chris, pulling them against her.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Susan said. “That was so close.”

“Close?” Jill repeated. “What do you mean?”

Larkin had gotten out of the Jeep and come over to stand next to them. He put a hand on Jill’s shoulder and said, “This area is mined. They have electronic detonators, so the project’s command center was able to turn them off, but not before you jumped down from that fence. You were just lucky enough not to land on one.”

Jill looked at the ground and felt like her stomach had dropped all the way to her feet. “Mines?” she said, her voice weak.