William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Larkin said, “Yeah, and I’ve got you to thank for telling me about this place, buddy. I might not have known about it otherwise, and we’d still be… up there.”

Threadgill’s face grew solemn. “Yeah. Your family is all here, safe and sound?”

“They’re somewhere in this crowd, all right.” Larkin put his arm around Luisa’s shoulders and gave her a quick hug, then reached past her to hug Sophie and shake hands with Jack. “Good to see you, son.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jack said. He looked pale and scared, but so did just about everybody else down here. There was a definite undercurrent of fear to the hubbub.

“You haven’t seen Susan, have you?” Larkin asked Threadgill.

The other former Marine shook his head and said, “No, not so far. But if you’re sure she’s down here…”

“I am, but I want to see her with my own eyes, and Jill and Trev and the kids, too.”

Threadgill nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“I’ll see you later,” Larkin told them. He resumed his search.

Before he found his family, he spotted another familiar face, one he didn’t really expect to see down here. He made his way over to the man and woman who stood near one of the walls, talking to each other. The woman saw him coming and frowned.

“Jim, Beth,” Larkin greeted the Huddlestons as he came up to them. “I, uh, didn’t know you were going to be here.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he realized how lame they sounded. He might as well have said, I figured you’d get blown to Kingdom Come.

“We almost weren’t,” Jim Huddleston said. “Got through the gate at the last minute.”

“Even then I thought some of those goons were going to shoot us,” Beth said. “Give a bunch of rednecks guns and some power, and it’s a bad situation.”

Larkin ignored that. He was sort of a redneck himself, in many ways, but he knew what Beth was like. Instead he clapped a hand on Huddleston’s shoulder and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Jim.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Beth said before her husband could respond. “Jim got me all spooked with his talk about nuclear war, but now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’m sure it’s not going to happen. Why, the President is much too smart to ever allow things to get to that point.”

“Then… you haven’t heard?” Larkin said.

“Heard what?”

“The Russians hit England with at least five nukes. They and the North Koreans launched missiles aimed at our west coast.” Larkin thought about how much time had passed. “Some of them have probably struck by now, unless we were able to stop all of them. And the odds of that are pretty slim, as gutted as our defenses have gotten over the past few years.”

Beth’s mouth tightened. “I don’t believe that. You’re just using that as an excuse to complain because your side didn’t win the last election.”

Huddleston said, “Beth, I don’t think Patrick would make up something like that just to score political points.”

“Of course he would. Those people will stop at nothing.”

The longer this conversation went on, the more difficult it was going to be to remain civil, Larkin realized. And having a partisan political argument under these circumstances was just asinine. After today, there was a good chance there wouldn’t be any more political parties. Not for a long, long time, if ever.

“I need to find my family, so I’m going to keep looking for them,” he told Huddleston.

“Thanks again, Patrick.”

Beth didn’t look grateful, just pissed. Larkin was glad he wasn’t going to have to deal with her.

His nervousness grew as he continued searching for his family. Moultrie and Deb had assured him they were safe for the moment, but like he had told Huddleston, he wouldn’t relax until he saw them for himself.

Of course, relax was a relative term. None of them could be absolutely certain that the Hercules Project was as safe as Graham Moultrie claimed it was until it was tested. It might turn out that their doom was only postponed briefly. One of those missiles might land right on top of them. Not even this bunker could withstand being ground zero, Larkin thought. But if the end came, he wanted to be with his family when it did.

He still had the rifle in his right hand. Someone took hold of his left. He looked around and then down and saw his grandson there, smiling up at him.

“Granddad,” Chris said. “We’re over there.”

He pointed, and Larkin saw Susan, Jill, Trevor, and Bailey about twenty feet away. His heart slugged like a jackhammer for a couple of seconds as his wife smiled at him. He didn’t trust himself to speak as emotion swept through him.

Then he grinned down at Chris and said, “How’re you doin’, kid?”

“I’m all right. Scared, but… you know. There are a lot of scary things in the world, Mom says. You have to live in it anyway.”

“Smart girl, your mom. I taught her everything she knows.”

“That’s what Grandma says. That she taught Mom everything she knows, I mean.”

“We can hash that out some other time. Right now, let’s just go see ’em.”

Susan hugged him as he came up to them, then so did Jill and Bailey. Larkin set the rifle on one of the bunks and returned the hugs. The bunks would be occupied later, but for now none of the residents who’d be staying here had claimed a place.

Trevor patted Larkin on the shoulder, an awkward gesture but one Larkin appreciated anyway. The younger man said, “Thanks for helping us out there, Patrick. We couldn’t have gotten in here safely if not for you. I guess that’s true in more ways than one.”

“We’re here, that’s all that matters.”

“Have you heard anything?” Jill asked. “I mean, about what’s going on?”

Larkin knew what she meant. Nobody had anything else on their mind today. He shook his head and said, “No, but by now Moultrie’s got the place shut up completely. Maybe he’ll make some kind of announcement soon.”

“All those people out there…” Susan said.

Larkin put his arm around her shoulder again and drew her against him. “If there was a way to save all of them, we would,” he said. “All we can do is save what we can.”

She nodded in understanding, but he saw the sheen of tears on her face again. A lot of people down here were crying, he saw. How could they help it? The world they had known all their lives was dying, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

There were little clusters of hilarity here and there, people laughing and joking, celebrating because they had made it into this refuge and at least had a chance to live through the disaster. Those happy notes didn’t really ring true, though, Larkin thought. It was easy to be relieved that you might live, harder to act as if the deaths of billions of people didn’t bother you.

An abrupt silence fell as Graham Moultrie’s voice came from loudspeakers mounted on the walls of the bunker.

“Welcome to the Hercules Project. All entrances are now closed and securely sealed. No matter what happens from here on out, we are all in this together. We are, potentially, the citizens of a new world. The future is impossible to predict, but one thing we do know is that it will be very, very different from the lives that all of us have known until today.”

Jill moved up on Larkin’s other side and pressed her shoulder against his. One hand reached out and clasped Trevor’s hand. Her other hand rested on Bailey’s shoulder as the girl stood in front of her, looking up at the speakers. Trevor had his free hand on Chris’s shoulder, holding the boy against him.

“I know all of you are anxious for news. Here in the command center, we’ve been monitoring all the reports we can from around the world, via the Internet. I will not lie to you: the situation is grave. Within the past half hour, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have all been hit by nuclear missiles launched from Russian and North Korean naval vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Destruction is widespread, and the loss of human life is incalculable.”