William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

A woman lunged from the crowd and started up the stairs, hands held like claws and reaching out toward Moultrie as she screamed at Moultrie, “Murderer! Murderer! You left Nelson out there to die!”

Larkin recognized the woman as the one who had come up to him earlier looking for her husband. Ruskin, that was her name, he recalled. It was obvious she hadn’t found Nelson, or else she wouldn’t have attacked Moultrie.

As the woman charged him, Moultrie moved quickly and protectively to put Deb behind him, even though the woman’s anger was directed at him. He lifted the arm holding the bullhorn to protect his face from Mrs. Ruskin’s hooked fingers, but he just shielded himself instead of striking back as she rammed into him and knocked him back against Deb.

By then, a couple members of the security force had moved around Moultrie. They sprang to his defense. Each grabbed one of Mrs. Ruskin’s arms and pulled her away from Moultrie.

“Don’t hurt her!” he shouted.

Mrs. Ruskin started screaming curses. Moultrie jerked his head toward the stairs and went on to his security men, “Take her up to my office. Somebody stay with her to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

The woman tried to pull away from the men in the red vests, but they had good grips on her. Moultrie and Deb moved over to the edge of the stairs to give them room as they forced Mrs. Ruskin up the steps. The assembled residents of the Hercules Project looked on in mingled shock and horror. The security men reached the landing and went around it, out of sight. Everyone could still hear Mrs. Ruskin’s screamed oaths, though. The staircase muffled them, and after a moment they went away.

Moultrie took a deep breath and heaved a weary sigh. “This is a terrible thing,” he said. He wasn’t using the bullhorn now, but the bunker was so hushed and quiet that his voice carried to everyone. “You can’t blame the poor woman. I certainly don’t.”

A man near the front of the crowd asked, “Was she right?”

Moultrie smiled, but there was no humor in the expression. It was more like a death’s-head grimace. He said, “Do you mean about me being a murderer? I’d like to think she wasn’t.”

“But her husband didn’t make it?”

Instead of answering directly, Moultrie turned to Deb and held out his free hand. She gave him a sheet of paper. He faced the crowd again and lifted the bullhorn.

“As you know, we have the fingerprints of all the project’s residents in our files. We’ve been matching them against those of the people who entered the project today, so it’s a simple matter to isolate the ones who are… unaccounted for.”

“Dead, you mean,” a woman said.

“Not necessarily. As I mentioned earlier, we’re far enough from Ground Zero that it’s possible there were survivors.”

“But if the bomb didn’t kill them, the aftereffects will,” a man spoke up. “That’s what you said.”

“It’s all speculation at this point,” Moultrie said. “We don’t know what the long-term result will be.” He swallowed hard. Watching from the crowd, Larkin could tell that Moultrie was almost overcome by emotion. Moultrie lifted the paper and went on, “These are the people who were not able to be with us today. David Ahearne. Melissa Ahearne. Jacob Ahearne. Tamara Bradley. Matthew Beckerman. Teresa Beckerman. John Eldridge. Samantha Eldridge. Peyton Harwell…”

He continued reading names, among them Nelson Ruskin. For the most part there was no reaction from the stunned crowd, but at some of the names, someone gasped or cried out, and sobs began to be heard, grim counterpoints to the list Moultrie was giving them.

Finally, Moultrie lowered the paper and said, “That’s all. Thirty-three of our residents are unaccounted for. The current population of the Hercules Project is three hundred and seventy-four. Three-hundred and seventy-four souls… and God bless each and every one of us.” His nostrils flared as he drew in another deep breath. “Right now, my friends, and until we know differently… we are the United States of America.”

Moultrie and Deb went back up to the command center. Larkin assumed that’s where they were headed, anyway. A short time later, Deb’s voice came over the loudspeakers announcing that everyone should begin moving to their assigned areas. That was good, Larkin thought, because it gave everybody something to do. They needed something to occupy their minds and their energy, instead of just sitting around thinking about what had happened. He had seen the same thing in combat. All hell could be breaking loose, but if somebody had a job to do—and it had been drummed into them that they should do it, no matter what the circumstances—they were a lot more likely to stay alive and prevail against the enemy… whoever that enemy happened to be.

At this point, the enemy wasn’t really Russia or North Korea anymore. They had shot their bolt, done the worst they could. The main enemy of the residents of the Hercules Project was fear, ably abetted by grief, resentment, and anger.

Susan said to Jill and Trevor, “Let’s find your place first. Your father and I have everything ready in our apartment.”

“I could have used some more time to move things into our quarters,” Jill said with a sigh. “But I suppose we were lucky to have as much time as we did.”

That comment made Larkin think of the old saying about how the lucky ones in a nuclear war would be the ones killed outright.

He hoped that wouldn’t turn out to be true in real life.

Several sets of stairs led from the lower bunker to the main hallways above. People began trooping up the steps, mostly couples and families. The ones who had chosen to live in the barracks-like lower bunker were overwhelmingly single. Space couldn’t be wasted. Anyone who was single but wanted to live in one of the main corridors or a missile silo apartment had to accept that they would have roommates.

The H-shaped main corridors ran roughly east and west. The quarters that Jill and Trevor would be sharing with Bailey and Chris were in the southern corridor, designated Corridor One. The northern corridor was Corridor Two. The four silos were called Silos A, B, C, and D, starting with the one at the western end of Corridor One and running clockwise. The door of the Sinclairs’ quarters was labeled 1A09, which meant it was actually the fifth door on the left, going toward Silo A, directly across the broad hallway from 1A10.

Down at the end of the corridor were wide double doors that opened into a reception area for Silo A. Apartment 1 in Silo A was located at this level, with four apartments underneath it, accessible by both elevator and stairs. Larkin and Susan were in Apartment 2, just one level down, with Jim and Beth Huddleston directly below them. Larkin wasn’t too fond of that idea, but he was glad that Jill, Trevor, and the kids would be so close.

When they went in, a door on the left opened into a small bedroom with two bunk beds in it. That wasn’t the optimal arrangement for the kids, but again, a certain level of privacy had to be given up. Along a painted concrete wall and around a corner, also to the left, was the small kitchen and dining area. A door in the left corner of that room led into the “master bedroom,” as Larkin wryly thought of it, another chamber on the cramped side with a full-size bed in it, along with a closet and a tiny bathroom barely big enough for the toilet and the combination bath/shower. Another bathroom and a storage area were beyond the kitchen.

Everything was pretty spartan. No living space other than the kitchen/dining room, but the dining table had space for six at it, so that was a little bigger than what they actually needed. The table would serve as a desk for Bailey and Chris, too, where they could do their homework. Larkin wasn’t sure how long it would be before the school was up and running, but he didn’t expect Moultrie to wait too long about that.