William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Turned out she wasn’t a secretary, or not just a secretary, anyway. Moultrie smiled and said, “This is my wife Deb. Deb, this is Pat Larkin. I told you about talking to him. He and his family are considering joining us.”

In some circumstances, Larkin would have corrected Moultrie. He would answer to Pat if he had to, but he had always gone by Patrick. Right now. it didn’t seem worth bothering with. Deb Moultrie stood up, extended her hand across the desk, and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Larkin.”

Larkin was just old enough and just enough of a reactionary that he had never been completely comfortable about shaking hands with women, although for the most part he had gotten used to it in the service. He took Deb’s hand and had to admit she had a good grip. Looked a guy in the eye, too, which he liked.

“Anything going on since I left earlier?” Moultrie asked his wife. Deb was a good twenty years younger than him, so Larkin had to wonder if she was a second or third wife, or a trophy wife. Not that it was any of his business or really mattered.

“Some emails for you to answer when you get a chance, that’s all.”

Moultrie nodded. “I’ll do it later. I’m gonna show Pat around the place. You want to come along?”

“No, I’m still making some calls. You go ahead.” She smiled at Larkin. “You wouldn’t believe how many contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors you have to deal with in order to get a place like this in shape.”

“I’ll bet,” Larkin said.

Moultrie gestured at a rear door and said, “We can go out here.”

The door opened onto an asphalt walk that led slightly uphill for about a hundred yards to a cinder-block building that looked like a garage. It had a garage door built into it, in fact, along with a smaller steel door.

Moultrie unlocked the smaller door with his remote before they got there. Larkin said, “You seem to depend a lot on that thing. What happens if the battery goes dead?”

“There are redundancies built into everything,” Moultrie said. “In this case, you can use a key card to get in, or if it comes to that, there’s a manual override operated with a regular key.”

“You think of everything.”

“We try.” Moultrie opened the door and motioned for Larkin to go ahead. He stepped into a room the size of a foyer. On the other side of it was a steel wall painted battleship gray. Set into the wall was a heavy steel door with a simple handle.

“It’s not locked… now,” Moultrie said as he stepped around Larkin and grasped the handle. He pulled the door out, and a light set into a recessed fixture in the ceiling beyond came on, evidently activated by the door opening. Sharp LED illumination washed down over a wide set of concrete stairs with steel rails on both walls. At a landing one floor down, the stairs turned back and continued to descend. Moultrie held on to the door with one hand and extended the other toward the stairs like a tour guide as he said, “Welcome to the Hercules Project.”

Larkin hesitated slightly. There was something about descending into the bowels of the earth with someone he didn’t really know that made the skin on the back of his neck crawl. But he was four inches taller and probably fifty pounds heavier than Graham Moultrie, plus he had all that training from his career as a Marine and had seen combat in the Middle East.

Besides, Moultrie wanted at least 150 grand from him. The guy wasn’t likely to try to kill a potential customer unless he was crazy.

Of course, in this day and age, anybody could turn out to be crazy…

Larkin didn’t pause more than a heartbeat. He started down the stairs with Moultrie behind him. Out of habit, he listened to Moultrie’s steps. A break in the rhythm might be a warning sign.

Nothing happened except they went down two flights of stairs. At the bottom of the second flight was an even thicker, heavier metal door.

Larkin twisted the handle. He grunted with effort as he pushed the door open and stepped into a concrete walled chamber eight feet wide and twelve feet long. A similar door was at the far end.

Moultrie followed him and pointed to a wheel on the back side of the door Larkin had just opened. “This is a blast door that will stand up to just about anything short of a nuclear explosion. It’s equipped with a mechanism like a bulkhead between compartments in a submarine. Turn that wheel and you can seal it off so completely nothing can get through. The door at the other end is identical.” He pointed with a thumb at vents in the ceiling. “This chamber can function as an airlock. We can pump out all the air in it, pump it back in, and open either door by remote control.”

“Just in case there’s something in the air outside that shouldn’t be inhaled?”

“Yep.” Moultrie opened the second blast door. “This leads into one of the main corridors.”

They stepped into a wide, tile-floored hallway that stretched for a hundred yards in either direction. Numerous doors opened from it, some closed, some standing ajar. Again, the lighting was recessed and LED.

Moultrie saw Larkin looking at the lights and said, “That’s one of the first things we did. The original lighting was fluorescent. This is more energy-efficient and easier on the eyes. Anybody who has to stay down here may be staying for a long time.”

Directly across from the blast door leading to the stairs was a corridor running at right angles to the main one. Larkin could tell it ended at another cross corridor about fifty yards away.

“These main halls are laid out in the shape of an H,” Moultrie explained. “There were four missile silos, one at each end of the long sides of the H. They go down considerably deeper, so we’re dividing them up into five levels with a separate apartment at each level.” He pointed to a sliding door and went on, “That’s an elevator leading down to the big storage bunker one level below this. We’re going to be turning it into more of a barracks type of living quarters. The quarters on this level”—he waved a hand toward the doors along the corridor—“are a more family and small-group type of arrangement, with six or eight bunks in each unit, along with a small kitchen and bathroom. Not a great deal of privacy, granted, but still more than there will be down in the lower level. We anticipate that most of the residents who will opt for that will be single people.”

“Are you splitting up the single male and female residents?” Larkin asked.

“No. Everyone here will have to be a grown-up and police their own actions to a certain extent.” Moultrie smiled. “Except the actual kids, of course, and they’ll be with their parents. But we’re not going to impose any sort of litmus test on potential residents. Gay, straight, any race, creed, or color, as they used to say, everybody is welcome here.”

“If they have the money.”

“Well… I created the Hercules Project because I think it’s the right thing to do, but it is a business venture, too.”

“Say it is a worst-case scenario,” Larkin mused. “There’s some sort of disaster and you and the people who have signed up with you have to come down here for a year or two, or longer. When you finally do go back up to the surface, what good is the money going to do you?”

“Probably not a damned bit.” Moultrie laughed. “I’m fully aware of that possibility, Pat. If that’s the way it plays out, I still have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped save the human race. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

Yeah, Larkin thought, if you’ve got a God complex.

Then he told himself that maybe he was being unfair. Maybe Graham Moultrie really was as altruistic as he was trying to make himself sound.