William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“You bastard,” she breathed. “I’ll always hate you.”

“That’s fine. I didn’t expect to be loved by everyone down here. I knew there would be hard choices and that some people would be hurt by them.”

“Hard choices! You’re responsible for my husband’s death!”

“That’s not fair,” Jill said. “There were other people who didn’t get here in time. When Mr. Moultrie had to close up the project, he didn’t know who was here and who wasn’t.”

“And if you want to blame somebody,” Larkin added, “blame the politicians who started the war in the first place. All of us”—he waved a hand to take in the crowd—“we’re just innocent bystanders who got caught in it.”

Moultrie said, “I’ve told you how sorry I am about your husband, Mrs. Ruskin. I wish there was something else I could do, but there just isn’t. We can’t change what’s happened. But we can make sure that we do the right thing going forward. I’d be interested in hearing what you think that is.”

“You’re lying,” Ruskin said. “You’re not interested in what anybody else thinks. You believe you’re God!”

Moultrie frowned and shook his head. He said, “You’re wrong about both of those things. I’m just a guy who did what he could to help. And if you believe you can help me make things better down here, then I damn sure do want to hear about it.” Moultrie looked around at the crowd. “Tell you what. You’ve got a good-sized group here. Why don’t I go back up to the Command Center, so that you can talk freely among yourselves?”

“Talk about what?” Ruskin asked. “And how can we talk freely with your goons still here?”

“My security people will leave, too.”

Fisher frowned and said, “Graham, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. They’ve got shotguns!”

Moultrie sighed and nodded. “And that’s a violation of the rules, yes. I agree, Chuck. So I propose that if we leave, those guns will be returned immediately to the vault where they came from, since there won’t really be a need for them to be down here.”

“You’d trust these people?” Fisher asked, jerking a hand toward Ruskin and her friends.

“I trust everyone down here,” Moultrie said simply. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have allowed them to become part of the project in the first place.”

That brought a few approving murmurs, Larkin noted. Moultrie knew how to work a crowd; Larkin had to give the guy credit for that.

“Do we have a deal?” Moultrie went on. “You can have your meeting and say whatever you want to say, but the guns go back where they’re supposed to be.”

“We’ll think about it,” Charlotte Ruskin said. She still looked suspicious.

“I suppose that’s fair enough,” Moultrie said with a shrug. “I hope you’ll come to the right decision. And if you’d bear with me just a little longer, I have a suggestion about what you can talk about, too.”

Greer said, “We don’t need any help from you—”

Moultrie held up a hand to stop him. “My suggestion, since you’ve got such a good crowd here, is that you talk about electing resident representatives. Nominate five or six people, and have an election. The top two, say, could be your representatives, and any time there’s a problem, you can all get together, figure out what you want, and then send the representatives to talk to me. We’ll all work together to make sure that everyone’s concerns are addressed. That sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?”

Again, people nodded and made noises of agreement. Charlotte Ruskin didn’t look too happy about the idea, though. Moultrie was stealing her thunder, and she knew it.

“What assurances do we have that you’d actually listen to us?” she demanded.

“All I can do is give you my word. But the only way to find out is to give it a try, isn’t it?”

Larkin could tell that Moultrie had won over the crowd. They had let themselves be stirred up by the strident claims of Ruskin and her friends that Moultrie was a dictator, but with him standing right there, talking quietly and calmly to them, his steady presence reminded them that they truly wouldn’t be alive today if not for him. Or at the very least, they wouldn’t be as healthy and safe as they were. Even if they had survived the nuclear blast somehow, they would still be facing a lingering death from radiation poisoning or starvation.

Ruskin was canny enough to sense that the pendulum had swung. Maybe not against her, but at least back to the center. With a sullen undertone in her voice, she said, “All right. We can discuss electing representatives. But you’re not going to be able to put off real change around here, Moultrie. The people have a right to a say in their own lives!”

That prompted a few cheers. Moultrie just smiled faintly, nodded, and said, “Come see me.” He turned his attention to Fisher. “Chuck, come with me. The rest of you can go back to whatever you were doing. I assume you’re all on duty?”

Fisher said, “No, I rounded ’em up. Didn’t want to take any of the regular guys away from their rounds.”

“All right, then.” Moultrie’s smile widened. “Go back to your families, then, and enjoy your evening.”

Moultrie and Fisher walked away, heading toward one of the stairways. Larkin, Jill, and Threadgill went the other way, toward the door that led to the elevator.

“Well, that could have gotten really ugly,” Threadgill said under his breath.

“It still might,” Jill said. “No matter what Mr. Moultrie does, it’s not going to satisfy Charlotte Ruskin. She hates him too much for that.”

Larkin didn’t say anything, but he thought his daughter was right.

Sooner or later, there would be some sort of showdown.

And when it happened, it wouldn’t be pretty.

The very next day, notices began to go up around the bunker and along both corridors. An election would be held in a week’s time to select two representatives for the residents. Charlotte Ruskin and Jeff Greer were among those nominated for the job, along with three men whose names were only vaguely familiar to Larkin. He figured they were only there to make it look good. There was no doubt in his mind who would actually win the election.

But that was a worry for another day, and anyway, it was Moultrie who would have to deal with them, not him. In the meantime, he had his own job, which consisted of both making rounds of the project and monitoring security equipment.

He also had a side project he didn’t talk about much. He had brought several laptops down here in the days before the war, and he always kept an up-to-date file of his current book on a couple of USB drives, one of which he carried around with him at all times. It had been in his pocket on the day everything had gone to hell, and as soon as he’d gotten a chance, he had loaded the manuscript onto one of the laptops and also onto a couple of spare USB drives. Larkin was well aware that he was paranoid about such things compared to a lot of writers, but once he had lost a book that was half written and had to start over, and he didn’t want to have to do that ever again.

So nearly every day, he sat down and wrote some pages on the thriller he’d been working on. It was a historical novel now, since it was set in a world that no longer existed, but Larkin didn’t care about that. Maybe someday there would be a publishing business again. For untold years, probably as far back as there had been language, people had had stories. It wasn’t as vital a need as air and food and water, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important. What was life without the human spirit, and what was the human spirit without imagination?

Besides, he was in the habit of writing, and he didn’t see any reason to change. Thinking about the book had gotten him through some dark nights of the soul when he might have brooded over everything that was lost, instead.