William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Thank you , Crandall tapped. Asking again, will you let us in?

No can do . Larkin was beginning to hate that phrase, but it was the only answer he could give.

After a few seconds, Crandall tapped, Will check back later. Really need medical assistance and supplies.

We know. Larkin left it at that.

He didn’t hear anything else, and after another short delay Moultrie said over the intercom, “Jill says they’re going back up top. What did you find out, Patrick?”

“Get me out of here and we’ll talk about it,” Larkin said in a voice thick with emotion. Maybe he had never been claustrophobic before, but right now the walls were starting to close in on him a little.

“He wouldn’t say how many of them there are?” Moultrie asked once Larkin had returned to the Situation Room, where Jill was still on duty at the monitors. Fisher stood to one side, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.

“He claimed there are only a few,” Larkin replied, “but I didn’t believe him. He took a little too long to answer.”

Jill said, “That’s reading a lot into somebody tapping on a steel door with a wrench.”

“I know. But that’s the way it seemed to me.”

Fisher said, “You didn’t tell him how many of us are down here, did you?”

“No. I didn’t really tell him much of anything except that we can’t help them. He asked if there was any way we could send some supplies out to them. I told him we’d look into it.”

“We can’t do that,” Moultrie said immediately. “We can’t risk giving up any of our own supplies.”

Larkin nodded slowly and said, “I know.”

“You gave him false hope, Dad,” Jill said. “Isn’t it better if they know the truth?”

“Is it? Sometimes the truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

For a moment, they were all silent. Larkin considered revealing to the others how he had passed along the information that Charlotte Ruskin was alive and well to her husband. He knew Fisher would complain about that, however, so for now he kept it to himself.

He looked at an image frozen on one of the monitors, a screen capture from the footage caught by the stairwell camera. It showed a man with a leathery face, his permanent tan set off by a close-cropped white beard and white hair drawn into a short ponytail at the back of his head. He wore an old army jacket, as Jill had reported earlier. Earl Crandall didn’t look sick. In fact, he looked like kind of a hardass. Larkin knew the type. He’d been accused of it himself.

He wasn’t sure if the past eight months had changed him, though. He felt keenly the loss of those millions of people who’d been wiped out in an hour or so of nuclear hell. Any man’s death diminishes me , John Donne had written. Larkin wasn’t sure he would go so far as to agree with that, but millions of deaths made him feel diminished, no doubt about it.

On the other hand, Crandall, Nelson Ruskin, and whoever was left alive up there would have been toughened up, even more than they were to start with, in the case of Crandall. Even worse, they had nothing left to lose.

He couldn’t afford to turn into some damn softhearted pile of mush, Larkin told himself. He had to stay as hard inside as any of those people on the surface.

Because sooner or later, it might come down to him and all the others down here defending their way of life from those who wanted to take it. If many of them were like Earl Crandall, Larkin and the rest of the residents of the Hercules Project might have one hell of a fight on their hands.

As soon as Nelson Ruskin had revealed who he was, Moultrie had cut the feed to the other monitors in the Command Center so it went only to the Situation Room. His standing orders were that nothing anyone on the Command Center staff learned in there could be discussed with anyone else. Just like Vegas, what happened there stayed there. And the hand-picked staff, devoted to the safety and security of the Hercules Project, could be depended upon to follow those orders.

Usually.

Charlotte Ruskin was on the way to her job in the hydroponic gardens when she heard her name called behind her. She stopped, turned, and saw a man walking quickly toward her, trying to catch up. He looked vaguely familiar, but she didn’t know his name, or at least couldn’t recall it if she’d ever heard it.

“Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Do you remember me, Mrs. Ruskin? My name is Charles Trahn.”

“Of course,” she said, although she didn’t, really.

“I came to one of your meetings and listened to you and Mr. Greer speak.”

She nodded and smiled faintly, still not recalling him. She had talked to so many people, and she’d never been that good with names and faces.

“I shouldn’t have been there, I suppose,” Trahn went on. “I’m Command Center staff.”

“Oh. Did Moultrie send you as a spy?”

“What?” Trahn looked surprised. “No! Not at all. I was just curious what you had to say. My grandparents, they came from North Vietnam. They escaped and immigrated to America. But they knew what it was like to live under a dictatorship, and I’ve never forgotten their stories. I guess that’s made me… I don’t know… a little leery of one person or group having too much power.”

Charlotte Ruskin’s polite smile turned into an ironic sneer. “And yet you work for Graham Moultrie.”

“I was chosen for Command Center staff because of my technological skills,” Trahn said defensively. “That doesn’t mean I agree with everything Mr. Moultrie does. In fact, that’s why I came looking for you today.”

“If you have something to say, Charles, I wish you’d go ahead and say it. I have a shift in the gardens in a few minutes.”

Trahn jerked his head in a nod. “You know the rumors about how there’s something still alive on the surface?”

“Everybody has heard about that.”

“Well, they aren’t just rumors. They’re true. There are people still alive up there.” Trahn paused. “And one of them is your husband.”

Charlotte Ruskin felt like she’d been punched. She took a step back and drew in a sharp breath. She didn’t dare let herself believe what she had just heard, so she said, “That’s not true!”

“It is,” Trahn insisted. “I was on duty yesterday and saw him with my own eyes. He came down the stairwell at the main entrance and held up a note for the surveillance camera there. It asked about you.”

She shook her head. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie about something like that?”

Charlotte Ruskin cast about wildly in her mind for an answer. She said, “Moultrie sent you to upset me, to distract me.”

“That’s crazy,” Trahn said. “If Mr. Moultrie knew I was telling you this, I’d be in big trouble. As soon as we all realized what was happening, he cut that feed to the regular Command Center monitors and sent it directly to his Situation Room. Only there. He and a few of his security people know what happened after that, but they’re the only ones. Your husband was there, though, right on the other side of the exterior blast door. I saw him with my own eyes.”

A wave of dizziness washed through her. She had to reach out and rest a hand on the wall to brace herself.

“I’m sorry,” Trahn went on. “I know it’s a real shock. I wrestled with myself all last night and earlier today, trying to decide if I ought to tell you. Finally, I… I knew I couldn’t keep it a secret. You deserve to know the truth.”

Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst out of her chest. All along, she had felt like Nelson was still alive. Logic and reason said that he wasn’t, but the connection, the bond between them, was still there. She would have known if it was broken. Even though, eventually, she had turned to Jeff Greer for comfort because she was a passionate woman by nature, she had experienced pangs of guilt. She had been aware somehow that she was cheating on her husband.