William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Greer stared at her. He liked to think he was a tough guy, and he didn’t back down when it came to a fistfight. She wasn’t sure he could have killed Fisher, though. He might have hesitated at just the wrong second. He wasn’t driven by the same sort of hatred she was.

After a moment, Greer drew a deep breath and nodded. “All right. I guess that means you’re ready to do this.”

“More than ready,” Charlotte said. She turned to the door with its card-reader slot. Taking the access cards from her pocket, she began trying them one by one until the small light set into the door’s handle turned green. She grasped the handle and twisted it. The door opened and they walked into the Command Center.

A guard was on duty just inside the door, but he wasn’t used to seeing anyone come in who wasn’t supposed to be there. A lot of Moultrie’s security force were the postapocalyptic version of rent-a-cops, not all that vigilant or even competent. This one just glanced at them, then did a double-take when he realized they were intruders and started to reach for the semi-automatic pistol on his hip.

Greer’s fist crashed into the man’s jaw before he could complete the draw. The punch knocked him back against the wall. Greer used his left hand to grab the man’s wrist and prevent him from pulling the gun. At the same time, Greer closed his right hand around the guard’s throat and banged his head against the wall. The man was already stunned and couldn’t muster up his wits enough to fight back. Greer rammed his head against the wall several more times until the man’s muscles went limp. He slid down the wall to the floor, leaving a slight bloody smear behind him from the contusions on the back of his head.

Charlotte bent down and pulled the pistol from the man’s holster. Greer was already armed with a short-barreled revolver stuck behind his belt at the small of his back.

Charles Trahn had sketched the layout of the Command Center for them. There was a central hallway with large rooms opening from both sides of it. Inside the rooms to the right were the controls for all the environmental and life-support systems, as well as access to the generators and the actual air- and water-filtration equipment. To the left were all the monitoring stations, including the big room where Trahn worked keeping track of readings from all over the project, as well as the sensors located on the surface. There were security camera feeds in here as well, but at this time of night only one person kept an eye on them. The Command Center operated on a skeleton staff during the nighttime hours. There were only two people in the main room with Trahn tonight, a man and a woman, Charlotte saw as she and Greer walked in carrying the guns.

Greer immediately leveled his revolver at the other two, who started to get up but sat back down, looking scared as the revolver’s muzzle menaced them. The man said, “What the hell?”

Charlotte pointed the pistol she had taken from the unconscious guard at Trahn. He had insisted that they treat him like the others, so no one would suspect he was actually helping them. She said, “You! Open the hatch at the top of the freight-elevator shaft!”

Wide-eyed with fear that was probably real because he wasn’t sure what Charlotte might do, Trahn stammered, “I-I can’t do that! It takes a special access card—”

With her other hand, Charlotte slapped the cards she had taken from Fisher onto the control panel in front of Trahn. “Find the right one and use it,” she ordered. “And if you try any tricks, I’ll kill you!”

As she said it, she more than halfway meant it.

With shaking hands, Trahn sorted through the plastic cards and picked up one of them. He tapped out some numbers on the keyboard in front of him, then inserted the card into a reader. A green light appeared on the screen in front of him. He swallowed hard and said, “I can access those controls now.”

“All right.” Charlotte picked up the other access cards. “Wait until one of us tells you to open the shaft.” She knew that once the hatch at the top of the shaft began to open, it would set off an alarm. She wanted to wait as long as possible before that happened so she would be ready for the next part of her plan. She glanced over at Greer, who still covered the other two technicians with the revolver. “You have this?”

“Of course I do,” he told her.

“I knew you would. Thanks, Jeff.” For a second she thought about going to him and kissing him, but she didn’t want to waste the time, and besides, the gesture might distract him. They both had to stay focused on what they were trying to do.

The female technician said, “You’re trying to leave the project? That’s crazy! It’s dangerous up there.”

“People live up there,” Charlotte snapped. “ My husband lives up there. Moultrie is lying to all of us about how bad it is. We can go back up and start our lives again any time we want to, and I’m going to prove it!”

She turned and ran out of the Command Center.

During the past few days, Charlotte had walked from the Command Center entrance to the freight elevator several times, counting off the seconds in her head and coming up with an average time. She had known she would be hurrying tonight, so that would make a few seconds’ difference, but she also had to locate the right access card for the elevator and there was no way of knowing how long that would take. So she and Greer had left the countdown the same and now those seconds were ticking off in her head as she approached the elevator.

Two men in red vests stood in front of it, talking.

Charlotte almost stopped short at the sight of them, but managed to keep moving because she thought an abrupt halt might make them even more suspicious than they normally would be when they saw her. She had expected perhaps one guard, or even none at all in the middle of the night like this. The double guard took her by surprise.

But the plan had come too far for her to abandon it now. She would just have to adapt.

She hurried up to the guards, who looked at her warily. All the members of the security force knew who she was. She held up her hands, palms out, and said, “Hey, I’m not looking for trouble.”

“What do you want, Mrs. Ruskin?” one of the men asked.

“And what are you doing out at this time of night?” the other guard added.

“I don’t sleep that well, so I go for walks at night,” she said. “I was doing that just now when I was around by the Command Center and saw some sort of commotion going on. I don’t know what it was about, but you guys might want to go make sure you’re not needed over there.”

“If they needed us, they would have called us on the walkie-talkie,” the first guard said.

“Maybe the walkie-talkies aren’t working,” Charlotte suggested. The numbers were still ticking off in her head, getting closer and closer to zero. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

Both men looked skeptical about that.

“Think whatever you want about me, but I just want what’s best for the project,” Charlotte snapped. “Besides, you may have forgotten, but I was elected to be a resident liaison and work with Mr. Moultrie. I’d just as soon put all the problems behind us.”

Neither guard looked like he believed that.

“At least one of you should go and see what’s happening,” Charlotte said.

“Look, Mrs. Ruskin, go on back to your quarters, or keep taking your walk, or do whatever you want to do, but stop trying to interfere with things that are none of your business. You let us worry about—”

The man stopped short as they all heard a faint rumble from somewhere up above.

Both guards turned to face the elevator doors and tipped their heads back, even though there was nothing to see except the ceiling. It was a natural instinct, though. That was the direction the unexpected sound came from.