William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

The countdown had already hit zero in Charlotte Ruskin’s head. Now she reached behind her back, pulled the compact 9mm semi-automatic from the waistband of her jeans where the sweatshirt she had taken from Chuck Fisher’s quarters had concealed it, and put the muzzle an inch away from the back of the nearest guard’s head. She squeezed the trigger. The blast was painfully loud. Fire from the gun’s muzzle charred the man’s hair. The bullet shattered his skull, bored through his brain, and blew out through his face where his nose had been. The other man was stunned for the half second it took Charlotte to swing the gun over and shoot him through the head, too.

Both of them hit the floor within a heartbeat of each other.

The noise of the shots, the sight of blood and gray matter dripping from the elevator doors, the sheer knowledge that she had just killed two more men left Charlotte disoriented. Before the war, she had been just a normal person. She had worked in an insurance office, for God’s sake! And now she was… What was she, anyway?

A woman who had spent months stewing in grief and hatred, that’s what she was, she realized as she shoved the gun down in her waistband again. A woman who’d had the love of her life taken away from her, only to learn that he was still alive but she couldn’t be with him again.

Well, they would see about that.

She pulled the access cards from her pocket and began trying them in the reader next to the door. The third one turned the indicator light green. Charlotte pushed the button that opened the doors. They slid back.

Somewhere not too far away, someone started shouting. Charlotte knew that alarms would be going off in various places to let people know the hatch at the top of the elevator shaft was opening. Back in the Command Center, Greer had done the same countdown she had and at the right time had ordered Trahn to activate the hatch.

Now it was up to her.

She stepped into the elevator. Greer had told her what she needed to do, but she would have been able to figure it out anyway. “G” was Ground—the surface—1 was the level they were on, 2 the lower bunker.

Charlotte pressed her thumb on the button marked “G.” The doors closed and with a slight jerk the elevator began to rise.

The fifty feet or so that separated the upper level of the Hercules Project from the surface was the longest ride of Charlotte’s life. The elevator’s progress was smooth and steady. It was as old as the rest of the installation, dating back to the early 1960s when the missile base was built, but Graham Moultrie had made sure that everything was in good working order. If it wasn’t, he had it repaired and refurbished until it was good as new. The smoothness of the elevator ride didn’t matter to Charlotte, though. It still seemed to take forever.

Finally, after seconds that had passed more like hours, the elevator came to a stop with just a slight bounce of the floor under her feet. The door might have opened automatically, but she didn’t wait to see. Instead she jammed her thumb down on the DOOR OPEN button.

With the same slight hiss as before, the doors parted.

Charlotte caught only a glimpse of flames flickering before hell poured in on her and she screamed.

Larkin was sound asleep next to Susan when the walkie-talkie on the table next to the bed squawked. He came awake fully and instantly—a habit left over from combat days that he had never lost—sat up as he swung his legs out of bed. Adam Threadgill’s voice came from the walkie-talkie. “Patrick!”

Larkin snatched it up, thumbed the button on the side, and said, “I’m here, Adam. What’s up?”

“Somebody’s opened the hatch at the top of the freight elevator. I’m on duty in the security office and got the alarm. I’m heading for the Command Center. Can you check out the elevator?”

“On my way,” Larkin said. He bit back a curse. He had warned Moultrie that the elevator might be a vulnerable point. Moultrie had told Chuck Fisher to double the guard, but Larkin wasn’t sure that was enough. Moultrie was a technophile; he relied on all the built-in security measures. He might not be as aware as he should have been, though, that sometimes the best defense was a wall of well-armed soldiers.

Of course, most of the members of the security force weren’t soldiers at all, but they were the closest thing available down here, Larkin thought as he shoved his feet into the work boots next to the bed. He slept in socks, sweatpants, and T-shirt, so putting the boots on was all he needed to do in order to be dressed and ready to move.

“Patrick, I heard that,” Susan said from where she had sat up on the other side of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t know, but that elevator hatch shouldn’t be opening.” He stood up and reached for the belt with the holstered 1911 attached to it.

“This is going to compromise the sealed environment down here.”

“Maybe. If the elevator doors stay closed, it might not.”

“The hatch wouldn’t be open unless somebody was trying to use the elevator.”

The same thought had occurred immediately to Larkin, followed by a question.

Was somebody trying to get in… or out?

“Keep your pistol close until we find out what’s going on,” he told his wife as he buckled on the gunbelt. “I’ll be back.”

“Patrick, be careful,” she called after him as he hurried out.

He would have told her he always was, if they hadn’t both known that wasn’t strictly true.

Larkin hurried out of the apartment and into Corridor One. The short hallway leading to the freight elevator opened from Corridor Two, so he had to run halfway to the other end of the project to reach the hall forming the crossbar in the giant letter “H.” He pounded along it toward Corridor Two, not knowing what he was going to find but feeling deep in his gut that it wasn’t going to be good.

He came out, swung to his right, and saw that people were milling around, obviously upset by something. Larkin paused and asked a man in pajamas, “What’s going on?”

“Somebody said they heard gunshots,” the man replied.

That made Larkin’s heart slug even harder. The next second, a woman screamed, kicking his adrenaline even higher. He bulled his way through the crowd and came to the hallway leading to the freight elevator. People were sobbing and cursing now. Larkin waved them back. His jaw clenched as he looked along the hall. Twenty feet away lay the bodies of the two men who had been posted here on guard duty. Pools of blood around their heads told him they’d been shot.

The elevator doors were closed, but Larkin didn’t believe for a second that they had been that way all along. The only reason to kill the guards was because somebody wanted to use the elevator. Charlotte Ruskin’s name sprang into Larkin’s mind. He couldn’t know for sure that was the truth, of course, but it was a strong hunch. Would Ruskin do something as crazy as going up to the surface to find her husband? Larkin didn’t doubt it for a second.

“Shouldn’t you get help for those men?” someone in the crowd asked.

Larkin knew from the way the guards were sprawled and the amount of blood that had welled from their head wounds that nothing was going to help them now, but he didn’t want to say that in front of these people. Instead he pulled the walkie-talkie from his pocket, keyed the microphone, and said, “Medical personnel to the freight elevator, ASAP!”

Then he stiffened as he heard something. He thrust out his left arm in a peremptory gesture and rested his right hand on the Colt at his hip.

“Shut up! Everybody be quiet!”

“What is it?” a man asked.