William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

The faint rumble Larkin heard could mean only one thing.

He waved the left arm at the crowd and shouted, “Get out of here! Clear out! Everybody move!”

The elevator was coming back down from the surface.

Inside the Command Center, alarms klaxoned. Spooked by the loud, raucous noise, Jeff Greer grabbed Charles Trahn, jerked him around, and ground the barrel of his gun against the terrified technician’s cheek.

“What the hell!” Greer said.

“I told you there’d be alarms!” Trahn practically wailed.

“I didn’t know it would be like that! Can’t you turn them off?”

“No, I’m sorry, I—”

Trahn didn’t get any further before the other male technician gathered up his courage now that Greer wasn’t pointing the gun at him and the woman anymore. The man leaped out of his chair and charged.

Greer heard the slap of shoe leather on the floor and wheeled around. He pulled the trigger and the gun boomed, flame lancing from its barrel. The slug tore through the other technician’s shoulder, but the man’s momentum carried him forward so that he crashed into Greer and knocked him back into Trahn. All three of them sprawled back against the console where Trahn had been working earlier.

Trahn screamed and frantically grabbed Greer’s wrist so he could point the gun away from him. Greer’s trigger finger jerked spasmodically. The weapon blasted twice more. Both bullets smashed into the gauges and controls in the console. Sparks flew with an electrical crackling.

Greer rammed a fist under Trahn’s chin and jerked his head back. Trahn went limp and slithered to the floor. Greer shoved the other man away, which gave him enough room to swing the pistol and slam it against the man’s head. The wounded technician went down, too.

Greer turned to look for the woman. She was gone. The door was open. He cursed as he realized she had made a run for it while he was tangled up with the two guys.

But it didn’t matter. Charlotte would be on her way to the surface by now, and no one was going to stop her. He supposed there were overrides on the elevator, but he wasn’t sure they would work anymore, considering the damage his shots had done to the controls.

Charlotte hadn’t known what she was going to find when she got up there, but her plan was to locate her husband and bring him and some of the others back down here. She would have to do it quickly, though, otherwise Moultrie would freeze the elevator at the surface. Greer’s hunch was that most of the survivors would be close to the project’s entrances, hoping for some miracle that would let them come down to safety.

At worst, Charlotte would be with her husband again, and since that was what she wanted more than anything else, Greer was willing to go along with it. Sure, he would miss her once she was gone, but there were plenty of other single women—legitimately single women—down here. Well, maybe not plenty, and some of them weren’t really that good-looking, he amended, but there were some.

A chance was all he’d ever asked for in life.

“Hey!”

The shout snapped Greer out of the momentary reverie. He looked up, saw the stocky figure of a guy he recognized as Adam Threadgill. The security man had a gun in his hand, so Greer didn’t stop to think about it. He just fired his own gun and saw Threadgill rock back a step as the bullet punched into him.

Then flame blossomed from the muzzle of Threadgill’s gun and Greer felt the hammerblow of a bullet. It knocked him back. He tripped over the unconscious Charles Trahn and fell to the floor. A wet heat flooded through his body. He couldn’t seem to get his breath, and his muscles just flopped uselessly when he ordered them to get up.

He was able to lift his gun, though. He pointed it at the dark figure coming toward him, knowing it had to be Threadgill. Greer was trying to pull the trigger again when the world split apart in orange flame.

That was the last thing he knew.

Except for a fleeting image of Charlotte’s face.

It was like something out of a horror movie. Twisted, grotesque faces leering at her. Skeletal hands clawing at her clothes and face. Gaunt bodies slamming against her, driving her against the back wall of the elevator.

No wonder terrified screams ripped Charlotte’s throat raw.

She flailed at the attackers flooding into the elevator. Panic gave her strength. She knocked several of them away from her. Sickness twisted her stomach as she felt her fists slide off faces that were little more than oozing sores.

The relatively close quarters of the elevator worked in her favor. With her back pressed to the wall, the maddened survivors couldn’t surround her. As soon as she had enough breathing room, she reached behind her and closed her hand around the gun. There were several rounds left in the magazine. She hoped that would be enough to drive these lunatics away.

Before she could fire, another gun went off somewhere nearby. The dull boom sounded like a shotgun. The attackers flinched from the sound and then began to shrink away from her as a man shouted, “Get out of there! Get back, damn it!”

Instantly, Charlotte knew those tones. She had expected never to hear them again. She cried, “Nelson!”

Her husband waded into the knot of people still blocking the elevator’s entrance and flung them aside with one hand while his other held the shotgun he had just fired. Charlotte saw him and felt her heart practically leap up her throat. Still holding the shotgun, he threw his arms around her and pulled her against him.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” he rasped.

Charlotte just cried, unable to find words anymore.

Another man shouted, “Back off!” The rest of the survivors cleared the elevator. The newcomer stood in the door, brawny and broad-shouldered, with a white beard and white hair pulled into a short ponytail. Like Nelson Ruskin, he held a pump shotgun.

After a moment, Nelson turned toward the other man, put his arm around Charlotte’s shoulders, and said in a voice thick with emotion, “Earl, this is my wife.”

The man called Earl gave her a curt nod. “Ma’am.” He looked at Nelson and went on, “Looks like your hunch paid off. You said the lady would get to you one way or another, if it was possible at all.”

“And now we’ve got a way down there.”

A frown creased Earl’s forehead. He said, “I’m still not sure that’s a good idea.”

“None of our people are going to survive up here. You know that.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Some of ’em are still in pretty good shape. Could be it’s time to move on, like those folks down there suggested.”

Charlotte could tell that this argument between the two men was nothing new. She looked around, saw that they were below ground level in what appeared to be the basement of a collapsed building. Rubble from that structure had fallen around them. This had been a warehouse at one time, she realized, probably for the supplies Moultrie had taken down into the project. The flames she had seen were from a large campfire about fifty yards away. The ragged, emaciated, diseased survivors had retreated toward it. Charlotte saw men, women, children, all in bad shape. Many of them looked like pictures she had seen of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, only worse if that was possible.

She looked up at her husband and said, “You’ve been waiting for me?”

“That’s right,” Nelson said. “I knew you’d come if you could. And I knew that you’d save us all.”

Earl just shook his head and stepped away, as if declaring that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with this. Charlotte supposed that he was Nelson’s friend, but right now she didn’t care. All that mattered was that the two of them were together again.