William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“How much time do we have before they shut off the elevator?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t know. I have a friend holding the Command Center. He’ll give us as much time as he can.”

“A friend?” Nelson asked the question, then gave an abrupt shake of his head as if realizing that it didn’t matter right now. He lifted a hand, put a couple of fingers in his mouth, and gave an old-fashioned, piercing whistle that carried through the dark night.

Charlotte’s eyes widened as more ragged figures began to drop down into the ruined basement. The dancing firelight threw shadows back and forth over them as they swarmed toward the elevator. Although gaunt and obviously sick, they appeared to be in better shape than the hapless, unarmed creatures who had rushed the elevator.

All of these people carried weapons. Most held firearms. Charlotte saw a variety of pistols, shotguns, and rifles. A few brandished axes or pitchforks. The firelight glittered on knife blades, too.

Even though the survivors had listened to Nelson and followed his orders earlier, the sight of this small but lethal army made Charlotte step back as fear welled up inside her.

“Don’t worry,” Nelson told her. “They’re your friends now. They know you came to save them.”

Charlotte wasn’t sure what those disease-ravaged brains knew. As more and more of the survivors crowded into the big elevator, she and Nelson were forced back into a corner. The stench of corrupted flesh filled the air and made her want to gag. She forced down the reaction.

“I… I thought you might want to leave here and go somewhere else,” she said. “Just the two of us.”

Nelson shook his head and said, “We wouldn’t make it. We need what’s down there, Charlotte.”

“But these people…” She suddenly felt queasy about what she had done and the possibilities she had opened up. Keeping her voice at a whisper only her husband could hear, she went on, “Most of them aren’t going to live.”

“Maybe not, but they’ll have more of a chance. And there’s something that’s more important, anyway.”

“What’s that?” Charlotte asked as someone at the front of the car pressed the button that closed the doors. Howls of outrage came from those left outside, but the doors cut off the sound.

“Revenge,” Nelson replied. “Revenge on Graham Moultrie and everyone else who turned their backs on us and left us up here in this hell.”

“You mean—”

“We’re going down there to kill as many of the bastards as we can. If we can manage it, we’ll kill ’em all.”

With a lurch, the overloaded elevator began to descend.

The alarm went out over the walkie-talkies that had been issued to every member of the security force. The strident ringing brought Jill Sinclair up out of the bed she shared with her husband. Trevor was left behind in the rumpled covers, sitting up and looking confused as Jill dressed rapidly and buckled on the belt that had her holstered Glock attached to it. Several loaded magazines were slid into pouches on the belt.

“What is it?” Trevor asked.

“Don’t know,” Jill said as she raked her hair back and put a band around it to keep it out of her eyes. “But that’s the general alarm, so it’s bad.”

“Like a red alert?”

“Yeah.” Jill opened the drawer in the nightstand on Trevor’s side of the bed and reached into it to bring out the 9mm Shield. She set it on the table and said, “Here. Get dressed, hang on to this, and put a couple of loaded magazines in your pocket.”

“I’m coming with you?”

She shook her head. “No, you’re staying here and readying for trouble.”

“I can come along—”

“No. I need to know that you’re here, protecting Bailey and Chris.”

“Of course I’ll protect them,” Trevor said as he stood up. “I’d die before I’d let anyone hurt them.”

Jill gave him a grim smile and said, “I’d rather you make any son of a bitch trying to hurt them die instead.” She leaned in, pressed her lips to his for a second, and then turned to run out of the bedroom.

Trevor picked up the little semi-automatic, looked at it, and took deep breaths as he tried to control his wildly hammering heartbeat.

Adam Threadgill leaned against the console and ignored the pain from the bullet wound in his side. It was bleeding heavily, but he was pretty sure the slug had bored through without hitting his ribs or nicking any internal organs. If that was the case, he wasn’t going to die, although he might pass out from blood loss.

He knew he couldn’t afford to let that happen. Not yet, anyway.

He bent down, fought off a wave of dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him, and grasped Charles Trahn’s shirt collar. He hauled the groggy technician upright and propped him against the console.

“Trahn!” Threadgill said urgently. “Trahn, come on, damn it. Wake up.”

Trahn muttered something Threadgill couldn’t make out. Threadgill didn’t know if the guy was speaking Vietnamese or was just incoherent from being knocked out.

That thought made Threadgill glance at the man who had battered Trahn into unconsciousness. Jeff Greer lay on the floor almost at their feet, his face a bloody ruin from the shot Threadgill had fired just in time to keep the man from shooting him again.

Threadgill knew he couldn’t worry about that now. He grabbed Trahn’s shoulder and gave him a shake.

“Come on! You gotta tell me what’s going on here. Has that elevator started back down?”

Trahn shook his head, pawed his hair back away from his face. He swallowed hard and looked at the readings on the console.

“The system shut down from the… from the power spike when Greer’s shot made it short out. Everything’s rebooting.”

“How long is that gonna take?”

Trahn looked at Greer, then shuddered. In a choked voice, he said, “I don’t know. It should be further along than it is.” He pointed a trembling finger at a status bar on one of the screens. “It looks like it may have gotten hung up somehow.”

Threadgill suddenly felt cold inside. “You mean the environmental systems aren’t working?”

“Nothing’s working,” Trahn said.

“Well, fix it! Without that life-support equipment, we’ll all die.”

Trahn leaned both hands on the console, obviously as dizzy as Threadgill was. “No. We have several days’ supply of usable water stored, and the air won’t go bad for hours.”

“Hours! What if it’s days before the computers start working again?”

“It won’t be. They may have to restart again, but they’ll boot back up in time, I’m sure of it. There are enough fail-safes and redundancies—”

Threadgill grabbed his arm. “What if they don’t?”

“Then we… we’ll have to get up to the surface somehow.”

“But the surface is poison!”

Trahn shook his head again. “As far as I know, there’s never been any sign of biological contamination in the air. The only real threat is the radiation.”

“But the air’s still bad, right?”

“It’ll keep us alive right now. We don’t know what the long-term effects would be. That’s better than suffocating to death in a matter of hours, though.”

Threadgill slumped into Trahn’s chair, unable to stand up anymore. Already the atmosphere seemed stuffier and hotter to him, but that might be his imagination running wild, he told himself.

“You can’t stop that elevator from coming back down?”

“I told you, I can’t do anything.”

Threadgill brightened slightly. “But if the computers are down, whoever’s inside it can’t open the doors.”