William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

Trahn made a face. “That’s not strictly true. The motors that control everything about the elevator, including the doors, run off electrical power, but they’re not computer-operated. Our generators are still working.” He pointed to a glowing display as proof of that, but the numbers didn’t mean anything to Threadgill. “You need an access card to get into the elevator, but you don’t need one to get out .”

“Holy crap,” Threadgill said. “The project’s about to be under attack.”

Trahn nodded and said, “I think there’s a pretty good chance of it.”

“Get out of here!” Larkin yelled at the crowd that had been drawn by the gunshots and the grisly sight of the guards’ dead bodies. “Everybody get away from here now!”

He didn’t know who—or what —was riding on that elevator, but he was convinced it wouldn’t be anything good.

He pulled the .45 and leveled it at the elevator door in a two-handed grip. There was no light to indicate the elevator’s progress, and he couldn’t hear it anymore because in addition to stampeding, the people in the crowd were yelling and screaming as well. It was chaos behind and the unknown in front, and standing between, as it had been so often in human history, was a rough man ready to do violence.

Larkin glanced over his shoulder as the tumult subsided slightly. The mob of nightclothes-wearing residents had cleared out of the immediate vicinity.

That was good, because when he looked at the elevator again, the doors started to open.

Gunshots erupted before the gap was more than a couple of inches wide.

Larkin opened fire as he backed away. The people in the elevator had to be survivors from the surface, and clearly, they didn’t come in peace. Aiming between the doors as they slid apart, he emptied the .45’s magazine. The thunderous roar from the Colt was deafening, especially in these closed spaces. The barrage brought screams from inside the elevator, and the shots stopped for a moment.

That gave Larkin the chance to duck around the corner at the end of the short hallway, back into the main area of Corridor Two. The bystanders were really scattering now that an actual battle had broken out.

But help was on the way, although Larkin wasn’t all that glad to see it. Jill ran toward him, gun in hand and an anxious expression on her face.

Larkin waved her toward the wall on the other side of the opening. She veered and put her back against it. Several men Larkin recognized as fellow members of the security force hurried toward the hall leading to the freight elevator, too. Thankfully, they were smart enough not to dash out into the open and expose themselves to the invaders’ guns.

Invaders , Larkin thought. That was exactly what they were dealing with here. Fellow human beings—fellow Americans—who had wound up in a hellish situation through no real fault of their own. But from the looks of things, that tragic situation had warped their brains until they didn’t want to do anything except lash out at the residents of the Hercules Project. Their minds were full of hate and the lust to kill.

At the moment, however, they weren’t shooting anymore, so Larkin took advantage of the opportunity to replace the magazine he had emptied with a full one. When he had done that, he risked a glance around the corner and saw that the elevator doors were closed again. He didn’t believe they would stay that way for very long.

“People from the surface?” Jill called across the hallway’s opening.

“Nobody else it could be,” Larkin replied.

“It sounded like they were well-armed.”

“They’ve got a lot of guns, anyway. Don’t know how good they are.”

“As long as they throw bullets, they’re dangerous.”

Larkin couldn’t argue with that.

“Have you seen Chuck?” he asked.

“Mr. Fisher?” Jill shook her head. “No, I haven’t. I’m surprised he’s not here with you.”

Larkin was surprised, too, and he thought that Chuck Fisher’s absence didn’t bode well. Fisher should have heard any alarm that went out, and Larkin couldn’t imagine him not showing up immediately to see what the trouble was. The only reason he wouldn’t, was if something had happened to him and he couldn’t.

“Since you were ready for them and kept them from getting off the elevator, maybe they’ll give up and go back up to the surface,” Jill suggested.

Larkin thought about that, but only for a second before he shook his head.

“They didn’t get down here quite fast enough to take us by surprise,” he said, “but what do they have to gain by going back up ? It’s no fit existence up there. They’ve all got radiation sickness already, and sooner or later they’ll either die from it or starve to death. They’d probably just as soon go out quicker and kill some of us in the process.”

“But they don’t gain anything by that!”

“Maybe they just want to be more comfortable in the time they have left. Or maybe they haven’t given up hope yet, even though the odds are against them. Or maybe they’re just mad and want to hurt somebody. No matter what they want, we can’t let them in here.”

“We’ll stop them,” Jill said.

Larkin hoped she was right. But they were going to have a fight on their hands first.

Inside the elevator, Charlotte Ruskin was breathing hard, trying to fight down the terror that had filled her when the guns started going off. Even though she had killed three men herself in the past hour, she hadn’t been prepared for the earth-shattering roar, the choking stench of gunpowder, and the overpowering feeling that the world was coming to an end around her.

Even though the shooting had stopped, she couldn’t hear anything. She wasn’t sure her hearing would ever return. She looked at Nelson, saw his lips moving, but couldn’t make out the words. She was no lip-reader, but gradually she realized he was asking her if she was all right.

She nodded. The people from the surface were packed in so tightly there’d been no chance of a bullet penetrating to the back of the elevator. She wondered if that was why Nelson had made sure the two of them were back here. The others were—what was the old-fashioned term?—cannon fodder.

He put his mouth next to her ear, and she was a little surprised to hear him saying, “We have to try again! That’s why I brought this along!”

He reached under his shirt and brought out something she didn’t recognize at first. For a second she thought the red cylinders fastened together with duct tape were sticks of dynamite and wondered if he was crazy enough to set off an explosion down here?

Well, why not? What did they have to lose?

Then she realized they weren’t dynamite at all. They were road flares, the kind the police set out when there was an accident. There was no telling where he had gotten them. During the more than eight months that had passed since the war, he’d had time to wander all over the devastated countryside.

“Give me room, give me room!” he shouted at the other people in the elevator. Charlotte’s hearing was coming back. The survivors wedged themselves aside. Charlotte caught at Nelson’s ragged sleeve.

“Be careful,” she told him.

He just grinned over his shoulder at her, then said to the others, “When this goes off, we go out right behind it, understand? They won’t be able to see us, so they’ll be shooting blind. We go out and we don’t stop until they’re all dead.”

That brought a cheer from the others. Nelson’s back was to Charlotte, so she couldn’t tell what he was doing with the flares. But then he jerked a nod at the man crowded up next to the elevator controls. The man must have pressed something, because the doors started to open again.