William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“Get it off of him, then,” Larkin ordered.

“Does that mean the rest of us can lose the suits, too, Cap?” Wade asked.

“Stop calling me that. And yeah, let’s take the suits off. One at a time, though, and the rest of you stand guard while that’s going on.”

Larkin waited until all the other men had taken off their hazmat suits before he lowered his rifle, unsealed his helmet, and pulled it off. The smell of ashes immediately filled his nostrils. An underlying chemical tang made it even more unpleasant.

But for all its faults, it was still real air, breathed under an open sky, and that meant something to Larkin. Judging by their expressions, it did to the other men, too.

“We can live up here,” Wade said, a slight note of disbelief in his voice.

“Yeah,” Larkin said. “It may not smell very good, but it won’t kill us.”

“Right away,” another man said bleakly.

“Hell, that’s always been true of a lot of things,” Larkin said. “How does Herring look?”

The man working on the wounded man didn’t look up from what he was doing as he said, “I’ve just about got a dressing in place. I cleaned the wound and gave him an antibiotic shot.”

Herring was conscious. He said in a voice strained from pain, “I’ll be all right, Patrick. I’ll be back on my feet in just a minute, and then we can get on with the mission.”

“Not you,” Larkin said. “You’re going back to the project and wait for us there. Jenkins, you’ll go with him.”

The man putting the dressing on Herring’s side nodded. “Probably a good idea. Who knows what sort of infectious agents might be floating around out here? He needs some actual medical attention.”

Herring started to argue, but then one of the other men called urgently, “Larkin.”

Larkin had just finished peeling off the hazmat suit, leaving him in jeans, sweatshirt, and a lightweight jacket. He’d had to set the rifle down in order to do that. He snatched it up again when he heard the note of alarm in the other man’s voice.

Another survivor had climbed out of the creek bed and was coming toward the group from the Hercules Project. He moved at a steady walk, however, instead of charging, and although he was armed, his rifle was slung on his back and his empty hands were in the air. Larkin recognized him immediately, even though it had been months since he’d seen the man. He couldn’t forget the old army jacket, the long white hair, and the beard.

The man was Earl Crandall, who had come down the stairs with Nelson Ruskin to tap out messages in Morse code with Larkin on the other side of the blast door.

“Hold your fire, boys,” Crandall called. “I told those fellows they’d be fools to bushwhack you, but they didn’t listen to me. I’m not looking for trouble.”

“How do we know that?” Larkin asked as he kept his rifle trained on Crandall. “Maybe you just hung back to see how it was going to play out.”

A faint smile tugged at Crandall’s mouth. “Maybe. That’d be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t it? But as it happens, I’m telling you the truth, mister.”

“Did you tell Nelson Ruskin he’d be a fool to attack the project, too, Crandall?”

The man’s bushy white eyebrows rose a little in surprise. “You’re the guy who was down there talking to me in code,” he said. “You seemed like a reasonable sort.”

“Yeah, so did you,” Larkin said. “Or maybe that was just in comparison to Ruskin.”

Crandall made a face and shook his head. “Nelson was a little crazy by that time, I’ll admit it. After what he went through, not knowing if his wife was dead or alive, and then seeing so many people get sick and die… It was hard on the guy.”

“It was no picnic for anybody else,” Larkin pointed out.

“No, it wasn’t. I wasn’t around here from the start, but I’ve heard and seen plenty. I know how bad it was.”

Larkin was careful not to let his guard down, but at the same time Crandall interested him. He said, “If you weren’t here for the war, what are you doing here now?”

“I grew up in these parts. Rode my bike back here from West Texas after the big blast. I knew there might be some people who’d survived, and I wanted to help them if I could.”

Wade said, “That’s crazy. You came back even though you knew it might kill you?”

“Hey, that’s what people do, son. At least they do if they’re following the better sides of their nature. Anyway, I waited until the radiation levels had gone down some.” An actual grin appeared on the man’s face. “I ain’t a complete doofus.”

Larkin gestured with the AR-15’s barrel toward the dead ambushers and asked, “Who are they?”

“Some of the remnants of the bunch that was with Ruskin. When Ruskin and the ones who went down with him never came back, we figured they were all dead. Same thing with the next batch. After that…” Crandall shrugged. “The ones who were left didn’t have the stomach for anything else. Some of them moved on. Most of the rest died. There are still a few holdouts in these hills. The ones I was with spotted you earlier this morning and followed you. They wanted to kill you, steal your gear and any supplies you have. You can’t really blame ’em. When you’ve been dying by inches for months, it does something to your head.”

“But it didn’t do anything to you?” Larkin said.

“Life I’ve led, I should’ve been dead twenty years ago. So I don’t worry too much these days, just try to help out where I can. Okay if I put my arms down now? Standing like this is getting a little tiresome.”

If he’d wanted to, Crandall could have opened fire on them from the creek bed, Larkin knew. Besides, he trusted his instincts, and they told him that Earl Crandall meant them no harm. He might even be willing to help, if he was telling the truth about the way he felt.

“Go ahead and put your hands down.” Larkin motioned with the AR-15 again, toward the project. “Do you know what that is, the place where we came from?”

“The Hercules Project. Sure, Ruskin told me all about it. That’s where he was supposed to wind up when the big bang came. His wife made it, but he didn’t. Is she still alive, by the way?”

Larkin shook his head and said, “No, she was killed in the fighting when Ruskin attacked the place.”

“Really? Well, son of a bitch. That’s a shame. I reckon he really did love her and just wanted to be together with her again. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit. He really was pretty loony there at the end.”

“How in the world did he survive?”

“Storm cellar. Just luck he found a house with one of them in the back yard. It had a good thick door, too. Still got hot enough in there it nearly killed him. Cooked his brain some, I suppose, and burned so much of the oxygen out of the air that he nearly suffocated. He laid down there for a couple of days before he was able to crawl out. All this is what he told me later, of course. I wasn’t there to see it. But I don’t know of any reason he’d have to lie about it.”

Neither did Larkin. Probably, Ruskin had been telling the truth.

By now, Herring had started walking slowly back toward the project, accompanied and supported by Jenkins. The rest of them would take Blakely’s body back with them when they returned, Larkin decided. The man had a family, and they deserved to see him into the incinerator in whatever fashion they deemed proper.

“You fellas are scroungers, aren’t you?” Crandall went on. “After gas and maybe some other supplies?”

“Maybe,” Larkin said, although it seemed rather useless to deny it when they had gas cans sitting out in plain sight.

“You’re wasting your time.”