William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

“Some,” Crandall admitted. “Probably a lot less by now. With all the tech fried and people having to get by on their own survival skills… well, you seem pretty smart. You ought to be able to make a good guess on how that worked out.”

“A lot of starvation and dying of infection after minor injuries, right?”

“Yeah, boy. The food in the stores ran out in a hurry, and with no more coming in, folks were left eating whatever they could get their hands on. I don’t imagine there’s a dog or cat left west of the Brazos unless it’s feral and stays far away from humans. And any kind of sickness, even a plain old cold, was fatal more often than not. That’s one reason I left. Just couldn’t stand to watch it all fall apart anymore. So I headed for a place where I knew things would be even worse.” Crandall let out a bark of laughter. “I never claimed that all of my decisions in life made sense. I got some exes who would testify to that.”

“What about now? Maybe they’ve tried to start doing some farming. Or is the soil too contaminated?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never been a farmer. But it seems like something worth trying.”

“One of these days,” Larkin mused. He was thinking about the Hercules Project’s hydroponic garden and the rabbits and chickens that had supplemented the food supplies. Seeds and livestock. Those were the keys to the future. Those and…

“Did the sun ever shine while you were out there? Did it rain?”

“No sunshine,” Crandall replied, shaking his head. “But some days it looked like the clouds were thinner, almost like the sun might break through. Man, it would be good to see some blue sky again. We got a little rain now and then. Not much, mind you, but that part of the country was never noted for being very rainy to start with. I mean, it’s West Texas, man. It’s hot and dry. Or I guess now it’s cold and dry.”

“But could you grow anything? Would it be fit to eat if you did?”

“If you had a really green thumb… maybe. But it’d take somebody who knows more than I do to tell you if you could eat it.”

While they were talking, they had almost reached the top of the ridgeline. A few more yards and they were there. Larkin stopped and took a good long look around. He remembered that on clear days, it had been possible to see downtown Fort Worth from here, although it was at least ten miles away to the east.

That wasn’t true anymore, at least not today. Visibility was no more than a mile in any direction. Then a persistent haze took over. That was probably from the ash still in the air, Larkin thought. The ash that stunk in his nose at this very moment.

His disappointment must have shown on his face. Crandall said, “Didn’t see what you wanted to see?”

“I’m not sure I ever will again,” Larkin said.

By the time they got back down to the convenience store, Adams had pulled a canvas bag full of parts off several cars that now had their hoods up. He hefted the bag and told Larkin, “I think we can adapt these to the generators. If not, we know now that we can come back out here and try to find more.”

“And we can do it without the damn hazmat suits next time,” Wade said. “It stinks out here and it’s cold, but somehow it beats bein’ locked up underground.” He shook his head. “That’s too much like, well…”

“Being buried?” Larkin suggested.

“Yeah. I know logically that bein’ down there is the only thing that saved us, but still… we’re human beings, Cap, not gophers or worms.”

Crandall nodded and said, “Folks aren’t meant to live under the ground. We came out of the caves too long ago for that.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Larkin said. “If we’d really left the caves behind, we wouldn’t have lobbed all those bombs at each other, would we?”

None of the other men had an answer for that.

Adams climbed into the cab of the tanker truck, taking the bag of parts with him. It had already been hotwired in the past, so all he had to do to start it was twist a couple of wires together. The engine coughed and rumbled to life.

“Rodriguez, ride shotgun with him,” Larkin said. “And I mean that literally. The rest of us will walk. Take it easy, Adams, and don’t get stuck anywhere. We don’t have any way to pull the truck out if you do.”

“I’ll be careful, Patrick,” Adams said over the noise of the engine.

Larkin, Crandall, and Wade led the way toward the project. The truck rolled along slowly behind them.

After a while, Crandall said, “Does the fact that you’re letting me come along mean I get to go down into the project with you?”

“That’s not up to me,” Larkin said. “Graham Moultrie will have to make that decision.”

“I remember hearing Ruskin talk about him. He’s the head man down there?”

“Yeah.”

Crandall chuckled. “As you can imagine, Ruskin wasn’t that fond of him.”

“Moultrie did what he had to do,” Larkin said. He didn’t mention the misgivings he had started to have about the founder of the Hercules Project. He still wanted to believe that Moultrie’s actions were meant to protect the residents.

As if Crandall had read his thoughts, the man said, “Yeah, a lot of people start out that way. Then they find out how much fun it is to have so much power.”

Larkin didn’t say anything. He had enough trouble wrestling with his own doubts without putting them into words.

They passed the site of the ambush. The dead men had been pulled over to one side. Larkin saw something scurry around the corpses and then vanish into the creek bed. He lifted his rifle and said, “What the hell was that?”

“Rats,” Crandall said. “Big mothers, too. I guess only the biggest and the strongest survived.”

“Or the radiation changed them,” Wade said. “Now they’re mutant rats.”

Larkin said, “I think I saw one earlier, but I didn’t know what it was. And stop talking about mutants, Wade, especially when we get back down to the project. You don’t want people to start panicking over nothing.”

“Giant rats aren’t nothin’, Cap. That’s something to worry about when we come back up here. By then there’s no tellin’ how big they’re gonna be.”

Larkin just shook his head and kept walking. After a moment he said to Crandall, “Sorry about your friends back there. They didn’t really give us a choice.”

“Oh, hell, I know that. I wouldn’t call them friends, either. They were kind of like those rats. Scavengers. Can’t blame them for it, at all, but it doesn’t change what they were, either.” Crandall was silent for a moment, then went on, “You’re thinking about moving back up to the surface, aren’t you?”

“I don’t believe a day has gone by when I didn’t think about it,” Larkin admitted. “Most of us down there, we didn’t go in thinking that we’d be there the rest of our lives. At least we hoped we wouldn’t be. A year, maybe two, and then it would be safe to come back up and start over.”

“In this?” Crandall waved a hand to indicated their surroundings.

Larkin looked at the hell-blasted landscape and shook his head. “No. This part of the world isn’t ready yet. Maybe it won’t be for a long time. But you came from someplace better.” He turned to look at Crandall. “You can take us back there.”

For a couple of heartbeats, Crandall didn’t respond. Then he said, “Now I get it. You help me, I help you. But there’s nowhere to go, Larkin. Nowhere good, anyway. It’s not some damn paradise out in West Texas. Life out there is hard and brutal.”

“But better than here.”

Again, Crandall was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged and said, “Probably. But not as good as you’ve got it down in that bunker. Hell, man, you should just stay there as long as you can. Come out long enough to look around for what you need, like that gas.”