William Johnstone - The Doomsday Bunker

The live shot bounced on the screen as the camera was jolted. Larkin gripped the edge of the counter hard as smoke and flames erupted from the mall and people screamed and shouted. The view tilted and careened as the person with the camera fled. For a split second, the camera caught sight of a massive fireball rising and enveloping the mall. Larkin felt sick.

Susan muted the sound on the TV but left the picture on, although there was nothing to see but chaos. She turned, looked at Larkin, and said, “That place out in the country… I’m ready to talk about it now.”

The destruction in Florida was massive, even though the newscasts kept harping on the fact that it hadn’t been a nuclear explosion that had destroyed the mall and killed the hundreds of people still inside it when the blast went off. The fact that it was a conventional bomb didn’t make them any less dead.

Since all the security cameras inside the mall had been destroyed as well, it was thought at first that the exact chain of events would remain unknown. However, within hours of the attack, cell phone video shot and sent out from inside the mall during the incident began to surface. Although the footage was often shaky, naturally enough, since the innocent people taking it had been terrified, it was clear enough to show the three young men of Middle Eastern descent opening fire on shoppers with semi-automatic pistols. No one else in the mall seemed to be armed; no one returned the fire anyway. People screamed, ran, and tried to hide instead.

Mall security guards showed up and engaged in a gun battle with the shooters. One of the men was hit and apparently killed. The others retreated into a store. Emergency personnel began to arrive and evacuated some of the wounded. The mall was effectively in lockdown, however, with most of the customers who’d been in there when the violence started still there, hiding, afraid to venture out and maybe become a target. Then the police had lobbed in tear gas and stormed the store where the remaining shooters had holed up…

And all the streaming video ended at that point.

Eventually the investigation into the attack determined that the three suspects (they were seldom, if ever, referred to in the media as terrorists) had parked a rental truck at the loading dock of one of the mall’s anchor stores. It had been packed to bursting with explosives and had been triggered with a remote detonator. The horrific blast destroyed more than half the mall, including the area where the attackers had taken shelter. It was a classic suicide bombing on a huge scale. If they hadn’t been trapped, if they had gotten away somehow, they might have waited until they were clear to trigger the bomb, but the consensus was that they’d had no real intention of surviving.

Identifying the three men hadn’t taken long, either. Two were Syrian refugees; the other had been born and raised in Encino. But all were fervent jihadists, according to their social media pages. All had predicted their own deaths.

And all had vowed that the bloodshed would go on no matter what happened to them, until a worldwide caliphate was established that would usher in peace.

The country was shaken. The previous holiday season, another mall had almost been destroyed in a terrorist attack. The pattern was forming. When it wasn’t even safe to go to the mall anymore…

The attack was the top story for a week. Then the North Koreans staged another nuclear test that put the entire Far East up in arms. The Iranian government issued a stern warning to the United States not to respond to the North Koreans’ action. The Hydra virus ramped up, with scores of new cases reported and a 90 percent mortality rate. Seven police officers were ambushed and killed in Kansas City, Missouri. The President made a speech from the Oval Office saying that in order to quell the rising tide of violence in the country, some constitutional rights might have to be suspended, but only temporarily, of course.

And the winner of Singing for Dollars was announced: Jodie Swain. Leading to immediate howls of protest that Taneesha Hamilton should have won and had been robbed because she was not only black but transgender. That story trended even more than any of the others.

In Texas, Patrick Larkin took his wife Susan to visit the Hercules Project.

“I have to say, you’re an absolutely perfect candidate for residency here, Susan,” Graham Moultrie said after taking them on the same tour of the project that Larkin had gotten a couple of weeks earlier. “It’s vital that we have people in the community with hands-on medical experience.”

“She’s got plenty of that,” Larkin said. “Fifteen years as an ER nurse. I’d say she’s seen just about every kind of medical emergency there is.”

“Hardly,” Susan said. “I’m sure there are all kinds of things I’ve never encountered.”

“But you’ve seen plenty,” Moultrie went on. “And it’s not like you’d be in charge of our medical unit. We already have several doctors and their families signed up. You’d be joining a great team.”

“Assuming that we’d ever have to take shelter down here.”

“Of course,” Moultrie said. “And we hope that never happens, don’t we? Just like we buy car insurance and home insurance to protect us against things that we hope will never happen.”

“So this place”—Susan gestured at their surroundings—” is nuclear war and plague insurance.”

Moultrie looked like he was thinking it over, then he nodded. “You could call it that, I suppose. I prefer just saying that it’s survival insurance, because there are all sorts of things out there that could threaten our survival.”

Larkin thought about everything that had been happening in the world recently and knew Moultrie was right about that, anyway. There was no telling which direction catastrophe would come from next. But there were getting to be so many potential civilization-ending disasters that the odds were tipping further and further in favor of something bad happening.

Susan looked around the main corridor where they were standing and said, “Well… it does seem like you’ve thought of just about everything.”

“We tried,” Moultrie said modestly. “And it’s not just Deb and me, either. I’ve hired some of the top survival experts and futurists in the country as consultants, to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything. I know that having a place down here isn’t cheap. One of our goals is to make sure that each of our residents gets his or her money’s worth.”

“Of course, who would anybody complain to?” Larkin asked. “If it’s bad enough on the surface for everybody to come down here, there won’t be any Better Business Bureau left.”

Susan said, “Patrick, that was rude.”

“No, not at all,” Moultrie said quickly. “Your husband is right, Susan. Ultimately, there’s only one person to be held accountable.” He poked a thumb against his chest. “Me. That old saying about where the buck stops is true. It’s right here. The Hercules Project is my baby, no one else’s.”

A moment of silence went by before Moultrie resumed in his usual affable tone, “Well, what do you think? Can we sign up the two of you?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “It’s a lot of money.”

“It is,” Moultrie agreed with a solemn nod.

Larkin said, “We have our daughter and her husband and our grandkids to think of, too. I’m not coming down here without them. If things are bad enough to need a place like this, there’s no way I’ll abandon them.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Susan said. “Our family is, well, a package deal.”