Nuclear attack on South Korea.
What? A nuclear attack? By who? Well, North Korea, of course, Trevor thought with a little shake of his head. Although he supposed it could have been some other country besides the usual suspect. But not likely.
He was about to respond but decided to check the email first. It was a news alert from one of the sites he subscribed to, and a click took him right to their front page, where there was a bulletin about the same thing, the nuclear bomb that apparently had gone off in Seoul. It was still uncertain whether the bomb had been dropped from an airplane or delivered via missile, although the latter was considered the most likely. Trevor took in that much at a glance.
He saw, as well, that North Korea was also threatening the United States, and so was Russia. Trevor didn’t know if the Koreans had any weapons that could reach the U.S., but the Russians did. Russia was still a credible threat.
A very credible threat.
Trevor picked up his phone again to respond to Jill’s text, but before he could do anything, another message from her came in. It was just one word.
Hercules?
Trevor’s thumbs moved swiftly as he answered: Now? You think?
There are sirens going off.
The pit of Trevor’s stomach suddenly felt cold. He swallowed hard, looked around. He was alone in the office right now. Most of the people who worked for the company did so from home. He did, too, most of the time, but he liked to come into the office some days. It made him feel more like he had a real job. He was alone today, though, as far as he knew.
Jill had better survival instincts than he did. He knew that, and he trusted her gut. If she thought it might be a good idea to head for the Hercules Project, then maybe that was what they ought to do.
I’m closer to Bailey’s school, he texted. I’ll get her.
I’ll get Chris. Bug-out bags in car?
Yeah. We’re good.
He wondered how long it would be before he could say that again and actually mean it.
* * *
The sudden commotion that ran through the mall made Adam Threadgill take hold of his wife Luisa’s arm and pull her behind one of the big pillars next to the entrance of a store. She said, “Adam, what—”
“Stand there,” he told her as he tried to look along the mall to see what was happening. The disturbance was up toward the food court.
Ever since malls had started proving to be such attractive targets for terrorists, he hadn’t liked coming here. He never set foot in the place without his carry gun being snugged in its waist holster. Not that his lone gun would really make much difference if the mall came under attack by suicidal, homicidal lunatics, but at least he could put up a fight and maybe, just maybe, save Luisa’s life.
Of course, these days terrorist attacks didn’t have to be large, well-coordinated affairs. It could be as simple as one nut with a gun or a knife, in which case two or three well-placed rounds could make all the difference in the world. Threadgill didn’t unholster his pistol because he didn’t want to start a panic, but his hand was close to it as he told Luisa, “Stay here and I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“Adam, I’m scared,” she said as people continued running and shouting.
“So am I, babe,” he told her. He leaned close, put his other hand behind her head, and kissed her hard. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, but somehow that isn’t making me feel better.”
Threadgill knew what she meant. It felt like they were saying good-bye forever.
These days, that might be true.
He turned and trotted toward the center of the mall, toward whatever the commotion was instead of away from it. That was a Marine for you, he thought wryly. Too dumb and stubborn to go the other way.
Then he heard someone yell, “Nuclear war!” That put a whole different slant on things. Threadgill grabbed the arm of a guy rushing past him and jerked him to a stop. The man looked like he was about to take a swing at him, but one look at Threadgill’s solid form made him pause.
“What the hell’s going on?” Threadgill asked.
“Somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on South Korea,” the man said, “and they’re coming after us next!”
“Who? North Korea?”
“I don’t know, man. I just want to get out of here!”
Threadgill let go of the man’s arm and stepped back. He didn’t have any right to keep the guy from getting to whoever he wanted to reach before the end came. If the end was indeed coming.
And then he thought about the Hercules Project, wheeled around, and broke into a run back toward his wife.
* * *
Beth Huddleston was about to start talking to her third-grade class about fractions when the speaker on the wall crackled into life and the principal’s voice said, “Teachers, just to let you we have a code orange.”
She probably sounded normal enough to the kids, but Beth heard the little quiver in the woman’s voice and knew something actually was wrong. This was no drill. There was a good reason to put the school on lockdown, which was what code orange meant.
After all the shootings over the years, Beth had taught herself not to think about the possibility of something like that happening at her school, but the little twinge of dread was always there in the back of her mind. She was firmly convinced that such things would never happen if the country would just wake up and make it illegal for anyone to own guns except the police and the military—and they shouldn’t have nearly as many guns, either.
As it was, the school had an armed security guard on duty at all times during the day, so Beth listened intently for the sound of shots as she tried to keep her voice calm and said, “All right, children, we’re all going to stand up and move over on the other side of the room.” Forcing herself not to rush and spook the kids, she walked to the door, locked it, and turned the lights off.
“Oh, my God!” one of the little girls cried. “It’s a lockdown! There must be a killer in the school!”
“Hush!” Beth told her as she motioned for everyone to be quiet. “We don’t know what’s going on. We’ll all just stand here quietly, and I’m sure everything will be all right . . .”
Her voice trailed off as even through the school’s walls, she heard warning sirens begin to wail.
* * *
Jim Huddleston tore out of the house like his tail was on fire. Larkin didn’t try to stop him. He was too busy calling Susan.
A glance at the clock had told him that it was late enough for her shift at the hospital to have ended some forty-five minutes earlier. At least, he hoped she hadn’t had to stay on duty for some reason. Maybe one of the other nurses couldn’t come in and Susan was covering for her. Maybe there had been a bad wreck and Susan didn’t feel like she could leave with the place swamped. Working in an ER wasn’t like punching a clock in a lot of jobs. You did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done, even if it meant staying past the end of your shift. At least, the dedicated nurses did.
Larkin knew that if his wife was still at the hospital with an emergency breaking, she might not leave. She would want to, but her sense of duty might not let her.
He was a little ashamed, but as he called her he was praying that she’d already started home.
She answered when the phone had barely started ringing. “Patrick?” she said. He heard the anxiety in her voice. “What’s going on? I hear sirens, and some people are even running around in the street.”
“You’re on your way home?”
“Yes, I’m like a mile away.”
Larkin closed his eyes for a second in relief, then said, “Thank God. Get on back here as soon as you can. I’ll have our bags ready. Grab the spare one from your car when you get out.”
“The bug-out bags?”
He didn’t answer her directly. Instead he said, “South Korea got nuked.”
“Oh, my God.”
“And North Korea and Russia say we’re next if we do anything about it.�
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“But we won’t . . . will we?”
“I don’t know. Lord help me, I don’t know.”
“So we’re not actually in . . . a nuclear war?”
“Not yet. It could happen any time, though.”
“Maybe I should go back to the hospital—”
“No!” Larkin forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. “Come on home,” he went on. “Whatever happens, you’ll be where there are people who need your help. Just remember that.”
“You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Larkin broke the connection. He didn’t want to—he would have preferred to stay on with her until she got home—but there was too much to do. He hurried through the house, grabbing not only the specially prepared bug-out bags but also his computer bag and a carrying case with several pistols in it. He had already taken a number of rifles and pistols out to the Hercules Project and stored them in one of the gun vaults there, along with a large supply of ammunition. The anti-gunners could call him a gun nut all they wanted to. He didn’t care. Being well-armed was a lot more important than what some people thought about him.
As he carried the bags into the garage, he looked down at the one containing the computer. His backup USB drives were in there, except for the one that was in his pocket. He was paranoid about losing his work and perfectly willing to admit it. He recalled that earlier he had backed up the current manuscript to the cloud.
Would there be a cloud left by the time this day was over? Would there be anybody left to read his books?
Did any of it even matter anymore?
But on the chance that it would matter, he was taking his computer with him.
The garage door rattled and started up. He needed to oil it, he thought as he saw Susan turn in at the end of the driveway. Couldn’t have a noisy garage door for the apocalypse.
She pulled into the open space next to his SUV. He had already opened the back gate and was piling the bags inside. She got out of her car, opened the trunk, and took out the bag she kept in it. Larkin took it from her and added it to the cache in the back of the SUV.
“Is this it?” she asked, tense but calm.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you talked to the kids?”
“Figured we’d call them on the way.”
“I’m not going in without them, Patrick.”
“I know,” Larkin said. “Neither am I.”
He slammed the SUV’s gate closed.
Chapter 14
Jill could hear the sirens continuing to wail as she drove toward Chris’s school, counterpointed by the screech of tires as she took the corners as fast as she could without rolling the crossover.
She had to do a lot of dodging, too, because people weren’t paying much attention to things like stop signs and traffic lights. In this crisis, everybody had somewhere they wanted to be right now. And she was the same way, gunning through intersections if there was enough of a gap in the chaos for her to make it.
The incessant honking of horns assaulted her ears, too. People were just driving down the streets leaning on their horns. What good that was going to do, she didn’t know, but obviously they felt compelled to do it.
She veered around a wreck that had the edge of the road blocked. Somebody had lost control of a pickup, jumped the curb, and slammed into a fire hydrant. A plume of water shot into the air, splattering Jill’s windshield as she went by. She hit the wipers to clean it off. She had to be able to see.
Chris’s school was only three blocks away now, but the road was getting more clogged with traffic. Everybody with a kid there wanted to reach their child or children. Jill had to slow down, then let out a groan as the vehicles in front of her shuddered to a halt.
This wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. She couldn’t reach the school, and if she stayed here, she’d be trapped in the traffic jam.
But there was a cross street just a couple of cars ahead, and she knew if she could reach it, she could circle around and come up behind the school. A drainage ditch blocked that side of the campus, so she couldn’t drive right up to the rear of the school, but she could get close enough to retrieve Chris. She hoped the smaller street back there wouldn’t be blocked like this main boulevard was.
That plan formed in her mind in an instant. She wrenched the wheel over and jammed her foot down on the gas. The crossover bumped up over the curb and tore across somebody’s front lawn at an angle. Jill was sorry for any damage she did, but every instinct in her body told her it no longer really mattered.
As she jolted off the curb into the cross street, she checked the rearview mirror, worried that other people would follow her example and flock to the back of the school, creating a logjam over there, too. The idea didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else just yet, though. The street was clear of vehicular traffic, although panicked pedestrians ran here and there.
Jill took the next two corners hard and fast. She rammed the crossover ahead on the street that ran next to the drainage ditch. When she could see the school on the other side of it, she hit the brakes and skidded to a stop on the side of the road. She was out of the vehicle in a flash, although she paused just long enough to lock it. One thing an emergency always brought out was the lawless element interested only in looting.
The sides of the ditch were concrete, the bottom covered with a couple of inches of mud and scummy water. Jill slid down, splashed through it with no thought for her shoes, and bounded up the other side. A high chain-link fence separated the ditch from the school’s playground. She hit it on the move and scrambled up it, grateful now for all the hours she had spent working out. Thankfully, there was no barbed wire at the top. This was a school, after all, not a prison.
She landed, running, in the playground.
The first door into the school she came to was locked. Of course it was, she thought. As soon as the sirens went off, the place had probably gone into lockdown. Since this was a fairly new school, it had been designed to make it difficult for intruders to break in. She couldn’t shatter a window or kick down a door.
Muttering bitter curses, she ran around the building to the front and found chaos waiting for her.
Dozens of parents had made it to the school and demanded to be let in so they could get their kids. From the looks of things, the principal was maintaining the lockdown, though. Men and women yelled and pounded on the glass doors at the entrance. As Jill forced herself into the mob, she peered through the glass and saw several terrified women inside. They had to be able to recognize at least some of the parents, but they still didn’t know what to do. The threat of a lawsuit hung over so much of modern life, including the educational system, that anything out of the ordinary tended to paralyze bureaucrats.
Behind Jill, someone screamed and a man shouted, “Get out of the way!”
She looked back and saw the crowd scattering in a frenzy as a van plowed through, picking up speed as the path cleared. Jill scrambled out of the way. The van flashed past her and crashed into the locked doors, blasting them open, shattering glass, spraying shards everywhere. The vehicle came to a stop in the school’s foyer.
People fought their way past it, ignoring the carpet of broken glass on the tile floor, and scattered through the school in search of their children. The principal and other administrators screamed at them to stop, but no one paid any attention to them.
Jill certainly didn’t as she wedged her way into the school and then dashed along one of the corridors toward Chris’s classroom. She knew where she was going, knew this school quite well from all the Meet the Teacher nights, the Open Houses, the field trips, and the special days when the parents could come and read with their kids or eat lunch with them, and she felt a sharp pang of loss as she realized she would probably never experience any of those things again.
There was Chris’s room. The door was closed. Jill appeared to be the first parent to reach it. She grabbed the knob and twisted
it. Still locked. She slammed her palm against the glass and shouted, “Mrs. Fletcher! Mrs. Fletcher! It’s Jill Sinclair. I have to get Chris. Let me in!”
A middle-aged woman with eyes so big they seemed about to pop out of her head appeared on the other side of the glass. She looked past Jill, maybe to make sure no one was forcing her to do anything, and then reached down to throw the bolt on the door. She stepped back quickly as Jill flung it open.
“Is it true?” the teacher said. “Is it a nuclear attack?”
“Maybe. We don’t know yet. But you have to let me take Chris.” Jill thought about the Walther in its holster inside the waistband of her slacks and had a crazy vision of her sticking the gun in Mrs. Fletcher’s face to force her to back off and give her her son.
It didn’t come to that. Mrs. Fletcher turned her head and said, “Chris! Grab your things and go with your mom!”
Jill’s heart pounded hard in relief as she saw Chris hurrying toward her. Then she looked at all the other kids, who were scared out of their minds, and wished she could take all of them with her.
But the only thing she could do was grab Chris’s arm, look at Mrs. Fletcher, say, “Good luck to you,” and then run along the hall toward a door that led out onto the playground. Like most of the school doors, it would open from the inside even though it was locked from the outside. The two of them burst through it and started at a run toward the drainage ditch.
“You’re gonna have to climb, kid,” she said as they approached the fence.
“Mom . . .” Panting a little. “Are we gonna be all right?”
“You bet.”
The sirens still howled. Jill looked at the sky. Clear, blue, beautiful. No sign that devastating, fiery death might lurk up there.
Behind them, the cry of the mob mixed with the sirens.
* * *
In the third-grade hall, Jim Huddleston thought he saw Larkin’s daughter Jill going out the back door with her son, but he only caught a glimpse of them as he started hammering on the door of Beth’s classroom.
“Beth, open up!” he shouted through the glass. “It’s me!”
The Doomsday Bunker Page 8