The Doomsday Bunker

by William W. Johnstone

  Of course, if it came down to that, they’d probably have lots worse things to think about than the sniffles. Human beings weren’t wired to spend their whole lives underground, like worms in the earth.

  In the meantime, there wasn’t much that could be done about colds. People just had to suffer through them, as they had done before the war. But occasionally the damage done by the virus turned into a bacterial infection, and Susan thought that was the case in the elderly man she was examining today. His nasal secretions were thick and green, and he was running a fever. He was going to need a round of antibiotics. Susan didn’t want the infection settling into his lungs and turning into pneumonia.

  She’d been about to tell him that when Moultrie’s voice came over the speaker, delivering the news of the shortwave transmission that probably had originated in Brazil. That had excited the patient so much he’d wanted to forget about the exam and rush back to his apartment to see his wife.

  “Not just yet, Mr. Bardwell,” Susan told him. “I’m as thrilled to hear about that as you are, but you don’t need to leave until I’ve written you a prescription for antibiotics. You’ll need to fill it today, too. Don’t wait until tomorrow to get started on these.”

  “All right, Dr. Larkin,” the man said. “But this sure is great news, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” Susan agreed with a smile. She had long since given up trying to get people to stop referring to her as “Doctor.” Early on, she had been pressed into the role of nurse-practitioner, since a couple of the people who hadn’t made it to the bunker in time that fateful day had been MDs Moultrie was counting on to work in the project’s clinic. Like most nurses, Susan knew as much on a practical level as most doctors did, at least when it came to general ailments. She’d been able to make up some of the clinic’s personnel shortage. Right now, in fact, she was the only member of the medical staff on duty.

  Jill helped out now and then, too, when she could find the time between her work in the pharmacy and her duties as a member of the security force. Susan still didn’t care for the idea of her daughter being in the middle of trouble when it broke out, but she had to admit that Jill was able to take care of herself.

  Mr. Bardwell took the prescription Susan wrote for him and hurried out of the exam room. With the door open, Susan could hear cheers coming from elsewhere in the project. People were excited, obviously.

  Jill appeared in the doorway a moment later with a big smile on her face. “You heard that, Mom? You heard?”

  Susan said, “I heard. It’s wonderful news, isn’t it? We’re not . . . alone in the world after all.” She frowned slightly as she went on, “But I just sent a patient to the pharmacy for some antibiotics. Shouldn’t you be there?”

  “Sandy Carter is working right now. She should have everything covered. I’ve got to go find Trev and the kids!” Jill threw her arms around her mother and gave her an exuberant hug. Susan didn’t often see her daughter this excited. Normally, Jill was on the cool and reserved side, as quiet and pragmatic as her father.

  “The kids will be in school,” Susan called after her as Jill started out of the clinic. “You shouldn’t interrupt—”

  She stopped, realizing that the same sort of excitement gripping the rest of the project was probably on display in the school, as well. The teachers and kids were all human. They would be as thrilled as anyone else to hear that there was other life in the world, that they weren’t the only ones left.

  The clinic’s waiting room was empty. There had been three more patients there earlier. Susan looked at the receptionist, Becky Hammond, and asked, “What happened to everybody?”

  “They all rushed out when they heard the news. I don’t think we’re likely to have any more business today, Susan.”

  “Well, maybe not. But I’ll stay until the end of my shift anyway. If you want to go . . .”

  Becky edged out from her little cubicle. “I’d really like to go find my husband . . .”

  Susan laughed and waved a hand. “Go.”

  “Don’t you want to see Patrick?”

  “If I know my husband, he’ll be showing up here before too much . . . Speak of the devil.”

  Larkin ambled through the entrance. He poked a thumb against his chest and said, “Me? I’m the devil?”

  “Of course not. But I was expecting to see you, and here you are.”

  “Great minds think alike.” Larkin took her in his arms and held her. Becky hurried out of the clinic, waving good-bye to Susan over Larkin’s shoulder as she left.

  After a moment, Susan stepped back and said, “It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked at him, saw the slight frown furrowing his forehead, and said, “What’s wrong? You don’t sound very enthusiastic, and I can tell that you’re thinking about something.”

  “A possibility occurred to me on the way over here. That was a shortwave message they picked up. Morse code, Moultrie said. My guess is that whoever sent it is looking for signs of human life just like we’ve been doing. We send out shortwave messages around the clock, too. It’s all automated.”

  “So?”

  Larkin sighed. “So what if the message we picked up is the same thing? An automated signal being sent out by some other survivors?”

  “I don’t see why that would be a bad thing,” Susan said.

  “Because unless we can answer them and get some response back from them, we don’t know that they’re really out there. We don’t have any way of knowing how long that signal has been going out. The system sending it could be programmed to keep doing so as long as it has power, even if whoever set it up in the first place isn’t . . . there anymore.”

  “You mean dead,” Susan said, a bleak note entering her voice.

  Larkin’s broad shoulders rose and fell. “That’s probably not the case, but it could be. Everybody’s getting excited about communicating with the outside world, but we aren’t, really. Not yet. It could be just . . . a ghost signal.”

  “You don’t know that. It could be that Graham is talking to those people in Brazil or wherever they are, and he just hasn’t announced it yet.”

  “Sure,” Larkin said, nodding. “That’s what I’m going to hope for. I’m just a little worried that if it doesn’t turn out that way, a lot of people are going to be really disappointed. And that’s a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “Because when people are disappointed,” Larkin said, “sometimes they get mad, too.”

  Chapter 27

  May 23

  Living underground like this, night and day didn’t mean much. It would have been easy to lose track of time completely. Knowing that, Moultrie insisted on an ironclad schedule. He had programmed the times of sunrise and sunset for the next year into the computers that controlled the lighting in the Hercules Project, and each day at the appropriate time the lights dimmed to almost nothing—many of them went off entirely—or brightened to simulate the dawning of a new day. Large monitors located in various places displayed the date and time. One thing he didn’t worry about was Daylight Savings Time, sticking with what it had been when the bunker was closed up.

  The temperature went down at night as well, not proportionate to what it would have in an uncontrolled environment, but rather just enough to give a suggestion of what would have been natural. If there had been any way to replicate rain that wouldn’t cause too much trouble, he probably would have provided that as well, but some things just had to be done without.

  Larkin hadn’t forgotten what it was like to feel the sun and the wind on his face. He hoped they would be outside again soon enough that he wouldn’t forget, and no one else would, either.

  He and Susan were in their apartment in Silo A one evening, watching a movie streaming from the project’s library, when a knock sounded on the door. Larkin paused the movie and went to answer it.

  Chuck Fisher was there, and Larkin was a little surprised to see that Jill and Threadgill w
ere with the security director. Fisher’s expression was grim.

  “What’s up?” Larkin asked.

  “Charlotte Ruskin and her friends are having a rally downstairs this evening. They went around putting up signs about it. They’re going to demand a vote to replace Graham.”

  “They can’t do that. This isn’t a political system. Graham wasn’t elected to start with. How can they have an election to replace him?”

  “They seem to have the idea that if they have the numbers on their side, they can do whatever they want.”

  Larkin grimaced and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Go down there and put a stop to it,” Fisher answered without hesitation.

  Larkin glanced at his daughter and saw the worried frown on her face. Threadgill didn’t look too sure about this, either.

  “Don’t you think that confronting them might just make things worse? They stand around and shake their fists in the air and yell a little, and it blows off steam.”

  “Yelling and shaking their fists in the air like Hitler did? That didn’t work out very well, did it?”

  Larkin winced this time. He said, “Don’t play the Hitler card, Chuck. You never win an argument by playing the Hitler card.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Fisher snapped. “I’m telling you, as the director of security, what I’m going to do. I’d like for you to come along, Patrick, but if you don’t want to be part of the force anymore—”

  “My dad didn’t say that, Mr. Fisher,” Jill put in.

  Larkin wasn’t too happy about that, either. He could express his own opinion without his daughter having to stick up for him.

  “Look, Chuck, I never said I wouldn’t go with you—”

  Susan had come up beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Go where? What’s going on, Patrick?”

  Larkin turned to look at her. “Charlotte Ruskin’s stirring up trouble again. She and her friends are staging some sort of rally downstairs, trying to convince people they can vote to replace Graham Moultrie.”

  “How can they replace him? He’s the one who built this project.”

  “That’s what I said, but—”

  “The woman’s a danger,” Fisher broke in. “It’s our job to keep the peace, and she’s trying to disrupt it. Simple as that.”

  In Larkin’s experience, not many things in life actually were simple if you took a close enough look at them. But Fisher had a point. Charlotte Ruskin’s actions were going to cause trouble. That trouble had to be dealt with.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Get your gun.”

  Fisher, Jill, and Threadgill were all wearing pistols. Larkin thought a display of force like that might just aggravate the situation, but on the other hand, they would probably be outnumbered by quite a bit and just the presence of some firepower might keep things from getting out of hand.

  “All right,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

  His holstered .45 was on the table next to the sofa where he and Susan had been sitting as they watched TV. He got it and snapped the holster onto his belt. When he returned to the door, he found Susan and Jill standing there talking quietly. Fisher and Threadgill had moved off across the little foyer and into the elevator.

  Susan put her hand on Larkin’s arm and said in a voice low enough that the other two men wouldn’t overhear, “I don’t like this very much, Patrick.”

  “Neither do I. If Fisher gets too gung-ho, Ruskin and her people can turn it around and use it against us. We’re the ones who’ll come off looking like Nazis.”

  “Maybe we can keep things tamped down enough it won’t come to that,” Jill suggested.

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Larkin said. “Come on, kid.”

  The four of them took the elevator down one level, which let them out into the foyer in front of Jim and Beth Huddleston’s apartment. Larkin had seen both of the Huddlestons fairly often since they’d been down here, although the two families didn’t really socialize, just as they hadn’t when they’d been next-door neighbors up on the surface. Jim, given his restaurant experience, worked as a supervisor in the kitchen while Beth taught in the school.

  Right now, the two of them were just coming out of their apartment as Larkin and his companions emerged from the elevator. Huddleston must have been able to tell from their grim faces that something was wrong, because he said, “Whoa. What’s going on?”

  Fisher said, “We’re going to put a stop to some sort of rally Charlotte Ruskin’s holding this evening.”

  Immediately, Beth said, “You can’t do that. We still have rights. What about freedom of assembly?”

  “Are the two of you going to it?” Fisher asked, his voice sharp with suspicion.

  “As a matter of fact, no,” Huddleston said, his tone conciliatory as always. With a wife like Beth, he had gotten used to smoothing over rough patches. “We’re on our way to a friend’s place over in Corridor Two for dinner.”

  “But you can’t just barge in on a meeting, start waving guns around, and break it up,” Beth said. “That’s not right.”

  Although Larkin would never admit it to her, this was one of the rare times he sort of agreed with Beth. He said, “We’re going to monitor the rally. There shouldn’t be any need for us to take action unless some sort of trouble breaks out.”

  Fisher frowned, as if he wanted to say that Larkin didn’t have the authority to make that statement, but he kept his mouth shut. He had never been acquainted with Beth Huddleston before the war, but like anyone else who came in contact with her, he had learned quickly that it was a waste of time and energy to argue with her. Her opinions were as unmovable as if they’d been encased in a hundred tons of concrete.

  “You need to be careful not to violate anyone’s rights,” Beth snapped.

  “We’ll do our best,” Larkin said.

  Beth sniffed, making it clear she thought their best was none too good. She and her husband went into the elevator. As the door slid closed with them behind it, Fisher said, “That man must have the patience of a saint.”

  “Actually, he’s kind of a jerk part of the time,” Larkin said. “He was obsessed with his businesses and always hustling to make more money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not sure he ever thought about anything else.” Larkin shrugged. “It didn’t wind up doing him much good in the long run, did it?”

  They followed a short hallway from the silo to a metal door with a push bar on it that opened into the vast, barracks-like lower level bunker. The walls were lined with tiers of bunk beds, while rows of single bunks were laid out to cover more than half of the floor space. Short partitions around groups of bunks provided a semblance of privacy. A common area in the center of the bunker had comfortable furniture, computer stations, a snack bar, and other amenities. Showers and restrooms were located at each end of the bunker. Back when he was still in the Corps, Larkin had once had cause to visit a federal minimum-security prison, and this bunker reminded him of that more than anything else.

  A few people were in their bunks, but most of the residents who lived down here, plus some from the corridors and the silos, had crowded into the central common area. A lot of talk was going on, but nobody was making any speeches—yet.

  Fisher looked around, his head jerking from side to side. Larkin knew he was trying to locate Charlotte Ruskin.

  “I don’t see her,” Fisher said after a moment. “She’s bound to be around here somewhere, though.”

  “Maybe she’s changed her mind,” Jill suggested.

  Fisher snorted in disbelief. Then he bobbed a curt nod toward one of the stairways leading down from the corridors.

  “Here she comes. And she’s got her entourage with her.”

  Charlotte Ruskin was descending the stairs with Jeff Greer beside her. Chad Holdstock and three other men followed them. What Holdstock and his companions were carrying made Larkin stiffen in alarm.

  Fisher noticed, too, and exclaim
ed, “They’ve got guns! They’re not supposed to be armed unless they’re on one of the ranges, practicing.”

  The four men had pump shotguns in their hands. As that fact soaked into Larkin’s brain, he said, “It’s just for show. They can’t fire those down here without hurting a lot of innocent people. They’re probably not even loaded.”

  “Are you willing to bet your life on that?” Fisher asked with a scowl.

  Unfortunately, Larkin wasn’t ready to bet his life on that assessment. Even more important, he wasn’t willing to risk his daughter’s life.

  “We’d better tread lightly here, Chuck,” he said. “If anybody sets off fireworks, we don’t want it to be us.”

  “I won’t have them strutting around here flouting the rules,” Fisher said. He started forward, his long strides carrying him quickly toward the large group in the center of the bunker.

  The crowd parted to let Charlotte Ruskin and her companions through, but as people looked around and saw Fisher, Larkin, Jill, and Threadgill approaching, they moved closer together and got truculent looks on their faces, as if they meant to block the security force’s advance.

  “Step aside,” Fisher ordered.

  “This isn’t any of your business,” one of the men responded.

  “Everything that happens in this project is my business. I’m the head of security.”

  “There’s no trouble here,” a woman said. “You’re not needed.”

  “That’s right,” another man put in. “This is a peaceful assembly. We’ve got a right to that, don’t we?”