“Don’t talk to me about—” Fisher stopped and took a deep breath. Larkin figured he’d been on the verge of saying not to talk to him about rights, but then Fisher had thought better of it. As Larkin had pointed out, it was a fine line they had to walk.
Instead, Fisher went on, “Those men are armed. That’s a violation of the rules.”
“What about the Second Amendment?”
That was another tricky area. Decades of efforts by liberal politicians to circumvent or abolish the right of American citizens to bear arms had failed for the most part, probably because those politicans knew in their guts that if they pushed the issue too hard, more than likely it would result in a civil war—and rightly so, in Larkin’s opinion.
However, that was all moot now. Or was it? Moultrie had made it plain that he wanted the Hercules Project to perpetuate American traditions and standards as much as possible, and the right to bear arms was part of that. Regulating that right because of the special circumstances was understandable, but Larkin had always worried about the slippery-slope aspect of that. Now this direct confrontation over the matter made him uneasy.
Charlotte Ruskin’s voice came from behind the human wall, saying, “Step aside, please. I’ll talk to them.”
“You don’t have to do that, Charlotte,” a man told her as he turned to look at her. “We’re not afraid of them.”
“No, it’s better to get things out in the open,” Ruskin insisted. She moved forward, and the people blocking her path stepped out of the way.
“What is it you’re doing here?” Chuck Fisher demanded when he was face-to-face with the woman. “And why are those men carrying shotguns?”
“Self-defense,” Ruskin coolly answered the second question first. “We have a right to protect ourselves.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you as long as you’re not breaking the rules.”
The woman smiled. “Americans have a long tradition of breaking the rules. It’s how the whole country got started, remember?”
“This is different—” Fisher began.
“Is it?” Ruskin broke in sharply. “How is it different, Chuck? We’re tired of the rule of an overbearing, despotic tyrant.”
Fisher started breathing a little harder. “How the hell can you say that? None of you people would even be alive today if it weren’t for Graham Moultrie!”
“That’s true,” Ruskin admitted. “But that doesn’t give him the right to dictate every aspect of our lives.”
“Seems to me it does, because he knows more about how this place works than anybody else. And if it doesn’t keep working perfectly, that means all of us will probably die.”
Ruskin shook her head, blew out a dismissive breath, and said, “You can’t possibly know that.”
“I don’t plan on taking a chance of being wrong. Anyway, you don’t really care about anybody’s rights. The only reason you’re doing this is because you’re mad at Graham for closing up the project before your husband got here.”
Ruskin’s nostrils flared as she sharply drew in air. Her face paled. Jeff Greer had moved up behind her, and he started to crowd forward, his hands tight on the shotgun he carried, as he said, “You’d better shut your damn mouth, you—”
Fisher took a step closer, too, and said, “What were you about to call me?”
“Stop it, both of you!” Charlotte Ruskin said. It didn’t look like her words were going to do much good, though, because Fisher and Greer both had their chests stuck out like bull apes ready to do battle.
“Charlotte, what is it you want?” Larkin asked, hoping to steer the conversation back on point and away from violence. “What do you hope to accomplish with this meeting?”
Ruskin glanced back and forth between Fisher and Greer, who were still glaring at each other, and then said, “We want to establish some reasonable reforms.”
“Like what?”
“Like giving people a voice in the decisions that are made down here, rather than Moultrie just handing down orders.”
“So basically you just want to express your opinion.”
“I’d like to see somebody else in charge,” Ruskin said, “but for right now I’d settle for being listened to and taken seriously.”
“Yelling and waving guns around isn’t the way to do that,” Larkin said.
“The hell it’s not,” Greer snapped. “Nobody ever really pays attention unless they feel like they’re being threatened.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Have you tried writing letters, circulating petitions—”
Greer snorted in contempt. “When did that ever work in the past? Don’t you know anything about history, Larkin? When did anything ever really change except by force?”
He had a good point there, Larkin thought. There had been some nonviolent turning points in history—but not many.
On the other hand, there had never been a closed system like the Hercules Project before. One could argue that ships at sea were similar, especially back in the age of sail, when there was no long-range communication. Each of those ships had been under the command of a single captain whose word was law, much like Moultrie’s was here.
And from time to time, the threat of mutiny had arisen on those ships, too, and sometimes it ended in bloody slaughter. Not the most appealing precedent, Larkin thought.
The tension in the air was growing tighter and thicker. Larkin glanced at Jill and Threadgill. Both of them looked as worried as he felt. They would do their duty as members of the security force, but he could tell they were conflicted, too, about who was right and wrong in this confrontation.
With Fisher and Greer both seemingly eager for trouble, there was no telling what might have happened . . . but at that moment the dynamic changed again. A surprised stir went through the crowd, and since most of them were staring past Larkin and his companions, he half-turned to look over his shoulder.
Graham Moultrie was walking briskly toward them. He stopped about twenty feet away, stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and asked, “What’s going on here?”
Chapter 28
For a moment, Charlotte Ruskin gazed at Moultrie as if unable to believe what she was seeing. Then she took a step forward. Since Fisher and Greer were still caught up in their own confrontation, Larkin moved a little to the side so he could intercept Ruskin if she tried to attack Moultrie.
“It’s all right, Patrick,” Moultrie said. “Mrs. Ruskin is a reasonable woman.”
“You bastard,” she breathed. “I’ll always hate you.”
“That’s fine. I didn’t expect to be loved by everyone down here. I knew there would be hard choices and that some people would be hurt by them.”
“Hard choices! You’re responsible for my husband’s death!”
“That’s not fair,” Jill said. “There were other people who didn’t get here in time. When Mr. Moultrie had to close up the project, he didn’t know who was here and who wasn’t.”
“And if you want to blame somebody,” Larkin added, “blame the politicians who started the war in the first place. All of us”—he waved a hand to take in the crowd—“we’re just innocent bystanders who got caught in it.”
Moultrie said, “I’ve told you how sorry I am about your husband, Mrs. Ruskin. I wish there was something else I could do, but there just isn’t. We can’t change what’s happened. But we can make sure that we do the right thing going forward. I’d be interested in hearing what you think that is.”
“You’re lying,” Ruskin said. “You’re not interested in what anybody else thinks. You believe you’re God!”
Moultrie frowned and shook his head. He said, “You’re wrong about both of those things. I’m just a guy who did what he could to help. And if you believe you can help me make things better down here, then I damn sure do want to hear about it.” Moultrie looked around at the crowd. “Tell you what. You’ve got a good-sized group here. Why don’t I go back up to the Command Center, so that you can talk freely among yourselves?”
“Talk about what?” Ruskin asked. “And how can we talk freely with your goons still here?”
“My security people will leave, too.”
Fisher frowned and said, “Graham, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. They’ve got shotguns!”
Moultrie sighed and nodded. “And that’s a violation of the rules, yes. I agree, Chuck. So I propose that if we leave, those guns will be returned immediately to the vault where they came from, since there won’t really be a need for them to be down here.”
“You’d trust these people?” Fisher asked, jerking a hand toward Ruskin and her friends.
“I trust everyone down here,” Moultrie said simply. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have allowed them to become part of the project in the first place.”
That brought a few approving murmurs, Larkin noted. Moultrie knew how to work a crowd; Larkin had to give the guy credit for that.
“Do we have a deal?” Moultrie went on. “You can have your meeting and say whatever you want to say, but the guns go back where they’re supposed to be.”
“We’ll think about it,” Charlotte Ruskin said. She still looked suspicious.
“I suppose that’s fair enough,” Moultrie said with a shrug. “I hope you’ll come to the right decision. And if you’d bear with me just a little longer, I have a suggestion about what you can talk about, too.”
Greer said, “We don’t need any help from you—”
Moultrie held up a hand to stop him. “My suggestion, since you’ve got such a good crowd here, is that you talk about electing resident representatives. Nominate five or six people, and have an election. The top two, say, could be your representatives, and any time there’s a problem, you can all get together, figure out what you want, and then send the representatives to talk to me. We’ll all work together to make sure that everyone’s concerns are addressed. That sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?”
Again, people nodded and made noises of agreement. Charlotte Ruskin didn’t look too happy about the idea, though. Moultrie was stealing her thunder, and she knew it.
“What assurances do we have that you’d actually listen to us?” she demanded.
“All I can do is give you my word. But the only way to find out is to give it a try, isn’t it?”
Larkin could tell that Moultrie had won over the crowd. They had let themselves be stirred up by the strident claims of Ruskin and her friends that Moultrie was a dictator, but with him standing right there, talking quietly and calmly to them, his steady presence reminded them that they truly wouldn’t be alive today if not for him. Or at the very least, they wouldn’t be as healthy and safe as they were. Even if they had survived the nuclear blast somehow, they would still be facing a lingering death from radiation poisoning or starvation.
Ruskin was canny enough to sense that the pendulum had swung. Maybe not against her, but at least back to the center. With a sullen undertone in her voice, she said, “All right. We can discuss electing representatives. But you’re not going to be able to put off real change around here, Moultrie. The people have a right to a say in their own lives!”
That prompted a few cheers. Moultrie just smiled faintly, nodded, and said, “Come see me.” He turned his attention to Fisher. “Chuck, come with me. The rest of you can go back to whatever you were doing. I assume you’re all on duty?”
Fisher said, “No, I rounded ’em up. Didn’t want to take any of the regular guys away from their rounds.”
“All right, then.” Moultrie’s smile widened. “Go back to your families, then, and enjoy your evening.”
Moultrie and Fisher walked away, heading toward one of the stairways. Larkin, Jill, and Threadgill went the other way, toward the door that led to the elevator.
“Well, that could have gotten really ugly,” Threadgill said under his breath.
“It still might,” Jill said. “No matter what Mr. Moultrie does, it’s not going to satisfy Charlotte Ruskin. She hates him too much for that.”
Larkin didn’t say anything, but he thought his daughter was right.
Sooner or later, there would be some sort of showdown.
And when it happened, it wouldn’t be pretty.
* * *
The very next day, notices began to go up around the bunker and along both corridors. An election would be held in a week’s time to select two representatives for the residents. Charlotte Ruskin and Jeff Greer were among those nominated for the job, along with three men whose names were only vaguely familiar to Larkin. He figured they were only there to make it look good. There was no doubt in his mind who would actually win the election.
But that was a worry for another day, and anyway, it was Moultrie who would have to deal with them, not him. In the meantime, he had his own job, which consisted of both making rounds of the project and monitoring security equipment.
He also had a side project he didn’t talk about much. He had brought several laptops down here in the days before the war, and he always kept an up-to-date file of his current book on a couple of USB drives, one of which he carried around with him at all times. It had been in his pocket on the day everything had gone to hell, and as soon as he’d gotten a chance, he had loaded the manuscript onto one of the laptops and also onto a couple of spare USB drives. Larkin was well aware that he was paranoid about such things compared to a lot of writers, but once he had lost a book that was half written and had to start over, and he didn’t want to have to do that ever again.
So nearly every day, he sat down and wrote some pages on the thriller he’d been working on. It was a historical novel now, since it was set in a world that no longer existed, but Larkin didn’t care about that. Maybe someday there would be a publishing business again. For untold years, probably as far back as there had been language, people had had stories. It wasn’t as vital a need as air and food and water, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important. What was life without the human spirit, and what was the human spirit without imagination?
Besides, he was in the habit of writing, and he didn’t see any reason to change. Thinking about the book had gotten him through some dark nights of the soul when he might have brooded over everything that was lost, instead.
Several days after the confrontation in the lower bunker, Larkin was working in the Command Center, sitting in the security force’s office in front of a computer connected to motion sensors on the surface. A camera at the bottom of the stairs in the main entrance was pointed up at the concrete blockhouse, which appeared to have survived the nuclear explosion twenty miles away relatively intact. It wasn’t one hundred percent radiation-proof, however, so the two blast doors at the bottom and the entrance chamber between them were still sealed as a precaution. In places around the project, radiation and atmospheric monitors, as well as radio antennas, had been run up concrete tubes topped with hatches powered by electric motors. Those hatches had been opened within hours of the explosion. The bottom ends of the tubes were sealed and shielded so no radiation or anything else dangerous could leak down through them, and the tubes were too small for anything living to travel through them except insects.
Larkin had heard rumors that fiber-optic cameras had been raised through similar tubes so those in the bunker were able to look around outside, but he had never seen any proof of that. If the rumors were true, it was likely only Graham Moultrie and maybe one or two other people had access to the video feeds from the surface. And it was possible the whole business simply wasn’t true.
From time to time, the motion sensors Larkin was monitoring had detected something moving around up there. The movements were brief and seemed totally random, though, so the consensus was that they were caused by bits of debris blowing past the sensors in the wind. It was unlikely any animals were left alive, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. By now they would be pretty sick and starving, though, and if they approached the sensors, it would be by accident, since there was nothing around them to eat.
Like any former soldier w
ho had spent hundreds of hours on boring details, Larkin had developed the ability to pay attention to what he was supposed to be doing and let his mind wander at the same time. He was thinking about some plot developments in his novel when he saw a red light pop up on the grid displayed on the computer’s screen. That meant something up there was moving enough to trigger the sensor. Larkin expected the light to disappear as the wind blew whatever it was out of range, but instead it glowed steadily and then was joined by another and another.
Larkin sat up straighter and identified the location on the grid. It was about a hundred yards away from the blockhouse above the project’s main entrance. Several objects were moving around there.
That still didn’t have to mean anything. A whirlwind could have whipped several bits of debris into the air. Hell, Larkin thought, it could be a tornado. Did they still have tornadoes on the surface? Nobody really knew. There could be any number of explanations . . .
But even though Larkin knew that, logically and intellectually, a bit of a cold shiver went down his spine. He was no more immune to the fear of the unknown than any other man, and these days, the surface was a vast unknown.
A woman named Andrea Marshall was working with him today, checking back and forth between views from the cameras located in various areas of the project. Without taking his eyes off the screen, Larkin said, “Andrea, take a look at this.”
“What is it?” she asked as she swiveled around in her chair.
“I’ve got movement up top, more movement than I’ve seen before.”
“These bogeys don’t act like animals.”
Indeed, the red dots marking the movement shifted position slowly and deliberately. Like somebody’s walking around up there, Larkin thought.
Then he sat forward suddenly as more dots appeared, leading in a fairly straight line. The dots at the tail end of the line faded and then disappeared.
Andrea had stood up and moved to look over Larkin’s shoulder. She let out a startled, “Holy—! Something’s moving fast up there!”
The Doomsday Bunker Page 18