Larkin checked the grid again and said, “It’s coming toward the blockhouse. You’ve got a camera pointed up the stairs—”
“On it!” Andrea whirled around and lunged back to her station. Larkin stood up and hurried behind her chair. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the bogey was still advancing rapidly, and then Andrea let out a shocked cry.
Larkin looked at the video feed and saw a cloud of dust filling the stairwell. Chunks of concrete came bouncing down out of that cloud.
“Oh, hell, Patrick! What . . . what happened up there?”
“Something just hit the blockhouse.”
“You mean another bomb?”
Larkin shook his head. “No. Something rammed it at high speed, something like a truck. Probably aiming to bust the door open.”
“But a truck would have to have somebody driving it, or at least aiming it. Who—”
Larkin pointed at the camera feed and said, “I think we’re about to find out.”
A vaguely human shape had formed in the dust. Now it came down the staircase slowly, step by step, becoming more and more visible . . .
Until Andrea screamed as a monster’s face loomed on the screen.
Chapter 29
Only it wasn’t a monster, Larkin realized a moment later as Andrea shrank away from the screen, stifling another scream. He leaned closer. The lines of a human face were still there in the thing looking up at the camera, just terribly distorted. The man was gaunt to the point of being skeletal, with his cheekbones pressing so sharply against his skin it appeared they might tear through. Much of that skin had sloughed off, leaving raw, oozing sores in its place. Most of the man’s hair had fallen out, including his eyebrows. Only a few tufts remained around his ears. Blood had leaked from his eyes and nose, leaving dark brown streaks. His mouth hung open as he breathed heavily, and Larkin could see that he had only a few stumps of teeth left in pale, dead-looking gums.
“Nosferatu,” Larkin muttered, reminded of the vampire in that classic movie. His nerves were stretched taut and his heart slugged heavily in his chest. He wasn’t scared by what he saw on the monitor, exactly, but he was definitely shocked.
“What . . . what is that thing?” Andrea had to force the words out.
“Someone suffering from extreme radiation sickness. The guy lived through the concussion and thermal waves, so he must have been underground somewhere. But he either came out too soon or his hiding place wasn’t shielded well enough. He looks like he caught a lot of grays.”
“What?”
“The unit of exposure of a human body to radiation. His symptoms look pretty systemic. He’s probably got half a dozen tumors eating him up from the inside, as well as what we can see on the outside.”
Andrea stared up at Larkin and asked, “How can you be so . . . so calm and analytical?”
Larkin let out a grunt of humorless laughter. “I promise you, I’m not calm at all. I feel like jumping out of my skin.”
That was probably a poor choice of words, considering what they were looking at. The thing on the stairs, which wore tattered clothing, clumped on down, mostly out of range of the camera. A bony fist came into view, then fell. The motion was repeated several times.
“He’s knocking on the door,” Larkin said. “He wants to be let in.”
“Ohhh,” Andrea said, the sound coming out as a low, choked moan. “He . . . he can’t get in, can he?”
Larkin shook his head. “I don’t see how. This guy’s at death’s door, and even if he was in perfect health, he couldn’t bust down that door. A SWAT team with a battering ram couldn’t bust down that door.” He reached for an intercom and pushed a button on it. “Graham, this is Patrick Larkin. You need to come in here.”
Moultrie’s voice came back from the intercom. “What is it, Patrick?”
For a second, Larkin considered what to say, then settled for, “We have a visitor.”
Another second ticked by. Larkin could imagine the stunned expression on Moultrie’s face. Then the man said, “I’ll be right there.”
Moultrie’s office was in the Command Center, so it took him less than a minute to reach the room where Larkin and Andrea were monitoring the equipment. He came in fast, not running, probably because he didn’t want to attract attention until he found out exactly what was going on, but not wasting any time, either.
The creature that had come down the stairs wasn’t visible at the moment. Larkin had a hunch he had slumped against the blast door, exhausted by his efforts. Hell, he might even be dead, Larkin thought.
“What is it?” Moultrie asked. He moved up between Larkin and Andrea so he could see the screen. The dust had cleared away somewhat, but the concrete rubble on the stairs was visible. “Son of a . . . What happened?”
Before either of the other two could answer, the diseased man loomed into view again, staggering up a couple of steps and looking back over his shoulder.
Moultrie took a step back and let out a startled, “Shit!” He recovered quickly and went on, “That man is dying of radiation poisoning.”
“Looks like he’s most of the way there,” Larkin agreed.
“How did he get down here? Where did that debris come from?”
“There was an impact up above. The best I can figure, a truck rammed the blockhouse and knocked down the door and part of the wall. Then that fella came down the stairs and started beating on the blast door like he wanted in.”
The creature had stopped on the stairs now. He half-turned so he could look directly into the camera.
“He knows we’re watching him,” Moultrie said in a hushed voice.
As if to confirm that, the man lifted a hand that was little more than skin and bones. It trembled badly, but he was able to control it enough to close all of the fingers into a fist.
Except the middle one, which stuck straight up in an unmistakable gesture of defiant anger.
Then he turned and shuffled up the steps, eventually going out of sight in the dust that lingered in the remains of the blockhouse.
Andrea broke the horrified and astounded silence by asking, “Did a zombie just give us the finger?”
“He’s not a zombie,” Larkin said. “He’s a human being like us . . . except he ran out of luck and we didn’t.” He turned his head to look at Moultrie. “And judging by what I saw on the motion sensors before things got crazy, he’s not the only one up there.”
Moultrie’s face was stony and so was his voice as he said, “Well, that’s liable to be a problem.”
* * *
Moultrie swore Larkin and Andrea to secrecy. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do about this before it becomes public knowledge,” he said. “We’ve known all along there was at least a chance there’d be survivors on the surface. But knowing that intellectually and then seeing that poor devil . . .”
Andrea shuddered and said, “I’ll never forget that face. I’m afraid I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares from now on. And what if that man was, well, one of the ones who’s in better shape . . .?”
“We’ll deal with this, don’t worry,” Moultrie assured her.
Larkin could tell that Andrea was very shaken up for the rest of their shift, however. As they were leaving the Command Center after going off duty, he asked her, “Are you going to be all right?”
“I suppose,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I just can’t stop thinking . . . that could have been any of us, couldn’t it, Patrick?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so, although it’s more likely that if we’d been caught aboveground when the bomb hit, we’d have been killed right away. Any survivors from around here must have been able to take shelter somewhere underground.” Something else had occurred to him. “It’s possible that these folks, the ones who rammed the blockhouse, they’ve come in from somewhere else, farther away from the blast area. But not far enough to escape the radiation. Not only that, the water and anything they could find to eat around here would be contaminated, too, not to mention any
dust that’s still in the air.”
In a small voice, Andrea said, “I’ve heard that it takes two hundred years for a place to be safe again after a nuclear explosion. We’re going to be down here for generations, aren’t we? You and I, we’ll never live long enough to see the sunlight again.”
“I don’t believe that,” Larkin said with a shake of his head. “That two hundred years figure is way overblown. With proper protection, we ought to be able to leave the bunker and have a look around within another four to six months.”
“But you don’t know that.”
He shrugged. “I guess it all depends on what the instruments tell us about surface conditions.”
“And when we do go out there, we’ll have to face those . . . zombies.”
Larkin made a face. “Don’t call ’em that. If people start thinking that way, it’ll just lead to more trouble. They’re not monsters or mutants or anything else from movies. They’re just human beings with a disease.”
Andrea didn’t look convinced, but Larkin didn’t spend any more time trying to convince her. As long as she kept her mouth shut about what she’d seen, it didn’t really matter what she thought of the radiation-riddled survivors. They might haunt her nightmares, but it wouldn’t make any practical difference.
Anyway, the whole thing might well be moot, Larkin thought. By the time an exploratory party from the Hercules Project could go up to the surface, any survivors who had lived through the blast or come into the area from elsewhere would probably be dead. The radiation sickness would not be denied.
Andrea headed back to her quarters in Corridor Two while Larkin returned to his apartment. Susan was still at the medical clinic, he supposed. He sat down and for a while tried to read, but he couldn’t get the image of what he had seen out of his mind.
The crude gesture the man in the stairwell had made was one thing. The look in his eyes, deep-set and burning in the gaunt, haggard face, was something else again. Larkin wasn’t sure if he had ever seen as much pure hatred and venom in anyone’s gaze as he had witnessed there. It was the hatred of someone who was doomed and knew it, directed toward those who still had a chance to survive.
If that man ever got a chance, he would kill each and every one of them, just to take them to hell with him. Larkin was sure of that.
Unable to concentrate, he put his book away and started preparing some supper for when Susan got home. It was nothing fancy, just a bacon and potato omelet, but fancy cooking was pretty much out of the question down here. Some of the people from the lower bunker had the attitude that the ones who dwelled in the silo apartments lived in the lap of luxury. True, they had more privacy, but the other day-to-day aspects of living were pretty much the same.
Susan came in while he was still working on the food. She stepped up behind him, put her arms around his waist, and hugged him hard as she rested her head against his broad back.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Larkin said, “but what’s that about?”
“Patrick.”
Something in her voice made him turn away from the stove so he could look at her. Her face was set in grim lines. He immediately felt a surge of fear that something had happened to Jill or Trevor or one of the kids, but before he could ask, Susan went on, “I know what you saw today. Graham called in some of us from the medical staff and told us.”
“Oh. Actually, I’m glad he did. He asked Andrea and me to keep our mouths shut about it, and I know it would have been hard keeping a secret from you.”
“Was it really as . . . terrible . . . as he made it sound?”
“It was pretty bad,” Larkin said. He turned back to the omelet so he could fold it over. Thinking about what he had seen in the Command Center blunted his hunger a little, but he could still eat. Like any good Marine, it took a lot to kill his appetite completely. He went on, “But it wasn’t anything we hadn’t considered a possibility all along.”
“If people like Beth Huddleston knew about this, they’d be demanding that we open the doors and let those survivors in so we can help them.”
“There’s not a damn thing we can do for them.” Larkin’s voice was a little harsher than he intended, but he knew he spoke the truth. “The most merciful thing any of those poor bastards could get is a bullet in the head.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m not sure I can argue with it. The reason Graham called us in was because he wanted to find out if there’s anything we could do for them, any way we might be able to help them.” Susan shook her head. “All the doctors agreed, there’s nothing we can do other than giving them drugs to ease the pain a little. Even if we still had access to the best hospitals in the world, anyone as sick from radiation as the man Graham described wouldn’t live much longer.”
Larkin slid the omelet from the pan onto a plate and cut it in two. A frown creased his forehead as he said, “Maybe they’re not all in that bad a shape.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw enough bogeys on the motion detectors to tell me that several people were moving around up there. Our visitor isn’t alone. Maybe the others sent him because they weren’t sure what he’d find down here and they considered him the most expendable.”
“That’s a pretty bleak way to look at it.”
“Life’s a pretty bleak business a lot of the time. Now more than ever.”
“Even if you’re right, what difference does it make if some of the other survivors aren’t as sick as the man you saw?”
“This guy pounded on the blast door, but even if it had been a regular door, he was too weak to do any damage. He wasn’t any kind of a threat.” Larkin paused. “I wonder if we can say that about the other survivors left up there.”
Chapter 30
June 3
Despite Moultrie’s orders and the efforts of everyone who knew what had happened, during the next week it proved impossible to keep the developments completely secret. Larkin knew he didn’t even hint about the matter to anyone who wasn’t already in the loop, and he didn’t believe that Susan had said anything, either.
But someone must have, because rumors began to fly, especially in the lower bunker, that something was still alive on the surface. No one seemed to know exactly what it was. Speculation ran rampant. Most of it seemed to spring from horror movies . . . from zombies to mutants—or mutant zombies—to animals that had been given super-intelligence by the radiation and were now walking around on two legs and building futuristic weapons, to aliens who had arrived from outer space to investigate the aftermath of Earth’s nuclear war. None of those fanciful things approached the grim reality of what Larkin had seen.
The excitement—or apprehension was probably a better word for it—didn’t affect the election. Some of the residents from Corridors One and Two had lobbied to be included, and even some of the silo dwellers wanted to be part of it, too. The organizers—Charlotte Ruskin’s friends, although not Ruskin herself because she was running for one of the posts—declared the election open to all residents of the Hercules Project who were of voting age. So the turnout was fairly high, but that didn’t change the results that Larkin expected. Charlotte Ruskin and Jeff Greer were elected to represent the residents. The fix had been in from the first, to Larkin’s way of thinking, and even if two of the other candidates had won, they still would have been taking their marching orders from Charlotte.
However, when Moultrie called a meeting of his senior staff to discuss the situation on the surface, Ruskin and Greer weren’t there. They would pitch a fit if they ever found out about being excluded, but evidently Moultrie didn’t trust them and didn’t care.
Larkin was a little surprised that he was invited. He held no official position other than being a member of the security force, but he knew that over the months Moultrie and Chuck Fisher had come to place a lot of confidence in him. Besides, Susan was a member of the inner circle when it came to the medical staff, due to her practical knowledge and tireless efforts to help keep the residents
as healthy as possible. Larkin knew from talking to her that at first some of the doctors had resisted bringing a “mere” nurse into their top-level discussions, but the more pragmatic among them had won over the ones with swelled heads.
Maybe Moultrie figured that whatever was discussed at the meeting, Susan would tell him about it anyway, Larkin mused as they walked into the big conference room. That wasn’t necessarily true, but he didn’t mind being here. He wanted to know what was going on.
Larkin’s gaze went around the table where people were talking quietly among themselves. He saw two of the doctors, Jessica Kenley and Stan Davis. A group of engineers and environmental experts, including Doug Liu, Sharon Bastrop, Will Grover, and Larry Milstead, clustered at one end of the table. Curtis Jackson from logistics and supplies sat with his hands clasped on the table in front of him. Down near the other end, Chuck Fisher stood with his hands on the back of a chair and a frown on his face.
Fisher caught Larkin’s eye and nodded a greeting. While Susan went to talk to the other medical personnel, Larkin drifted in Fisher’s direction.
“Wondering why you’re here?” the security chief asked.
“Because no meeting is complete without my good looks and wit?”
Fisher grunted. “Not exactly. You’re officially second in command of the security force now.”
“I don’t recall asking for a promotion.”
“You’re being appointed, not offered a job. That means you can’t say no. Not that I’d expect you to want to.”
“You’re right,” Larkin said. “Thanks, Chuck. I’ll try not to let you down.”
“If we believed you might let us down, Graham and I wouldn’t have made this decision. You’ve earned it. You’ve always been there and done anything we’ve asked you to do. Anyway, you know more about the enemy than anyone else.”
“The enemy?” Larkin repeated as a frown creased his forehead.
“You know.” Fisher gestured with a blunt thumb. “Up there. You’ve looked one of them in the eye. It was through a camera lens, but still . . .” Fisher shrugged. “We’ve seen the footage, of course, but seeing it live is different.”
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