The Doomsday Bunker

by William W. Johnstone

  Now instead of surprise, a look of suspicion appeared on his face. “Is this some kind of threat?”

  “No, it’s a warning, damn it!” Charlotte Ruskin said. “It’s about Jeff.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  It was her turn to shake her head. “Not anymore,” she said. “He . . . he’s taken things too far, Fisher. He and some of his friends, they’re going to try to carry out a coup against Moultrie.”

  Fisher took that seriously, as she had known he would. He was as devoted to Graham Moultrie as a dog is to its master. That was disgusting, as far as Charlotte was concerned, but she planned to turn Fisher’s attitude to her advantage.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “They were in my place, talking. They thought I was asleep. I heard them planning the whole thing.”

  Fisher wasn’t buying it. “The way you feel about Graham, I’d think you’d be glad to see somebody get rid of him.”

  “It’s not Moultrie I’m worried about,” she snapped. “He can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. But if Jeff and his buddies try to do this, innocent people are going to be hurt, maybe even killed. I don’t want that.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth for a second, then added, “And I don’t want to see him hurt, either. Yeah, now that I know Nelson’s alive, I feel bad about being with Jeff . . . but I may never see Nelson again, and Jeff ’s here.”

  Fisher grunted and said, “Love the one you’re with, eh?”

  She could have killed him for that, right then and there, but she didn’t have what she needed yet. Instead she kept her voice calm and steady as she said, “Just let me tell you about it, okay?”

  Fisher shrugged and stepped back. “Sure, I guess it won’t hurt anything to listen. I’m still not convinced you’re telling me the truth, but maybe you can persuade me.”

  “If you just listen to me, you’ll be convinced, all right.”

  She walked past him into the small living and dining area. Fisher closed the door behind her. He wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and no shoes, but he didn’t look like he had gotten out of bed to answer her knock. Charlotte spotted a tablet lying on a table next to a chair and figured Fisher had been reading or watching a movie.

  Her gaze darted around the rest of the room, coming to rest on a key ring that lay on the counter dividing the kitchen area from the rest of the room. Several small plastic oblongs the size of credit cards were next to the keys. Nobody down here needed credit cards anymore, so she knew that one of them had to be what she was looking for.

  Fisher walked past her and asked with grudging courtesy, “Can I get you something to drink?”

  He was a big guy, ex-military, able to handle himself. She was no lightweight herself, but she didn’t have the sort of experience that he did. So she knew she couldn’t afford to waste her one chance. She slid the knife out of her jeans pocket, swung her arm around to get up some momentum, and drove the four-inch-long blade into the side of his neck as hard as she could. All the accumulated tension exploded out of her in a yell.

  Fisher tried to turn toward her. She caught a glimpse of his eyes bugging out with shock and pain. She still had hold of the knife’s handle. She shoved on it as hard as she could, slicing the keen edge across his throat. Blood spurted out over her hand.

  Instinct brought Fisher’s arm up and around. His forearm crashed against Charlotte’s head and knocked her backward, making her lose her grip on the knife. Her back hit the door, bounced off. He came after her and reached out for her with his right hand while his left pawed at his ruined throat. Crimson welled over his fingers and spread down the front of his T-shirt.

  Charlotte was half-stunned. She got her arms up and tried to fend off Fisher’s attack, but he rammed into her and drove her back against the door again. This time her head hit it and the impact disoriented her even more. She flailed at him, but he got his hand on her throat and closed it. The pressure of his fingers was incredible.

  Fisher twisted, hauled her around with him, fell forward. She landed on her back with him on top of her. She couldn’t breathe because of his choking grip and his weight pressing down on her torso. He had caught her without much air in her lungs. Frantic desperation welled up inside her. A red haze began to creep over her vision.

  She felt the hot splash on her face as more blood gouted from Fisher’s throat. He slumped even more heavily on her. His fingers relaxed slightly. Charlotte blinked blood out of her eyes and looked up into his, only a few inches away, as they started to glaze over in death. She clawed at his hand and pulled it away from her throat.

  Fisher was a big man. Getting him off her wasn’t easy. But the urgency of needing to breathe again gave her strength. She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved as hard as she could while at the same time arching her back. For a second, Fisher’s deadweight stubbornly resisted her efforts. Then he rolled to Charlotte’s left and wound up on his back next to her, arms slightly outflung, his throat a gory mess.

  She pushed herself up on an elbow and lay there gasping for air for more than a minute before her galloping pulse began to slow down. She gathered her strength and struggled to her feet. A few staggering steps brought her to the bathroom. She shuddered as she looked at herself in the mirror.

  She resembled something from an old horror movie, with blood splattered on her face and already clotting in her hair. She grabbed a towel from a rack, got it wet in the sink, and started scrubbing desperately. She had come here to kill Chuck Fisher, partly because he was Moultrie’s right-hand man and deserved it, to Charlotte’s way of thinking, but mostly because she knew he would never turn over that access card and she needed it to save her husband. Even though what she had done was justified in her opinion, actually ending the man’s life had shaken her.

  But she would kill again if she had to, in order to save Nelson.

  Her shirt had a lot of blood on it, too. She pulled it off and dropped it on the bathroom floor. She looked in Fisher’s bedroom and found a sweatshirt in his closet. It was too big, of course, but nobody would pay any attention to that. She pulled it on, and with most of the blood washed off, she didn’t think anyone would notice her.

  She didn’t know which of the access cards she needed, so she stuffed all of them in her pocket, along with the ring of keys. Might come in handy, she told herself. She didn’t want to approach Fisher’s body or even look at it, but he had pulled the knife from his throat and it lay beside him. Charlotte came close enough to pick it up and wipe off the blade on his sweatpants. She slipped it back in her pocket as she turned toward the door.

  It wouldn’t be much longer now, she told herself. She would be reunited with her husband.

  And Graham Moultrie’s reign as dictator of the Hercules Project was about to be over.

  Chapter 35

  Jeff Greer was waiting for her at the east end of Corridor Two, near the entrance to the Command Center. He had argued against her being the one to steal the access card, but Charlotte had been insistent. Fisher wouldn’t have trusted Jeff enough to let him close to him. But Fisher was a Neanderthal and hadn’t given “a mere woman” enough credit for being dangerous, just as Charlotte had predicted.

  It was late enough, after midnight, that no one else was around. Moultrie’s imposition of a regular day/night routine wasn’t exactly a curfew, but it was strict enough that for practical purposes it served as one. The Hercules Project never actually slept, but not many people were out and about in the middle of the night.

  Greer stepped forward to meet her with a worried frown on his face. “Are you all right?” he asked, then abruptly reached out to take hold of her shoulders. “My God, Charlotte, is that blood on your face?”

  “What?” Charlotte was annoyed. She swiped a hand at her face. She had believed she got all the gore off. “It’s not mine,” she went on.

  “Fisher’s,” Greer breathed.

  Charlotte shrugged, signifying her agreement with what he said and getting his hands off her at the sam
e time. She patted her pocket and said, “I’ve got his access cards.”

  “Is he going to—”

  “He’s not going to do anything to cause us a problem. Ever again.”

  Greer stared at her. He liked to think he was a tough guy, and he didn’t back down when it came to a fistfight. She wasn’t sure he could have killed Fisher, though. He might have hesitated at just the wrong second. He wasn’t driven by the same sort of hatred she was.

  After a moment, Greer drew a deep breath and nodded. “All right. I guess that means you’re ready to do this.”

  “More than ready,” Charlotte said. She turned to the door with its card-reader slot. Taking the access cards from her pocket, she began trying them one by one until the small light set into the door’s handle turned green. She grasped the handle and twisted it. The door opened and they walked into the Command Center.

  A guard was on duty just inside the door, but he wasn’t used to seeing anyone come in who wasn’t supposed to be there. A lot of Moultrie’s security force were the postapocalyptic version of rent-a-cops, not all that vigilant or even competent. This one just glanced at them, then did a double-take when he realized they were intruders and started to reach for the semi-automatic pistol on his hip.

  Greer’s fist crashed into the man’s jaw before he could complete the draw. The punch knocked him back against the wall. Greer used his left hand to grab the man’s wrist and prevent him from pulling the gun. At the same time, Greer closed his right hand around the guard’s throat and banged his head against the wall. The man was already stunned and couldn’t muster up his wits enough to fight back. Greer rammed his head against the wall several more times until the man’s muscles went limp. He slid down the wall to the floor, leaving a slight bloody smear behind him from the contusions on the back of his head.

  Charlotte bent down and pulled the pistol from the man’s holster. Greer was already armed with a short-barreled revolver stuck behind his belt at the small of his back.

  Charles Trahn had sketched the layout of the Command Center for them. There was a central hallway with large rooms opening from both sides of it. Inside the rooms to the right were the controls for all the environmental and life-support systems, as well as access to the generators and the actual air- and water-filtration equipment. To the left were all the monitoring stations, including the big room where Trahn worked keeping track of readings from all over the project, as well as the sensors located on the surface. There were security camera feeds in here as well, but at this time of night only one person kept an eye on them. The Command Center operated on a skeleton staff during the nighttime hours. There were only two people in the main room with Trahn tonight, a man and a woman, Charlotte saw as she and Greer walked in carrying the guns.

  Greer immediately leveled his revolver at the other two, who started to get up but sat back down, looking scared as the revolver’s muzzle menaced them. The man said, “What the hell?”

  Charlotte pointed the pistol she had taken from the unconscious guard at Trahn. He had insisted that they treat him like the others, so no one would suspect he was actually helping them. She said, “You! Open the hatch at the top of the freight-elevator shaft!”

  Wide-eyed with fear that was probably real because he wasn’t sure what Charlotte might do, Trahn stammered, “I-I can’t do that! It takes a special access card—”

  With her other hand, Charlotte slapped the cards she had taken from Fisher onto the control panel in front of Trahn. “Find the right one and use it,” she ordered. “And if you try any tricks, I’ll kill you!”

  As she said it, she more than halfway meant it.

  With shaking hands, Trahn sorted through the plastic cards and picked up one of them. He tapped out some numbers on the keyboard in front of him, then inserted the card into a reader. A green light appeared on the screen in front of him. He swallowed hard and said, “I can access those controls now.”

  “All right.” Charlotte picked up the other access cards. “Wait until one of us tells you to open the shaft.” She knew that once the hatch at the top of the shaft began to open, it would set off an alarm. She wanted to wait as long as possible before that happened so she would be ready for the next part of her plan. She glanced over at Greer, who still covered the other two technicians with the revolver. “You have this?”

  “Of course I do,” he told her.

  “I knew you would. Thanks, Jeff.” For a second she thought about going to him and kissing him, but she didn’t want to waste the time, and besides, the gesture might distract him. They both had to stay focused on what they were trying to do.

  The female technician said, “You’re trying to leave the project? That’s crazy! It’s dangerous up there.”

  “People live up there,” Charlotte snapped. “My husband lives up there. Moultrie is lying to all of us about how bad it is. We can go back up and start our lives again any time we want to, and I’m going to prove it!”

  She turned and ran out of the Command Center.

  * * *

  During the past few days, Charlotte had walked from the Command Center entrance to the freight elevator several times, counting off the seconds in her head and coming up with an average time. She had known she would be hurrying tonight, so that would make a few seconds’ difference, but she also had to locate the right access card for the elevator and there was no way of knowing how long that would take. So she and Greer had left the countdown the same and now those seconds were ticking off in her head as she approached the elevator.

  Two men in red vests stood in front of it, talking.

  Charlotte almost stopped short at the sight of them, but managed to keep moving because she thought an abrupt halt might make them even more suspicious than they normally would be when they saw her. She had expected perhaps one guard, or even none at all in the middle of the night like this. The double guard took her by surprise.

  But the plan had come too far for her to abandon it now. She would just have to adapt.

  She hurried up to the guards, who looked at her warily. All the members of the security force knew who she was. She held up her hands, palms out, and said, “Hey, I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “What do you want, Mrs. Ruskin?” one of the men asked.

  “And what are you doing out at this time of night?” the other guard added.

  “I don’t sleep that well, so I go for walks at night,” she said. “I was doing that just now when I was around by the Command Center and saw some sort of commotion going on. I don’t know what it was about, but you guys might want to go make sure you’re not needed over there.”

  “If they needed us, they would have called us on the walkie-talkie,” the first guard said.

  “Maybe the walkie-talkies aren’t working,” Charlotte suggested. The numbers were still ticking off in her head, getting closer and closer to zero. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  Both men looked skeptical about that.

  “Think whatever you want about me, but I just want what’s best for the project,” Charlotte snapped. “Besides, you may have forgotten, but I was elected to be a resident liaison and work with Mr. Moultrie. I’d just as soon put all the problems behind us.”

  Neither guard looked like he believed that.

  “At least one of you should go and see what’s happening,” Charlotte said.

  “Look, Mrs. Ruskin, go on back to your quarters, or keep taking your walk, or do whatever you want to do, but stop trying to interfere with things that are none of your business. You let us worry about—”

  The man stopped short as they all heard a faint rumble from somewhere up above.

  Both guards turned to face the elevator doors and tipped their heads back, even though there was nothing to see except the ceiling. It was a natural instinct, though. That was the direction the unexpected sound came from.

  The countdown had already hit zero in Charlotte Ruskin’s head. Now she reached behind her back, pulled the compact 9mm semi-a
utomatic from the waistband of her jeans where the sweatshirt she had taken from Chuck Fisher’s quarters had concealed it, and put the muzzle an inch away from the back of the nearest guard’s head. She squeezed the trigger. The blast was painfully loud. Fire from the gun’s muzzle charred the man’s hair. The bullet shattered his skull, bored through his brain, and blew out through his face where his nose had been. The other man was stunned for the half second it took Charlotte to swing the gun over and shoot him through the head, too.

  Both of them hit the floor within a heartbeat of each other.

  The noise of the shots, the sight of blood and gray matter dripping from the elevator doors, the sheer knowledge that she had just killed two more men left Charlotte disoriented. Before the war, she had been just a normal person. She had worked in an insurance office, for God’s sake! And now she was . . . What was she, anyway?

  A woman who had spent months stewing in grief and hatred, that’s what she was, she realized as she shoved the gun down in her waistband again. A woman who’d had the love of her life taken away from her, only to learn that he was still alive but she couldn’t be with him again.

  Well, they would see about that.

  She pulled the access cards from her pocket and began trying them in the reader next to the door. The third one turned the indicator light green. Charlotte pushed the button that opened the doors. They slid back.

  Somewhere not too far away, someone started shouting. Charlotte knew that alarms would be going off in various places to let people know the hatch at the top of the elevator shaft was opening. Back in the Command Center, Greer had done the same countdown she had and at the right time had ordered Trahn to activate the hatch.

  Now it was up to her.

  She stepped into the elevator. Greer had told her what she needed to do, but she would have been able to figure it out anyway. “G” was Ground—the surface—1 was the level they were on, 2 the lower bunker.

  Charlotte pressed her thumb on the button marked “G.” The doors closed and with a slight jerk the elevator began to rise.