The fifty feet or so that separated the upper level of the Hercules Project from the surface was the longest ride of Charlotte’s life. The elevator’s progress was smooth and steady. It was as old as the rest of the installation, dating back to the early 1960s when the missile base was built, but Graham Moultrie had made sure that everything was in good working order. If it wasn’t, he had it repaired and refurbished until it was good as new. The smoothness of the elevator ride didn’t matter to Charlotte, though. It still seemed to take forever.
Finally, after seconds that had passed more like hours, the elevator came to a stop with just a slight bounce of the floor under her feet. The door might have opened automatically, but she didn’t wait to see. Instead she jammed her thumb down on the DOOR OPEN button.
With the same slight hiss as before, the doors parted.
Charlotte caught only a glimpse of flames flickering before hell poured in on her and she screamed.
Chapter 36
Larkin was sound asleep next to Susan when the walkie-talkie on the table next to the bed squawked. He came awake fully and instantly—a habit left over from combat days that he had never lost—sat up as he swung his legs out of bed. Adam Threadgill’s voice came from the walkie-talkie. “Patrick!”
Larkin snatched it up, thumbed the button on the side, and said, “I’m here, Adam. What’s up?”
“Somebody’s opened the hatch at the top of the freight elevator. I’m on duty in the security office and got the alarm. I’m heading for the Command Center. Can you check out the elevator?”
“On my way,” Larkin said. He bit back a curse. He had warned Moultrie that the elevator might be a vulnerable point. Moultrie had told Chuck Fisher to double the guard, but Larkin wasn’t sure that was enough. Moultrie was a technophile; he relied on all the built-in security measures. He might not be as aware as he should have been, though, that sometimes the best defense was a wall of well-armed soldiers.
Of course, most of the members of the security force weren’t soldiers at all, but they were the closest thing available down here, Larkin thought as he shoved his feet into the work boots next to the bed. He slept in socks, sweatpants, and T-shirt, so putting the boots on was all he needed to do in order to be dressed and ready to move.
“Patrick, I heard that,” Susan said from where she had sat up on the other side of the bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know, but that elevator hatch shouldn’t be opening.” He stood up and reached for the belt with the holstered 1911 attached to it.
“This is going to compromise the sealed environment down here.”
“Maybe. If the elevator doors stay closed, it might not.”
“The hatch wouldn’t be open unless somebody was trying to use the elevator.”
The same thought had occurred immediately to Larkin, followed by a question.
Was somebody trying to get in . . . or out?
“Keep your pistol close until we find out what’s going on,” he told his wife as he buckled on the gunbelt. “I’ll be back.”
“Patrick, be careful,” she called after him as he hurried out.
He would have told her he always was, if they hadn’t both known that wasn’t strictly true.
Larkin hurried out of the apartment and into Corridor One. The short hallway leading to the freight elevator opened from Corridor Two, so he had to run halfway to the other end of the project to reach the hall forming the crossbar in the giant letter “H.” He pounded along it toward Corridor Two, not knowing what he was going to find but feeling deep in his gut that it wasn’t going to be good.
He came out, swung to his right, and saw that people were milling around, obviously upset by something. Larkin paused and asked a man in pajamas, “What’s going on?”
“Somebody said they heard gunshots,” the man replied.
That made Larkin’s heart slug even harder. The next second, a woman screamed, kicking his adrenaline even higher. He bulled his way through the crowd and came to the hallway leading to the freight elevator. People were sobbing and cursing now. Larkin waved them back. His jaw clenched as he looked along the hall. Twenty feet away lay the bodies of the two men who had been posted here on guard duty. Pools of blood around their heads told him they’d been shot.
The elevator doors were closed, but Larkin didn’t believe for a second that they had been that way all along. The only reason to kill the guards was because somebody wanted to use the elevator. Charlotte Ruskin’s name sprang into Larkin’s mind. He couldn’t know for sure that was the truth, of course, but it was a strong hunch. Would Ruskin do something as crazy as going up to the surface to find her husband? Larkin didn’t doubt it for a second.
“Shouldn’t you get help for those men?” someone in the crowd asked.
Larkin knew from the way the guards were sprawled and the amount of blood that had welled from their head wounds that nothing was going to help them now, but he didn’t want to say that in front of these people. Instead he pulled the walkie-talkie from his pocket, keyed the microphone, and said, “Medical personnel to the freight elevator, ASAP!”
Then he stiffened as he heard something. He thrust out his left arm in a peremptory gesture and rested his right hand on the Colt at his hip.
“Shut up! Everybody be quiet!”
“What is it?” a man asked.
The faint rumble Larkin heard could mean only one thing.
He waved the left arm at the crowd and shouted, “Get out of here! Clear out! Everybody move!”
The elevator was coming back down from the surface.
* * *
Inside the Command Center, alarms klaxoned. Spooked by the loud, raucous noise, Jeff Greer grabbed Charles Trahn, jerked him around, and ground the barrel of his gun against the terrified technician’s cheek.
“What the hell!” Greer said.
“I told you there’d be alarms!” Trahn practically wailed.
“I didn’t know it would be like that! Can’t you turn them off?”
“No, I’m sorry, I—”
Trahn didn’t get any further before the other male technician gathered up his courage now that Greer wasn’t pointing the gun at him and the woman anymore. The man leaped out of his chair and charged.
Greer heard the slap of shoe leather on the floor and wheeled around. He pulled the trigger and the gun boomed, flame lancing from its barrel. The slug tore through the other technician’s shoulder, but the man’s momentum carried him forward so that he crashed into Greer and knocked him back into Trahn. All three of them sprawled back against the console where Trahn had been working earlier.
Trahn screamed and frantically grabbed Greer’s wrist so he could point the gun away from him. Greer’s trigger finger jerked spasmodically. The weapon blasted twice more. Both bullets smashed into the gauges and controls in the console. Sparks flew with an electrical crackling.
Greer rammed a fist under Trahn’s chin and jerked his head back. Trahn went limp and slithered to the floor. Greer shoved the other man away, which gave him enough room to swing the pistol and slam it against the man’s head. The wounded technician went down, too.
Greer turned to look for the woman. She was gone. The door was open. He cursed as he realized she had made a run for it while he was tangled up with the two guys.
But it didn’t matter. Charlotte would be on her way to the surface by now, and no one was going to stop her. He supposed there were overrides on the elevator, but he wasn’t sure they would work anymore, considering the damage his shots had done to the controls.
Charlotte hadn’t known what she was going to find when she got up there, but her plan was to locate her husband and bring him and some of the others back down here. She would have to do it quickly, though, otherwise Moultrie would freeze the elevator at the surface. Greer’s hunch was that most of the survivors would be close to the project’s entrances, hoping for some miracle that would let them come down to safety.
At worst, Charlotte would be with her
husband again, and since that was what she wanted more than anything else, Greer was willing to go along with it. Sure, he would miss her once she was gone, but there were plenty of other single women—legitimately single women—down here. Well, maybe not plenty, and some of them weren’t really that good-looking, he amended, but there were some.
A chance was all he’d ever asked for in life.
“Hey!”
The shout snapped Greer out of the momentary reverie. He looked up, saw the stocky figure of a guy he recognized as Adam Threadgill. The security man had a gun in his hand, so Greer didn’t stop to think about it. He just fired his own gun and saw Threadgill rock back a step as the bullet punched into him.
Then flame blossomed from the muzzle of Threadgill’s gun and Greer felt the hammerblow of a bullet. It knocked him back. He tripped over the unconscious Charles Trahn and fell to the floor. A wet heat flooded through his body. He couldn’t seem to get his breath, and his muscles just flopped uselessly when he ordered them to get up.
He was able to lift his gun, though. He pointed it at the dark figure coming toward him, knowing it had to be Threadgill. Greer was trying to pull the trigger again when the world split apart in orange flame.
That was the last thing he knew.
Except for a fleeting image of Charlotte’s face.
* * *
It was like something out of a horror movie. Twisted, grotesque faces leering at her. Skeletal hands clawing at her clothes and face. Gaunt bodies slamming against her, driving her against the back wall of the elevator.
No wonder terrified screams ripped Charlotte’s throat raw.
She flailed at the attackers flooding into the elevator. Panic gave her strength. She knocked several of them away from her. Sickness twisted her stomach as she felt her fists slide off faces that were little more than oozing sores.
The relatively close quarters of the elevator worked in her favor. With her back pressed to the wall, the maddened survivors couldn’t surround her. As soon as she had enough breathing room, she reached behind her and closed her hand around the gun. There were several rounds left in the magazine. She hoped that would be enough to drive these lunatics away.
Before she could fire, another gun went off somewhere nearby. The dull boom sounded like a shotgun. The attackers flinched from the sound and then began to shrink away from her as a man shouted, “Get out of there! Get back, damn it!”
Instantly, Charlotte knew those tones. She had expected never to hear them again. She cried, “Nelson!”
Her husband waded into the knot of people still blocking the elevator’s entrance and flung them aside with one hand while his other held the shotgun he had just fired. Charlotte saw him and felt her heart practically leap up her throat. Still holding the shotgun, he threw his arms around her and pulled her against him.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” he rasped.
Charlotte just cried, unable to find words anymore.
Another man shouted, “Back off!” The rest of the survivors cleared the elevator. The newcomer stood in the door, brawny and broad-shouldered, with a white beard and white hair pulled into a short ponytail. Like Nelson Ruskin, he held a pump shotgun.
After a moment, Nelson turned toward the other man, put his arm around Charlotte’s shoulders, and said in a voice thick with emotion, “Earl, this is my wife.”
The man called Earl gave her a curt nod. “Ma’am.” He looked at Nelson and went on, “Looks like your hunch paid off. You said the lady would get to you one way or another, if it was possible at all.”
“And now we’ve got a way down there.”
A frown creased Earl’s forehead. He said, “I’m still not sure that’s a good idea.”
“None of our people are going to survive up here. You know that.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Some of ’em are still in pretty good shape. Could be it’s time to move on, like those folks down there suggested.”
Charlotte could tell that this argument between the two men was nothing new. She looked around, saw that they were below ground level in what appeared to be the basement of a collapsed building. Rubble from that structure had fallen around them. This had been a warehouse at one time, she realized, probably for the supplies Moultrie had taken down into the project. The flames she had seen were from a large campfire about fifty yards away. The ragged, emaciated, diseased survivors had retreated toward it. Charlotte saw men, women, children, all in bad shape. Many of them looked like pictures she had seen of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, only worse if that was possible.
She looked up at her husband and said, “You’ve been waiting for me?”
“That’s right,” Nelson said. “I knew you’d come if you could. And I knew that you’d save us all.”
Earl just shook his head and stepped away, as if declaring that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with this. Charlotte supposed that he was Nelson’s friend, but right now she didn’t care. All that mattered was that the two of them were together again.
“How much time do we have before they shut off the elevator?” Nelson asked.
“I don’t know. I have a friend holding the Command Center. He’ll give us as much time as he can.”
“A friend?” Nelson asked the question, then gave an abrupt shake of his head as if realizing that it didn’t matter right now. He lifted a hand, put a couple of fingers in his mouth, and gave an old-fashioned, piercing whistle that carried through the dark night.
Charlotte’s eyes widened as more ragged figures began to drop down into the ruined basement. The dancing firelight threw shadows back and forth over them as they swarmed toward the elevator. Although gaunt and obviously sick, they appeared to be in better shape than the hapless, unarmed creatures who had rushed the elevator.
All of these people carried weapons. Most held firearms. Charlotte saw a variety of pistols, shotguns, and rifles. A few brandished axes or pitchforks. The firelight glittered on knife blades, too.
Even though the survivors had listened to Nelson and followed his orders earlier, the sight of this small but lethal army made Charlotte step back as fear welled up inside her.
“Don’t worry,” Nelson told her. “They’re your friends now. They know you came to save them.”
Charlotte wasn’t sure what those disease-ravaged brains knew. As more and more of the survivors crowded into the big elevator, she and Nelson were forced back into a corner. The stench of corrupted flesh filled the air and made her want to gag. She forced down the reaction.
“I . . . I thought you might want to leave here and go somewhere else,” she said. “Just the two of us.”
Nelson shook his head and said, “We wouldn’t make it. We need what’s down there, Charlotte.”
“But these people . . .” She suddenly felt queasy about what she had done and the possibilities she had opened up. Keeping her voice at a whisper only her husband could hear, she went on, “Most of them aren’t going to live.”
“Maybe not, but they’ll have more of a chance. And there’s something that’s more important, anyway.”
“What’s that?” Charlotte asked as someone at the front of the car pressed the button that closed the doors. Howls of outrage came from those left outside, but the doors cut off the sound.
“Revenge,” Nelson replied. “Revenge on Graham Moultrie and everyone else who turned their backs on us and left us up here in this hell.”
“You mean—”
“We’re going down there to kill as many of the bastards as we can. If we can manage it, we’ll kill ’em all.”
With a lurch, the overloaded elevator began to descend.
Chapter 37
The alarm went out over the walkie-talkies that had been issued to every member of the security force. The strident ringing brought Jill Sinclair up out of the bed she shared with her husband. Trevor was left behind in the rumpled covers, sitting up and looking confused as Jill dressed rapidly and buckled on the belt that had her holstered Gl
ock attached to it. Several loaded magazines were slid into pouches on the belt.
“What is it?” Trevor asked.
“Don’t know,” Jill said as she raked her hair back and put a band around it to keep it out of her eyes. “But that’s the general alarm, so it’s bad.”
“Like a red alert?”
“Yeah.” Jill opened the drawer in the nightstand on Trevor’s side of the bed and reached into it to bring out the 9mm Shield. She set it on the table and said, “Here. Get dressed, hang on to this, and put a couple of loaded magazines in your pocket.”
“I’m coming with you?”
She shook her head. “No, you’re staying here and readying for trouble.”
“I can come along—”
“No. I need to know that you’re here, protecting Bailey and Chris.”
“Of course I’ll protect them,” Trevor said as he stood up. “I’d die before I’d let anyone hurt them.”
Jill gave him a grim smile and said, “I’d rather you make any son of a bitch trying to hurt them die instead.” She leaned in, pressed her lips to his for a second, and then turned to run out of the bedroom.
Trevor picked up the little semi-automatic, looked at it, and took deep breaths as he tried to control his wildly hammering heartbeat.
* * *
Adam Threadgill leaned against the console and ignored the pain from the bullet wound in his side. It was bleeding heavily, but he was pretty sure the slug had bored through without hitting his ribs or nicking any internal organs. If that was the case, he wasn’t going to die, although he might pass out from blood loss.
He knew he couldn’t afford to let that happen. Not yet, anyway.
He bent down, fought off a wave of dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him, and grasped Charles Trahn’s shirt collar. He hauled the groggy technician upright and propped him against the console.
“Trahn!” Threadgill said urgently. “Trahn, come on, damn it. Wake up.”
Trahn muttered something Threadgill couldn’t make out. Threadgill didn’t know if the guy was speaking Vietnamese or was just incoherent from being knocked out.
The Doomsday Bunker Page 24