“Wade, Rodriguez, Adams, you come with me,” Larkin said without addressing Crandall’s suggestion. “The rest of you take Blakely’s body back and make sure Jenkins and Herring get there okay, too.”
“We’re goin’ after that truck?” Wade asked.
“That’s right.”
“And taking him with us?” Wade nodded toward Crandall.
“Can’t really stop him from coming along without shooting him, now can we?”
Wade looked like he didn’t mind that idea, but he didn’t say anything.
“You won’t regret this,” Crandall said. “You’ll find that I’m a good guy to have on your side . . . what is your name, anyway, buddy?”
“It’s Larkin. Patrick Larkin.”
“Pleased to meet you in person this time.”
Some of the other men looked like they agreed with Wade and wanted to argue with Larkin’s decision, but they didn’t say anything when he told them to get moving back to the project. Larkin turned back to Crandall, nodded, and said, “Let’s go get that gas.”
Chapter 45
The concussion from the nuclear blast had knocked down the convenience store’s walls, except for a few remnants on the west side of the building. Everything inside it had burned or melted, including the people. The gas pumps and the awning that had been over them were gone. Larkin thought it was lucky the underground tanks hadn’t ignited.
The hillside north and west of the store had been covered with a housing development, he recalled. All those dwellings were gone now. Only a few vestiges of foundations remained to testify that dozens of families had lived here once. Looking at what was left, it was like those days had been centuries earlier, instead of less than a year.
Larkin and his companions hadn’t encountered anyone else in the time it had taken them to cover the mile from the site of the ambush. Wade had muttered several times along the way that Crandall might be leading them into a trap. Larkin didn’t believe that was the case, but he couldn’t rule out the possibility entirely. That was the main reason he had split his force. If Crandall was trying some sort of trick, the whole group from the project wouldn’t be wiped out. The others would get back and be able to tell Moultrie what had happened.
The air of desolation around the entire place was overwhelming, though. Larkin didn’t see any threats, just the old tanker truck parked next to what remained of the store’s walls.
“With the road full of cars, we’ll have to drive in the ditch,” he commented. “It’ll be slow going.”
“You can get there,” Crandall said. “Might have to push down a fence or two along the way, but the truck’s big enough to do that without any trouble.”
Larkin looked at the smaller road that led to the top of the ridge. Since he was this close, he wasn’t going to turn back without taking that look around he wanted.
“Wade, Rodriguez, you guys guard that truck,” he said. The third man was one of the engineers, so Larkin told him, “Adams, you scavenge the parts we need for the generators from some of these cars.”
“It may take a while to find everything we need,” Adams said.
“That’s all right. Crandall and I are going up to the top of the hill.”
“We are?” Crandall said.
“That’s right. Unless you know of some reason not to.”
The man shook his head. “It’s fine by me. Good view from up there.” He paused. “Too bad there’s not much to see.”
“Be careful, Cap,” Wade said. “I still don’t trust this guy.”
“I’m always careful,” Larkin said. “Just ask my wife. On the other hand, don’t.”
He and Crandall walked along the side road, which went up and down a couple of smaller hills before climbing to the top of the ridge. As they headed in that direction, Crandall asked, “Why does the kid call you Cap? You have military ranks down there in the project?”
Larkin shook his head. “No, that’s just him. I don’t know why he decided to do it, but it seemed like more trouble than it would be worth to break him of the habit. We’re both members of the project’s security force, but it’s not set up like a military outfit. More law enforcement.”
“I was just curious. It sort of suits you, Larkin. Guys like you may be as close to Captain America as anybody the world has left.” Crandall was silent for a moment, then said, “Speaking of that . . . have you made contact with other survivors anywhere else?”
“We picked up some shortwave transmissions fairly early on from some foreign country. People who knew more about it than I did seemed to think they were coming from Brazil. They stopped after a while, though. If there’s been anything else, I don’t know about it. What about you?”
Crandall frowned over at him. “Me? I don’t have access to any sort of technology other than my rifle and my bike, man.”
“You said you came here from West Texas. There must be quite a few people still alive out there.”
“Some,” Crandall admitted. “Probably a lot less by now. With all the tech fried and people having to get by on their own survival skills . . . well, you seem pretty smart. You ought to be able to make a good guess on how that worked out.”
“A lot of starvation and dying of infection after minor injuries, right?”
“Yeah, boy. The food in the stores ran out in a hurry, and with no more coming in, folks were left eating whatever they could get their hands on. I don’t imagine there’s a dog or cat left west of the Brazos unless it’s feral and stays far away from humans. And any kind of sickness, even a plain old cold, was fatal more often than not. That’s one reason I left. Just couldn’t stand to watch it all fall apart anymore. So I headed for a place where I knew things would be even worse.” Crandall let out a bark of laughter. “I never claimed that all of my decisions in life made sense. I got some exes who would testify to that.”
“What about now? Maybe they’ve tried to start doing some farming. Or is the soil too contaminated?”
“Don’t know. I’ve never been a farmer. But it seems like something worth trying.”
“One of these days,” Larkin mused. He was thinking about the Hercules Project’s hydroponic garden and the rabbits and chickens that had supplemented the food supplies. Seeds and livestock. Those were the keys to the future. Those and . . .
“Did the sun ever shine while you were out there? Did it rain?”
“No sunshine,” Crandall replied, shaking his head. “But some days it looked like the clouds were thinner, almost like the sun might break through. Man, it would be good to see some blue sky again. We got a little rain now and then. Not much, mind you, but that part of the country was never noted for being very rainy to start with. I mean, it’s West Texas, man. It’s hot and dry. Or I guess now it’s cold and dry.”
“But could you grow anything? Would it be fit to eat if you did?”
“If you had a really green thumb . . . maybe. But it’d take somebody who knows more than I do to tell you if you could eat it.”
While they were talking, they had almost reached the top of the ridgeline. A few more yards and they were there. Larkin stopped and took a good long look around. He remembered that on clear days, it had been possible to see downtown Fort Worth from here, although it was at least ten miles away to the east.
That wasn’t true anymore, at least not today. Visibility was no more than a mile in any direction. Then a persistent haze took over. That was probably from the ash still in the air, Larkin thought. The ash that stunk in his nose at this very moment.
His disappointment must have shown on his face. Crandall said, “Didn’t see what you wanted to see?”
“I’m not sure I ever will again,” Larkin said.
* * *
By the time they got back down to the convenience store, Adams had pulled a canvas bag full of parts off several cars that now had their hoods up. He hefted the bag and told Larkin, “I think we can adapt these to the generators. If not, we know now that we can come back out here and try t
o find more.”
“And we can do it without the damn hazmat suits next time,” Wade said. “It stinks out here and it’s cold, but somehow it beats bein’ locked up underground.” He shook his head. “That’s too much like, well . . .”
“Being buried?” Larkin suggested.
“Yeah. I know logically that bein’ down there is the only thing that saved us, but still . . . we’re human beings, Cap, not gophers or worms.”
Crandall nodded and said, “Folks aren’t meant to live under the ground. We came out of the caves too long ago for that.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Larkin said. “If we’d really left the caves behind, we wouldn’t have lobbed all those bombs at each other, would we?”
None of the other men had an answer for that.
Adams climbed into the cab of the tanker truck, taking the bag of parts with him. It had already been hotwired in the past, so all he had to do to start it was twist a couple of wires together. The engine coughed and rumbled to life.
“Rodriguez, ride shotgun with him,” Larkin said. “And I mean that literally. The rest of us will walk. Take it easy, Adams, and don’t get stuck anywhere. We don’t have any way to pull the truck out if you do.”
“I’ll be careful, Patrick,” Adams said over the noise of the engine.
Larkin, Crandall, and Wade led the way toward the project. The truck rolled along slowly behind them.
After a while, Crandall said, “Does the fact that you’re letting me come along mean I get to go down into the project with you?”
“That’s not up to me,” Larkin said. “Graham Moultrie will have to make that decision.”
“I remember hearing Ruskin talk about him. He’s the head man down there?”
“Yeah.”
Crandall chuckled. “As you can imagine, Ruskin wasn’t that fond of him.”
“Moultrie did what he had to do,” Larkin said. He didn’t mention the misgivings he had started to have about the founder of the Hercules Project. He still wanted to believe that Moultrie’s actions were meant to protect the residents.
As if Crandall had read his thoughts, the man said, “Yeah, a lot of people start out that way. Then they find out how much fun it is to have so much power.”
Larkin didn’t say anything. He had enough trouble wrestling with his own doubts without putting them into words.
They passed the site of the ambush. The dead men had been pulled over to one side. Larkin saw something scurry around the corpses and then vanish into the creek bed. He lifted his rifle and said, “What the hell was that?”
“Rats,” Crandall said. “Big mothers, too. I guess only the biggest and the strongest survived.”
“Or the radiation changed them,” Wade said. “Now they’re mutant rats.”
Larkin said, “I think I saw one earlier, but I didn’t know what it was. And stop talking about mutants, Wade, especially when we get back down to the project. You don’t want people to start panicking over nothing.”
“Giant rats aren’t nothin’, Cap. That’s something to worry about when we come back up here. By then there’s no tellin’ how big they’re gonna be.”
Larkin just shook his head and kept walking. After a moment he said to Crandall, “Sorry about your friends back there. They didn’t really give us a choice.”
“Oh, hell, I know that. I wouldn’t call them friends, either. They were kind of like those rats. Scavengers. Can’t blame them for it, at all, but it doesn’t change what they were, either.” Crandall was silent for a moment, then went on, “You’re thinking about moving back up to the surface, aren’t you?”
“I don’t believe a day has gone by when I didn’t think about it,” Larkin admitted. “Most of us down there, we didn’t go in thinking that we’d be there the rest of our lives. At least we hoped we wouldn’t be. A year, maybe two, and then it would be safe to come back up and start over.”
“In this?” Crandall waved a hand to indicated their surroundings.
Larkin looked at the hell-blasted landscape and shook his head. “No. This part of the world isn’t ready yet. Maybe it won’t be for a long time. But you came from someplace better.” He turned to look at Crandall. “You can take us back there.”
For a couple of heartbeats, Crandall didn’t respond. Then he said, “Now I get it. You help me, I help you. But there’s nowhere to go, Larkin. Nowhere good, anyway. It’s not some damn paradise out in West Texas. Life out there is hard and brutal.”
“But better than here.”
Again, Crandall was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged and said, “Probably. But not as good as you’ve got it down in that bunker. Hell, man, you should just stay there as long as you can. Come out long enough to look around for what you need, like that gas.”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the truck creeping along behind them.
“Some people might want to do that,” Larkin said.
“But not you.”
“If we’re being honest . . . no, I don’t. You say it’s a hard, brutal life out west, but I can’t believe it’s any more hard and brutal than it was a couple of hundred years ago when the first settlers started across there. Sure, a lot of them died, but a lot survived, too, and made new lives for themselves. Better lives, to their way of thinking.”
“So you want to be a pioneer, like in the old days.”
“Well, you know what they say.” Larkin smiled. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Crandall laughed. “Yeah . . . like some guys being as stubborn as mules.”
“You sound like you’ve been talking to my wife,” Larkin said.
The truck had to go so slowly, navigating through the ditches where they were shallow and cutting through what had been fields before the war, that it took quite a while to get back to the project’s entrance. They didn’t encounter any trouble along the way, although Larkin remained alert for it. When they reached the remnants of the asphalt road, they followed it up to the collapsed building that housed the service elevator.
Larkin waved at Adams to indicate that he should park the truck by what was left of a wall. Adams did so and then killed the engine. He and Rodriguez climbed down, bringing the bag of parts with them.
“You’re coming with us,” Larkin said to Crandall. “It’ll still be up to Moultrie to decide whether or not you can stay.”
“Guess I can’t ask for any more than that.”
They went down the ramp into the basement. The elevator stood open. Larkin kind of hated to get in it and descend once more into the earth, but his family was down there, and they were more important to him than anything else.
What kind of life would it be for all of them if they left the Hercules Project and struck out to the west? Would it be fair to Bailey and Chris to take them away from the comforts and advantages they had, sparse though those might be? Could they all survive out there? Plenty of the old pioneers hadn’t, Larkin reminded himself. The West was littered with thousands of unmarked, forgotten graves.
But if nobody tried, nothing would ever get better. And they had to start over sometime. The supplies stored down in the project wouldn’t last forever and couldn’t be replenished fast enough to keep up with the demand. Another year at most and there wouldn’t be any choice in the matter. Maybe it would be better to make the attempt now . . .
Those thoughts went through Larkin’s brain as the elevator descended slowly. He still hadn’t reached a decision when it stopped and the door slid to the side, opening into the short passage off Corridor Two.
Any consideration of the future vanished abruptly from Larkin’s brain as he stiffened, his hands tightening on the rifle he held. Alarm surged up inside him. He exclaimed, “What the hell?”
Somewhere not too far off, gunfire echoed through the Hercules Project.
Chapter 46
Larkin charged out of the elevator with the other men close behind him. Adams dropped the bag of engine parts. They rattled and clanked as t
he bag hit the floor.
Larkin followed the sounds. They were coming from the direction of the Command Center. No one was in the corridor, and the deserted look of it just increased the worry he felt. Something was badly wrong, and the only thing he could think of was that the Bullpenners, led probably by Chad Holdstock, had rebelled against Moultrie and tried to take over.
Were there enough of them to do that? Larkin knew it was possible, especially if they were able to break into the armory and get their hands on a good supply of guns and ammunition.
From the sound of it, that was what was going on. The racket was that of a full-fledged battle.
“What’s all the shooting about?” Crandall asked a little breathlessly as he ran along with Larkin and the others. “I thought you folks all got along down here!”
“Not even close,” Larkin snapped. Up ahead were double metal doors leading into the long foyer that ran between the end of the two corridors. A silo was at each end, with the entrance to the Command Center in the middle. Larkin turned a little as he ran, hit the right-hand door with his shoulder, and bulled through it.
The gunfire came from his right. He swung in that direction, saw men falling back from the Command Center entrance, firing rifles and handguns as they retreated toward Corridor One. More men, some of them wearing the red vests of the security force, poured out of the entrance and fired at the ones who were fleeing. Larkin took in all of that in a split second and knew where his loyalties lay.
Then the world was yanked right out from under his feet.
Because his daughter was among those retreating.
Larkin came to a dead stop. Across that distance of fifty yards, his stunned gaze locked with Jill’s. She had a pistol in her hand and was laying down covering fire, fighting a rearguard action as those with her tried to get away. For a split second they looked at each other.
Then a bullet slammed into her and twisted her around. Larkin saw the blood fly. Jill went to one knee, then staggered up and stumbled after the others.
Rage erupted inside Larkin. He didn’t know what was going on here, didn’t know which side was in the right, but he knew one thing.
The Doomsday Bunker Page 30