The Doomsday Bunker

Chapter 25

May 16, the following year

Larkin hurried toward the angry shouts, pushing through the crowd in the Bullpen. He didn’t know who had given the lower bunker that name, but someone had done so fairly early on, and it had stuck.

“Break it up!” he yelled, the time-honored command of authority wading into a mob.

Resentful faces turned to glare at him. A man said, “It’s the Redshirts! Look out!”

That was just wrong on so many levels, Larkin thought. For one thing, the security force wore red vests. Larkin hadn’t been able to talk Moultrie and Fisher out of that readily identifiable garment, and he supposed they had a point. For another, the man’s frightened cry, along with the reactions of the people who shrank away from him, made it seem like he was here to hurt them, rather than doing his job and protecting them. Larkin didn’t like being seen as the bad guy.

On the other hand, he did have a job to do, and it included breaking up fights before anybody was injured seriously.

Susan, Jill, and the rest of the medical staff had enough to do without having to deal with broken noses, busted knuckles, and all the bruises and scratches that came with brawling.

The crowd parted enough for him to get through to the area in the middle of the huge chamber where four men were fighting. Two of them rolled around on the floor, wrestling with each other, while the other two stood toe-to-toe, slugging it out. Larkin recognized all of them.

The two on the floor were Chad Holdstock and Michael Pomeroy. The two sluggers were Jeff Greer and Zeke Ortega. Holdstock and Greer were part of Charlotte Ruskin’s group of malcontents. They’d probably been mouthing off, and Pomeroy and Ortega had taken exception to it. There was no telling who had thrown the first punch. With tensions in the Hercules Project as high as they were, it could have been any of them.

It didn’t matter who started the fight, Larkin reminded himself. His job was to end it.

The pair on the floor grappling with each other were closest to him, and Holdstock was on top at the moment, trying to wrap his hands around Pomeroy’s throat. Larkin stepped in, bent over, and grabbed Holdstock from behind, sliding his arms under the man’s arms and then locking his left hand around his right wrist in front of Holdstock’s chest. With a grunt of effort, he heaved upward and hauled Holdstock off Pomeroy. Turning, Larkin gave Holdstock a shove that sent him stumbling into the crowd.

“I said break it up!” Larkin repeated. As he swung around, he saw Pomeroy scrambling to his feet. The look on Pomeroy’s face told Larkin he was eager to go after Holdstock and continue the fight. Larkin thrust his left hand toward Pomeroy, palm out in an order to stop, and added, “Damn it, back off !”

Pomeroy stopped, but his hands were still clenched into fists.

Larkin moved around him toward Greer and Ortega. Greer had moved into Charlotte Ruskin’s quarters in Corridor Two a while back. People’s personal lives were their own business. The security force didn’t care who slept with who as long as they were peaceful about it. But Greer’s relationship with Charlotte Ruskin probably had a lot to do with his dislike for Graham Moultrie and his frequent bitching about the things Moultrie and the project staff did.

Ever since Day One, the day of the nuclear war—that was how they measured time here in the Hercules Project; today was Day 247—Charlotte Ruskin had caused trouble. She hadn’t physically attacked anyone again, but she complained constantly about anything and everything. A few months in, she had started holding meetings in the Bullpen, meetings at which she had given loud, angry speeches about Moultrie’s leadership. Larkin hadn’t attended any of those gatherings, but he’d heard that she was comparing Moultrie to Hitler and his security force to the Gestapo. That appealed to people like Beth Huddleston, since playing the Hitler card had always been one of the Left’s go-to tactics in political arguments.

And despite Larkin’s hope that they were now beyond all that partisan bullshit—that the residents would understand they were in this together—almost right from the start it had been evident that wasn’t going to be the case. Factions had formed almost right away. “Democrat” and “Republican” might not mean much anymore, but now there were Bullpenners, Corridor People, and the Silo-ites—a name that Larkin hated with a passion. Varying degrees of Haves and Have-nots, although anybody who looked at the situation with a clear-eyed, practical bent could see right away that nobody down here “had” much more than anybody else.

Sure, the people who lived in the corridors and the silo apartments enjoyed a little more room and privacy than the ones in the Bullpen, but that had been everyone’s choice to make. Nobody was living in the damn lap of luxury, as Larkin had pointed out during more than one argument with Beth Huddleston, who had appointed herself the spokesperson for and guardian of the so-called downtrodden—not that she was just about to give up anything of her own in order to “share their pain.”

Charlotte Ruskin, fueled by grief over her husband’s death and her hatred for Graham Moultrie, used that festering discontent to stir up trouble. Larkin knew it, Moultrie knew it, and so did everybody else on the security force, but, per Moultrie’s orders, there wasn’t much they could do about it. This tiny outpost was still America, after all, and people had rights.

But when they started throwing punches… then Larkin could step in and do what was necessary to keep the peace.

Which was what he did now as he moved toward Greer and Ortega. He had gotten close when Greer hooked a left into Ortega’s stomach that doubled him over, then followed with a right uppercut that sent Ortega flying backward. Larkin braced himself and caught the man.

Ortega hung loosely in Larkin’s grip, only semiconscious. Greer bored in with his fists cocked, evidently so caught up in the heat of battle he didn’t notice who had hold of Ortega.

“Hang on to him!” he cried. “I’ll teach the bastard a lesson he’ll never forget!”

“Damn it!” Larkin turned and pushed Ortega into the waiting arms of the crowd, several of whom grabbed him and kept him from falling. He put his hand out in a warding-off gesture, as he had with Pomeroy. “Back off, Greer!”

The man’s chest rammed hard against Larkin’s hand, but Larkin was bigger and had set his feet. Greer grunted from the contact and fell back a step.

“Larkin!” A scowl twisted Greer’s face. “Come to strut around in your red shirt and give orders?”

Larkin started to say something about how it was a vest, not a shirt, then stopped as he realized how pointless that was. He kept his hand up and said, “I don’t know what this is about—”

“He called Charlotte a bitch!”

Maybe if she wouldn’t act like one… The thought started to form in Larkin’s mind, but he shook it away. “That’s no excuse for going after a guy.”

“Isn’t it? What would you do if somebody called your wife a bitch, Larkin?”

Larkin knew good and well what he would feel like doing in that case. Whether or not he gave in to the urge would depend on other factors, he supposed. He liked to think he could control himself, but if he was being honest, he didn’t know if that would always be the case.

“Look, if you and Ortega don’t get along, just stay away from each other.”

“Yeah, that’s easier said than done. You can’t exactly go for much of a walk down here, man.”

Greer revolved his hand to take in their surroundings. He had a point there, too. This underground chamber seemed vast, but when you were stuck down here all the time, it shrunk in a hurry. People could walk around the Bullpen and then go upstairs and walk the full length of both corridors in less than fifteen minutes. It didn’t take long to start feeling like the concrete walls were closing in.

“You’re gonna have to find some other way to deal with your problems, Greer,” Larkin said. “You can’t just start whaling away on people.”

A man in the crowd yelled, “Yeah, if you do that, the Redshirts will drag you away to jail, Jeff!”

Larkin looked around, unsure who had said that. His jaw tightened. “Nobody’s getting dragged to jail—”

“Damn right,” Holdstock said from behind him, “because there’s only one of you. Where are the rest of your fascist buddies, Larkin?”

Fascist. There it was again. Larkin hadn’t been born until World War II was over, but he was old enough to have known men who had fought in it. One of his uncles had been in the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Another had been on the Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea and had survived by the skin of his teeth when the carrier went down. A guy like Holdstock could start an argument in an empty room, so he was viewed mostly as a hothead. A lot of muttering came from the crowd. Larkin could tell that some supported Greer and Holdstock while others were on the side of Pomeroy and Ortega. It wouldn’t take much for this to go from a fight to a full-scale riot. He didn’t want that.

“Look,” he said. “Why don’t all of you just move on—”

“What’s going on here?” a shrill voice demanded. Charlotte Ruskin came through the crowd, pushing people aside. She stopped in front of Larkin, put her hands on her hips, and glared at him. “What are you doing, Larkin? Carrying out Moultrie’s illegal orders to harass my friends?”

“My only orders are to keep the peace,” Larkin said as he struggled to keep a tight rein on his temper.

That wasn’t easy where Charlotte Ruskin was concerned. She was like fingernails on a blackboard. She was around forty, with dark red hair and the sort of looks that used to make people use the phrase “a handsome woman.” Not beautiful by any means, but she could be compelling, at least when she wasn’t screeching like a harpy.

Now she snorted contemptuously at Larkin’s declaration about keeping the peace. “Funny how Moultrie’s idea of peace is beating people up and putting them behind bars.”

In point of fact, there were several small chambers adjacent to the Command Center where people could be detained, but they were hardly jail cells and there were no bars, just doors. Those confinement rooms were seldom used. Mostly they served as a place where somebody could sleep it off if they got drunk and started causing trouble. Liquor was supposedly controlled—Moultrie had learned quickly that people under as much stress as they were in the Hercules Project didn’t need unlimited access to alcohol—but some of them found a way to get their hands on booze anyway. It was an age-old story, Larkin supposed.

“Nobody’s getting locked up,” he began again. “These guys blew off some steam, and that’s the end of it—if they’ll go on about their business.”

Greer bunched his fists and stuck his jaw out defiantly. “What if we’re tired of shutting up and rolling over?” he said. “What if we’ve decided it’s time to start fighting for our rights?”

He was just showing off for his girlfriend, Larkin thought. But before he could respond to Greer, the loudspeakers crackled and Graham Moultrie’s voice filled the bunker. His tone betrayed his excitement as he said, “Attention, please. I need your attention, everyone. We’ve just received a signal—from outside!”

Chapter 26

That news made everyone in the bunker fall silent—but only for a few seconds.

Then voices erupted in shouts of surprise, joy, and maybe even a little apprehension. During the past eight months, people had settled into a life here, despite its drawbacks.

Who knew what might be going on in the outside world?

For all this time, everything had been silent up there. The Internet, wireless networks, shortwave radio… all had been quiet. The project’s instruments showed that radiation levels had dropped steadily and exponentially since the day of the war, but the initial readings had been almost off the charts, indicating that the warhead that had fallen on Arlington had been a high-yield and extremely dirty one. The contamination was still bad enough to be dangerous to human life. Moultrie wasn’t going to risk the whole project and everyone in it by unbuttoning too soon.

A significant number of the residents were convinced that the people down here were the last human beings on Earth. They had formed their own group and called themselves the Sole Survivors. Their philosophy was a blend of apocalyptic hysteria and religion. Larkin thought their beliefs were a little far-fetched—the chances of the residents of the Hercules Project being the only ones left seemed unlikely to him—but as far as he was concerned, whatever got them through the days and nights was their business.

If there were people still alive on the surface, that would shoot holes in the Sole Survivors’ dogma, but they would just have to get over that and move forward. Larkin, like everybody else in the bunker, was excited and eager to hear what Moultrie had to say.

“We’ve picked up a shortwave radio transmission,” the project’s leader continued, causing a hushed, attentive silence to fall again. “It was very brief and fragmentary, probably caused by signal skip in the upper atmosphere. Someone was sending old-fashioned Morse code. We weren’t able to transcribe complete sentences, just parts of individual words here and there, so we don’t’t know who they are or where they’re located. They were sending in a foreign language, possibly Portuguese, so right now we’re speculating that the message may have originated in Brazil. That seems to be the most likely possibility. But even though we don’t actually know much at this time, we can be sure of this: we are not alone. There were others who lived through that terrible day, and it’s only a matter of time until the human race is reunited again. Until then, God bless each and every one of us in the Hercules Project.”

The loudspeakers clicked off, another second went by, and then another storm of cheers and whistles burst out. People hugged and pounded each other on the back. Some kissed, some even danced around. They were excited and justifiably so. This terrible ordeal they were enduring probably still had a long way to go, but now, for the first time, it was possible to glimpse some hope for the future again.

The fight Larkin had broken up seemed to be forgotten, at least for now, but he didn’t fully trust Charlotte Ruskin and her friends. Greer had grabbed Charlotte and was hugging her so tightly her feet had come off the floor. She wasn’t a petite woman, so that probably wasn’t easy. It showed how excited Greer was, though.

Larkin turned, caught the eye of Pomeroy and Ortega, and motioned with a thumb for them to take off. Putting some distance between them and their former opponents would go a long way toward restoring the peace. Pomeroy nodded and faded off into the celebrating crowd, but Ortega hesitated before moving closer to Larkin.

“Listen, man, you don’t know what those two were saying,” Ortega said, keeping his voice quiet enough that only Larkin could hear him in the hubbub. “They were talking about how it’s time to take control of the project away from Moultrie.”

“There are always malcontents, wherever you go,” Larkin said. “Those two were just letting out some hot air.”

Ortega shook his head. “No, they were saying Moultrie’s a dictator and he’s got to be overthrown.” He leaned closer. “They want to take over and open up the bunker. They say it’s time to go back up.”

A chill went through Larkin at that. Moultrie kept all the members of the security force updated on surface conditions. Larkin knew it wasn’t safe there yet. He understood why people wanted to get back up top and see the sun again, take stock of what was left and what might be possible going forward, but rushing things could spell doom for all of them.

Ortega went on, “Mike and I told ’em they were crazy, and they jumped us. That’s what started the whole thing.”

Larkin nodded and said, “Thanks for filling me in, Zeke.”

“Of course, I guess it’s not completely their fault. That Ruskin woman keeps stirrin’ ’em up.”

“I know,” Larkin said. “Maybe this news today will change things.”

“I sure hope so,” Ortega said, then he drifted off into the crowd, too.

Larkin looked around. More than likely, the excitement that gripped the bunker would keep things relatively peaceful here for a while. Anyway, he wasn’t the only security man on duty. He started toward the closest set of stairs leading up to the corridors.

In the wake of Moultrie’s announcement, he wanted to see his wife.

Susan had been treating a patient with a cold that was threatening to turn into a sinus infection when Moultrie’s announcement came over the public-address system. Colds—good old upper-respiratory viruses—weren’t as common down here as they had been in the world before the war, but they hadn’t been wiped out because a number of people had been sick when they entered the Hercules Project. In a closed environment like this, it was inevitable that the virus would be passed around. A person couldn’t catch the same virus twice, but with more than 200 of the little bastards that caused the common cold, Susan didn’t believe the ailment would ever be wiped out completely. Maybe if generation after generation of residents lived down here for the next couple of hundred years…

Of course, if it came down to that, they’d probably have lots worse things to think about than the sniffles. Human beings weren’t wired to spend their whole lives underground, like worms in the earth.

In the meantime, there wasn’t much that could be done about colds. People just had to suffer through them, as they had done before the war. But occasionally the damage done by the virus turned into a bacterial infection, and Susan thought that was the case in the elderly man she was examining today. His nasal secretions were thick and green, and he was running a fever. He was going to need a round of antibiotics. Susan didn’t want the infection settling into his lungs and turning into pneumonia.

She’d been about to tell him that when Moultrie’s voice came over the speaker, delivering the news of the shortwave transmission that probably had originated in Brazil. That had excited the patient so much he’d wanted to forget about the exam and rush back to his apartment to see his wife.

“Not just yet, Mr. Bardwell,” Susan told him. “I’m as thrilled to hear about that as you are, but you don’t need to leave until I’ve written you a prescription for antibiotics. You’ll need to fill it today, too. Don’t wait until tomorrow to get started on these.”

“All right, Dr. Larkin,” the man said. “But this sure is great news, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” Susan agreed with a smile. She had long since given up trying to get people to stop referring to her as “Doctor.” Early on, she had been pressed into the role of nurse-practitioner, since a couple of the people who hadn’t made it to the bunker in time that fateful day had been MDs Moultrie was counting on to work in the project’s clinic. Like most nurses, Susan knew as much on a practical level as most doctors did, at least when it came to general ailments. She’d been able to make up some of the clinic’s personnel shortage. Right now, in fact, she was the only member of the medical staff on duty.

Jill helped out now and then, too, when she could find the time between her work in the pharmacy and her duties as a member of the security force. Susan still didn’t care for the idea of her daughter being in the middle of trouble when it broke out, but she had to admit that Jill was able to take care of herself.

Mr. Bardwell took the prescription Susan wrote for him and hurried out of the exam room. With the door open, Susan could hear cheers coming from elsewhere in the project. People were excited, obviously.

Jill appeared in the doorway a moment later with a big smile on her face. “You heard that, Mom? You heard?”

Susan said, “I heard. It’s wonderful news, isn’t it? We’re not… alone in the world after all.” She frowned slightly as she went on, “But I just sent a patient to the pharmacy for some antibiotics. Shouldn’t you be there?”

“Sandy Carter is working right now. She should have everything covered. I’ve got to go find Trev and the kids!” Jill threw her arms around her mother and gave her an exuberant hug. Susan didn’t often see her daughter this excited. Normally, Jill was on the cool and reserved side, as quiet and pragmatic as her father.

“The kids will be in school,” Susan called after her as Jill started out of the clinic. “You shouldn’t interrupt—”

She stopped, realizing that the same sort of excitement gripping the rest of the project was probably on display in the school, as well. The teachers and kids were all human. They would be as thrilled as anyone else to hear that there was other life in the world, that they weren’t the only ones left.

The clinic’s waiting room was empty. There had been three more patients there earlier. Susan looked at the receptionist, Becky Hammond, and asked, “What happened to everybody?”

“They all rushed out when they heard the news. I don’t think we’re likely to have any more business today, Susan.”

“Well, maybe not. But I’ll stay until the end of my shift anyway. If you want to go…”

Becky edged out from her little cubicle. “I’d really like to go find my husband…”

Susan laughed and waved a hand. “Go.”

“Don’t you want to see Patrick?”

“If I know my husband, he’ll be showing up here before too much… Speak of the devil.”

Larkin ambled through the entrance. He poked a thumb against his chest and said, “Me? I’m the devil?”

“Of course not. But I was expecting to see you, and here you are.”

“Great minds think alike.” Larkin took her in his arms and held her. Becky hurried out of the clinic, waving good-bye to Susan over Larkin’s shoulder as she left.

After a moment, Susan stepped back and said, “It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

She looked at him, saw the slight frown furrowing his forehead, and said, “What’s wrong? You don’t sound very enthusiastic, and I can tell that you’re thinking about something.”

“A possibility occurred to me on the way over here. That was a shortwave message they picked up. Morse code, Moultrie said. My guess is that whoever sent it is looking for signs of human life just like we’ve been doing. We send out shortwave messages around the clock, too. It’s all automated.”

“So?”

Larkin sighed. “So what if the message we picked up is the same thing? An automated signal being sent out by some other survivors?”

“I don’t see why that would be a bad thing,” Susan said.

“Because unless we can answer them and get some response back from them, we don’t know that they’re really out there. We don’t have any way of knowing how long that signal has been going out. The system sending it could be programmed to keep doing so as long as it has power, even if whoever set it up in the first place isn’t… there anymore.”

“You mean dead,” Susan said, a bleak note entering her voice.

Larkin’s broad shoulders rose and fell. “That’s probably not the case, but it could be. Everybody’s getting excited about communicating with the outside world, but we aren’t, really. Not yet. It could be just… a ghost signal.”

“You don’t know that. It could be that Graham is talking to those people in Brazil or wherever they are, and he just hasn’t announced it yet.”

“Sure,” Larkin said, nodding. “That’s what I’m going to hope for. I’m just a little worried that if it doesn’t turn out that way, a lot of people are going to be really disappointed. And that’s a problem.”

“How so?”

“Because when people are disappointed,” Larkin said, “sometimes they get mad, too.”

Chapter 27

May 23

Living underground like this, night and day didn’t mean much. It would have been easy to lose track of time completely. Knowing that, Moultrie insisted on an ironclad schedule. He had programmed the times of sunrise and sunset for the next year into the computers that controlled the lighting in the Hercules Project, and each day at the appropriate time the lights dimmed to almost nothing—many of them went off entirely—or brightened to simulate the dawning of a new day. Large monitors located in various places displayed the date and time. One thing he didn’t worry about was Daylight Savings Time, sticking with what it had been when the bunker was closed up.

The temperature went down at night as well, not proportionate to what it would have in an uncontrolled environment, but rather just enough to give a suggestion of what would have been natural. If there had been any way to replicate rain that wouldn’t cause too much trouble, he probably would have provided that as well, but some things just had to be done without.

Larkin hadn’t forgotten what it was like to feel the sun and the wind on his face. He hoped they would be outside again soon enough that he wouldn’t forget, and no one else would, either.

He and Susan were in their apartment in Silo A one evening, watching a movie streaming from the project’s library, when a knock sounded on the door. Larkin paused the movie and went to answer it.

Chuck Fisher was there, and Larkin was a little surprised to see that Jill and Threadgill were with the security director. Fisher’s expression was grim.

“What’s up?” Larkin asked.

“Charlotte Ruskin and her friends are having a rally downstairs this evening. They went around putting up signs about it. They’re going to demand a vote to replace Graham.”

“They can’t do that. This isn’t a political system. Graham wasn’t elected to start with. How can they have an election to replace him?”

“They seem to have the idea that if they have the numbers on their side, they can do whatever they want.”

Larkin grimaced and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Go down there and put a stop to it,” Fisher answered without hesitation.

Larkin glanced at his daughter and saw the worried frown on her face. Threadgill didn’t look too sure about this, either.

“Don’t you think that confronting them might just make things worse? They stand around and shake their fists in the air and yell a little, and it blows off steam.”

“Yelling and shaking their fists in the air like Hitler did? That didn’t work out very well, did it?”

Larkin winced this time. He said, “Don’t play the Hitler card, Chuck. You never win an argument by playing the Hitler card.”

“I’m not arguing,” Fisher snapped. “I’m telling you, as the director of security, what I’m going to do. I’d like for you to come along, Patrick, but if you don’t want to be part of the force anymore—”

“My dad didn’t say that, Mr. Fisher,” Jill put in.

Larkin wasn’t too happy about that, either. He could express his own opinion without his daughter having to stick up for him.

“Look, Chuck, I never said I wouldn’t go with you—”

Susan had come up beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Go where? What’s going on, Patrick?”

Larkin turned to look at her. “Charlotte Ruskin’s stirring up trouble again. She and her friends are staging some sort of rally downstairs, trying to convince people they can vote to replace Graham Moultrie.”

“How can they replace him? He’s the one who built this project.”

“That’s what I said, but—”

“The woman’s a danger,” Fisher broke in. “It’s our job to keep the peace, and she’s trying to disrupt it. Simple as that.”

In Larkin’s experience, not many things in life actually were simple if you took a close enough look at them. But Fisher had a point. Charlotte Ruskin’s actions were going to cause trouble. That trouble had to be dealt with.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Get your gun.”

Fisher, Jill, and Threadgill were all wearing pistols. Larkin thought a display of force like that might just aggravate the situation, but on the other hand, they would probably be outnumbered by quite a bit and just the presence of some firepower might keep things from getting out of hand.

“All right,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

His holstered .45 was on the table next to the sofa where he and Susan had been sitting as they watched TV. He got it and snapped the holster onto his belt. When he returned to the door, he found Susan and Jill standing there talking quietly. Fisher and Threadgill had moved off across the little foyer and into the elevator.

Susan put her hand on Larkin’s arm and said in a voice low enough that the other two men wouldn’t overhear, “I don’t like this very much, Patrick.”

“Neither do I. If Fisher gets too gung-ho, Ruskin and her people can turn it around and use it against us. We’re the ones who’ll come off looking like Nazis.”

“Maybe we can keep things tamped down enough it won’t come to that,” Jill suggested.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Larkin said. “Come on, kid.”

The four of them took the elevator down one level, which let them out into the foyer in front of Jim and Beth Huddleston’s apartment. Larkin had seen both of the Huddlestons fairly often since they’d been down here, although the two families didn’t really socialize, just as they hadn’t when they’d been next-door neighbors up on the surface. Jim, given his restaurant experience, worked as a supervisor in the kitchen while Beth taught in the school.

Right now, the two of them were just coming out of their apartment as Larkin and his companions emerged from the elevator. Huddleston must have been able to tell from their grim faces that something was wrong, because he said, “Whoa. What’s going on?”

Fisher said, “We’re going to put a stop to some sort of rally Charlotte Ruskin’s holding this evening.”

Immediately, Beth said, “You can’t do that. We still have rights. What about freedom of assembly?”

“Are the two of you going to it?” Fisher asked, his voice sharp with suspicion.

“As a matter of fact, no,” Huddleston said, his tone conciliatory as always. With a wife like Beth, he had gotten used to smoothing over rough patches. “We’re on our way to a friend’s place over in Corridor Two for dinner.”

“But you can’t just barge in on a meeting, start waving guns around, and break it up,” Beth said. “That’s not right.”

Although Larkin would never admit it to her, this was one of the rare times he sort of agreed with Beth. He said, “We’re going to monitor the rally. There shouldn’t be any need for us to take action unless some sort of trouble breaks out.”

Fisher frowned, as if he wanted to say that Larkin didn’t have the authority to make that statement, but he kept his mouth shut. He had never been acquainted with Beth Huddleston before the war, but like anyone else who came in contact with her, he had learned quickly that it was a waste of time and energy to argue with her. Her opinions were as unmovable as if they’d been encased in a hundred tons of concrete.

“You need to be careful not to violate anyone’s rights,” Beth snapped.

“We’ll do our best,” Larkin said.

Beth sniffed, making it clear she thought their best was none too good. She and her husband went into the elevator. As the door slid closed with them behind it, Fisher said, “That man must have the patience of a saint.”

“Actually, he’s kind of a jerk part of the time,” Larkin said. “He was obsessed with his businesses and always hustling to make more money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not sure he ever thought about anything else.” Larkin shrugged. “It didn’t wind up doing him much good in the long run, did it?”

They followed a short hallway from the silo to a metal door with a push bar on it that opened into the vast, barracks-like lower level bunker. The walls were lined with tiers of bunk beds, while rows of single bunks were laid out to cover more than half of the floor space. Short partitions around groups of bunks provided a semblance of privacy. A common area in the center of the bunker had comfortable furniture, computer stations, a snack bar, and other amenities. Showers and restrooms were located at each end of the bunker. Back when he was still in the Corps, Larkin had once had cause to visit a federal minimum-security prison, and this bunker reminded him of that more than anything else.

A few people were in their bunks, but most of the residents who lived down here, plus some from the corridors and the silos, had crowded into the central common area. A lot of talk was going on, but nobody was making any speeches—yet.

Fisher looked around, his head jerking from side to side. Larkin knew he was trying to locate Charlotte Ruskin.

“I don’t see her,” Fisher said after a moment. “She’s bound to be around here somewhere, though.”

“Maybe she’s changed her mind,” Jill suggested.

Fisher snorted in disbelief. Then he bobbed a curt nod toward one of the stairways leading down from the corridors.

“Here she comes. And she’s got her entourage with her.”

Charlotte Ruskin was descending the stairs with Jeff Greer beside her. Chad Holdstock and three other men followed them. What Holdstock and his companions were carrying made Larkin stiffen in alarm.

Fisher noticed, too, and exclaimed, “They’ve got guns! They’re not supposed to be armed unless they’re on one of the ranges, practicing.”

The four men had pump shotguns in their hands. As that fact soaked into Larkin’s brain, he said, “It’s just for show. They can’t fire those down here without hurting a lot of innocent people. They’re probably not even loaded.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on that?” Fisher asked with a scowl.

Unfortunately, Larkin wasn’t ready to bet his life on that assessment. Even more important, he wasn’t willing to risk his daughter’s life.

“We’d better tread lightly here, Chuck,” he said. “If anybody sets off fireworks, we don’t want it to be us.”

“I won’t have them strutting around here flouting the rules,” Fisher said. He started forward, his long strides carrying him quickly toward the large group in the center of the bunker.

The crowd parted to let Charlotte Ruskin and her companions through, but as people looked around and saw Fisher, Larkin, Jill, and Threadgill approaching, they moved closer together and got truculent looks on their faces, as if they meant to block the security force’s advance.

“Step aside,” Fisher ordered.

“This isn’t any of your business,” one of the men responded.

“Everything that happens in this project is my business. I’m the head of security.”

“There’s no trouble here,” a woman said. “You’re not needed.”

“That’s right,” another man put in. “This is a peaceful assembly. We’ve got a right to that, don’t we?”

“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 who 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!”

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.”

Larkin wasn’t sure if he would refer to the people on the surface as “the enemy.” What had happened to them wasn’t really their fault, other than trusting to luck to keep them alive in case of a nuclear war. And more than 99.9 percent of the population had done exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, Larkin had seen the expression on the mutilated face of the survivor who had come down from the blockhouse. Disease had done more than ravage that man’s body. It had turned him mad with resentment and filled him with hate. He would have done harm to the residents if he’d been able to get into the Hercules Project, and in a very real way, that did make him “the enemy.”

Moultrie came in while Larkin was thinking about that, and the talk in the room immediately stopped as everyone turned to look at the project’s founder and leader. Deb was with him, and both of them wore grim expressions.

“Hello, everyone,” Moultrie said as he walked to the head of the table. “Thank you for coming. Please sit down.”

They took chairs. Susan came back to sit next to Larkin. Deb sat at one end of the table, Moultrie at the other.

“I’m sure all of you have a pretty good idea why we’re here,” Moultrie went on. “We need to figure out a plan to deal with the problem facing us. I’ll be honest with you. I considered this possibility when I was putting the project together, but I never believed it to be a real likelihood. All the odds seemed to be that no one in the area would survive a nuclear war except us.”

No one else looked like they were going to say it, so Larkin did. “Those survivors may have come in from somewhere else. From what we know, there are probably large parts of West Texas that are still livable.”

Moultrie leaned back slightly in his chair and said, “It depends on what you mean by livable. There’d be no power because of the EMPs knocking out everything that relies on computers, which is almost everything electronic and mechanical these days. Depending on the winds, the fallout could be dangerous. And twenty-first-century people just aren’t equipped, mentally or physically, to deal with an eighteenth-century existence. I suspect the mortality rates have been extremely high all across Texas during the past eight months.”

He was probably right about that, Larkin thought. But it still didn’t rule out the chance that the survivors moving around up on the surface had come from somewhere else.

But then Larkin had to ask himself if it really mattered one way or the other. He supposed it didn’t. The survivors were there and in bad shape, wherever they came from.

“We’ve had other suspicious readings from the motion sensors in the past few days,” Moultrie went on. “The data is too fragmentary to make even a wild guess about how many survivors there might be. At least a handful.”

“We could easily handle a few more people,” Jessica Kenley said. She had been a pediatrician before the war, although down here there were no real specialists anymore. All the doctors had to treat whatever patients came their way.

“Even if we knew there were only three or four, it would mean opening the project and exposing everyone down here to outside contaminants. I’m not willing to do that yet.”

Bald, dour Dr. Stan Davis spoke up, saying, “We’ve all seen the footage from the stairwell camera. Anyone with that degree of radiation sickness is beyond our help. I agree with Graham that it’s not worth the risk.”

“And we don’t know that there are only three or four of them,” Chuck Fisher said. “There could be hundreds of them, maybe more, staying just out of range of our sensors. There’s no telling what they might be plotting against us up there.”

The mention of plotting struck Larkin as a little paranoid, but unfortunately, none of them had any way of knowing whether Fisher was right.

Or did they? Larkin knew he might be pushing his luck, but he asked bluntly, “Is there any truth to the rumors that you’ve sent surveillance cameras up to the surface, Graham?”

Moultrie didn’t answer immediately, which in a way was an answer in itself. Finally, he said, “We did, but the cameras failed after a short time, possibly due to the high levels of radiation. And I wouldn’t give the okay to open the access tubes so they could be taken out and repaired. But in the time they were operational, we got a look around. There were… no signs of life. If you’ve ever seen an area after a big wildfire went through, that’s the way it looks up there now. All the vegetation was burned off. The hills are bare dirt and rock. And there was no sun. You’ve heard about nuclear winter. That seems to be what the area is experiencing. The clouds of dust and ash still in the sky are causing a state of perpetual dusk. The temperature hadn’t gotten out of the forties, we know that much from our other sensors, even though we don’t have eyes up there anymore. It’s pretty bleak, my friends. No place for humanity.” He paused. “We’re better off down here.”

“No one’s doubting that,” Larkin said.

Fisher said, “The important thing is that we don’t know how much of a threat those people represent, so we have to proceed as if they’re a danger to us. I know you mean well, Dr. Kenley, but we can’t open the doors.”

“Is that what we’re debating here?” she asked.

“It’s not a debate,” Moultrie said. “I’m not going to risk the safety of everyone down here. My humanitarian impulses ended the day they dropped the bomb.”

Susan said, “There are some residents who would say that you calling all the shots makes this a dictatorship, Graham.”

Moultrie smiled. “Do you feel that way, Susan?”

“I didn’t say I did. As a matter of fact, I don’t feel that way. But you know who does.”

“Charlotte Ruskin and her friends.”

“And people like Beth Huddleston and her husband.”

Moultrie arched an eyebrow. “Beth and Jim? Really? I thought they were in agreement with how things have been going.”

Beth would disagree that the sky was blue, just to be disagreeable, Larkin thought. But these days… well, who could say what color the sky really was, with all those clouds of dust and ash blocking the sun?

“We’re losing sight of why we’re here,” Fisher said. “We’re not letting anyone else in, that’s clear enough. But what are we going to do if they try to get in?”

“You mean force their way in?” Larkin asked.

“That’s right. They have to be desperate. There’s no telling what they might do. They busted into the blockhouse, didn’t they?”

One of the engineers said, “I don’t see how they did that. Vehicles won’t run without computers, will they?”

Moultrie smiled. “You’re too young to remember when cars didn’t have computers, Jared, but some of us here aren’t. As long as they’ve got gas to run it and the charge in the battery holds out, an old truck with a carburetor will work just fine. I’m sure that’s what they used to crash into the blockhouse and knock down the door. There may be a lot of other vehicles up there that will still run.”

“That’s not eighteenth-century technology,” Larkin pointed out. “Neither are the weapons they could have.”

“Exactly,” Moultrie said, nodding. “I have trouble believing they could come up with enough explosives to damage the blast door, and they’d have to get through two of them, not just one. But we can’t rule it out, so we have to be ready just in case. We control the ventilation system in the antechamber between the doors. I propose that if there’s ever a breach of the outer door, we pump poison gas into the chamber. In fact, we can flood the whole stairwell with it.”

A tense silence filled the room in response to Moultrie’s suggestion. Susan and Dr. Kenley stared at him in apparent disbelief at what they had just heard, and some of the technical staff looked uneasy, too. Finally, Dr. Kenley said, “Graham, you’re talking about murder.”

From the other end of the table, Deb spoke up for the first time since entering the meeting. She said, “No, he’s talking about self-defense. We’ve already killed to protect the project. Or have you forgotten about some of the things that happened on the day of the war? There’s a good chance that if we hadn’t stopped people from flooding in here, we’d all be dead by now.”

Quietly, Moultrie said, “Deb’s right. I won’t deny that the idea is distasteful, but it’s a matter of survival.”

Fisher said, “I don’t find anything distasteful about the idea of killing murderous bastards who want to kill us.” He turned to Larkin. “You saw that guy who came down here, Patrick. He didn’t have anything good in mind, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” Larkin admitted. “He probably knew there was a good chance he couldn’t get in, but if he’d been able to, I think he’d have tried to hurt somebody.”

“Or get help for himself and the other survivors,” Susan said.

“They’re bound to know they’re beyond help,” Fisher said. “That’s why all they have in mind is revenge.”

Dr. Kenley said, “You can’t know what’s in their minds, Chuck. Hope is a big part of the human spirit. People don’t like to give up. They’ll cling to hope long past the point that it’s reasonable.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that they’re a danger to us.”

Moultrie said, “No, it doesn’t.” He looked at the engineers and technicians. “Start setting up an apparatus to pump the gas into the antechamber and stairwell. Stan, you’ll be in charge of actually producing the gas.”

Davis nodded. “I can do that.”

“We’re going to be doubling the guard on the entrances as well,” Moultrie continued. “I want to be sure that each man is issued plenty of ammunition. The odds of it ever coming to a fight are pretty slim, but I’d just as soon not take chances.”

Moultrie was giving orders now, Larkin thought. The “discussion” was over, and it had been mostly for show, anyway. Before Moultrie ever came in here, his mind had been made up about what he was going to do. Although if anyone had come up with a good argument against it, he might have changed his mind.

Or would he? Larkin had to ask himself that question. As he cast his mind back over the preceding months, he couldn’t recall a single occasion when anybody had talked Graham Moultrie out of anything. Moultrie would listen, then do what he wanted to do all along. Maybe the Hercules Project was a dictatorship. A benevolent one, at least so far, but still a dictatorship.

Good Lord, Larkin thought. Was he actually agreeing with Charlotte Ruskin? He didn’t trust her, that was for sure. He didn’t trust anybody who ranted about oppression and dictators. As far as he could tell, any time somebody wanted to overthrow a so-called dictator, it was so they could become one themselves.

Before Moultrie could say anything else, the speaker of the old-fashioned wired intercom on the table at his elbow crackled, and an urgent voice said, “Graham, we need you to come to the Situation Room, please, if you can find the time.”

Larkin drew in a sharp breath. He recognized that voice. It belonged to his daughter.

Moultrie pushed the button to talk and said, “On my way, Jill.” As he came to his feet, he looked at Larkin and Fisher. “You fellows come with me.”

Dr. Kenley asked worriedly, “What’s going on now?”

“I don’t know, Jessica, but I’m going to find out.”

Moultrie stalked toward the door with Fisher right behind him. Larkin hesitated just long enough to put a hand on Susan’s shoulder and squeeze, then followed them. As they walked along the hallway, Larkin saw the expressions on the faces of the other two men and said, “This isn’t good, is it?”

“‘Find the time’ is today’s Code Red phrase,” Fisher said. “It means somebody is coming down the stairs from the surface.”

Chapter 31

The Situation Room had access to all the same feeds and data from the cameras and monitors that the regular security room did, plus the setup Moultrie used for addressing everyone in the project and override controls for all the equipment. One member of the security force was on duty there around the clock, tasked with alerting Moultrie immediately, at any hour of the night or day, if anything unusual happened. Larkin had done plenty of those shifts himself but had never had to summon Moultrie.

Jill was sitting in front of a bank of monitors. She turned her chair slightly and looked back over her shoulder. She pointed at one of the screens and said, “There he is.”

Larkin, Moultrie, and Fisher crowded in around her and leaned forward to peer at the screen. A different man than before stood on one of the steps near the bottom of the staircase. He wore a khaki shirt and jeans, and although the clothes were stained and ragged, they were in better shape than the tatters the first man had worn.

The same was true of the man himself. His long, bony face had an unhealthy pallor to it, and several sore places were visible, but his skin hadn’t begun to slough off yet. He still had brown hair on his head, although it was thinning, whether naturally or from radiation sickness, there was no way to tell. He was thin, but not to the point of starvation.

He was looking directly into the camera. His slash of a mouth opened and his lips moved. No sound came from the speakers in the Situation Room.

“No audio feed?” Larkin asked.

“It went down a while back,” Fisher said. “And we haven’t gone out to fix it.”

Larkin could understand that. “Anybody read lips?”

Jill said, “I think he’s asking if we can hear him.”

“Damn, I wish we could talk to him,” Moultrie said. “Maybe he’d let something slip about how many of them there are and what they want.”

Fisher said, “I’ll tell you what they want. They want in here.”

“You’re probably right,” Moultrie said with a nod. “Wait, what’s he doing?”

The man had taken a notebook from a hip pocket of his jeans. He slid a marker out of his shirt pocket, opened the notebook, and began writing something on one of the pages. After a moment, he turned the notebook around and held it up toward the camera so they could read the large, printed letters.

IS MY WIFE IN THERE? IS SHE SAFE? HER NAME IS CHARLOTTE RUSKIN.

“Ohhhh, hell,” Fisher said. “He’s alive.”

“That’s Nelson Ruskin?” Larkin said.

Moultrie sighed and said, “It is. I recognize him now. He’s changed a lot in the past eight months, of course.” He reached over and flipped some switches on the console in front of Jill.

“That woman can’t find out about this,” Fisher declared. “She’s raised enough hell already, and it’ll just get worse if she knows her husband is out there.”

Jill looked around and said, “You don’t think she has a right to know he’s still alive?”

“No, I don’t, and you’re not going to tell her. That’s an order.”

Larkin didn’t care for Fisher’s tone of voice as the man spoke to Jill, but he reminded himself not to think of her as his daughter right now. They were all members of the security force, and Fisher had a point. Charlotte Ruskin was already a troublemaker, and she would go batshit crazy if she found out her supposedly dead husband was right on the other side of the blast doors, alive but clearly not well.

“Anyway,” Fisher went on, “he’s got the radiation sickness, too. Look at those sores on his face.”

Larkin couldn’t stop himself from playing devil’s advocate. “It’s not as advanced a case as that other guy we saw. Maybe we could do something to help him.”

“What? Prolong his misery by a few more weeks or months?” Fisher shook his head. “Not worth the chance.”

Jill asked, “Isn’t there any way we can at least let him know his wife’s alive?”

“Not really,” Moultrie said. “I suppose we could open the inner door and try to tap out a message on the outer one in Morse code, but there’s no way of knowing if Ruskin understands it.”

“You wanted to establish communication,” Larkin pointed out. “That might be one way of doing it.”

“It’s too risky,” Fisher insisted.

“That little chamber between the blast doors hasn’t been contaminated, has it?”

Moultrie rubbed the beard on his chin as he frowned in thought. After a moment he said, “No, it’s still fine. The outer door is sealed and hasn’t been breached at all. It’s pretty thick, but if you took a hammer and banged on it, Ruskin ought to be able to hear it.”

“It’s a bad idea, Graham,” Fisher said. “You don’t know what kind of trick Ruskin and his friends are trying to pull.”

Larkin said, “Do you really think they have the capability to carry out any kind of trick? It’s probably taken everything they have just to stay alive up there. They’re not plotting against us.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

“No more than you can guarantee that they are.”

“That’s enough,” Moultrie said. “I would like to know more about what’s going on at the surface. We need to find somebody who knows Morse code.”

“I do,” Larkin said.

Jill looked up at him and said, “Dad, wait a minute—”

“It’s a good idea, it ought to work, and I won’t be taking much of a chance. I can do it, Graham.”

“If anything goes wrong, we won’t be able to let you back in,” Fisher warned.

Jill looked like she was going to protest about that, but Moultrie said, “I’m afraid Chuck’s right, Patrick. We can open the inner door and let you into the antechamber, but then we’ll have to seal it up again, and if there’s any sort of breach—as unlikely as that seems—we won’t open it.”

Larkin nodded and said, “I understand that. But this won’t be the first time I’ve volunteered for a job with some risk to it.”

“No, I imagine it’s not,” Moultrie said, smiling faintly. “If you’re sure you want to tackle it, we’ll give it a try.”

“Dad, you ought to go talk to Mom before you do this,” Jill said.

“Nah, she knows what I’m like. Besides, she might try to talk me out of it. Better she doesn’t know until it’s all over and I’m fine.”

“But what if—”

Larkin held up a hand to stop her. “I said I’d be fine.”

Moultrie turned to Fisher and said, “Find one of the maintenance guys and borrow a hammer. Meet us at the inner door.”

Larkin patted Jill on the shoulder and told her, “Just relax, kid. Don’t worry about me.”

He felt his daughter’s anxious gaze following him as he left the Situation Room with Moultrie.

“I appreciate you stepping up like this, Patrick,” Moultrie said as they headed for the hallway leading to the main entrance and the blast doors. Along the way, they passed a number of the residents, none of whom had any idea what was going on. Most smiled and nodded pleasantly as Larkin and Moultrie went by. The two men walked at a casual pace, taking pains that their gait didn’t reveal anything was wrong.

“Somebody’s got to do the job, and I’m not as vital a cog as you and Chuck,” Larkin said.

“I don’t know about that. I like to think that everyone down here is a vital cog in the way the project functions. We’ve made it so far.”

“But since we’ve been down here, we haven’t really been tested,” Larkin pointed out. “The friction with Charlotte Ruskin and her bunch doesn’t really count.”

“No, you’re right about that.” Moultrie sighed. “That grace period may be over. We may be tested sooner than we’d like.”

Larkin could understand Moultrie’s concern, but at the same time he really didn’t see how Nelson Ruskin and any other survivors up on the surface could pose a serious threat.

Along the way, they also passed a set of heavy steel doors. Larkin knew that on the other side of those doors was a short corridor leading to a freight elevator that Moultrie had used for bringing supplies down here during the months before the war when he’d been developing the project. Larkin pointed at the doors with a thumb and said, “What about the elevator?”

“You mean as a way for outsiders to breach the project?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Impossible,” Moultrie said. “The elevator is down here, and the top of it is solid steel. It would take a week to cut through it. At the top of the shaft is a hatch made of steel and concrete thick enough that a bomb would have to land directly on it to even make a dent. And that hatch was inside a building that’s now debris. Outsiders wouldn’t even know the elevator shaft is there. Despite all that, just as a precaution we have cameras monitoring it. You know that, Patrick.”

“I know, but it’s still another potential way in. We should probably have guards stationed there around the clock, too.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea. Why don’t you say something to Chuck about it when you get back from this job?”

“All right.”

“And be sure to tell him it was your suggestion, and I agree with it.”

Larkin didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t give a damn who got credit for an idea, only that it was implemented properly and did what it was supposed to.

He started to say something about another rumor he had heard, that Moultrie had a private elevator somewhere in the project that only he and Deb knew about. Larkin decided not to mention it at the moment, but he would feel Chuck Fisher out about the possibility later. If there was any truth to the gossip, that was another avenue of ingress that would need to be secured.

They reached the corridor leading to the blast doors without attracting any undue attention and went through the regular doors to wait for Fisher, who showed up a couple of minutes later carrying a large, heavy hammer. He held it up and said, “Didn’t think you could use a sledgehammer for something like this, but this one’s got plenty of heft and ought to do the job.”

Larkin took it, weighed it in his hand, and nodded. “That’ll work.”

Fisher threw a latch that locked the door leading into the hallway from Corridor One. They didn’t want any of the residents wandering in here right now. Moultrie went to the control panel next to the interior blast door and began pushing buttons on it as he said, “There’s an intercom on the wall in there, Patrick. We’ll be able to hear you as well as see you, so you can let us know when you’re ready to be let back in. Are you sure you’re all right with going through with this?”

“I’m not gonna back out now,” Larkin said.

“All right.” Moultrie thumbed one more button, and machinery began to hum. That sound built to a rumble, and then with a low hiss that signified the airtight seal was breaking, the blast door began to swing open.

As soon as the gap was big enough, Larkin slipped through it into the antechamber. He looked back and nodded curtly to Moultrie, who returned the nod and began entering another sequence on the keypad. The door reversed itself and settled back into place. Larkin heard the seals tightening into position. Dim, recessed lighting shone from the ceiling as he turned toward the outer blast door.

He was alone now in this steel and concrete bubble between two worlds, the sterile safety of the Hercules Project and the outside that had been devastated by nuclear fire.

He took a deep breath, walked over to the other door, and began tapping on it with the hammer.

Chapter 32

Larkin had learned Morse code when he was a young man, even before he was in the Marine Corps, because he had thought for a while that he might want to be a ham radio operator. He had never gotten very involved in the hobby, but he still remembered the dots and dashes. He was sure he was rusty at it, but he believed that if he took it slow, he could make himself understood.

Provided, of course, that Nelson Ruskin also understood Morse.

Larkin began by tapping out CQ several times, the universal hail for hams. When there was no response, he tried H-E-L-L-O, then Ruskin’s last name. The clanging impacts of hammer against steel were loud in the antechamber, but he knew the sounds would be muffled by the time they passed through the blast door. He paused to listen.

Moultrie’s voice came over the intercom speaker. “Anything, Patrick?”

Larkin held up a hand in a gesture for silence, knowing they could see him on the monitors in the Situation Room, and leaned closer to the door.

It was faint but there: Tap. Tap. Tap.

“I hear him,” Larkin said, keeping the excitement out of his voice. “What does Jill see on the camera?”

“Ruskin has moved on down the steps to the door. She can’t see what he’s tapping with. The heel of his shoe, maybe.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty quiet, but he’s definitely responding. Let me try again.”

He hammered out Ruskin’s name again, then stopped and listened intently. It wasn’t really a tapping he heard but more of a thudding instead, lending credence to the idea that Ruskin might be using his shoe. The sounds came in a steady rhythm. Larkin grimaced. The man on the other side of the door wasn’t sending code.

“I don’t think he knows Morse,” he reported through the intercom. He tapped a query but the only answer was the steady thumping. It stopped abruptly.

Then as Larkin frowned and pressed his ear to the door, he heard something that took him by surprise.

Bump-bump-ba-bump-bump… bump-bump!

He straightened, threw back his head, and laughed, unable to suppress the impulse.

“Patrick, what the hell?” Moultrie asked with a tinge of alarm in his voice. Maybe he thought something was wrong with the air in here after all and it was making Larkin crazy.

“He gave me the old ‘Shave and a Haircut,’” Larkin said. “That’s something I never really expected to hear again, especially coming from outside.”

Chuck Fisher spoke up, saying, “This isn’t a joke.”

“No, but it’s human. Ruskin can’t understand code, so he doesn’t know what we’re saying, but he knows there are people in here and he’s telling us that he’s human, too. Damn it, he’s asking for help.”

“We’ve been through this,” Moultrie said, his voice flat. “However many people are up there, they’re not coming in. Not now.”

“Wait too long and they’ll all die,” Larkin said, then realized that might be exactly what Moultrie was hoping for.

“Can you ask him what he wants?”

“I can ask, but he won’t be able to answer because he won’t know what I’m saying.”

“Go ahead and try… Wait a minute.” There was a pause, then Moultrie went on, “He’s gone back up a few steps so he can write in that notebook and show it to us. Jill’s relaying the information to me. He’s written… I know you’re sending code… I can’t understand it… I’ll see if I can find somebody who does.”

“Then there’s more of them!” Fisher said.

“We knew that,” Larkin said. He listened at the door again. “I don’t hear anything else.”

“Ruskin is going back up the stairs,” Moultrie reported. “Let’s get you out of there, Patrick.”

“No, let’s give it a few minutes.”

“We don’t know how long it’s going to take Ruskin to find anyone who understands Morse, or if he even will.”

“Yeah, but he might get lucky. Let’s just wait a little while and see.”

“You’re the one who’s stuck in there,” Moultrie said. Larkin could hear the shrug in his voice. “As long as you’re not getting claustrophobic…”

“I’m still good to go,” Larkin said.

“We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything.”

Larkin stood there waiting, concentrating on his breathing and forcing himself to take deep, regular breaths. He’d never had a problem with claustrophobia, and he wasn’t feeling any twinges of panic now. Still, he was aware of the tension ratcheting tighter inside him. He hoped that Nelson Ruskin would be able to locate someone who understood Morse because he didn’t want to have to work himself up to start this effort over.

After twenty minutes that seemed much longer, Moultrie said, “Someone’s coming back down the stairs. It’s… wait a minute… it’s Ruskin and another man. Jill says this one is older, with white hair and a beard. He’s wearing… an old army jacket. He has something with him… looks like a wrench—”

Larkin heard the sharp impact of metal against metal and said quickly, “Hold on!” He didn’t need Moultrie talking while he was trying to listen. He leaned closer to the door again.

C-Q-C-Q

Larkin’s pulse jumped as he recognized the letters.

The man on the other side of the door followed with Who goes there?

Larkin lifted the hammer. His telegrapher’s fist was slow and laborious, but he got the message through, letter by letter.

Patrick Larkin. Who am I talking to?

Earl Crandall, U.S. Army, retired.

I’m one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children.

Dogface!

Leatherneck!

Who you got in there with you, son?

Some friends. Larkin wasn’t going to give away any more information than he had to. How about you?

Same here. We’re in bad shape, Marine. Could use some help.

How many?

Crandall hesitated, then tapped out, Just a few.

Larkin didn’t believe him. That pause had been telling. The outsiders were wary, too. If there were honestly only a few of them, Larkin didn’t think Crandall would have hesitated to say so and might well have provided an exact number.

Sorry, can’t open up.

We need help. Women and children sick. Not much food.

Larkin believed that, and his guts twisted a little at the thought of what those people had to be going through. What they had already gone through. He was glad Susan wasn’t here. With her instincts, this would be hell on her.

He realized he was the only one inside the project who knew what was going on here, the only one who understood the conversation, at least for now. Moultrie might have equipment picking up and recording the words Larkin and Crandall were tapping out, so they could be analyzed later, but for the moment he was the sole representative of the Hercules Project and could tell Crandall whatever he wanted.

But unless Moultrie agreed with it, those would be only empty words.

Sorry, Larkin tapped again. No can do. Before Crandall could respond, he went on, Nelson Ruskin is with you?

If Morse code being tapped out by a guy with a wrench could sound surprised, what came back from Crandall did. Ruskin is here. You know him?

Tell him his wife is alive and safe.

There was a moment’s silence, then Crandall tapped urgently, Get her. Let them talk.

No can do, Larkin sent again.

Does she know he is alive?

Not yet. Will tell her. That was a lie, but Larkin didn’t see how it could hurt anything.

Thank you. If you can’t open up, can you send help or supplies to us?

Will work on it, Larkin replied. Maybe that wasn’t a lie, he thought. Maybe the engineers and technicians could work out some way to get a few supplies to the surface. They were ingenious; they ought to be able to do that.

But then his spirits sank again. Even if it were possible to deliver them, Moultrie would never give up any of the project’s supplies. Especially when the food wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. The survivors truly were doomed if they stayed around here. They would be better off heading for one of the less-damaged parts of the state. If they had any more vehicles, they could get away from the residual radiation here on the edge of the destroyed Metroplex. The chances of long-term survival would still be very slim, but any chance was better than none.

Thank you, Crandall tapped. Asking again, will you let us in?

No can do. Larkin was beginning to hate that phrase, but it was the only answer he could give.

After a few seconds, Crandall tapped, Will check back later. Really need medical assistance and supplies.

We know. Larkin left it at that.

He didn’t hear anything else, and after another short delay Moultrie said over the intercom, “Jill says they’re going back up top. What did you find out, Patrick?”

“Get me out of here and we’ll talk about it,” Larkin said in a voice thick with emotion. Maybe he had never been claustrophobic before, but right now the walls were starting to close in on him a little.

“He wouldn’t say how many of them there are?” Moultrie asked once Larkin had returned to the Situation Room, where Jill was still on duty at the monitors. Fisher stood to one side, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.

“He claimed there are only a few,” Larkin replied, “but I didn’t believe him. He took a little too long to answer.”

Jill said, “That’s reading a lot into somebody tapping on a steel door with a wrench.”

“I know. But that’s the way it seemed to me.”

Fisher said, “You didn’t tell him how many of us are down here, did you?”

“No. I didn’t really tell him much of anything except that we can’t help them. He asked if there was any way we could send some supplies out to them. I told him we’d look into it.”

“We can’t do that,” Moultrie said immediately. “We can’t risk giving up any of our own supplies.”

Larkin nodded slowly and said, “I know.”

“You gave him false hope, Dad,” Jill said. “Isn’t it better if they know the truth?”

“Is it? Sometimes the truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

For a moment, they were all silent. Larkin considered revealing to the others how he had passed along the information that Charlotte Ruskin was alive and well to her husband. He knew Fisher would complain about that, however, so for now he kept it to himself.

He looked at an image frozen on one of the monitors, a screen capture from the footage caught by the stairwell camera. It showed a man with a leathery face, his permanent tan set off by a close-cropped white beard and white hair drawn into a short ponytail at the back of his head. He wore an old army jacket, as Jill had reported earlier. Earl Crandall didn’t look sick. In fact, he looked like kind of a hardass. Larkin knew the type. He’d been accused of it himself.

He wasn’t sure if the past eight months had changed him, though. He felt keenly the loss of those millions of people who’d been wiped out in an hour or so of nuclear hell. Any man’s death diminishes me, John Donne had written. Larkin wasn’t sure he would go so far as to agree with that, but millions of deaths made him feel diminished, no doubt about it.

On the other hand, Crandall, Nelson Ruskin, and whoever was left alive up there would have been toughened up, even more than they were to start with, in the case of Crandall. Even worse, they had nothing left to lose.

He couldn’t afford to turn into some damn softhearted pile of mush, Larkin told himself. He had to stay as hard inside as any of those people on the surface.

Because sooner or later, it might come down to him and all the others down here defending their way of life from those who wanted to take it. If many of them were like Earl Crandall, Larkin and the rest of the residents of the Hercules Project might have one hell of a fight on their hands.

Chapter 33

As soon as Nelson Ruskin had revealed who he was, Moultrie had cut the feed to the other monitors in the Command Center so it went only to the Situation Room. His standing orders were that nothing anyone on the Command Center staff learned in there could be discussed with anyone else. Just like Vegas, what happened there stayed there. And the hand-picked staff, devoted to the safety and security of the Hercules Project, could be depended upon to follow those orders.

Usually.

Charlotte Ruskin was on the way to her job in the hydroponic gardens when she heard her name called behind her. She stopped, turned, and saw a man walking quickly toward her, trying to catch up. He looked vaguely familiar, but she didn’t know his name, or at least couldn’t recall it if she’d ever heard it.

“Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Do you remember me, Mrs. Ruskin? My name is Charles Trahn.”

“Of course,” she said, although she didn’t, really.

“I came to one of your meetings and listened to you and Mr. Greer speak.”

She nodded and smiled faintly, still not recalling him. She had talked to so many people, and she’d never been that good with names and faces.

“I shouldn’t have been there, I suppose,” Trahn went on. “I’m Command Center staff.”

“Oh. Did Moultrie send you as a spy?”

“What?” Trahn looked surprised. “No! Not at all. I was just curious what you had to say. My grandparents, they came from North Vietnam. They escaped and immigrated to America. But they knew what it was like to live under a dictatorship, and I’ve never forgotten their stories. I guess that’s made me… I don’t know… a little leery of one person or group having too much power.”

Charlotte Ruskin’s polite smile turned into an ironic sneer. “And yet you work for Graham Moultrie.”

“I was chosen for Command Center staff because of my technological skills,” Trahn said defensively. “That doesn’t mean I agree with everything Mr. Moultrie does. In fact, that’s why I came looking for you today.”

“If you have something to say, Charles, I wish you’d go ahead and say it. I have a shift in the gardens in a few minutes.”

Trahn jerked his head in a nod. “You know the rumors about how there’s something still alive on the surface?”

“Everybody has heard about that.”

“Well, they aren’t just rumors. They’re true. There are people still alive up there.” Trahn paused. “And one of them is your husband.”

Charlotte Ruskin felt like she’d been punched. She took a step back and drew in a sharp breath. She didn’t dare let herself believe what she had just heard, so she said, “That’s not true!”

“It is,” Trahn insisted. “I was on duty yesterday and saw him with my own eyes. He came down the stairwell at the main entrance and held up a note for the surveillance camera there. It asked about you.”

She shook her head. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie about something like that?”

Charlotte Ruskin cast about wildly in her mind for an answer. She said, “Moultrie sent you to upset me, to distract me.”

“That’s crazy,” Trahn said. “If Mr. Moultrie knew I was telling you this, I’d be in big trouble. As soon as we all realized what was happening, he cut that feed to the regular Command Center monitors and sent it directly to his Situation Room. Only there. He and a few of his security people know what happened after that, but they’re the only ones. Your husband was there, though, right on the other side of the exterior blast door. I saw him with my own eyes.”

A wave of dizziness washed through her. She had to reach out and rest a hand on the wall to brace herself.

“I’m sorry,” Trahn went on. “I know it’s a real shock. I wrestled with myself all last night and earlier today, trying to decide if I ought to tell you. Finally, I… I knew I couldn’t keep it a secret. You deserve to know the truth.”

Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst out of her chest. All along, she had felt like Nelson was still alive. Logic and reason said that he wasn’t, but the connection, the bond between them, was still there. She would have known if it was broken. Even though, eventually, she had turned to Jeff Greer for comfort because she was a passionate woman by nature, she had experienced pangs of guilt. She had been aware somehow that she was cheating on her husband.

Now she knew that her instincts hadn’t deceived her. She’d been right all along.

That is, if she could trust Charles Trahn. He certainly looked sincere, and he looked more than a little afraid of her, too. That was enough to convince her he was speaking the truth.

She reached out and caught hold of his arm. He flinched and tried to pull away, but her grip tightened. Her jaw was tense as she said, “Tell me everything you know.”

“I… I already did—”

“No, you didn’t. How did he look? Is he all right?”

“Well… not too bad, I guess,” Trahn said. “Understand, I didn’t get a very long look at him. Like I told you, Moultrie cut all the feeds except his private one. But your husband… Mr. Ruskin… looked like he’d had a hard time of it. You know it’s bound to have been pretty bad up there on the surface.”

Pretty bad was putting it mildly, Charlotte Ruskin thought. Hell on earth was more like it.

“Was he sick?”

Trahn swallowed. “Yeah, I guess. He had some, you know, sore places on his face. And I could tell he hadn’t had enough to eat for a long time. But he was moving around okay and seemed strong enough. He had, like, a notebook and a marker, and that’s how he wrote the message he held up to the surveillance camera. He asked about you. He wanted to know if you were in here and okay.”

She had to close her eyes and take several deep breaths. Emotions ran riot inside her. Chief among them was relief that Nelson was still alive, but she also felt a surge of pure rage that Graham Moultrie had known about this and not told her. He would have let her go on thinking her husband was dead. She would have continued mourning for him.

When she opened her eyes, she asked, “What did Moultrie tell him?”

“I have no idea.”

“Who else knew?”

“You mean about your husband? Uh, besides me, there was only one other guy on duty at the security monitors right then. A guy named Pierce Watson.” Trahn shook his head. “He’ll never say anything, though. He thinks Mr. Moultrie is God.”

“But you don’t.”

“He’s just as human as the rest of us. He can make mistakes. Or make decisions based on his own self-interest.”

“What about the others? Who else?”

“Let me think.” Trahn frowned for a few seconds, then said, “I believe Jill Sinclair was on duty in the Situation Room, and I don’t remember seeing her come out. Mr. Moultrie wasn’t there at first, and he came in, in a hurry, so I guess Jill called him. He had Chuck Fisher and Patrick Larkin with him. Larkin is Jill’s dad—”

“I know who he is,” Charlotte Ruskin broke in. “So the four of them were in the Situation Room?”

“Yeah. And a minute or so after they went in there, Mr. Ruskin held up the notebook with the message he’d printed on it and then the rest of the feeds went down. So I know Mr. Moultrie had to give the order. That was the time line.”

“The bastard.”

Trahn assumed correctly who she was talking about and said, “I’m sure Mr. Moultrie felt like he had a good reason—”

“He’s a damned tyrant, that’s his reason. How dare he keep that from me!”

“Yeah, I didn’t feel like that was right. That’s why I finally decided to come and find you—”

Charlotte Ruskin took hold of his arm again. “Don’t say anything about this to anybody.”

Trahn looked confused and scared again. “I thought you’d want people to know.”

“Not until I figure out the best way to handle this. Just keep your mouth shut, understand?”

Trahn swallowed and nodded. “Of course.”

She let go of him and forced a smile. “Thank you for telling me. I won’t forget this kindness.”

“Sure. If, uh, if there’s anything else I can do to help…”

“You’ve done plenty,” Charlotte Ruskin told him.

In fact, he had changed everything.

Jeff Greer knew that Charlotte Ruskin didn’t love him. She was still in love with her husband, and that wasn’t liable to change any time soon. She seemed like one of those ladies who’d cling to the memory of her dead hubby forever, as if they actually believed in soul mates and shit like that.

No, Charlotte had hooked up with him for two reasons: she needed somebody who didn’t mind kicking ass to help her settle the score with Graham Moultrie, and she needed a man to hold her in the night when the loneliness got to be too much.

Greer could accept that just fine because he had his own reasons for being with Charlotte. She was a damned good-looking woman for her age—which was a few years older than him—and he didn’t like Moultrie and was glad to go along with anything that would bust the guy’s chops. Greer had been in the real-estate business himself, before the war, and he had seen too many guys like Moultrie, golden boys whose projects always came in on time and under budget and made money hand over fist. Greer had done all right for himself—well enough to afford a place in this bunker—but he was nowhere near as successful as Moultrie had been, and that just wasn’t fair.

So he was all right with letting Charlotte call the tune. It got him laid, and it meant that sooner or later Moultrie would get what he had coming to him, and those things were just fine and dandy with Jeff Greer.

He hadn’t really expected things to come to a head so quickly, though. He frowned as he propped himself up on an elbow and looked at Charlotte.

“We’re going to do what now?”

“Take over the freight elevator,” she said. She had come out of the shower in her Corridor Two quarters with a towel wrapped around her body and another caught up around her dark red hair. “Moultrie has men guarding it, but we can deal with that. You can run it, can’t you?”

“A moron could run a freight elevator, or any other kind,” Greer said. “There’s a hatch at the top of the shaft, though, isn’t there?”

“It’s controlled from down here. We can get someone to open it.”

“You seem mighty sure about that.”

“I am.”

Greer frowned. “That still doesn’t explain why. I mean… there’s nothing up there on the surface I want.”

“There’s something I want,” Charlotte said as she unwound the towel and resumed drying her hair. “You’ve heard the rumors about there being survivors from the war?”

“Sure. Everybody’s heard them. But there’s no proof—”

“Yes, there is. And Moultrie and his bunch of goons have been in contact with at least one of them.” She paused. “Don’t get upset about this, Jeff, but my husband is still alive.”

He sat up sharply in the bed. “What! You mean… Nelson?”

“He’s the only husband I have,” Charlotte said with a smile.

“But he didn’t get into the bunker.”

“That’s why he’s up on the surface. But he’s alive. I’ve talked to someone from Moultrie’s staff who actually saw him just outside the blast doors. There’s no telling how many other people are still up there, starving and trying to survive any way they can. They need help.”

“Well, yeah, but…” Greer’s brain struggled to process what she had told him. The light dawned on him, and he said, “You want to go up and get them, don’t you?”

“Moultrie didn’t have any right to lock them out in the first place. You know what he’s like, Jeff. He’s a little tin-plated dictator who enjoys playing God.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I can’t stand the guy. But this? This kind of changes everything, doesn’t it?”

She came to the bed and sat down beside him. “It doesn’t have to.”

“Sure it does. If you get your husband back, that’s pretty much the end for you and me, isn’t it? You won’t need me anymore.”

“Damn it, I need you for a lot more than this. We’ve stood up and fought together against Moultrie’s heavy-handed rule, haven’t we? Nothing’s going to change about that. The people are looking to you and me to lead that effort.”

“You’re talking politics. I’m talking about—”

Her arm slid around the back of his neck as she moved against him. “I know what you’re talking about,” she said as she leaned in, her face close to his. “And I still say that doesn’t have to change.”

Her mouth found his. His hand went to the towel wrapped around her and pushed it away. In the back of his head, a little voice warned, She’s playin’ you, you dumbass.

I know that, Greer told the voice. But right now, he was still getting what he wanted, and there was really no way to predict what might happen in the future. He would deal with that when the time came, he decided.

“Now,” he said in a half-whisper as his arms went around her, “just how is it you plan to get that hatch at the top of the elevator shaft open…?”

Chapter 34

Charles Trahn was as American as could be. He had been born in Dallas, grew up in Irving, then gotten a good job in Arlington doing international accounting for a bank. He was lucky he had been in Fort Worth on the day the bomb fell, doing some work at one of the bank’s locations over there, so he’d been able to reach the Hercules Project in time to get in. He’d had to get a loan to afford the place—one of his buddies at work had helped him with that—and of course now it didn’t matter because he’d never have to pay it back.

Of course, he might never have a regular job or a home or a family, either, but he was alive and he was grateful for that every single day.

Grateful enough that when Charlotte Ruskin cornered him in his quad in the lower bunker, he didn’t want to even listen to what she was saying, let alone agree to go along with the crazy idea.

“Look, I never should have said anything to you,” he told her, trying to keep his voice steady. That wasn’t easy when he kept darting glances at Jeff Greer, who had come with her and now stood behind and to one side of her, arms crossed over his broad chest. He had the look of a guy who had played college football and then tried to stay in shape afterward, without a whole lot of success.

But he was still taller, heavier, and no doubt meaner than Charles Trahn. None of those things would have taken very much.

“You were just trying to do the right thing, Charles. We know that. And I appreciate it more than I can say. Now I need you to do the right thing again.”

Trahn glanced around the vast, dormitory-like bunker. No one was close by at the moment. If Ruskin and Greer wanted to intimidate him with their visit—and of course they did—they had chosen the right moment for it. Trahn could yell for help if they attacked him, but Greer could get in several good shots before anybody came running up to stop him. Trahn had always feared physical violence.

“What do you want?” he asked warily.

“You work rotating shifts in the Command Center, right?”

Trahn nodded. “Yeah.”

“When’s your next middle-of-the-night shift?”

“I’ve got the midnight-to-six in, uh, three days from now, I think.”

“And you have access to the controls that open and close things? Like doors?”

Trahn’s eyes got big. “Oh, hell no,” he said. “You want me to open the blast doors? I can’t do that. It takes a special access card to do that, and I don’t have it. Only a few people do. Just Mr. Moultrie and his top staff.”

“What about the hatch at the top of the freight elevator shaft?”

“It’s the same deal. It takes a card with the right chip on it.”

“But if you had that card, you could open it?”

“Yeah, more than likely, but—”

“I’m going to get that for you,” Charlotte Ruskin said. “I need to get up to the surface, so I can be with my husband again.”

“You’re leaving the project?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“But it’s dangerous up there! The radiation—”

“Have you seen the readings from the sensors, Charles? Do you really know what it’s like? Does anyone other than Moultrie and his Gestapo? I mean, people are living up there, right now. It’s been more than eight months, and my husband is still alive. How bad can it be, really?”

“I… I don’t know…”

“Anyway, it should be my choice, shouldn’t it?” she argued. “If I want to take my chances to be with him again, why shouldn’t I be allowed to do that?”

Trahn looked past her at the silent, scowling Greer. “But I thought the two of you—”

Greer broke his silence by saying, “I just want whatever makes Charlotte happy, buddy. That’s good enough for me.”

“Well…” What the woman was saying made sense, Trahn supposed. While he worried about contamination, just opening the top of the elevator shaft shouldn’t expose the rest of the project to too much of whatever was up there. Anyway, the atmosphere couldn’t be too toxic or people wouldn’t be able to live in it. Nelson Ruskin had been exposed to it for more than eight months now, and while he hadn’t looked healthy, exactly, he didn’t seem to be on the verge of dying, either. But Trahn was still worried. “I could get in a lot of trouble.”

“Hey, I’d have your back,” Greer said. “Nobody’s gonna give you trouble without going through me first.”

Trahn wasn’t sure how much that reassurance really meant, but at the same time, he could read the menace in Greer’s eyes. If he didn’t go along with what they wanted, one of these days Greer and some of his friends might catch him alone, in some isolated part of the bunker, and then there was no telling what they might do…

“All right,” Trahn said. “I don’t think you’ll be able to get one of those access cards, but if you do, I guess I can help you. Nobody could be too mad at me for helping a wife get back together with her husband, right?”

“Of course not,” Charlotte Ruskin said as she smiled and leaned in. She gave Trahn a kiss on the cheek. He felt his face warming. This was ridiculous, he told himself. She was almost old enough to be his mother. But in spite of that, she was kinda hot…

Greer stepped up, grinning, and slapped Trahn on the shoulder. “Way to go, pal,” he said. “I knew we could count on a good guy like you.”

Trahn swallowed and nodded. He liked the sound of that, too.

“Three nights from now, you said?” Charlotte Ruskin asked.

“Yep.”

“Then that’s when it’ll happen.”

Chuck Fisher’s eyebrows rose in surprise when he opened the door of his quarters in Corridor Two and saw Charlotte Ruskin standing there. He recovered quickly and asked in a cold voice, “What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Fisher shook his head. “I don’t think you and I have anything to talk about.”

“You’d be wrong,” she said. “Something’s going to happen, and you need to know about it.”

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 same 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-automatic 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.

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 Glock 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.

That thought made Threadgill glance at the man who had battered Trahn into unconsciousness. Jeff Greer lay on the floor almost at their feet, his face a bloody ruin from the shot Threadgill had fired just in time to keep the man from shooting him again.

Threadgill knew he couldn’t worry about that now. He grabbed Trahn’s shoulder and gave him a shake.

“Come on! You gotta tell me what’s going on here. Has that elevator started back down?”

Trahn shook his head, pawed his hair back away from his face. He swallowed hard and looked at the readings on the console.

“The system shut down from the… from the power spike when Greer’s shot made it short out. Everything’s rebooting.”

“How long is that gonna take?”

Trahn looked at Greer, then shuddered. In a choked voice, he said, “I don’t know. It should be further along than it is.” He pointed a trembling finger at a status bar on one of the screens. “It looks like it may have gotten hung up somehow.”

Threadgill suddenly felt cold inside. “You mean the environmental systems aren’t working?”

“Nothing’s working,” Trahn said.

“Well, fix it! Without that life-support equipment, we’ll all die.”

Trahn leaned both hands on the console, obviously as dizzy as Threadgill was. “No. We have several days’ supply of usable water stored, and the air won’t go bad for hours.”

“Hours! What if it’s days before the computers start working again?”

“It won’t be. They may have to restart again, but they’ll boot back up in time, I’m sure of it. There are enough fail-safes and redundancies—”

Threadgill grabbed his arm. “What if they don’t?”

“Then we… we’ll have to get up to the surface somehow.”

“But the surface is poison!”

Trahn shook his head again. “As far as I know, there’s never been any sign of biological contamination in the air. The only real threat is the radiation.”

“But the air’s still bad, right?”

“It’ll keep us alive right now. We don’t know what the long-term effects would be. That’s better than suffocating to death in a matter of hours, though.”

Threadgill slumped into Trahn’s chair, unable to stand up anymore. Already the atmosphere seemed stuffier and hotter to him, but that might be his imagination running wild, he told himself.

“You can’t stop that elevator from coming back down?”

“I told you, I can’t do anything.”

Threadgill brightened slightly. “But if the computers are down, whoever’s inside it can’t open the doors.”

Trahn made a face. “That’s not strictly true. The motors that control everything about the elevator, including the doors, run off electrical power, but they’re not computer-operated. Our generators are still working.” He pointed to a glowing display as proof of that, but the numbers didn’t mean anything to Threadgill. “You need an access card to get into the elevator, but you don’t need one to get out.”

“Holy crap,” Threadgill said. “The project’s about to be under attack.”

Trahn nodded and said, “I think there’s a pretty good chance of it.”

“Get out of here!” Larkin yelled at the crowd that had been drawn by the gunshots and the grisly sight of the guards’ dead bodies. “Everybody get away from here now!”

He didn’t know who—or what—was riding on that elevator, but he was convinced it wouldn’t be anything good.

He pulled the .45 and leveled it at the elevator door in a two-handed grip. There was no light to indicate the elevator’s progress, and he couldn’t hear it anymore because in addition to stampeding, the people in the crowd were yelling and screaming as well. It was chaos behind and the unknown in front, and standing between, as it had been so often in human history, was a rough man ready to do violence.

Larkin glanced over his shoulder as the tumult subsided slightly. The mob of nightclothes-wearing residents had cleared out of the immediate vicinity.

That was good, because when he looked at the elevator again, the doors started to open.

Gunshots erupted before the gap was more than a couple of inches wide.

Larkin opened fire as he backed away. The people in the elevator had to be survivors from the surface, and clearly, they didn’t come in peace. Aiming between the doors as they slid apart, he emptied the .45’s magazine. The thunderous roar from the Colt was deafening, especially in these closed spaces. The barrage brought screams from inside the elevator, and the shots stopped for a moment.

That gave Larkin the chance to duck around the corner at the end of the short hallway, back into the main area of Corridor Two. The bystanders were really scattering now that an actual battle had broken out.

But help was on the way, although Larkin wasn’t all that glad to see it. Jill ran toward him, gun in hand and an anxious expression on her face.

Larkin waved her toward the wall on the other side of the opening. She veered and put her back against it. Several men Larkin recognized as fellow members of the security force hurried toward the hall leading to the freight elevator, too. Thankfully, they were smart enough not to dash out into the open and expose themselves to the invaders’ guns.

Invaders, Larkin thought. That was exactly what they were dealing with here. Fellow human beings—fellow Americans—who had wound up in a hellish situation through no real fault of their own. But from the looks of things, that tragic situation had warped their brains until they didn’t want to do anything except lash out at the residents of the Hercules Project. Their minds were full of hate and the lust to kill.

At the moment, however, they weren’t shooting anymore, so Larkin took advantage of the opportunity to replace the magazine he had emptied with a full one. When he had done that, he risked a glance around the corner and saw that the elevator doors were closed again. He didn’t believe they would stay that way for very long.

“People from the surface?” Jill called across the hallway’s opening.

“Nobody else it could be,” Larkin replied.

“It sounded like they were well-armed.”

“They’ve got a lot of guns, anyway. Don’t know how good they are.”

“As long as they throw bullets, they’re dangerous.”

Larkin couldn’t argue with that.

“Have you seen Chuck?” he asked.

“Mr. Fisher?” Jill shook her head. “No, I haven’t. I’m surprised he’s not here with you.”

Larkin was surprised, too, and he thought that Chuck Fisher’s absence didn’t bode well. Fisher should have heard any alarm that went out, and Larkin couldn’t imagine him not showing up immediately to see what the trouble was. The only reason he wouldn’t, was if something had happened to him and he couldn’t.

“Since you were ready for them and kept them from getting off the elevator, maybe they’ll give up and go back up to the surface,” Jill suggested.

Larkin thought about that, but only for a second before he shook his head.

“They didn’t get down here quite fast enough to take us by surprise,” he said, “but what do they have to gain by going back up ? It’s no fit existence up there. They’ve all got radiation sickness already, and sooner or later they’ll either die from it or starve to death. They’d probably just as soon go out quicker and kill some of us in the process.”

“But they don’t gain anything by that!”

“Maybe they just want to be more comfortable in the time they have left. Or maybe they haven’t given up hope yet, even though the odds are against them. Or maybe they’re just mad and want to hurt somebody. No matter what they want, we can’t let them in here.”

“We’ll stop them,” Jill said.

Larkin hoped she was right. But they were going to have a fight on their hands first.

Inside the elevator, Charlotte Ruskin was breathing hard, trying to fight down the terror that had filled her when the guns started going off. Even though she had killed three men herself in the past hour, she hadn’t been prepared for the earth-shattering roar, the choking stench of gunpowder, and the overpowering feeling that the world was coming to an end around her.

Even though the shooting had stopped, she couldn’t hear anything. She wasn’t sure her hearing would ever return. She looked at Nelson, saw his lips moving, but couldn’t make out the words. She was no lip-reader, but gradually she realized he was asking her if she was all right.

She nodded. The people from the surface were packed in so tightly there’d been no chance of a bullet penetrating to the back of the elevator. She wondered if that was why Nelson had made sure the two of them were back here. The others were—what was the old-fashioned term?—cannon fodder.

He put his mouth next to her ear, and she was a little surprised to hear him saying, “We have to try again! That’s why I brought this along!”

He reached under his shirt and brought out something she didn’t recognize at first. For a second she thought the red cylinders fastened together with duct tape were sticks of dynamite and wondered if he was crazy enough to set off an explosion down here?

Well, why not? What did they have to lose?

Then she realized they weren’t dynamite at all. They were road flares, the kind the police set out when there was an accident. There was no telling where he had gotten them. During the more than eight months that had passed since the war, he’d had time to wander all over the devastated countryside.

“Give me room, give me room!” he shouted at the other people in the elevator. Charlotte’s hearing was coming back. The survivors wedged themselves aside. Charlotte caught at Nelson’s ragged sleeve.

“Be careful,” she told him.

He just grinned over his shoulder at her, then said to the others, “When this goes off, we go out right behind it, understand? They won’t be able to see us, so they’ll be shooting blind. We go out and we don’t stop until they’re all dead.”

That brought a cheer from the others. Nelson’s back was to Charlotte, so she couldn’t tell what he was doing with the flares. But then he jerked a nod at the man crowded up next to the elevator controls. The man must have pressed something, because the doors started to open again.

Charlotte just had time to wonder about something—wouldn’t they be shooting blind because of the flares, too?—when Nelson tossed them out, and a hellish red glare erupted and seemed to swallow the whole world.

Chapter 38

Larkin saw the bundle of taped cylinders come flying out of the elevator to bounce along the short hall and out into Corridor Two. He thought they were explosives and yelled, “Everybody down!”

A huge fear for Jill’s safety filled his heart.

But then instead of blowing up, the bundle seemed to turn into the flaming heart of the sun instead, and Larkin knew he’d been wrong. They were highway flares, and they were so bright he couldn’t see anything else.

He knew what was going to happen, though, so he shoved the .45 around the corner and began pulling the trigger as fast as he could while he swung the barrel from left to right. Slugs sprayed through the hallway, but a deathstorm of lead came right back at him. He sensed the bullets flying through the air as much as heard them.

There were too many of the invaders. Some of them had to be down, but others took their place. Larkin didn’t know if the other security forces could hear him, but he bellowed, “Fall back, fall back!”

His eyes had squeezed shut as he was emptying the Colt. Now he opened them to tiny slits as he turned and ran away from the hall. His vision had adjusted a little, so he was able to see where he was going, even though the red glare lingered along his optic nerves and in his brain. There was a small common area not too far away, where residents of Corridor Two could get together. Larkin stumbled into it and dropped behind one of the benches to use it for cover.

The survivors from the surface were boiling out of the corridor now, firing pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Some of them howled like wild animals, others shouted curses or just yelled incoherently. As they swarmed past the still-burning bundle of flares, they blocked the hellish light, so Larkin began to be able to see better. He rammed home a loaded magazine into the Colt and aimed over the back of the bench.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The evenly spaced shots took down three of the attackers, spilling them limply to the floor. They drew attention, though, and Larkin had to duck as slugs and buckshot hammered the bench. More of the crazed intruders charged toward him, firing as they came. He knew his position would be overrun within seconds.

Then another figure leaped through the haze of gunsmoke that was tinted red by the flares. Shots spurted from the Glock Jill held and drove some of the attackers off their feet. She burst through their ranks, spinning and firing as she whirled through the air. A man’s head jerked as blood and brains flew from it. Another twisted around from the impact of a slug in his chest. Larkin rose up and fired past Jill, his bullets shredding another of the attackers.

She leaped behind another bench and crouched there, breathing hard as she looked over at her father. Larkin nodded in thanks.

Gunfire roared along the corridor as the people from the surface scattered in their murderous rampage and the residents fought back. Larkin raised his voice over the racket and called over to Jill, “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Dad. Look!”

Larkin turned back to the elevator hallway in time to see Charlotte and Nelson Ruskin dart out of it and run in the other direction, toward the Command Center. So those two had been reunited, just as he’d thought, and now they were on their way to cause even more trouble. If they reached the Command Center, there was no limit to the damage they might do. They might wreck enough equipment to put the whole project in danger.

“Son of a bitch!” Larkin said as he surged to his feet. “We’ve got to stop ’em!”

He took off running after the Ruskins. He knew without looking that Jill was right behind him.

Charlotte panted as she tried to keep up with Nelson. He had grabbed up a rifle that one of the other men had dropped, a military-looking weapon—Charlotte didn’t know what they were called—and held it in front of him at a slant across his chest.

“What are we… going to do?” she managed to ask.

“I remember the Command Center from the tour we took. Moultrie will be there. If we can get our hands on him, we can force the bastard to do whatever we want.”

“We should kill him! He locked you out!”

“That would be a waste. Look out!”

Two men in the red vests of the security force had popped into sight in front of them. Both men were armed and tried to raise the pistols they held. Nelson skidded to a stop and brought up the rifle, firing three swift shots before the guards could get off even a single round. They both flopped backward as the bullets tore through them.

Nelson grabbed Charlotte’s hand and tugged her on. They ran past the dying men, who were gasping out their last breaths.

“What about the people who came down here with you?”

Nelson shook his head. “They’re on their own. They knew it might be a losing battle. But they’re getting to strike back, and that’s all they care about. I want to take over this place so we can bring down even more of them and wipe out everybody! That’s why I need to get my hands on Moultrie.”

He was insane with hatred, Charlotte thought—but she felt her lips curving in a savage grin right along with his.

In this world, what was left but madness and revenge and death?

“There’s the entrance to the Command Center,” she told him, “straight ahead!”

Threadgill tried to push himself up from Trahn’s chair. All the surveillance cameras were down, along with the computers, so he couldn’t see what was going on out in the project, but he could hear the rattle of gunfire and knew hell was breaking loose. He needed to be there, doing what he could to help.

He had lost enough blood, though, that he was too weak to stand. His muscles simply refused to obey him.

“Trahn,” he mumbled. “How’re the computers doin’?”

“They crashed again,” Trahn said as he hovered over a keyboard. “I forced another restart. Maybe they’ll reboot this time.”

“They damned well… better,” Threadgill said.

“Oh, my God!” Trahn exclaimed. “Mr. Moultrie!”

Graham Moultrie, clad in hastily pulled-on jeans and T-shirt, shouldered Trahn aside and reached for the keyboard. He stopped before he did anything and stared at the monitor.

“Five minutes,” he muttered.

“Sir?” Trahn said.

“It’ll take at least five minutes for the computers to be up again. How many reboots is this?”

“It’s the second one.”

Moultrie nodded. His face was drawn and tense, but he seemed composed. “Let’s hope that does it,” he said. “The electrical grid is intact and emergency systems are running. That’ll hold us until the system is fully functional again.”

Trahn heaved a sigh of obvious relief. He said, “I knew you’d be prepared for any contingency, sir.”

Moultrie smiled grimly. “Don’t count on that yet. We’re under attack from the surface.”

“What?” Threadgill again tried to stand up. “I gotta go help—”

Moultrie put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re hurt, Adam. You’ve done enough already.” He glanced at the body on the floor. “Is that Jeff Greer?”

“Yeah. When I got here to see what the alarm was about, he shot me. I didn’t have any choice but to kill him.”

“Was Charlotte Ruskin with him?”

Threadgill found the strength to shake his head. “Didn’t see her. How about you, Trahn?”

“She… she was here,” the technician said. “She and Greer forced me to open the hatch at the top of the elevator shaft. They had an access card for the override.”

Moultrie looked even more haggard at that news. “Where did they get it?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“It must have come from Chuck Fisher,” Moultrie said with a frown. “Chuck wouldn’t have given it up unless…”

“Oh, hell,” Threadgill said as Moultrie’s voice trailed off. He was thinking the same thing: Fisher wouldn’t have given up his access cards as long as he was alive.

“So Charlotte Ruskin was trying to reach the surface and find her husband,” Moultrie said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. And now Ruskin and some of those other survivors have made it down here and are attacking the project—”

“That’s right,” a voice came from the doorway. “Your arrogance has caught up with you, Moultrie, and now you’re gonna get what’s coming to you!”

The men at the console turned their heads to look at the entrance, where Nelson Ruskin stood with an AR-15 in his hands and his wife beside him, pointing a pistol at them.

Charlotte stalked forward, being careful to stay out of the line of fire, and said, “You! Trahn! Send the elevator back up.”

“I… I can’t!” Trahn said. “The computer’s still rebooting. I don’t have any control.”

She paused and looked down at Greer’s body. “Jeff…” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Moultrie was standing so that he partially blocked Threadgill from the Ruskins’ view. Threadgill reached deep inside and finally found the strength he needed to move. The intruders either hadn’t noticed him or didn’t realize he was armed. He came up out of the chair and swung his left arm, hitting Moultrie’s upper arm and driving the man aside and down. Threadgill’s gun came up and belched flame.

The AR-15 roared as Nelson Ruskin frenziedly pulled the trigger four times. One bullet went past Threadgill and shattered a monitor behind him, but the other three smashed into his chest. Threadgill’s finger clenched spasmodically on the trigger and his gun went off again. The wild shot struck Charlotte Ruskin just above her left eye and snapped her head back. Her knees buckled. She was dead by the time they hit the floor, and she pitched forward on her face.

“Nooooo!” Nelson Ruskin howled. He tracked the rifle toward Moultrie, jerking the trigger as he swung the weapon. The bullets found Charles Trahn first. Trahn scrambled to get out of the way but was too slow. A couple of slugs tore through his body and exited in sprays of blood. He crumpled to the floor next to Greer and Threadgill, who had also collapsed from his wounds.

Moultrie would have been next. Ruskin charged across the room toward him, eager to kill. But before Ruskin could pull the trigger again, Larkin and Jill rushed into the Command Center and opened fire. Ruskin stumbled forward as the bullets pounded into his back. Great blossoms of blood appeared on his shirt. Some of the slugs bored all the way through and whined around the room, most of their force spent by their lethal passage through Nelson Ruskin’s flesh. The AR-15 slid from Ruskin’s hands and clattered to the floor. He reached out blindly, as if trying to get his hands around Graham Moultrie’s throat, then sank to his knees and rolled onto his side. A crimson pool spread around him.

Larkin kept his gun trained on Ruskin as he told Jill, “Check on Charlotte.”

Only a couple of seconds went by before Jill reported, “She’s dead, Dad.”

“I’m pretty sure Ruskin is, too, but keep an eye on him anyway.”

Having said that, Larkin lowered his gun and hurried to Adam Threadgill’s side. He knelt next to his old friend.

“Damn it, Adam.”

Threadgill’s eyes fluttered open. “P-Patrick…” he managed to say. “You need to watch out… for Ruskin…”

“He’s done for, buddy,” Larkin said quietly. He put a hand on Threadgill’s shoulder and squeezed. “Thanks to you.”

“Nah, I didn’t… but I guess… it doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Larkin said, trying to keep his voice from choking. “It sure doesn’t.”

“What matters… is that you tell Luisa… that I… I love…”

Threadgill didn’t have the strength to go on. Larkin leaned close to him and whispered, “She knows, Adam. She knows. But I’ll tell her for you anyway.”

“Thanks… Patrick… Semper…”

“Fi,” Larkin grated out as Threadgill’s last breath rattled in his throat. Larkin knelt there for a long moment, head down, before he dragged in a deep breath and came to his feet.

Gunfire continued elsewhere in the project. Larkin needed to be there. He looked at Moultrie, who was ashen but apparently unhurt, and said, “You all right, Graham?”

Moultrie nodded. “Thank you, Patrick.”

Larkin turned toward the door and jerked his head at Jill. “Come on, kid. There’s more work to do.”

Chapter 39

The computer system finished its reboot approximately fifteen minutes later. All systems came back online, although some of them were glitchy. By that time, the shooting had stopped. All the invaders from the surface were dead: fourteen men and seven women.

So were nine of the Hercules Project’s residents, six members of the security force and three so-called civilians. Those casualties included Chuck Fisher, Adam Threadgill, and Charles Trahn. Two dozen more residents were wounded, some seriously.

Larkin and Jill had come through the fighting without a scratch. Larkin’s heart was full of pain from the death of his old friend, though.

With Fisher’s death, Larkin found himself unofficially heading up the security force, so the report came to him of noises from the elevator shaft. Somebody was banging around up there. Larkin went and listened for himself. He knew right away what was going on.

He found Moultrie in the now up-and-running-again Command Center and told him, “Some of the survivors have managed to climb down the elevator cables and they’re on top of the car now, trying to bust through it with what sounds like shovels and axes.”

“They’re not going to be able to, are they?” Moultrie said. “It’s solid steel. They’d need a torch to cut through it, and even if they happen to have one, we’re not going to give them the chance to do that.”

“What do you think we should do, Patrick?”

Larkin pointed with his thumb and said, “Send the car back up. The hatch is open. They can scramble back out before they get caught. Then we bring it down and close the hatch. We’re back where we started.”

“Only the atmosphere down here has been breached and exposed to the air from up there.”

“I’m sure you’ve checked the radiation readings by now. Just letting some surface air down here hasn’t made them go up, has it?”

Moultrie shook his head. “No, we seem to be safe where that’s concerned. And the scans for any other sort of contaminant have come up negative. The only thing that got down here that’s still dangerous are the bodies of those dead maniacs—and we have an incinerator to deal with those.”

Larkin grimaced. He knew Moultrie was right. Burning the corpses was the best and safest way to dispose of them. It still seemed a little harsh to him, anyway, despite the fact that he himself planned to be cremated if possible when his time came.

Moultrie sighed and said, “I should have taken your advice more seriously, Patrick. You knew that freight elevator was a weak spot in our defenses, and I didn’t shore it up enough. I won’t make that mistake again. I need someone to take Chuck’s place, and I’m hoping you’ll agree to accept the job.”

“As head of security?”

“That’s right.”

The offer didn’t come as a surprise to Larkin. It wasn’t a responsibility he would have ever sought out on his own, but it also wasn’t something he could turn down. Somebody had to do the job, and he was as qualified as anybody else down here. More qualified than most.

“All right,” he told Moultrie. “I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Patrick. I’ll rest easier at night, knowing that you’ll be watching over all of us. Now…” Moultrie turned to a keyboard and typed for a few seconds. He took a handheld tablet from his pocket and tapped a couple of icons on its screen. “I’m sending the elevator back up, as you suggested. When it comes back down, you can arrange to post as many guards there as you’d like, around the clock.”

“I don’t know if they’ll try to get down that way again,” Larkin said. “They had to have somebody on the inside helping them to make it this time. If it hadn’t been for Charlotte Ruskin—”

“Someone else down here might decide to turn traitor,” Moultrie broke in. “You’re going to have to be on the lookout for that, too. I’m counting on you, Patrick, to ferret out anyone who might be disloyal to the Hercules Project.”

“Sure,” Larkin said, but even as he spoke, he felt a faint stirring of misgivings. It was easy for such efforts as Moultrie described to turn into a witch hunt. That could do more harm than good.

“And just to make sure those bastards on the surface think twice before they try anything else…” Moultrie did more tapping on the handheld tablet.

“What are you doing now?”

“Closing the hatch,” Moultrie said.

Larkin frowned. “Doesn’t seem like the elevator’s had enough time to get all the way to the top—”

“It hasn’t.”

“But that means—” Larkin’s heart thudded hard in his chest. For a second he couldn’t speak. Then he said, “If the hatch is closed, those people on top of the car won’t have anywhere to go when it gets to the top of the shaft.”

“No, they won’t. But you saw how insane they all were, Patrick. All they wanted to do was slaughter us, like they were some sort of crazed horde.”

“They’re sick and scared—”

“And a danger to the project.” Moultrie set the tablet aside and put a hand on Larkin’s shoulder. “How many of them did you kill, Patrick? Several, I imagine.”

That was different, Larkin thought. That was in battle. It wasn’t tapping an icon on a screen and standing idly by while people were crushed to bloody paste between two unyielding slabs of steel. Larkin could only imagine the stark terror that had gripped those people in the shaft as darkness closed in around them and the elevator car continued grinding upward…

And by now it was probably over, he realized. None of the blood would seep into the sealed elevator car. There would be no signs to haunt the residents of the project. Those poor bastards were gone just as much as the ones chucked into the incinerator soon would be. Gone and forgotten.

But Larkin wasn’t sure he would ever forget the faint, satisfied smile on Graham Moultrie’s face as the man sent those people to their doom.

Chapter 40

August 15

Larkin lifted his arm and used his sleeve to wipe sweat from his face as he entered his apartment after a shift on patrol duty, circulating through the project to make sure everything was peaceful. The heat was worse than usual today. It had been like that off and on for several weeks, enough so that people were talking about how it was hotter than it used to be. Some of them speculated that it must be summer on the surface.

Larkin knew that wasn’t the case. Or maybe, technically, it was. But either way, it didn’t matter. With the thick layer of earth, steel, and concrete above them serving as insulation, the climate at the surface would have no effect on conditions inside the Hercules Project.

The situation was worrisome enough that he said something about it to Susan when he found her in the apartment’s small kitchen. She nodded and said solemnly, “I know. And it’s not just the heat, Patrick. We’ve had a big jump in the cases we’re seeing of asthma complications and other breathing problems. The air’s just not as good as it was.”

Larkin knew what she meant. On occasion, he’d found himself having trouble catching his breath, and he knew there wasn’t anything wrong with his lungs. It was almost like there wasn’t enough air in the air.

“You should say something to Graham about it,” Susan went on.

“I don’t know. I’m not a scientist…”

“But you’re the head of security and basically his second-in-command down here. If there’s a problem, he should have told you about it.”

Larkin shook his head. Susan had said that he was Graham Moultrie’s second-in-command, and he knew other people thought of him that way, too. But ever since the attack from the surface led by Nelson Ruskin, Moultrie had changed. He didn’t even pretend to listen to anyone else’s opinion these days. He just gave orders and expected them to be carried out without question. Everything he did was for the good of the project and their continued survival, he claimed, and Larkin supposed that Moultrie actually believed that. But sometimes Larkin wasn’t sure that was all there was to it.

Sometimes it seemed like Moultrie just wanted to shut down anybody who might disagree with him. More than once, Larkin had gotten the impression that Moultrie was keeping things from him, important things.

Like the way the life-support systems in the bunker were working.

Larkin might have mentioned that ill-at-ease feeling to Susan, but at that moment the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt crackled and his daughter’s voice said, “Dad? You there?”

He knew that Jill’s security shift was beginning as his ended, so she was on duty now. She probably wouldn’t be calling him right now if it wasn’t security-related, so he wasted no time unclipping the walkie-talkie and bringing it to his lips.

“I’m here, kid. What’s up?”

“Got a situation brewing down here in the bunker. You mind coming down?”

Larkin cocked an eyebrow. Jill didn’t ask for help very often, so her “situation” had to be something fairly serious.

“I’ll be right there,” he told her, then put the walkie-talkie back on his belt next to the holstered 1911.

“Should I come with you?” Susan asked.

“No, you stay here.”

“She’s my daughter, too, Patrick.” Susan’s tone was a little sharper than usual. “And if it’s trouble, you might need some medical assistance.”

She had a point there, he thought, but at the same time he wasn’t going to put her in harm’s way if it wasn’t necessary.

“I’ll call you if I need you,” he said as he turned toward the door. From the corner of his eye he saw how her features tightened in anger, but he couldn’t do anything about that right now.

Their apartment was on the same level as the lower bunker, so he didn’t have to go “down there,” as Jill had put it, just out the door, through the foyer, and into the huge, open living area. The sound of raised, angry voices drew him immediately toward the other end.

A crowd of close to a hundred people had gathered in front of one of the staircases. A man had gone up several stairs and turned so he could face the others and address them. As Larkin came closer, he recognized Chad Holdstock, who had been Jeff Greer’s friend.

There was no proof that Holdstock had been part of the plan hatched by Greer and Charlotte Ruskin to allow the survivors from the surface to invade the project. Holdstock had denied even knowing what the two of them were plotting, and there was no evidence to say that he was lying. Larkin didn’t trust the guy anyway.

After the bloody attack, the malcontents among the Bullpenners had been pretty quiet. Larkin didn’t expect it to stay that way, though, so he wasn’t surprised when he saw that Holdstock was trying to stir up the crowd.

Jill stood off to the side but came toward him when she spotted him. Larkin nodded toward the assemblage and said, “Looks like we’ve got some rabble-rousing going on.”

“I’m worried that they’re working themselves up to a riot,” Jill said.

“What do they want now? To have another election?”

Since both of the residents’ elected representatives—Charlotte Ruskin and Jeff Greer—were dead, the idea of the residents having any input into Moultrie’s decisions seemed to have died, too. The whole thing had been a fraud to begin with, Larkin knew, and Moultrie had dispensed with even keeping up the pretense. It wouldn’t surprise him if the Bullpenners started agitating for new representatives, even though it wouldn’t do them any good.

But Jill shook her head and said, “It’s not that. It’s the food.”

Larkin frowned. “What about it?”

“People don’t like the new rationing regulations.”

Larkin’s frown deepened. Everyone down here had known all along that it was necessary to keep track of how much food was consumed. Even with the livestock and the hydroponic garden, their supplies weren’t limitless. Moultrie had estimated that they could have full rations for eighteen months, and if the project remained closed up longer than that, some sacrifices might have to be made. It hadn’t even been a full year yet since the war.

“Nobody told me about new rationing regulations.”

“They just went into effect today,” Jill said. “Supplies for people who live in the Bullpen have been cut by thirty percent.”

“Wait, that’s not right,” Larkin said. “What about everybody else?”

Jill shrugged and said, “Just before I went on duty, Trevor and I received a message that our available supplies were being reduced by 10 percent. I don’t know if there was any change for you and Mom and the other people who live in the silos.”

Anger stirred inside Larkin. Susan hadn’t said anything to him about a change in their rations, but maybe she hadn’t had a chance to. Or maybe they weren’t being asked to give up anything, while the people who lived in the Bullpen and the main halls were. If that was the case, the unfairness of it grated at him.

“That’s what has Holdstock and these other folks so worked up?”

“Yes. Did Graham say anything to you about this, Dad?”

Larkin blew out a breath. “I don’t think he tells anybody much of anything these days, unless it’s his wife.”

“Well, maybe you should say something to these people.”

Larkin didn’t consider himself any sort of public speaker, but he knew Jill was right. Holdstock’s loud, angry complaints were bringing shouts of agreement from the crowd. Larkin couldn’t really blame them for being upset, but there were better ways to deal with that than inciting a riot.

He moved into the rear of the crowd, shouldering a few people aside. “Hey!” he shouted. “Holdstock! Wait a minute—”

Holdstock spotted him—Larkin was taller than most of the people in the crowd—and pointed. “There’s one of Moultrie’s Redshirts now! Tell him what you think of Moultrie trying to starve us out!”

Larkin wasn’t wearing the red vest of the security force. He had left it back in the apartment. But by now everybody in the Hercules Project knew who he was. For a little while, he had been regarded as one of the heroes of the battle against the surface survivors, but that goodwill had faded fast, as it always did where the public was concerned.

The people around him began yelling and shoving at him. Larkin dropped his hand to the butt of the gun on his hip. He had no intention of drawing it; he just didn’t want anybody else making a grab at the weapon.

But somebody saw the move and cried, “Look out! He’s gonna shoot us!”

“Grab him!” another man urged. “Pull him down before he kills us all!”

Larkin kept his right hand on his gun and swung his left arm in an attempt to clear some space around him. His fist backhanded one of the men with a solid thud that sent the man flying backward. But more surged forward to take his place, and suddenly Larkin was surrounded by a crazed melee, with most of the punches directed at him.

“Dad!” he vaguely heard Jill calling to him. “Dad!” He knew she wouldn’t stand by and let him be stomped and kicked to death, which was what the mob seemed intent on doing. And it was a mob now, no doubt about it.

Larkin knew his daughter. She would open fire to save him, and that would escalate the violence even more...

With the suddenness of a sucker punch, darkness fell.

And down here far underground, it was such a complete absence of light that it took the breath away. Everyone froze, stunned by the unexpected blackness that had swallowed them. That shocked silence and immobility lasted a couple of heartbeats, then people began to scream and lunge around blindly. Bodies rammed into Larkin, but at least they were just panicking now, not trying to kill him anymore.

Anyone who fell, though, might wind up trampled to death anyway. Larkin bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Stop! Everybody be still! Just stop where you are!”

The commands seemed to get through to some of the mob. Other voices called out, urging calm. Gradually, the screaming and milling around came to a halt. Larkin heard a lot of harsh, frightened breathing.

What he didn’t hear was worse. The life-support systems gave off a low hum that filled the project around the clock.

But the absence of that hum was like an alarm bell going off. The last time it hadn’t been present was when the computer system had crashed during the attack from the surface. Even then, the lights had remained on.

Now it seemed as if everything in the project had shut down. All the things that kept everyone alive…

Less than a minute had gone by since the lights went out, although it seemed longer. Larkin forced his brain to work and remembered the small, battery-powered flashlight he had in his pocket. It was part of his equipment as a member of the security force, just like the walkie-talkie and his gun, and he always had it either on his person or within reach. He slid his hand into his pocket, found the light, brought it out, and thumbed it on.

His eyes had already had time to react to the darkness, so the shaft of light was a little blinding when it shot out. Larkin squinted and looked away from it. Several people exclaimed reflexively. Larkin aimed the flashlight at the ceiling so the light would bounce and spread out.

A palpable sense of relief filled the air. Nobody liked being stuck in the dark.

At least for the moment, the near-riot was over. Everyone was too worried about the power going off to think about the food-rationing situation.

“Dad!” Jill worked her way through the crowd to Larkin. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “But I intend to find out. You have your light, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then help these people back to their quads. Then go to the apartment and make sure your mother’s all right.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the Command Center,” Larkin said. “I want some answers.”

Chapter 41

Larkin had just reached the landing where the staircase turned, halfway between the lower bunker and the main level, when the lights recessed along the top of the walls flickered a couple of times, then came on and stayed lit. He had been guided so far by his flashlight, but he turned it off now.

He stood there for a long moment, listening. When he felt as much as heard the low, powerful hum that meant the generators and the life-support equipment were working again, he closed his eyes for a second and heaved a sigh of relief. They weren’t going to have to evacuate the project, at least not yet. That would have been a nightmare, although it was possible since the blast doors at the main entrance could be opened by hand once Moultrie physically unlocked them with his master key.

That would have meant all the residents would be fleeing to the surface—and they didn’t know what dangers might be waiting for them up there.

Despite the fact that things seemed to be working again, he still wanted to know what had just happened. Like everything else in the Hercules Project, one man would have the answers: Graham Moultrie.

The Command Center was buzzing with excitement and activity when he got there, and the hubbub of conversation among the people on duty had an anxious note to it. Andrea Marshall spotted him and called, “Patrick! Do you know what just happened?”

“I was hoping somebody here could tell me,” Larkin said.

Andrea shook her head. “It took us all by surprise, too.”

“Graham in his office?”

“I think so…”

Larkin didn’t wait to hear more. He strode through the Command Center to Moultrie’s office and knocked on the door.

For a moment, there was no response. Then Larkin heard the electronic lock on the door buzz, and Moultrie called, “Come in.”

When Larkin entered the room, Moultrie nodded and went on, “I thought that might be you, Patrick. I recognized your knock.”

“Maybe it was a little heavy-handed—” Larkin began.

“Not at all. I also figured you’d be the first one to come see me.” Moultrie was sitting behind his big desk, surrounded by monitors, computer terminals, and other equipment. He leaned back in his chair and said, “You like to stay on top of everything that’s going on down here.”

“I don’t think I’ve been staying on top of it enough. Something’s going on, Graham. I was considering asking you about it anyway, but with everything that’s happened today, I have to.”

“The power going out, you mean?”

“And the riot that almost broke out in the Bullpen over the new food rationing.”

Moultrie sat forward, suddenly tense. “Riot?” he repeated. Clearly, he hadn’t heard about that yet.

“Don’t worry, it got broken up when the lights went out and everybody started panicking about suffocating instead. But once they get over being scared, they’ll be mad again about the food.”

Moultrie waved a hand dismissively and said, “They’ll get used to that. There’ll still be enough for everyone to survive.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think they signed up for a subsistence diet,” Larkin said. “At the moment, though, I’m more worried about the power and the life-support systems. It’s hotter down here than it used to be, Graham, and the air’s not as good. Plenty of people have noticed that, too, and I expect they’re not happy about it.”

Moultrie clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him and sighed. “It’s been that obvious?”

“It has.”

“I was hoping people would think… Well, I don’t know what I was hoping. That it wouldn’t come to this, I guess.”

“Come to what?” Larkin said. He couldn’t help but hear the hollow note of dread in his voice.

“The life-support systems are failing.”

Larkin stared at Moultrie for a long moment, then shook his head. “That can’t be. You worked everything out ahead of time.”

“I did the math,” Moultrie snapped. “All the experts I hired did the math. But this is uncharted territory, Patrick. Nobody ever tried to support this many people in a completely sealed environment for this long before.”

“It hasn’t been completely sealed the whole time,” Larkin pointed out.

“The breach from the surface was a short one. We’ve been monitoring for radiation and contaminants, and the levels are so low they’re well within the normal range. The breach elevated them so slightly that it might as well have not happened.”

Larkin couldn’t suppress the reaction he felt to that statement. He burst out, “Well, then, my God, why don’t we just go back up to the surface?”

“I said the range is normal down here.” Moultrie’s voice was hard and flat now, revealing that he didn’t like to be challenged, which Larkin already knew. “It’s still too high at the surface.”

“It wasn’t too high for Ruskin and the others to survive.”

“You saw them, Patrick. You know what they were like. Is that the sort of existence you want to condemn our people to?”

“Of course not. But we don’t know why those people were in such bad shape. The worst of them could have been poisoned by the radiation from the blast itself, not the residual radiation. We know that Ruskin was somewhere around here when the bomb went off. He must have been down in a storm cellar or something like that to have made it through. And he was in better shape than some of the others.” Larkin cast his memory back. “What about Earl Crandall? He didn’t seem sick. He could have come here from somewhere else, somewhere where things aren’t as bad.”

“And your point is?” Moultrie asked.

“If Crandall could come here and still be all right, it stands to reason we could leave the project and head west, to where the damage and the radiation aren’t as bad. Sure, the infrastructure will be heavily damaged and the technology will be gone, but we’d learn new ways of doing things. A lot of us have the necessary survival skills, and we can teach and help the ones who don’t.”

That was the most the normally laconic Larkin had spoken at one time in quite a while. He could tell from the stony look on Moultrie’s face, though, that the argument hadn’t done any good.

“When the time comes, that’s what we’ll do,” Moultrie said. “But it’s not that time yet.”

“Then when? When the generators and the life-support systems fail entirely?”

“They’re not going to—” Moultrie broke off and slapped a palm down on the desk in obvious frustration and anger. “Damn it!”

“They are failing, aren’t they? Not just the life-support systems, but the generators, too.”

Moultrie looked away, unable to meet Larkin’s eyes for a few seconds. Then he said, “Again, no one has ever undertaken anything like this before. The wear and tear on the equipment has been more than we anticipated. We’ve been having to shut down some of the generators for a while each day, and when we do that, we have to take some of the life-support systems off-line as well, so as not to put too much of a strain on the other generators. We’re doing that on a rotating basis, so nothing is down for too long at a time.”

“Like the old rolling brownouts we used to hear about,” Larkin said.

“Exactly. But there’s a solution.”

“What’s that?”

“We need generator parts to replace the ones that are wearing out. Honestly, best-case scenario, we could use some more gas to power them, too. If we can keep the generators running, we can patch up the life-support systems enough to get by.”

Larkin had to stare again. “There’s not enough gasoline?”

“Blast it, Patrick, you know as well as I do that not everything was completely in place when all hell broke loose. If I’d just had another month to prepare, even two more weeks…” Moultrie sighed and shook his head. “We had enough of everything on hand to survive in relative comfort for almost a year, didn’t we? And it’s not like everything is going to run out tomorrow.”

“But it’s going to get a little more dicey the longer we stay down here.”

Larkin’s words weren’t really a question, but Moultrie shrugged in eloquent response anyway.

“All the more reason to risk moving back to the surface—”

“No! I won’t abandon the project until I’m absolutely certain that it’s completely safe.”

“Nothing in life is completely safe, Graham,” Larkin said quietly.

“Maybe not, but I won’t do less than my absolute best to protect my people.”

Larkin didn’t care much for the way Moultrie said my people like that, as if they were his subjects rather than his tenants. In a sense, that’s what he was: a landlord. Not a king or an emperor.

Larkin didn’t want to get into that. Instead he said, “How do you intend to get parts for the generator and more gasoline?”

“I said we weren’t all going up to the surface.” Moultrie smiled a little. “I didn’t say that nobody could go.”

Larkin’s brain was still reeling a little by the time he got back to the apartment—not only from the dangers Graham Moultrie had revealed to him but also the plan that Moultrie had concocted to counter those dangers.

Susan was waiting for him. He could tell she was trying not to look anxious, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

The first question she asked was that of a mother. “Is Jill all right?”

“She was fine the last I saw of her,” Larkin replied as he put his arms around his wife and drew her against him. “If there had been any more trouble, I’m sure I would have heard.”

Susan moved back a little and tilted her head to look up at him. “Patrick, what happened? Why did Jill call you, and did it have anything to do with the lights going out a little while later? I don’t mind telling you, I was scared.”

“So was I. I wish I could have been here with you.”

“But I felt my way around and found a flashlight, and then it wasn’t quite so bad. But I was still so worried about you and Jill…”

“Let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They settled onto the love seat. Larkin enjoyed the warm, companionable pressure of her hip against his. He couldn’t imagine life without her, and he hoped he’d never have to experience it.

For the next few minutes, he told her about the near-riot caused by the new food restrictions. Susan shook her head in answer to his question about that and said, “No, I haven’t heard anything about our supplies being cut. Thirty percent for the Bullpen and ten percent for the people in the main halls, you said?”

Larkin nodded. “Yep.”

“Well, that’s just not right! It should be the same for everybody.”

“I agree with you. I got into that a little when I went to talk to Graham, but there are bigger problems to consider.”

“The power going out, you mean.”

“Yeah.” Larkin made a face. “Turns out that he didn’t have everything figured out quite so perfectly as everybody thought, including him. The life-support systems have developed some problems, but the real trouble is the generators. They’re wearing out, Susan, and even if the guys who maintain them can keep them limping along, they’re going to run out of fuel before we’re ready to go back up to the surface.”

Her eyes widened. “But… if the generators don’t work… we can’t stay down here.” Her voice took on a shaky note. “We’ll all suffocate in the dark…”

His wife had a steel core, Larkin knew that. She could deal with bloody injuries and life-and-death situations as well as anyone. But this was different. The possibilities Larkin was talking about tapped into the sort of primitive fears every human being had lurking deep inside. No matter how far humanity progressed, within the heart of everyone was a prehistoric creature peering at the eternal darkness and everything bad hidden within it.

“That’s not gonna happen,” he said as he tightened his arm around her. “We’re going to do something about it before things ever get that bad.”

“We?”

“Well… some of us. Graham has decided to send an expedition up to the surface to scavenge for the things we need.” Larkin paused, knowing he couldn’t dodge the rest of the news he had for Susan. “And I’m going to lead it.”

Chapter 42

Larkin expected an argument, and he got one.

“Are you crazy?” Susan demanded as she paced back and forth in front of him. “It’s too dangerous for the rest of us to go up to the surface, but you’re going.”

“Someone has to,” Larkin said calmly. “And it’s not like this is the first time I’ll be doing something dangerous.”

Susan swung around sharply toward him. “I know! You always volunteered for every insane mission that came along.”

“And I came back safe and sound from all of them. Well, mostly,” Larkin added, thinking of a few scars and stiff muscles he had brought back with him.

“Getting shot at is one thing. I suppose you know how to guard against that about as well as anyone down here. But what about the radiation and all the other things up there that can kill you?”

“We have a dozen hazmat suits. Moultrie had them stored down here in case anyone had to go into possibly contaminated areas and work on equipment. They’ll provide a decent level of protection from radiation, and they should filter out any biological hazards. I’ll be fine.”

“What about the… the people up there?”

Susan’s voice held a note of horror. As someone in the medical profession, she understood quite well on an intellectual level that the people from the surface who had attacked the project were just suffering from various diseases and medical conditions. But that prehistoric part of her brain had recoiled from them in fear and disgust. Larkin knew that because he had experienced the same thing.

“The motion sensors haven’t detected anything up there since right after the attack, except a few stray anomalies that probably weren’t human. Even those seem to have gone away. The survivors who were left, they’ve either moved on somewhere else or…”

“Or died,” Susan finished for him.

“The shape they were in, some of them are bound to have passed away by now,” Larkin agreed.

“What if they just pulled back? What if they’re still close by and see you and the others moving around?”

“We’ll be better armed than they are,” Larkin said confidently. “Chances are, if that happens they’ll steer clear of us. They probably don’t want any more to do with us than we do with them.”

“And you’re sure of that.”

“Nothing in life is certain, babe.”

She glared at him for a moment, then sat down beside him again. He took that as a small victory.

After a couple of minutes of silence, she asked, “Who’s going with you?”

“I’ll have to ask for volunteers, of course.”

“I can tell you who’s not going with you, Patrick.”

“Jill,” he said before she could go on. “Yeah, I already thought of that. She’ll probably want to, but I’m in command of this mission, so I have the final say on who stays and who goes.”

“She’s going to be very angry with you.”

“Hey, she’s been angry with me before. Remember that guy in high school… what was his name?”

“Danny,” Susan said.

“Yeah, Danny. She was convinced she was in love with him, and when I told her she wasn’t, she threatened to move out.”

“And then she broke up with him a week later.”

“After breaking his finger when he wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Larkin sighed in satisfaction. “That’s my girl.”

Susan leaned against his shoulder. “But she’s still not going with you.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Larkin said.

The heat and the staleness of the air grew worse over the next few days, though not unbearably so. Rumors ran rampant throughout the project, though, and the level of anxiety was high. Most people didn’t know what was going on, and naturally, most of them assumed the worst.

Without going into detail, Larkin put the word out among the security force that he was looking for volunteers for an urgent, vital mission that might involve a high degree of risk. He didn’t say anything about it to Jill, but he wasn’t the least bit surprised when she got wind of it anyway. She confronted him one day in the Command Center.

“What’s this about some secret mission?” she asked. “If you’re looking for volunteers, Dad, you know you don’t even have to ask.”

“Yeah, I know,” Larkin said. “Which is why I didn’t’t ask.”

Jill’s eyebrows drew down in a puzzled and maybe a little bit of an angry frown. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you’re not going.”

She drew in a sharp breath. “Just like that.”

“Yep. Just like that.”

For a moment she glared at him, then said, “Mom put you up to this, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have to. It just so happens I’m in complete agreement with her. You’ll be staying here.”

“Because you think I can’t handle myself if there’s trouble?”

“You know better than that,” Larkin scoffed. “You’re staying here because your mother, your husband, and my grandkids are staying here. I can’t afford to be worrying about them while I’m trying to take care of business on the surface. And I won’t worry if I know you’re down here looking after them. Besides, you have enough medical skills that they might come in handy down here.”

“So you’re just trying to butter me up to get your way.”

Larkin grinned. “Is it working?”

She didn’t answer that. Instead, she asked, “So the rumors are true? You are going up to the surface?”

“A small group. There are some things the project needs, and we’re going to look for them.”

“It’s a scrounging party?”

“That’s right,” Larkin said with a nod. He looked around, saw that no one else was in earshot at the moment, and went on, “We need parts for the generators as well as more gasoline if we can get it.”

“The generators are failing, and that’s why the life-support systems haven’t been working at full capacity?”

“You got it, kid.”

Jill frowned and asked, “Where are you going to find parts? Everything got blown to hell.”

“We were on the outer edge of the blast wave. Not everything was destroyed. Some buildings are probably left, and what was inside them will be, too. There have to be some vehicles around, as well. Generators are basically gasoline engines. We can get some parts off cars and trucks that the engineers can rig to work. That’s what they’ve told Graham, anyway.”

Jill was thinking now. He could tell that by her expression. She said, “You can siphon gas from the tanks of any vehicles you find intact.”

“Yeah. We might even find some underground storage tanks that are still all right, like at that convenience store a few miles west of here.”

“You’re going that far away from the project?” she asked in surprise and a certain amount of alarm.

“We’ll go as far as we have to in order to get what we need,” Larkin told her. “We’ll take enough supplies for a few days.”

“This could turn out to be very dangerous. If you take me along, I’ll have your back. You know that, Dad.”

“I know,” he said. “But like I told you, it’s more important for you to stay here and keep an eye on things.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m not sure I completely trust Graham anymore.”

That surprised Jill, too. “You don’t? But without him—”

“I know, I know. We’d all be dead. Nobody’s disputing that. But he’s said and done some things—” Larkin thought about the way Moultrie had killed those surface survivors who had tried to break through the top of the service elevator. Jill didn’t know about that, and right now she didn’t need to. “Let’s just say that he worries me. Too much power can go to a guy’s head.”

“And the way he changed the food rationing without any warning was kind of, well, harsh.” Jill nodded slowly. “I guess I see what you mean. All right. I don’t like it, but I understand. I’ll stay here to guard against any more trouble. But you have to promise me you’ll be careful up there.”

“Of course. Just like I always promised your mother.”

“And you didn’t mean it then, either, did you?”

Larkin couldn’t argue with that.

A day and a half later, Larkin had his team assembled. He was taking eight men with him, so that three of the hazmet suits could remain down in the project if they were needed. He had only male volunteers, but if anyone gave him any trouble about that, he could honestly say that Jill was the only woman who had offered to come along. And if they wanted to accuse him of patriarchy, they could go right ahead and do so. He didn’t give a damn.

To keep more rumors from spreading, they assembled in the middle of the “night” when most of the project’s residents were sleeping. They would use the service elevator to reach the surface. Ruskin and the other survivors had gotten in that way, so it stood to reason Larkin and his team could get out.

He looked around at the other eight men in the hallway. Graham Moultrie was there, too, with his hands in his jeans pockets and a solemn expression on his face.

Larkin wished the hazmat suits weren’t made of bright yellow plastic. The colorful outfits would make them easier to spot on the surface, especially in the gray, overcast environment. That was what Moultrie had on hand, though, and the protection the suits offered was important, at least until Larkin could determine what the conditions were up on the surface.

They were taking along instruments that would allow them to monitor the air quality and radiation level. If those things were close enough to safe, they would remove the hazmat suits and stow them in the packs they were taking along. If they ran into trouble, it would be a lot easier to move around in a hurry without the bulky suits on.

Larkin had put some thought into selecting his team. Two of the men were engineers whose normal job was maintaining the generators and life-support systems. They would be able to tell what was needed and what they could make work. Larkin had had a long talk with them to make sure they were aware of the dangers they might encounter on the surface. Both men were willing to run that risk.

The other six members of the team were, like Larkin, members of the security force. Three of them carried pump shotguns. The other three were armed with AR-15 s, as was Larkin. Each man, including the two engineers, also had a semi-automatic pistol holstered at his waist, over the hazmat suit. With the protective gloves they wore, handling the guns wouldn’t be as easy as it would have been otherwise, but until they determined what the surface conditions were, they were going to err on the side of caution.

Unfortunately, caution had some inherent trade-offs, as Larkin well knew.

As they gathered in front of the service elevator, Moultrie said, “On behalf of everyone here in the Hercules Project, I want to express our appreciation to you men. This is a dangerous mission on which you’re embarking, but one that’s vital of the survival of everyone here.”

“We know that, Graham,” Larkin said, his voice muffled by the plastic helmet of the hazmat suit. It sounded odd to him in his own ears. “We’ll stay in touch as much as possible, but we may wind up going out of range of the walkie-talkies.”

“Do what you need to do,” Moultrie said with a grim nod. “Just bring us back what we need to keep going.”

Larkin returned the nod. There was nothing left to say. The group had gone over the plan, such as it was, until everyone knew exactly what they were doing. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, there were simply too many unknowns to take into account.

They were going into hostile territory, and they would have to play things by ear until they saw what it was like up there.

Even through the suit, Larkin heard the rumble that told him the hatch at the top of the shaft was opening. The elevator door slid back. The nine men trooped into it, carrying their weapons and packs.

Earlier, Larkin had had dinner with Susan, Jill, Trevor, Bailey, and Chris. The kids didn’t know what he was going to be doing, but the adults did. Even though Larkin didn’t intend it as such, there was an unmistakable feeling that this might be the last time they would all see each other. It had always been like that when men went off to war, he supposed, no matter how far back you went in history.

Later, when the two of them were alone, he had held Susan for a long time, each drawing strength and comfort from the other.

Then he had saddled up, figuratively speaking, and left to do the job that had fallen to him.

Now the eight men turned to face Moultrie, who gave them a smile of encouragement. Larkin pressed a button on the elevator’s control panel. The door closed, and with a slight lurch, the elevator started up toward the surface.

Chapter 43

The elevator opened in the rear wall of a large basement that had been used for storage when this place was a missile base. On the far side of the space was a broad ramp where trucks had backed down into the basement so they could unload. Larkin wasn’t clear on how the giant Nike Hercules missiles had been loaded into their launch silos, but at this point it didn’t matter. The tops of those silos had been sealed up and covered with tons of earth, so no one could ever go in or out that way.

When Larkin stepped out of the elevator, holding the AR-15 ready in case of trouble even though sensors reported nothing moving around up here, he couldn’t resist the urge to tip his head back and look upward. The building above this basement had mostly collapsed into it, leaving piles of rubble everywhere and open air above.

He was looking up at the sky, Larkin thought. For the first time in almost a year, he was gazing at the heavens again, as man had done from time immemorial.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a damned thing to see. For one thing, it was night, and for another the thick overcast that had hung above the earth for months was still in place. The gloom was thick as mud. There was too much debris down here for the team to move around safely without any light, so Larkin let the others emerge from the elevator, then said, “We’ll wait right here for morning.”

That was part of the plan they had all gone over ahead of time, so no one was surprised. If the others were anything like Larkin, they were eager to get out of here and back onto the surface, but they all knew it would be better not to show any lights that could draw attention to them.

The engineers, doubling as environmental techs for this mission, busied themselves taking readings, gathering their samples, and then going back into the elevator to check them so the lights they used to see the instruments wouldn’t show. Larkin tried not to hover over them, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “How does it look?”

“The air quality has a slightly higher particulate level than usual,” one of the men responded. “That’s probably due to the massive quantities of ash that were lifted into the upper-atmosphere as a result of the nuclear explosions. That ash has been circling the planet, carried by the upper-level winds, but slowly settling back to earth ever since.”

“It wouldn’t have all come back down by now?”

The man shook his head. “No, it may take a couple of years, maybe even longer, before the so-called nuclear winter is over. By this point, you probably won’t be able to see what’s in the air, but if your helmet was off, you could smell it, like you were in the vicinity of a big forest fire.”

“And that ash is radioactive,” Larkin said, trying not to sound dispirited.

The other engineer said, “Yes, but a lot of things in our normal lives were radioactive. It’s a matter of how much. By now the radiation from the contaminants in the air, as well as in the soil and the debris that’s left, has decayed to the point that it’s not extremely hazardous.”

“You’re saying we can take off these suits and breathe the air?”

“Well,” the man said, shrugging, “short-term exposure should be fine. If you were to spend years living in these conditions, your risk of developing cancer or some other form of radiation-related sickness would be somewhat higher than the normal, everyday risk in our old lives, before the war. But probably not dramatically so.”

“But don’t go taking off that hazmat suit just yet,” the first man said. “Give us a chance to take some more readings once we’re actually up on the surface, just to be sure.”

That made sense, Larkin thought. Again, they were going to be careful instead of reckless… although a big part of him wanted to yank that helmet off right now.

The three hours or so until dawn were some of the longest of Larkin’s life. And when morning finally did arrive, the blackness faded to gray at such a gradual pace it was almost indistinguishable. Only when Larkin realized he could see the piles of rubble in the basement did he understand that the time had come to move out.

The men were more than ready. They had sat down in the elevator, but when Larkin told them to get ready, they scrambled to their feet as quickly as they could in the bulky suits. He studied the wreckage in the basement and picked out a path through the rubble to the ramp, which appeared to be intact. Turning his head a little, Larkin said to the others, “Follow me.”

He led the way across the basement, up the ramp, and into the open. Setting foot on actual ground, rather than steel or concrete or tile, made another thrill go through Larkin. He paused and looked around while he waited for the rest of the team to climb up out of the basement.

Larkin had seen the aftermath of numerous wildfires in his life, and that was what the scenery around the Hercules Project reminded him of. Gray, barren hillsides met his gaze no matter where he looked. The scrubby trees that had covered so much of the landscape around here were all gone, except for a few twisted trunks with dead branches extending from them like skeletal fingers.

The buildings had been flattened by the concussion of the nuclear blast twenty miles away. Here and there a small piece of cinder-block wall stuck up from the charred ground. The brick wall along the perimeter, which should have been visible, was nowhere to be seen. Larkin looked in the direction of downtown Fort Worth, but in the persistent gloom the horizon quickly faded to a hazy nothingness.

The clouds overhead were thick and gunmetal gray as they scudded slowly along, driven by a chilly wind. The sealed suits protected the men from that wind and retained their body heat, keeping them comfortable. Right now, though, Larkin wouldn’t have minded feeling the cold on his face. It would remind him that he had climbed up out of the ground and was walking on the earth again like a man.

He turned to the two engineers, who were studying their instruments. “How’s it look?”

“The readings are consistent with the ones we took down in the basement,” one of the men reported. “I think we should stay suited up for a while, though, just to be on the safe side.”

A surge of recklessness welled up inside Larkin for a moment. He had survived the greatest disaster to hit the planet since that asteroid had come along and wiped out the dinosaurs. He was sick and tired of playing it safe.

However, the more pragmatic part of his nature won out. He nodded and said, “We’ll keep the suits on while we take a look around.”

Larkin could tell where the main road leading into the project had been. Some of the asphalt was still visible. He led the men along it toward the county road. As they came closer, he saw the rusted hulks of hundreds of cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs along the route where people had tried to flee. Some of them were overturned and lay on their tops or sides. Others were scattered haphazardly in the ditches, as if a giant hand had picked them up and flung them around. The blast wave had done that, Larkin knew.

“Most of those vehicles look burned,” one of the engineers said. “The heat from the explosion probably ignited the gas in their tanks. We’re not going to find anything useful here.”

Larkin nodded. He had suspected that would be the case while hoping it wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t be able to grab what they needed and get back down into the project in a matter of hours. They were going to have to range farther afield.

“We’ll head west along the county road,” he said. “How far do you think we’ll need to go in order to find usable parts and gasoline?”

The man just shook his head helplessly. He didn’t know the answer to that question any more than the rest of them did.

“Let’s go,” Larkin said. He started winding his way through the wrecked cars along the county road. From time to time he glanced inside one of the vehicles, knowing what he was going to see: the charred remains of the unfortunate people who had been caught out here, trying futilely to get away. Sometimes there was an almost complete skeleton slumped over a melted steering wheel. More often there was just a jumble of blasted-apart bones.

Larkin had seen plenty of bad things in wartime… but never anything like this.

He didn’t let himself think about that. As always, he concentrated on the job at hand.

Something moved up ahead. Just a flicker, but that was enough to make Larkin bring up the AR-15 and tighten his finger on the trigger. He didn’t have a target, though. Whatever it was had ducked back out of sight.

The other men had noticed his reaction and responded accordingly, lifting their weapons as well. One of the men asked, “Did you see something, Patrick?”

“Yeah, but it seems to be gone now. And before you ask, I didn’t get a good look at it. Couldn’t tell what it was, except that it wasn’t very big.”

Another man, a fellow in his twenties named Wade, said, “At least we haven’t seen any aliens or mutants or zombies yet.”

“No, and you won’t, because they don’t exist.”

Wade said, “There’s usually a guy in the books and movies who says something like that, and he’s the first one who gets eaten.”

“Not today,” Larkin said. “Come on.”

They moved ahead. He didn’t see anything else suspicious. The line of wrecked and burned-out cars stretched as far as he could see along the road, which was never more than a few hundred yards at a time because of the terrain. He knew this area very well, but it was difficult to tell exactly where they were because everything looked so different. All the houses along here had been destroyed in the blast. Here and there he saw what he thought were the remnants of foundations.

He thought they had gone close to a mile from the project’s entrance when he called a halt and told the two men with the instruments to take more readings. After a minute or so, one of the men said, “The levels are holding steady. If anything, they’re down slightly.”

“Does that mean we can take these suits off ?” one of the men asked.

“Not yet,” Larkin said. “It’s not hurting anything to wear them.”

There was some grumbling about that, but nobody objected too much. Undoubtedly, in each man’s brain lurked some fear of the environment up here on the surface. It was human nature to accept what their technology told them… but also to be a little leery of believing in it too much.

The sky brightened a little more. The sun was climbing higher, even though Larkin couldn’t see it. A long ridge rose to their right. Larkin knew that up ahead was a road that climbed to the top of that ridge, and from that vantage point they could see for miles. He wanted to get up there and take a look around.

Where that other road turned off, there had been a small convenience store and gas station. Maybe the tanks there still held some of the precious stuff.

As they trudged on, some of the vehicles they passed began to look as if they were in somewhat better shape. They didn’t appear to have been burned as badly. Larkin thought that was an indication their gas tanks hadn’t exploded from the sharp spike in temperature, even though the heat had peeled most of the paint from the outside of the vehicles. The group had brought along mechanical siphons and some plastic gas cans. Larkin called a halt and pointed to a car with the windows all blown out but not much fire damage.

“Check the tank in that one, Wade,” he said.

The young man got out the siphoning equipment and unscrewed the car’s gas cap. He slid the tube down into the tank and worked the pump. Larkin saw gas climbing through the tube. Wade grinned and stuck the other end of the tube into one of the gas cans. The flow improved.

“We got it, Cap,” Wade said. “You want me to go ahead and fill up this can?”

“Yeah. Get as much as possible out of there. We have a dozen cans. As soon as we fill them, we’ll head back. No point in going any farther.”

Larkin glanced at the top of the ridge again. He wanted to get up there, but if it wasn’t necessary to accomplish the mission, they wouldn’t risk it. Not today, anyway.

The gas in the car’s tank filled two and a half cans before it sputtered out. Larkin and his men moved on, searching for another vehicle that looked promising. As they left, though, he glanced into the car, saw the half-intact skeleton in the front seat, and wished he could say thanks to whoever that person had been.

Then he saw the car seat strapped into the backseat and had to tighten his jaw as he turned away and kept moving. He felt his heart slugging harder in his chest. The grief and anger over what had happened to the world would overwhelm him if he allowed it to. He forced himself to concentrate on the goal instead.

They passed a creek that flowed between rocky banks on both sides of the road and passed underneath it through a culvert. Up ahead, maybe a mile away, was the convenience store and the road that led up to the ridge.

Larkin was thinking about that when gunshots suddenly exploded behind him.

Chapter 44

He twisted around in time to see several men charging out of the creek bed, where they had been hidden by those rocky banks. They carried rifles, and as more shots erupted, Larkin saw that a couple of his men were down. He cursed himself for leading them into an ambush. The sheer barrenness of the landscape must have convinced him, at least subconsciously, that no one was around to threaten them.

That reaction lasted only a fraction of a second, however. Then the AR-15 was at his shoulder, spitting fire as fast as he could pull the trigger.

The group from the Hercules Project was better armed and outnumbered the attackers. They opened fire along with Larkin, and the ambushers, clad only in rags, went down with blood welling from numerous wounds in their gaunt bodies.

Larkin knew these men, shot up as they were, would no longer be a threat, but there could be more of them. He kept his rifle ready as he swiveled back and forth to check the creek on both sides of the road. No more attackers emerged, but that didn’t mean he could stop worrying. Armed survivors could still be hidden out there.

Meanwhile, he had men down. He shouted through the helmet, “A couple of you check those wounded men while the rest of you stay alert!”

They formed a circle around the men on the ground and the two who knelt to see how badly they were hurt. After a minute or so, one of those men reported, “Blakely is dead, Patrick. Herring doesn’t seem to be hurt too bad, though.”

“You’re sure about Blakely?” Larkin asked, his voice curt with anger.

“I’m certain. He was shot right through the heart. Looks like Herring just got a graze on his side, though. Hard to be sure in this damned suit.”

“Get it off of him, then,” Larkin ordered.

“Does that mean the rest of us can lose the suits, too, Cap?” Wade asked.

“Stop calling me that. And yeah, let’s take the suits off. One at a time, though, and the rest of you stand guard while that’s going on.”

Larkin waited until all the other men had taken off their hazmat suits before he lowered his rifle, unsealed his helmet, and pulled it off. The smell of ashes immediately filled his nostrils. An underlying chemical tang made it even more unpleasant.

But for all its faults, it was still real air, breathed under an open sky, and that meant something to Larkin. Judging by their expressions, it did to the other men, too.

“We can live up here,” Wade said, a slight note of disbelief in his voice.

“Yeah,” Larkin said. “It may not smell very good, but it won’t kill us.”

“Right away,” another man said bleakly.

“Hell, that’s always been true of a lot of things,” Larkin said. “How does Herring look?”

The man working on the wounded man didn’t look up from what he was doing as he said, “I’ve just about got a dressing in place. I cleaned the wound and gave him an antibiotic shot.”

Herring was conscious. He said in a voice strained from pain, “I’ll be all right, Patrick. I’ll be back on my feet in just a minute, and then we can get on with the mission.”

“Not you,” Larkin said. “You’re going back to the project and wait for us there. Jenkins, you’ll go with him.”

The man putting the dressing on Herring’s side nodded. “Probably a good idea. Who knows what sort of infectious agents might be floating around out here? He needs some actual medical attention.”

Herring started to argue, but then one of the other men called urgently, “Larkin.”

Larkin had just finished peeling off the hazmat suit, leaving him in jeans, sweatshirt, and a lightweight jacket. He’d had to set the rifle down in order to do that. He snatched it up again when he heard the note of alarm in the other man’s voice.

Another survivor had climbed out of the creek bed and was coming toward the group from the Hercules Project. He moved at a steady walk, however, instead of charging, and although he was armed, his rifle was slung on his back and his empty hands were in the air. Larkin recognized him immediately, even though it had been months since he’d seen the man. He couldn’t forget the old army jacket, the long white hair, and the beard.

The man was Earl Crandall, who had come down the stairs with Nelson Ruskin to tap out messages in Morse code with Larkin on the other side of the blast door.

“Hold your fire, boys,” Crandall called. “I told those fellows they’d be fools to bushwhack you, but they didn’t listen to me. I’m not looking for trouble.”

“How do we know that?” Larkin asked as he kept his rifle trained on Crandall. “Maybe you just hung back to see how it was going to play out.”

A faint smile tugged at Crandall’s mouth. “Maybe. That’d be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t it? But as it happens, I’m telling you the truth, mister.”

“Did you tell Nelson Ruskin he’d be a fool to attack the project, too, Crandall?”

The man’s bushy white eyebrows rose a little in surprise. “You’re the guy who was down there talking to me in code,” he said. “You seemed like a reasonable sort.”

“Yeah, so did you,” Larkin said. “Or maybe that was just in comparison to Ruskin.”

Crandall made a face and shook his head. “Nelson was a little crazy by that time, I’ll admit it. After what he went through, not knowing if his wife was dead or alive, and then seeing so many people get sick and die… It was hard on the guy.”

“It was no picnic for anybody else,” Larkin pointed out.

“No, it wasn’t. I wasn’t around here from the start, but I’ve heard and seen plenty. I know how bad it was.”

Larkin was careful not to let his guard down, but at the same time Crandall interested him. He said, “If you weren’t here for the war, what are you doing here now?”

“I grew up in these parts. Rode my bike back here from West Texas after the big blast. I knew there might be some people who’d survived, and I wanted to help them if I could.”

Wade said, “That’s crazy. You came back even though you knew it might kill you?”

“Hey, that’s what people do, son. At least they do if they’re following the better sides of their nature. Anyway, I waited until the radiation levels had gone down some.” An actual grin appeared on the man’s face. “I ain’t a complete doofus.”

Larkin gestured with the AR-15’s barrel toward the dead ambushers and asked, “Who are they?”

“Some of the remnants of the bunch that was with Ruskin. When Ruskin and the ones who went down with him never came back, we figured they were all dead. Same thing with the next batch. After that…” Crandall shrugged. “The ones who were left didn’t have the stomach for anything else. Some of them moved on. Most of the rest died. There are still a few holdouts in these hills. The ones I was with spotted you earlier this morning and followed you. They wanted to kill you, steal your gear and any supplies you have. You can’t really blame ’em. When you’ve been dying by inches for months, it does something to your head.”

“But it didn’t do anything to you?” Larkin said.

“Life I’ve led, I should’ve been dead twenty years ago. So I don’t worry too much these days, just try to help out where I can. Okay if I put my arms down now? Standing like this is getting a little tiresome.”

If he’d wanted to, Crandall could have opened fire on them from the creek bed, Larkin knew. Besides, he trusted his instincts, and they told him that Earl Crandall meant them no harm. He might even be willing to help, if he was telling the truth about the way he felt.

“Go ahead and put your hands down.” Larkin motioned with the AR-15 again, toward the project. “Do you know what that is, the place where we came from?”

“The Hercules Project. Sure, Ruskin told me all about it. That’s where he was supposed to wind up when the big bang came. His wife made it, but he didn’t. Is she still alive, by the way?”

Larkin shook his head and said, “No, she was killed in the fighting when Ruskin attacked the place.”

“Really? Well, son of a bitch. That’s a shame. I reckon he really did love her and just wanted to be together with her again. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit. He really was pretty loony there at the end.”

“How in the world did he survive?”

“Storm cellar. Just luck he found a house with one of them in the back yard. It had a good thick door, too. Still got hot enough in there it nearly killed him. Cooked his brain some, I suppose, and burned so much of the oxygen out of the air that he nearly suffocated. He laid down there for a couple of days before he was able to crawl out. All this is what he told me later, of course. I wasn’t there to see it. But I don’t know of any reason he’d have to lie about it.”

Neither did Larkin. Probably, Ruskin had been telling the truth.

By now, Herring had started walking slowly back toward the project, accompanied and supported by Jenkins. The rest of them would take Blakely’s body back with them when they returned, Larkin decided. The man had a family, and they deserved to see him into the incinerator in whatever fashion they deemed proper.

“You fellas are scroungers, aren’t you?” Crandall went on. “After gas and maybe some other supplies?”

“Maybe,” Larkin said, although it seemed rather useless to deny it when they had gas cans sitting out in plain sight.

“You’re wasting your time.”

“What makes you think that?”

Crandall gestured toward the plastic cans and said, “You’re siphoning gas from cars to fill those when there’s a whole tanker truck of the stuff less than a mile from here.”

Larkin caught his breath but tried not to let the surprise—and hope—he felt show on his face.

“What are you talking about?”

Crandall half-turned and pointed. “That little store up yonder a ways. As best I can figure it out, a gas truck was there making a delivery the day of the war. The truck was empty when I found it, but the underground tanks were full. The truck’s pump still worked, so I pumped it back up into the tanker. Just luck it was all mechanical, nothing digital for the EMP to wipe out.”

“And it’s still just sitting there?” Larkin asked.

“Some of the boys used it to fill up every time they got an old car running. A lot of them drove out of here, headed for someplace they hoped would be better. Probably won’t be, but people have to try, don’t they?”

Larkin had said much the same thing himself on more than one occasion, so he knew what Crandall meant. Right now, he was more interested in the information the man had just given them.

“We need that truck and the gas inside it,” he said. “Why did you tell us about it?”

Crandall’s shoulders rose a little and then fell. “I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping that if I helped you out, you’d let me down into that place you’ve got.”

“Don’t trust him, Cap,” Wade said. “If he’s got gas, he could’ve gotten back on that motorcycle he mentioned and ridden out of here a long time ago.”

“Sure I could have,” Crandall agreed. “But maybe I had something else in mind.”

“And what might that be?” Larkin wanted to know.

“I thought maybe you’d invite me down there for a cup of coffee.” Crandall’s grin widened. “Like Joni Mitchell said, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. And you don’t know what you’re going to miss the most, either.”

Larkin shook his head. “We can’t let you into the project.”

“Why the hell not? Ruskin wasn’t the only one who was supposed to be down there who didn’t make it that day. The others are all either dead or gone, so I know you’ve got the space and supplies. And I just did you a solid by telling you about that tanker truck.”

“We were headed that direction anyway. We would have found it.”

“Maybe. Or would you have turned back before you got there, once you filled up those gas cans?”

That was exactly what Larkin had been thinking about doing, so Crandall had a point. Now that they knew the tanker was there, they would push on to the old convenience store. It wouldn’t take all of them for that chore, either.

“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 to 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 the 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.

Those sons of bitches had just hurt his daughter.

He brought the AR-15 up and opened fire.

Even with the red haze of fury clouding his brain, he didn’t send bullets lancing wantonly into the men just outside the Command Center. He fired low instead. Some of the slugs ricocheted up into the crowd, but for the most part they just forced the men in the red vests to throw on the brakes and then scramble back through the opening.

“Cap, what are you doin’?” Wade demanded as he caught at Larkin’s arm. “Those are our guys!”

“So are the ones they were shooting at,” Larkin said as he lowered the rifle slightly. “And one of them was my kid!”

The group that included Jill had vanished through the doors at the other end of the foyer. Larkin had been able to tell that she was moving fairly well, so he hoped she wasn’t hurt too badly. He had to find out, so he told the men with him to find their friends and family and keep their heads down until they found out what was going on.

Then he rammed through the doors again and loped along Corridor Two toward the foyer at the far end, where he could get the elevator down to his apartment. First, he would make sure Susan was all right, then he would try to find Jill and check on her.

The thud of rapid footsteps behind him made him glance over his shoulder. Earl Crandall was there. The man said, “I’m coming with you, hoss. I realize we haven’t known each other long, but you’re the closest thing to a friend I got down here!”

Larkin wasn’t going to waste time arguing with him. Not when the world he had known for almost a year seemed to be falling apart with no warning.

Just like the world before it had done…

A door up ahead on the left side of the corridor opened a few inches. Larkin angled the rifle in that direction but held off on the trigger. He was glad he did when he saw a woman’s terrified face peering out at him. She jerked back and slammed the door.

Crandall said, “I’ve seen a few other folks peeking out at us after we went by. Looks like everybody’s hunkered down, Larkin. Shit must’ve really hit the fan. Was everything all right here when you left?”

“I thought it was,” Larkin said. “I guess I just didn’t know.”

Even though he was hurrying, his brain was working even faster. What he had seen back there had disoriented him, but he was sure of one thing: Jill never would have thrown in with Holdstock and the other malcontents who had rallied around him. So if it hadn’t been the bunch from the Bullpen who’d been fighting with the security force… then who was it?

Larkin and Crandall reached the far end of the corridor and pushed through the doors there. Larkin’s rifle was ready, but Crandall still had his slung on his back, where it had been all along. He asked, “You want me to cover your back, Larkin? I don’t want to break out the hardware unless you’re sure you trust me.”

Larkin didn’t hesitate. He said, “Yeah, I trust you. And if you give me any reason to regret it, I’ll kill you.”

“Fair enough,” Crandall said with a grim smile. He brought the rifle around and let the sling slip down off his shoulder. It was an old deer rifle, Larkin noted. Not the greatest weapon for fighting a battle… but nearly 250 years earlier, a bunch of patriots had won a revolution using their era’s equivalent.

They hadn’t reached the elevator leading down to the apartments in Silo A when the door to the apartment on this level swung open. Jim and Beth Huddleston lived there, so Larkin wasn’t surprised to see Beth step out.

He was shocked to see the gun in her hand, though: a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver that she pointed at him as she said in a shrill, hysteria-edged voice, “Stop right there, Patrick Larkin!”

Larkin stopped and made a slight motion with his left hand, hoping Crandall would understand that he was telling him not to open fire. “Beth?” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m all confused. Where’s Jim? Have you seen my wife?”

Beth sneered and said, “Jim called me on the walkie-talkie and warned me about you. He said you tried to kill him and the others. I’m not surprised. Your own daughter was with those lunatics trying to overthrow Graham Moultrie!”

Damn, Larkin thought, would the world ever stop lurching around under his feet? Beth Huddleston was not only holding a gun—she who hated guns and had argued stridently against the Second Amendment at every opportunity—but now she sounded like she supported whatever it was that Moultrie had done now. She’d always hated Moultrie. To her warped, throwback way of thinking, he was The Man—and she took that ridiculous notion seriously.

What would make her turn around so quickly and completely?

Larkin started to get a glimmer of an answer to that question, but he didn’t really have time to ponder it right now. Instead he said, “Beth, you need to put down that gun. I know you don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“Who’s that with you?” Beth’s voice quivered, less from fear than from rage, Larkin thought. “He’s one of those awful people from the surface, isn’t he?”

Crandall said, “I’m not looking for any trouble, ma’ am—”

“Things are going to be different now,” Beth interrupted as if she hadn’t heard him. “Everything is going to be all right. We’re going to get rid of all the bad people, and then there’ll be plenty for the rest of us.”

Those words made a chill go through Larkin. He said, “What are you talking about, Beth?”

The gun in her hand didn’t budge. Larkin had been waiting for her hand to start to shake. But for someone who probably had never held a gun before, Beth was remarkably steady as she said, “The food. There’s not enough. It’s going to run out in less than a month unless there are fewer people to eat it.”

“That’s crazy. There should be enough for another six months, at least.”

“No. There would have been, if Graham had had more time. But then there was the war…”

Under his breath, Crandall said, “This is some bad shit, Larkin. It sounds like she’s talking about culling the herd.”

“Yeah.” Larkin had thought the same thing, and it put a cold ball of unease in his stomach. “Listen, Beth, I don’t know what happened while I was gone, but I’m sure everything can be worked out.”

Beth shook her head. “There’s only one answer.”

“Moultrie promised you and Jim that you’d be among the ones left, didn’t he?” Larkin had gotten a hint of that earlier, but he was sure of it now.

“Well, it’s only right that we are,” Beth said with a note of defensiveness in her voice. “Jim has always been supportive of him, and I’ve come to appreciate that he’s just trying to look out for us.”

“He bought you off.” Larkin couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice, even with the gun pointed at him.

“He didn’t have to. We’re better. We’ve always been better. We deserve to live.” Beth sniffed. “It’s only right. The people who are smarter, better educated, they have to survive and run things. You can’t let normal people decide things for themselves. They’ll do it all wrong. I mean, my God, look at some of the politicians normal people have elected!”

As always, arguing with Beth Huddleston was a waste of time, Larkin realized. She was as much of an elitist as she had ever been, although the world’s circumstances had changed drastically. People who thought they were better than everybody else would always try to seize power sooner or later, though, no matter what their circumstances were.

“Just what is it you want, Beth?” Larkin asked. “What do you hope to accomplish by pointing that gun at me?”

“I’m going to hold you here so Jim can come and get you. He’ll take you to Moultrie, and they’ll decide what to do with you.”

“Look, I want to talk to them, too. You don’t have to threaten me—”

The silo elevator opened. Larkin darted a glance in that direction, saw Susan stepping out. She looked all right, didn’t appear to be hurt in any way.

But then Beth jerked the revolver toward her and Larkin saw her finger whitening on the trigger. He leaped toward Susan, praying that he could knock her out of the way in time.

The gun in Beth’s hand blasted just as Larkin grabbed Susan and forced her back against the wall. He expected to feel the .38 caliber bullet smash into his back, but instead there was no impact.

When he looked around he saw Beth on her knees, cradling her right hand against her body and sobbing. The gun lay a few feet away. She didn’t look like she was interested in making any attempt to retrieve it.

Crandall picked up the pistol and tucked it behind his belt, then said, “I used the barrel of my rifle and knocked her hand up just in time. May have broken her wrist, though. I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Larkin told him. “You saved either my life or my wife’s. Thank you, Earl.”

“That shot’s liable to bring more trouble. Where do we need to go?”

Larkin glanced at Susan. “Have you seen Jill?”

“No,” she said. “I was on my way to their place. I didn’t know you were back, Patrick.” She gave him a brief but fierce hug. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. What the hell’s going on down here? How did it all fall apart so fast?”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t know. Jill came by earlier and said that there might be trouble. She told me to stay in the apartment with the door locked and to keep one of your guns handy. Then she left. I tried to do what she said and wait there, but I just couldn’t…”

She didn’t know that Jill had been shot, he realized. He was still hoping the wound wasn’t a bad one, so he decided not to say anything just yet.

Instead he took her hand and said, “Let’s go see if we can find her.”

“All right. Patrick…?” Susan’s voice held a tentative note. “Who’s this?”

She was looking at Crandall, who smiled back at her.

“A friend,” Larkin said, knowing that would have to be enough of an explanation for now. “Come on.”

Chapter 47

Bailey had tear streaks down her face when she opened the door of the Sinclair family’s living quarters in Corridor One, and seeing that made fear shoot through Larkin’s heart.

“Grandpa!” the girl cried. “Grandma! Mom’s hurt!”

“What?” Susan said. She rushed into the apartment.

When Larkin started to follow her but then hesitated, Crandall said, “Go on, man, don’t worry. I’ll stand watch out here.”

Larkin jerked his head in a curt nod and said, “Thanks.” He hurried after his wife, leaving the door open behind him.

Jill was on the love seat, stretched out as much as she could in its confines, with Trevor kneeling on the floor beside her. Her shirt was pulled up about a foot, revealing a bloody gash in her side where a bullet had plowed a furrow. Despite the blood, Larkin felt a surge of relief go through him. He had seen plenty of wounds like that during his time in combat. They left the victims stiff and sore, but as long as the bleeding wasn’t too bad and the injury was cleaned properly and kept that way, it wasn’t serious.

Just painful as hell, as was evident by the pallor that covered Jill’s pinched face.

“Oh, honey!” Susan cried.

Trevor glanced up. “Thank God you’re here. I think I’ve got the bleeding stopped, but I’m not sure what to do now—”

“Get out of the way,” Susan said, her voice brisk as her training and experience took over. “This is something I know how to deal with.”

Bailey stood to one side, her arm around her little brother’s shoulders. Chris had been crying, too. Larkin went over to them and said, “Don’t worry. Your mom’s going to be just fine. I know what I’m talking about. Anyway, your grandma’s the best nurse in the world, and she’s gonna take good care of your mom.”

“Dad?” Jill said, her voice showing the strain as much as her face did. “Dad, I have to talk to you.”

“No, honey, it can wait—” Susan began.

“No, it can’t,” Jill broke in. “I’m sorry, Mom, but it can’t.”

Larkin went over and knelt beside the love seat. He leaned closer and said, “I’m here, kid. What do you have to tell me?”

“Moultrie’s gone crazy, Dad. He came on the loudspeakers and announced that because of food shortages, half of the people down here would have to leave.” Jill paused and took a couple of deep breaths. Larkin knew she was fighting off the pain of her wound. “Then he started reading off names. He said they had been chosen by lottery, but most of them were people who have complained about him in the past. He’s getting rid of his enemies. Or at least, the people he considers enemies.”

“This so-called food shortage that nobody ever heard of until today… is it real?”

Jill shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows except him. But it wasn’t just Bullpenners he’s kicking out… My name was on the list, and yours was, too.”

Larkin’s jaw clenched. While he’d been up on the surface, fighting to get the things the project needed to keep going, Moultrie had been plotting to get rid of him and his family. Because the power-mad son of a bitch knew he and Jill would never leave without Susan, Trevor, Bailey, and Chris.

“What happened after he made that announcement?”

“Just what you’d expect. Things went nuts. Holdstock led a delegation from the Bullpen up to the Command Center to talk to Moultrie. But some of the security force… opened fire on them.” Jill swallowed hard. “Holdstock and another man were killed. The rest of them fell back. When the members of the security force who weren’t on duty heard about that, we went to see what was going on. Some of the Bullpenners who’d been with Holdstock came with us. But when we got there—”

“They started shooting at you, too,” Larkin broke in. His face was grim as he nodded. “Because Moultrie made sure that only guys who would be loyal to him were on duty in the Command Center. He has to have been planning this for a while. And that’s another reason he sent me up to the surface. If I hadn’t volunteered, he would have maneuvered me into it somehow. He knew I’d never go along with this purge crap.”

“Dad… how is it up there?”

“We got a whole tanker truck full of gas, plus some parts that will probably work as replacements for the generators. The environmental readings are good enough that people can survive without the hazmat suits, and they ought to be better the farther away from the Metroplex you get.” Larkin shrugged. “It wouldn’t be easy, but there’s at least a chance folks could get away from the worst of the damage and find a place to live. To start over.”

Trevor said, “Then for God’s sake, why don’t we do that?”

Susan said, “But we wouldn’t have medical supplies or a school or even the limited amount of technology we have now. And what would we do for food?”

“We’d have to take some things with us,” Larkin said. “Those medical supplies you mentioned, and enough food to keep us going for a while. As for the technology… people used to survive without it. I guess we’d learn how to do that again.”

Looking up at him as her mother finished applying a dressing to the wound, Jill said, “We’d need a leader. That would be you, Dad.”

“I don’t know if I want that sort of responsibility—”

“Whether you want it or not, you know good and well you’re the right man for the job.”

“She’s right, Patrick,” Trevor added.

Susan straightened from what she’d been doing and said, “If you’re really talking about leaving, quite a few people will want to go with you if they think they can live up there. That would solve the problem of not enough food here, wouldn’t it? There’s no need for more violence.”

“If we can get Moultrie to listen to reason.”

Jill said, “I’m not sure we can do that. When he started reading off names and saying they had to go, he sounded sort of, well, unhinged.”

Larkin rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. “And he doesn’t know yet what conditions are really like up there, because nobody has reported back to him from our mission. For all he really knows, he would be sending people out to their deaths.”

“He doesn’t care about that,” Jill said. “I told you he’s gone crazy.”

Larkin thought about the people Moultrie had sent to their deaths on top of the service elevator when the surface hatch was closed. Moultrie had been going around the bend for a while, and Larkin knew now he should have spoken up sooner.

But it wasn’t too late to prevent a bloodbath down here. He had to do what he could to accomplish that.

“I’ll go talk to him,” he said as he stood up.

“To Moultrie?” Susan asked.

“Not without me,” Jill said as she started struggling to get to her feet. “I’m coming, too.”

Susan put a hand on her shoulder and said, “No, you’re not. After losing that much blood, you need to rest—”

“But Mom—”

“Listen to your mother,” Larkin said. “She knows what she’s talking about.”

“I’m not six years old!”

“But you are hurt,” Trevor said as he moved in to perch on the arm of the love seat, “and your parents are right. You stay here with your mother.” He glanced at Larkin. “I’ll go with you, Patrick.”

Larkin shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but you need to stay here and keep an eye on things. I’ll feel a lot better about it if you do.”

“I don’t mind helping—”

“That’s how you can help me the most right now.”

Trevor looked like he wanted to argue more, but after a second he shrugged and nodded. “All right. I understand.”

“That guy Earl who came back with me, he’s been living up there. He can explain to Moultrie how things are, if we can get him to listen. And then we can ask for volunteers to come with us. None of that ‘list’ bullcrap. Nobody should be kicked out if they don’t want to go.”

“You’ll never get Moultrie to go along with that,” Jill warned. “He’s using this as an excuse to get rid of people he thinks may give him trouble, either now or in the future. That’s why you and I were on the list, Dad. He knows we won’t stand for him hurting anybody.”

For a moment, there was a bitter, sour taste under Larkin’s tongue. He had stood for Moultrie murdering those people, because he’d considered it a time of war. The survivors had wanted to break into the project and slaughter anybody they could. That was war, damn it, and Larkin would never lose a second of sleep over the men he had killed in combat.

But what Moultrie had done was over the line, and Larkin could see now that was just the first step in the man’s descent into madness.

He remembered reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness many years earlier, and he had seen Apocalypse Now, as well. He was murmuring, “The horror,” when someone knocked on the door.

Everyone in the room stiffened. Larkin swung his rifle toward the door. Trevor picked up a semi-automatic pistol from a table. Larkin motioned for him to stay beside Jill and Susan and told Bailey and Chris, “You kids go back in the bedroom.”

Crandall had been standing guard in the corridor and Larkin hadn’t heard any shots, so he figured the man from the surface was the one who’d knocked on the door. But he didn’t take any chances, holding the rifle ready as he went to the door and swung it open.

“You got company,” Crandall said. He stood there alertly with the deer rifle in his hands as he leaned his head toward the woman who was next to him.

Deb Moultrie.

“Deb,” Larkin said. “What the hell—”

“Graham sent me to talk to you, Patrick,” she said. “Can I… come in?”

“We can talk out here,” Larkin said, his voice curt. He stepped into the corridor and swung the door closed behind him. “What does he want?”

“He’s hoping you can put an end to the trouble.”

“Funny. I was hoping the same thing about him. I was gone less than twelve hours, Deb. What happened down here in that time?”

Her face was pale and drawn into tight lines under the red hair, which was pulled back at the moment and fastened into a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. In a plain shirt and jeans, she didn’t look like a fashion model anymore. She said, “Graham was trying to postpone this confrontation for as long as possible, but someone—probably one of the workers in the commissary—found out about the supply situation and leaked the information to Chad Holdstock.”

“Then it’s true?” Larkin asked tautly. “The food is running low?”

“Dangerously low. I… I knew there might be a problem, but even I didn’t know how bad it really was…” Deb took a deep breath. “Graham wasn’t cutting corners, Patrick. I swear he wasn’t. He just didn’t have time to get as ready for the disaster as he led everyone to believe.”

“Because that would have meant he’d failed, and he didn’t want to admit that.”

“I don’t know what he thought, and anyway, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Larkin shrugged. “I guess what’s important is that folks are going to start starving to death, unless your husband gets rid of a bunch of them.”

Anger flashed in her eyes as she said, “It’s not like he’s going to line them up against a wall and shoot them!”

“He will if it comes to that,” Larkin said with utter conviction that he was right about Graham Moultrie. He thought about Jim Huddleston and added, “He’s probably got enough guys backing his play to make that happen, too.”

Deb shook her head, but Larkin could tell that she wasn’t completely convinced she was right about what her husband would or wouldn’t do. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, the fear that Larkin was right lurked within her.

“So what does Graham want from me?” Larkin went on. “Why did he send you here?”

“To ask you to come and talk to him. He knows you have a lot of friends here. He wants to convince you that he’s only doing what’s necessary, so that you can make everybody else understand.”

Larkin snorted in disbelief. “I’m not going to do his dirty work for him.”

“You can make people see that they need to negotiate, though, instead of trying to kill each other.”

Was that really worth a try? Larkin was dubious, but he supposed anything that might prevent more bloodshed shouldn’t be ruled out.

“All right,” he said, “but you’re coming with me. Your husband’s bunch won’t start shooting if you’re in the line of fire.”

“He doesn’t have a bunch,” Deb snapped. “We’re all still on the same side. We’re all residents of the Hercules Project.”

Larkin wished that were still true, but he couldn’t make himself believe it.

Just like he hoped he was right about how having Deb with him would keep Moultrie’s men from gunning him down.

Chapter 48

August 21

Susan tried to talk him out of going to parley with Moultrie. Trevor and Jill both wanted to come along. Larkin just hugged the grandkids, shook hands with Trevor, ruffled Jill’s hair like he had done when she was a little girl, and kissed his wife.

Then he and Deb walked toward the Command Center, with Earl Crandall following and keeping an eye out behind them.

An air of tense, hushed anticipation still hung over the project. Larkin didn’t know what was going on down in the Bullpen, but he would have been willing to bet they were nursing their wounds and trying to figure out a plan for attacking the Command Center. He wanted to head that off if he could.

He had an ace in his hand to play. He knew that conditions on the surface were suitable for human survival, despite the hardships they would encounter. The solution seemed simple enough to him: let anyone who wanted to leave the project do so, giving them enough provisions to hold them for a while. Larkin had a hunch quite a few would choose that option. Then the ones left behind would have enough supplies to hold out for a few more months.

Maybe by then, the ones who had left would have a settlement established somewhere west of here. They could come back for the others and lead them to their new home…

Larkin was getting ahead of himself and knew it, so he shut down that line of thought. Stopping the killing here today, that was the main thing.

The three of them went through the doors at the end of the corridor and turned toward the Command Center entrance. Several guards in red vests were posted there. Instantly, they tensed and lifted their weapons.

“Hold your fire,” Deb called. “I’ve brought Patrick Larkin to talk, just like Graham wanted. Let him know we’re here.”

“That’s one of those mutant survivors from the surface with him, Mrs. Moultrie,” a guard said. “We can’t risk—”

“What the hell is it with you people and mutants?” Larkin interrupted. “This is a friend of mine, Earl Crandall. He’s as human as you or me, and he knows about conditions on the surface. I do, too. I’ve been up there, damn it. Bring Moultrie out here and I’ll tell him about it.”

One of the guards spoke low-voiced into his walkie-talkie. He listened to the squawking response, then said, “Graham says we’re to bring you in.”

Larkin shook his head and put his left hand on Deb’s shoulder as she started to take a step forward. He still held the AR-15 in his right. “We’re staying here,” he said. “Moultrie can come out and talk to us.”

The guards didn’t like that. They were all men that Larkin knew, men he had worked alongside. But there was a subtle difference now, a slightly different cast to their faces. He knew that was because they had all made a decision that put them on the opposite side from him.

Even so, he’d been right about their unwillingness to shoot as long as Deb was with him. One of them ducked back through the doors while the others continued to point their weapons toward Larkin and Crandall.

A couple of tense minutes went by. Then the doors opened again and Graham Moultrie stepped out.

He wore his usual friendly smile as he said, “It’s good to see you again, Patrick. I was hoping to hear your report from the surface under better circumstances, but at least we can move forward from here.”

Moultrie sounded as affable and reasonable as ever, but Larkin knew better now. It was a pose, pure and simple, to get what he wanted.

“Why don’t you let Deb come back over here,” Moultrie went on, “and then you can tell me all about what you found up there.” He looked past Larkin at Crandall and added, “I see you brought a… souvenir.”

“I’m no damn souvenir, mister,” Crandall snapped.

“This is Earl Crandall,” Larkin said. “He’s the one who translated the Morse code for Nelson Ruskin. And he helped us find a tanker truck nearly full of gasoline.”

Moultrie’s eyes widened. “That much gas? That’s wonderful. It’ll keep the generators going for a long time. Assuming you got the parts we need for them, too.”

“Maybe,” Larkin said. “Don’t know for sure yet. But there’s a good chance of it. I’d say the generators and the life-support system are less of a problem now than the food supplies.”

Moultrie’s expression tightened. “That’s not my fault,” he snapped. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to fix the situation. But the only way—”

“Is to cut down on the number of people depending on those supplies,” Larkin said. “Isn’t that right? And you’ll get rid of the extra folks any way you can, whether it’s booting them out of the project or putting them in the incinerator.”

Moultrie took a step forward and clenched his fists. “Damn you,” he grated. “You don’t know what it’s like, having all this responsibility. Having to decide who has to die so that others can live.”

“Having to be a god, you mean? Since this is the Hercules Project, I guess that would make you Zeus. You’re all powerful, and the rest of us are just puny mortals.”

“If that’s what it takes!” Moultrie shouted as his control began to slip away from him. “I’ve said all along, I’ll do anything I have to in order to protect this project.”

“Even if it means killing everybody, one by one, until you’re sitting down here by yourself, lord of all you survey.” Larkin paused. When Moultrie didn’t say anything, just stood there red-faced and glaring, Larkin went on, “Luckily, you don’t have to do that. I’ve been to the surface. People can live up there, Graham. It won’t be easy, but they can live. Let me take the ones who want to go. That’ll give you some breathing room down here and time to figure out what you want to do next.”

That proposal sounded eminently reasonable to Larkin, but he could tell by the look on Moultrie’s face that he wasn’t going to agree. That would mean splitting up the residents, with him in charge of one group and Larkin, however reluctantly, leading the other. Moultrie wasn’t going to relinquish even that much power.

Moultrie shook his head and said, “I’ve already announced who has to go.”

“Some of them may not want to, and some of the folks you didn’t pick might decide they’d rather take a chance up on the surface. You have to let people decide for themselves.”

“No!” The cords in Moultrie’s neck stood out from the vehemence of his reply. “No, I’m in charge here. I make the decisions. I created this place. I made it happen, nobody else. You’d all be dead without me!”

“That’s true,” Larkin said, “but now it’s time to move on.”

Moultrie shook his head. “Never!” He twisted abruptly and snatched a rifle from one of the guards. “Never!”

“Look out!” Crandall yelled. He started to lift his deer rifle, but Deb turned and grabbed the barrel, lunging against him and forcing the weapon up. Flame spat from the barrel of the rifle Moultrie held as he sprayed shots along the foyer. Larkin heard slugs whine past his ear and threw himself forward. From the corner of his eye, he saw Deb slump against Crandall. A crimson flower bloomed on the back of her shirt.

Then he landed on the floor and the AR-15 bucked against his shoulder as he fired. He squeezed off three rounds, saw Graham Moultrie jolted back as the shots slammed into his chest. Moultrie lived long enough to drop the rifle and gasp, “Oh, God! Deb…”

Then his eyes rolled up in their sockets. He fell to his knees, swayed there for a second, and pitched forward onto the floor.

The guards stared in disbelief. By now Deb had sagged to the floor as well. Her blood stained Crandall’s old army jacket where she had fallen against him. Crandall had his rifle pointed at the guards, and Larkin covered them with the AR-15, as well.

One man sighed, bent over, and put his rifle on the floor. The others set their weapons aside as well.

“I guess it’s over,” one of them said bitterly.

“You’re wrong, hoss,” Crandall said. “I got a hunch the new world’s just getting started.”

It had been a showdown Patrick Larkin never wanted. But in that split second as he lined his sights on Moultrie and squeezed the trigger, he had realized that it never could have ended any other way. Everybody was the hero of his own story, Larkin had read somewhere, and he was sure Moultrie felt the same way, that he was only doing what was necessary, no matter how many people died in the process.

Time would tell which of them was right, Larkin supposed.

He looked around the basement at the 197 people assembled there, all of the adults and most of the kids wearing backpacks. Many of the adults were armed, as well. All of them had decided to take their chances on the surface. Everyone left down in the corridors and silos and the lower-level bunker had decided to remain. It was a free choice, influenced by no one. Larkin had made sure of that as much as he possibly could.

He’d had a chance to take inventory of the food supplies. He had split it up, 50 percent for the people leaving the project, 50 percent for those staying behind, even though more than half of the residents were heading for the surface. Larkin was confident they would find food up there. As soon as they located a good place, they would plant crops, and they were taking along some of the rabbits and chickens, as well. There would be some lean and hungry days ahead, no doubt about that, but they would make it.

The engineers had replaced the failing parts on the generators, and the project’s gasoline supplies had been replenished from the tanker truck. Larkin and his group would be taking the truck and the rest of its valuable cargo with them, though, because they needed gas for the older, still-working vehicles they had scavenged to make the pilgrimage westward. Right now, those vehicles were fueled up and waiting for them.

Earl Crandall had come from a small town called Cross Plains; that would be their destination starting out. They would move on from there, if and when they needed to.

Larkin had sent the service elevator back down once everyone was here, so he was a little surprised when he heard its door open. He turned around and saw Jim Huddleston standing there. Huddleston’s face was set in grim lines.

“Decide to come with us, Jim?” Larkin asked.

“You know better than that. I just wanted to tell you… some of the people in the group staying behind have been talking about organizing and electing a new leader. Beth wants the job.” Huddleston took a breath. “And you and I both know, when Beth wants something…”

“She usually finds a way to get it.” Larkin shrugged. “If that’s what she wants, I wish her luck. She may wind up regretting it, though.”

“I just thought you should know that if she’s running things down in the project, you and your people… well, you won’t be welcome back here. If you try to come back, there’s liable to be trouble.”

“Jim, if there’s one thing I can promise you, it’s that nobody’s going to want to come back here, unless it’s to help you folks out. You’re going to have to move back to the surface eventually. If we can, we’d be glad to give you a helping hand.”

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see when and if that day comes. Until then…”

Huddleston stuck his hand out.

Larkin hesitated; he couldn’t deny that. He didn’t like Huddleston, had very little respect for the man. But there was no point in being a jerk, either. He gripped Huddleston’s hand hard for a second and meant it when he said, “Good luck.”

Huddleston nodded and went back into the elevator. The door slid closed. For the brave souls here in the basement, the Hercules Project was over. They were moving on to something they hoped would be better.

As they left, they would walk past two graves. Larkin hadn’t wanted to put Graham and Deb Moultrie into the incinerator. He and some of the others had dug the graves, fashioned markers for them. Moultrie and Deb rested on a hilltop, looking out over the project. Someday, grass and flowers would grow again on that hill, Larkin hoped. He would probably never see it, but that day would come.

He looked around again. Susan was there, summoning up a smile. Jill, still looking a little pale from the wound she had suffered, but strong and determined anyway. Trevor and the kids, setting off into what was a vast unknown for them, but unshakable in their family bond. The widow, daughter, and son-in-law of Larkin’s old friend Adam Threadgill, reminding Larkin that he wished Adam was here to see this day. It might never have come without him, because he was the one who had told Larkin about the Hercules Project in the first place. Wade, Rodriguez, Adams, and the other men who had gone with Larkin on that first mission to the surface were here, too. Like him, they knew they could make it up there. And Earl Crandall, who would show them the way on his motorcycle, a new friend, but one of them now.

“Patrick,” Susan said. “Look at the sky.”

Larkin tipped his head back and gazed up through the ruined building at the thick gray clouds overhead. At first, he didn’t see what Susan was talking about, but then…

There was the smallest of gaps, a tiny crack in the overcast, really, but behind it for a second, maybe two, Larkin saw a sliver of blue sky before the clouds came together again.

That was enough to tell him it was still there. Hope was still there.

Larkin stepped out to lead the way up the ramp into the light.