The Doomsday Bunker

by William W. Johnstone

  Threadgill’s beefy shoulders rose and fell. “I don’t know exactly. I’m not sure Graham’s figured out the price yet. He said he’s putting at least twenty million into developing it, though. So that’s fifty K per person just to recoup his investment. I figure he’s going to be asking somewhere in the neighborhood of $75,000 each to cover contingencies and allow him to make a little profit.”

  “Twenty million?” Larkin let out a low whistle. “If he’s got that kind of money, what’s he doing getting mixed up in a thing like this? Why doesn’t he just build himself a bug-out space and call it good?”

  “Because like I told you, he’s a visionary. He wants to help people. Besides, we’re talking worst-case scenario here, right? The end of the world as we know it. What’s the point of escaping that if you’re the only one left? Well, I mean, he’s got a wife, but you know what I mean. They don’t want to open a hatch and find the world devastated with no way to start over. So he needs enough people to have a real community. That way the human race has still got a fighting chance.”

  “I guess that makes sense. Still, seventy-five K . . .”

  “To ensure that you and Susan survive. Doesn’t sound like much then, does it?”

  Larkin squinted at his friend and said, “You’re not gettin’ a kickback on this, are you?”

  “Me? No, I—” Threadgill stopped, frowned at Larkin for a second, and then laughed. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “No, I don’t have a piece of the deal. There’s no discount for drumming up new customers, either. I’m trying to scrape up enough for me and Luisa and the kids.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I’m thinking my daughter Sophie and her husband can kick in some. I know they’re not rich and haven’t been married long, but they’re both working.”

  “Kids aren’t known for worrying much about the future.”

  “Well, they’d better start,” Threadgill said. “The way things are going . . .”

  “Yeah,” Larkin said with a sigh. “There’s that.” He had a daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids of his own, and that was a real concern.

  “Anyway, you want to go out and take a look at the place?” Threadgill slid a business card across the table. “There’s Graham’s number. He’s got a website, too, so you can look it up and check it all out before you call him to set up an appointment. Just don’t wait too long.”

  “At those prices, I don’t think the place is going to fill up in a hurry.”

  Threadgill glanced at the TV mounted on the wall of the barbecue joint. Set to one of the cable news stations, at the moment it was showing live footage of flashing lights and cops in riot gear and smoke billowing from a building, with a graphic across the bottom that read NEW TERRORIST ATTACKS IN LONDON.

  “The bunker filling up isn’t what I’m worried about,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  Larkin hadn’t had a job lined up when he retired from the Marine Corps. He had a dream instead.

  He was going to be a writer.

  Such a crazy idea had never occurred to him when he was growing up, or during his first few years in the Corps. He enjoyed reading but never gave much thought to the people who actually produced the books.

  Then he met an older Marine who edited and wrote for the base newspaper and who had been a journalist before enlisting. The guy had invited Larkin to submit something to the paper, and that had been the start of it. Larkin had discovered right away that he enjoyed putting words together and had even sold a few short stories and articles, mostly about military history, to paying markets. That had planted enough of a seed to make the dream grow.

  Along the way, he had also met and married a beautiful blond emergency-room nurse. They’d had a daughter, Jill, now married with kids of her own. Larkin and Susan were soul mates and best friends, and when he’d retired from the Corps they moved back to her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, where their daughter and her family lived. Susan’s salary, along with his retirement pension, had supported him while he took a crack at writing books.

  Five years into that effort, he had done fairly well: six books sold, thriller novels under a pseudonym that had done decent numbers without being big bestsellers. Maybe he would break through to that higher level someday, maybe he wouldn’t, but either way he was having fun and doing what he wanted to do. It would be nice to make enough money so that in a few years Susan could retire, too, but they’d have to just wait and see about that.

  Problem was, all those plans were moot if the world went to hell . . . as it was looking more and more like it was going to, with each passing day.

  That was why he found himself getting out of his SUV in front of a large steel gate attached to a massive stone and concrete pillar on each end. A brass plate was mounted on one of the pillars, and on it were etched the words THE HERCULES PROJECT. That was all it said.

  A Jeep was parked on the other side of the gate. Behind it, a paved road ran up into gently rolling hills dotted here and there with live oaks and post oaks and cottonwoods. At this time of year, the scenery was green and beautiful, almost like a pastoral English countryside except for the occasional clump of cactus that made it unmistakably Texas. A few low structures were visible among the hills, mostly screened from the road by trees.

  A man got out of the Jeep and lifted a hand in greeting. “Patrick?” he called through the bars of the gate.

  “That’s right,” Larkin replied. “You’re Graham Moultrie? I talked to you on the phone.”

  “You bet,” Moultrie said with a smile. He was a wiry, medium-size man with close-cropped silvery hair and a little goatee. He wore a khaki shirt and jeans and looked more like somebody who would run a lawn-care service instead of an entrepreneur with the ability to sink twenty million dollars into something like the Hercules Project.

  He took a small, square remote from his shirt pocket and pressed a button on it. Almost noiselessly, the gate began to roll back.

  “Drive on in,” Moultrie invited when the gate was open. “You can park your SUV here and we’ll take the Jeep up to the office.”

  Larkin did what Moultrie said. As he got out of the SUV after parking it at the side of the road, the gate began to close again.

  “Feels a little like a prison,” he commented.

  Moultrie laughed. “Just the opposite. We want to keep people out, not in.”

  “Will that gate do it?”

  “You could ram through it with a tank, if you’ve got a spare one in your garage, I guess,” Moultrie said with a shrug. “Anything short of that and it ought to hold up.”

  Larkin pointed at the high chain-link fence that ran along the front of the property. “Wouldn’t take a tank to go through that.”

  “No, but we’ll have some extra defenses put in place soon.” Moultrie didn’t explain what those defenses were, but he added, “For now, it can be electrified with a flip of a switch in the office or the push of a button on this remote. That’s enough to keep most intruders out.”

  Larkin nodded. It still felt a little like a prison to him, but at least the fence wasn’t topped with coils of razor wire. Yet.

  Moultrie waved him into the Jeep. They started along the road, weaving easily through the hills.

  “You know the history of this place, I guess?” Moultrie asked.

  “Yeah, mostly. My buddy told me about it.”

  “Adam Threadgill.” Moultrie nodded. “Seems like a good guy. I hope he’s able to join us.”

  “Us meaning you and the people who have already signed up with you?”

  “That’s right. We’d all like for you and your family to be part of the Hercules Project, too. You said you were married?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any kids?”

  “A grown daughter. She’s married and has a little boy and girl.”

  “Grandkids,” Moultrie said. “That’s great. I don’t have any children myself, and I wish I did
. There’s something about being able to see the continuity of the family. Kids and grandkids are like . . . a physical manifestation of the future.”

  “Assuming we make it to the future.”

  “Well, yes,” Moultrie said, “there’s that.” While he drove, he moved his head to indicate their surroundings. “That’s why we have the Hercules Project.”

  “Named after the missiles that used to be here, I suppose?”

  “That and because Hercules is a symbol of strength. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re making a stronghold to ensure the future of humanity.”

  “You really think that’s necessary?” Larkin asked.

  “I hope every day that it’s not . . . but I’m a practical man. Practical enough to recognize that the possibility exists, and it’s not going to go away, no matter how much most people want to ignore it.”

  Larkin nodded. Moultrie was a salesman, all right . . . but that didn’t mean he was wrong.

  Moultrie drove around a clump of trees and pulled into a gravel parking lot in front of one of the squat, tan brick structures Larkin had caught a glimpse of from the gate.

  “This is the office,” Moultrie went on. “We’ll stop in here for a minute and then walk on up to the bunker’s main entrance.”

  Inside looked like hundreds of other offices Larkin had seen in his life, with a couple of desks, computers on each one, filing cabinets, and a water cooler. Two things were different: an oil painting of a big missile with flame blasting from its tail hung on one wall, presumably one of the Nike Hercules missiles that had been kept here . . . and behind one of the desks was a drop-dead gorgeous redhead who looked more like a fashion model than a secretary.

  Turned out she wasn’t a secretary, or not just a secretary, anyway. Moultrie smiled and said, “This is my wife Deb. Deb, this is Pat Larkin. I told you about talking to him. He and his family are considering joining us.”

  In some circumstances, Larkin would have corrected Moultrie. He would answer to Pat if he had to, but he had always gone by Patrick. Right now. it didn’t seem worth bothering with. Deb Moultrie stood up, extended her hand across the desk, and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Larkin.”

  Larkin was just old enough and just enough of a reactionary that he had never been completely comfortable about shaking hands with women, although for the most part he had gotten used to it in the service. He took Deb’s hand and had to admit she had a good grip. Looked a guy in the eye, too, which he liked.

  “Anything going on since I left earlier?” Moultrie asked his wife. Deb was a good twenty years younger than him, so Larkin had to wonder if she was a second or third wife, or a trophy wife. Not that it was any of his business or really mattered.

  “Some emails for you to answer when you get a chance, that’s all.”

  Moultrie nodded. “I’ll do it later. I’m gonna show Pat around the place. You want to come along?”

  “No, I’m still making some calls. You go ahead.” She smiled at Larkin. “You wouldn’t believe how many contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors you have to deal with in order to get a place like this in shape.”

  “I’ll bet,” Larkin said.

  Moultrie gestured at a rear door and said, “We can go out here.”

  The door opened onto an asphalt walk that led slightly uphill for about a hundred yards to a cinder-block building that looked like a garage. It had a garage door built into it, in fact, along with a smaller steel door.

  Moultrie unlocked the smaller door with his remote before they got there. Larkin said, “You seem to depend a lot on that thing. What happens if the battery goes dead?”

  “There are redundancies built into everything,” Moultrie said. “In this case, you can use a key card to get in, or if it comes to that, there’s a manual override operated with a regular key.”

  “You think of everything.”

  “We try.” Moultrie opened the door and motioned for Larkin to go ahead. He stepped into a room the size of a foyer. On the other side of it was a steel wall painted battleship gray. Set into the wall was a heavy steel door with a simple handle.

  “It’s not locked . . . now,” Moultrie said as he stepped around Larkin and grasped the handle. He pulled the door out, and a light set into a recessed fixture in the ceiling beyond came on, evidently activated by the door opening. Sharp LED illumination washed down over a wide set of concrete stairs with steel rails on both walls. At a landing one floor down, the stairs turned back and continued to descend. Moultrie held on to the door with one hand and extended the other toward the stairs like a tour guide as he said, “Welcome to the Hercules Project.”

  Chapter 4

  Larkin hesitated slightly. There was something about descending into the bowels of the earth with someone he didn’t really know that made the skin on the back of his neck crawl. But he was four inches taller and probably fifty pounds heavier than Graham Moultrie, plus he had all that training from his career as a Marine and had seen combat in the Middle East.

  Besides, Moultrie wanted at least 150 grand from him. The guy wasn’t likely to try to kill a potential customer unless he was crazy.

  Of course, in this day and age, anybody could turn out to be crazy . . .

  Larkin didn’t pause more than a heartbeat. He started down the stairs with Moultrie behind him. Out of habit, he listened to Moultrie’s steps. A break in the rhythm might be a warning sign.

  Nothing happened except they went down two flights of stairs. At the bottom of the second flight was an even thicker, heavier metal door.

  Larkin twisted the handle. He grunted with effort as he pushed the door open and stepped into a concrete walled chamber eight feet wide and twelve feet long. A similar door was at the far end.

  Moultrie followed him and pointed to a wheel on the back side of the door Larkin had just opened. “This is a blast door that will stand up to just about anything short of a nuclear explosion. It’s equipped with a mechanism like a bulkhead between compartments in a submarine. Turn that wheel and you can seal it off so completely nothing can get through. The door at the other end is identical.” He pointed with a thumb at vents in the ceiling. “This chamber can function as an airlock. We can pump out all the air in it, pump it back in, and open either door by remote control.”

  “Just in case there’s something in the air outside that shouldn’t be inhaled?”

  “Yep.” Moultrie opened the second blast door. “This leads into one of the main corridors.”

  They stepped into a wide, tile-floored hallway that stretched for a hundred yards in either direction. Numerous doors opened from it, some closed, some standing ajar. Again, the lighting was recessed and LED.

  Moultrie saw Larkin looking at the lights and said, “That’s one of the first things we did. The original lighting was fluorescent. This is more energy-efficient and easier on the eyes. Anybody who has to stay down here may be staying for a long time.”

  Directly across from the blast door leading to the stairs was a corridor running at right angles to the main one. Larkin could tell it ended at another cross corridor about fifty yards away.

  “These main halls are laid out in the shape of an H,” Moultrie explained. “There were four missile silos, one at each end of the long sides of the H. They go down considerably deeper, so we’re dividing them up into five levels with a separate apartment at each level.” He pointed to a sliding door and went on, “That’s an elevator leading down to the big storage bunker one level below this. We’re going to be turning it into more of a barracks type of living quarters. The quarters on this level”—he waved a hand toward the doors along the corridor—“are a more family and small-group type of arrangement, with six or eight bunks in each unit, along with a small kitchen and bathroom. Not a great deal of privacy, granted, but still more than there will be down in the lower level. We anticipate that most of the residents who will opt for that will be single people.”

  “Are you splitting up the single male and fem
ale residents?” Larkin asked.

  “No. Everyone here will have to be a grown-up and police their own actions to a certain extent.” Moultrie smiled. “Except the actual kids, of course, and they’ll be with their parents. But we’re not going to impose any sort of litmus test on potential residents. Gay, straight, any race, creed, or color, as they used to say, everybody is welcome here.”

  “If they have the money.”

  “Well . . . I created the Hercules Project because I think it’s the right thing to do, but it is a business venture, too.”

  “Say it is a worst-case scenario,” Larkin mused. “There’s some sort of disaster and you and the people who have signed up with you have to come down here for a year or two, or longer. When you finally do go back up to the surface, what good is the money going to do you?”

  “Probably not a damned bit.” Moultrie laughed. “I’m fully aware of that possibility, Pat. If that’s the way it plays out, I still have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped save the human race. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

  Yeah, Larkin thought, if you’ve got a God complex.

  Then he told himself that maybe he was being unfair. Maybe Graham Moultrie really was as altruistic as he was trying to make himself sound.

  “Anyway, to get back to what we were talking about, what I envision down here is a meritocracy,” Moultrie went on. “What can you do, and how good are you at it? That’s what’s really going to count. And because of that, at some point I probably will have to do some picking and choosing as to who gets in here. Now, take you for example . . .”

  “I’m a writer,” Larkin said. “I’m not going to be much good to you.”

  “Yes, but you’re also an ex-Marine.”

  Larkin had to correct that. “Former Marine. There are no ex-Marines.”

  “Once a Marine, always a Marine. Sorry. I knew that. Slip of the tongue. The important thing is, you have an exemplary military record. You’ve been in combat, you’ve commanded men, you know how to get the job done, whatever it is.”