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 . . .” Moultr
ie 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.
The Doomsday Bunker Page 26
