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?” Lark
in 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 e
very 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 Doomsday Bunker Page 27
