“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.”
“An
d 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.
The Doomsday Bunker Page 29
