The Doomsday Bunker

Chapter 1

May 24

“In other news, there are unconfirmed reports that North Korea conducted further missile tests today. The missiles involved in these tests are said to have the potential to reach the continental United States. With the recent increase in North Korea’s nuclear development, these reports have caused grave concern in some circles in Washington, but the President, in a statement today, referred to that concern as ‘fear-mongering’ and said that there is no reason to believe North Korea may be considering aggressive action, despite heightened tensions with South Korea and the U.S.”

As a commercial came on for the season finale of Singing for Dollars, Patrick Larkin picked up the remote and pushed the mute button.

“See?” he said to his wife Susan.

“You’re just fear-mongering,” she said.

Larkin rolled his eyes.

“And don’t roll your eyes at me,” Susan added. “You’re talking about a lot of money, Patrick. A hell of a lot of money.”

He grimaced and said, “Yeah, I know. We’ve got it, but it would sure take a big chunk out of our bank accounts.”

“It would wipe out a couple of them.”

Larkin nodded. The remote was in his right hand. He slid his left arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulled her closer against him.

“You’re not getting ideas, are you?” she asked.

“Not the kind you’re thinking about,” he said with a sigh.

He was in his late forties, but the only signs of his age were a few streaks of gray in his thick dark hair and a slight weathering of his features. Also, he wasn’t in quite as good a shape as he had been when he retired from the Marine Corps a few years earlier, but he liked to think he hadn’t lost too much of that conditioning.

Susan, with her honey-blond hair and classic good looks, didn’t show her age, either. Even after all the years of marriage, it didn’t take much encouragement for him to think about turning off the TV and taking her to bed. Unfortunately, watching the news was as much of an antidote for that as a bucket full of ice water dumped over his head would have been.

Too late now, he thought as she said, “It’s back on.”

“West Nile, Zika, and now Hydra. No, we’re not talking about comic book villains. The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed three more cases of the Hydra virus, so named because of the way it reproduces. This brings the number of confirmed cases in the United States to seventeen. The latest victims of the disease have been identified as refugees from the Middle East who were resettled in Houston, Texas.”

“Good Lord,” Larkin said. “It’s in Texas now, not just Florida and the East Coast.”

“Shh,” Susan said.

“These patients are being held in strict quarantine, and Houston’s mayor stated today that the situation is under control and there is no danger of the virus spreading. The patients are listed as being in critical condition, and the prognosis for their recovery is uncertain.”

“Uncertain, my ass,” Larkin said. “Hydra’s killed everybody else who came down with it. And how can that windbag politician say there’s no danger of it spreading? The doctors and scientists don’t know how it spreads. And now it’s in Texas. You think it’s not coming up I-45 toward us right now?”

“They’ll get it under control. They did with all the other new viruses, didn’t they?”

“Well, there hasn’t been another plague that wiped out half the country yet, but give it time.”

“I swear, Patrick, you sound almost like you wish that would happen.”

“No,” he said, “I just wish people would wake up to the fact that it could.”

“Widespread demonstrations prompted by last week’s incident in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, erupted in violence today as police and peaceful protestors clashed. Riots broke out in Des Moines, as well as in other cities in Illinois, Ohio, California, and New York. The Cedar Rapids incident, in which two alleged armed robbers were gunned down by police, is under investigation by the Justice Department, and the officers involved in the shooting have been placed in protective custody after their homes were destroyed by firebombs. No arrests have been made in those bombings.

“We’ll have news of the latest celebrity breakup right after—Wait. What? Where… Breaking news. There has been an explosion in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. Reports are coming in of serious destruction and numerous injuries, although there are no confirmed fatalities at this time… We’ll try to find out more—”

“That’s enough,” Larkin said as he pushed the power button on the remote this time.

“I might have wanted to see that, you know,” Susan said.

“Why? You know what’s going to happen. All the talking heads will speculate about who’s responsible for that explosion, and they’ll mention everybody except who it turns out to be.”

“You don’t know who’s responsible.”

Larkin just gave her a look.

“Well, you don’t.”

“Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. The history of the last thirty years says I won’t be, though.” Larkin shook his head. “Let’s face it, you could write the script for the news every night before it comes on. Some dictator on the other side of the world rattles a sword, and our guy waves it off and accuses his political opponents of fear-mongering. So-called peaceful protestors start burning and looting because they can get away with it, while cops trying to do their jobs have to worry not only about being shot but about their families being threatened as well. Some athlete spits on the country that made him a millionaire. We’ve conquered all the diseases except the ones that have mutated to the point that we can’t do anything to control them. And people can’t go about their business without having to wonder if there’s some suicidal nutcase with a bomb standing next to them in a crowd. Isn’t that what we see, night after night?”

“Maybe, but what good is ranting going to do about it?”

“Ranting? This is not ranting. I haven’t even come close to working up to a good rant—”

Susan stood up. “Good night, Patrick.”

“That’s it? Good night?”

“Yeah, I think so. I’m tired. I still have a job, you know, and it was a long shift in the ER today.”

He made a face again and said, “Sorry. I guess I do get a little wound up sometimes.”

She went behind the sofa, leaned over, and kissed his ear. “You’re passionate about things,” she told him. “I can’t complain too much about that.” She straightened, started to walk toward the bedroom, and then paused to add, “I just hate to see you get so worked up over things you can’t do anything about. Really, Patrick, this is just… the new normal.”

The new normal, he thought as she left the room. He supposed she was right about that.

God help us all.

Chapter 2

Two weeks earlier

“It’s out in the country west of here,” Adam Threadgill said. “You know, so it would be handy to the Air Force base.” He shrugged. “Back when there was still an Air Force base.”

“There’s still a base there,” Larkin said. “It’s just a reserve base now.”

“Yeah. So they don’t have any need for nuclear bombs, do they?”

“I thought you said this place you’re talking about was where they kept missiles.”

“They had missiles to protect the bombs.”

“I get it,” Larkin said, although he wasn’t sure he did. “But now the installation is empty?”

“Yep,” Adam said. “For now. But not for long, if this guy I’m telling you about has his way.”

“Okay, run it past me again,” Larkin said as he reached for his glass of iced tea. The plate in front of him was empty except for a couple of tiny smears of barbecue sauce, all that was left of his weekly lunch with his fellow retired Marine.

The two men were in what looked like a hole-in-the-wall dump of a restaurant, but actually it had some of the best barbecue to be found in Fort Worth. Located near the big aircraft plant, the place was usually packed with guys Larkin could tell were engineers just by looking at them. It was popular with retired military, too, and there were a lot of them in this area.

“Okay,” Threadgill said. He had let himself go more than Larkin had, but you could still kind of see the tough, squatty noncom he had been. “The Air Force had this secret underground base out in the hills west of town where they stored all the nuclear bombs they’d stockpiled for the B-52s and B-58s that flew out of the regular base. This was in the early Sixties, you know, when the Cold War was at its height. Everybody was afraid the Russians were going to try to bomb the hell out of us at a moment’s notice. Considering there was a stockpile of nuclear weapons here, this whole area was considered a prime target for the Russkies. So they put in Nike Hercules missiles to guard the place. In fact, there were missile bases all around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but the one I’m talking about was secret. You can’t find out anything about it even on Wikipedia.”

“Then how do you know about it?”

“You forget, I grew up around here. My dad worked at General Dynamics, right across the runways from the Air Force base. All the kids whose dads worked at GD knew about the missile base. And it scared the shit out of us thinking that the Russians had painted a big bull’s-eye on the whole area.”

“So your dads who worked on the flight line knew about it. Wow, that’s some really top-notch military security there.”

“What can I say?” Threadgill shrugged. “The Russians never bombed us. Maybe they didn’t know about it, after all.”

“They should have put a few sleeper agents into the elementary schools around here.”

“Anyway, the empty silos are still there, and so are the bunkers where the warheads were stored, along with all the fire control and administrative areas. It’s almost like an underground mall, but there’s nothing in it. It’s been sitting there like that for all those years, just waiting for somebody to come along and put it to good use.”

“Like this guy Moultrie you were telling me about.”

“Yeah. Graham’s got vision.”

Larkin was pretty sure Threadgill was quoting something Graham Moultrie had said. In his experience, he was a little suspicious of anybody who claimed to have vision. All too often, a businessman who said that was just after a buck. A politician who started spouting about it was after power… and a buck. None of it ended well.

“Moultrie bought the property?”

“Yeah. From the way he talks, the government was glad to get rid of it. It’s kind of a white elephant. It’s never been sold to a real-estate developer because then they’d have to disclose the fact that nuclear material used to be stored there. Otherwise, if somebody bought the property and covered it with McMansions, they’d be opening themselves up to lawsuits for not revealing that. But in Graham’s case, he knew what had been down there and bought it as is.”

“Complete with radiation contamination.”

Threadgill shook his head. “No, the place is clean. He’s had it checked up one way and down the other. It’s perfectly safe.”

A dubious frown creased Larkin’s forehead. “Yeah, but if he’s trying to sell shares in the place, he’s not going to admit that it might give you radiation poisoning, is he?”

“He’s going to live there himself, if that day ever comes, God forbid. He wouldn’t move into a place he knew would kill him, would he?”

“I suppose not,” Larkin admitted. “It wouldn’t be much of a survival bunker if it was going to kill you.”

Survival bunker… It said something about the state of the world that such a term had even come into being. Of course, back when he was a kid, Larkin had heard people talking about fallout shelters, even though the craze where everybody wanted one in their backyard had passed more than a decade earlier. Even most of those had been nothing more than glorified storm cellars, a place where you could go to hunker down safely until a tornado blew over. You couldn’t wait out a nuclear war in one of them, though.

A survival bunker was different. He had read up on them, even before Adam Threadgill got interested. Most of them were set up in abandoned military installations like the one Threadgill was talking about, underground bases hardened against not only nuclear blasts but also electromagnetic pulses, chemical and biological warfare, and any other hideous threat the modern world could dish up. They were big enough to hold more than just a family; most could house hundreds of people in relative comfort and were self-sustaining with generators to provide power, plenty of room for stored rations, equipment to supply clean water, and even gardens to grow food hydroponically in case the rations ever ran low. Theoretically, people could live safely under the ground for years no matter what went on above them on the surface.

What would they find when they came up, though?

Larkin pushed that thought out of his head. Always a practical man, he said, “What’s it going to cost to buy some space in there?”

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 female 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.”

“You’re going to have a military force down here?”

“A security force,” Moultrie said with a shrug. “I’d like to think that everyone will be on their best behavior at all times, but I’m realistic enough to know that won’t be the case. It’s possible we’ll have to step in and restore order now and then. When and if that happens, I want men I can count on. I think you could be one of those men, Pat, along with your friend Adam.”

“Sounds like you know quite a bit about us,” Larkin said as suspicion stirred again in his mind.

“An arrangement like this requires trust on both sides,” Moultrie said. “And you know what they say… There aren’t many secrets left in the world.” He smiled and gestured again. “Let’s look around some more.”

They walked along the main corridor, Moultrie opening doors to show Larkin storage areas and a dining area with a large kitchen attached to it. “We’ll provide meals for people who prefer that, or people can cook in their own units, sort of like an assisted-living center for the elderly. Everyone’s food consumption will be kept track of, though, either way. There’ll be enough rations stored down here to keep the population alive for a number of years, plus we intend to grow crops hydroponically—that area is down on the lower level, too—and we’ll be raising both rabbits and chickens, as well, to stretch our food supplies. But it’s unlikely we’ll be able to feed ourselves indefinitely.”

“Your population will grow, too,” Larkin pointed out.

“Undoubtedly. And we probably won’t have many elderly residents, so they won’t die out at the same rate as babies are born. But we’ll deal with that as it happens.”

Larkin pointed through an open door into a room lined with sturdy-looking cabinets. “What’s this?”

“Our armory. We’ll have some weapons to start with, and residents will be allowed to bring along their personal firearms, at least a certain number. But they’ll all be kept here and used only for practice and in emergencies.”

“Some people won’t like giving up their guns.”

“We’re talking about a situation where there are a lot of things people don’t like.”

“Armageddon,” Larkin said.

Moultrie shrugged. “Or a reasonable facsimile.”

“You have medical facilities?”

“An infirmary and an operating room, plus a large supply of every drug we can think of. A woman like your wife will be a very welcome addition to our ranks, Pat.”

That nickname was getting under Larkin’s skin, but he still suppressed the urge to say anything about it. Instead, he said, “So you know she’s an ER nurse.”

“Of course. A very highly regarded one, too. Honestly… you two are just about perfect. I couldn’t ask for a better couple to join us.”

“We’ll have to do a lot of thinking and talking about it,” Larkin said. He added grudgingly, “I have to say, though, you seem to have thought of everything. This looks like a viable operation.”

“Just as viable and self-sustaining as I can make it,” Moultrie said. “You have my word on that.”

“Where are your generators?”

“Down on the lower level as well. We actually have our own power plant, as well as equipment to recycle both air and water.”

“So we’ll be drinking our own piss.”

“You’re already doing that if you have any sort of municipal water supply. We just—you’ll pardon the expression—streamline the process.” Moultrie pointed up. “There will be sensors in place on the surface to instantly detect any sort of radiation or unusual chemical or biological activity. We can monitor that around the clock and keep the shelter completely sealed off as long as there’s the least bit of danger. Food, clean air and water, sustainable resources, and enough hardened steel and concrete to withstand anything up to a ground zero nuclear hit… what more could you ask for when it comes to survival, Patrick?”

The guy was good, Larkin had to give him that. Moultrie must have noticed the slight tightening of his mouth when he called him Pat and adjusted accordingly.

“You say there are separate apartments in the old missile silos?”

“That’s right. Twenty in all, with full kitchens, two bedrooms, and two baths. I wouldn’t exactly call them luxurious, but they’re very comfortable. If it weren’t for the lack of windows, you’d think you were in a nice apartment house.”

“How much?” Larkin asked bluntly.

“I’ll give you our price list when we get back to the office,” Moultrie said.

That didn’t bode well, Larkin thought, if it cost so much to get in here that Moultrie didn’t want to say the numbers out loud. Or maybe it was just easier to hand out a price list. Larkin supposed he would find out.

“Also, you don’t have to come up with the entire cost at once,” Moultrie went on. “You can put down a deposit to hold your space and pay it off either in installments or in a lump sum when everything is complete and the place is ready to move into.”

“But once it is, you’ve got to be paid in full to get in if the shit hits the fan.”

“That’s the way it works,” Moultrie said quietly.

“Survival on the layaway plan,” Larkin said.

Chapter 5

May 25

As Larkin was driving away from the Hercules Project, he had the satellite radio in the SUV tuned to a news channel. The announcer was talking about a series of riots in Indonesia that had resulted in more than a hundred deaths before being broken up by a typhoon that swept in and killed several hundred more. Meanwhile, one of the socialist countries in South America was descending further into chaos and starvation, one more domino toppling in a seemingly endless chain. Larkin grunted and switched the station to some music. He didn’t care what kind of music it was; he just wanted to hear something other the constant litany of death, discord, and destruction.

As he drove through the countryside west of Fort Worth, it was hard to believe there was so much terrible news in the world. The landscape was green and beautiful, with nice houses tucked in among trees and cows and horses grazing in the fields. From some of the hills, he could see the downtown skyscrapers about ten miles away, shining in the sun.

A vision suddenly appeared in his head: those buildings disappearing in an instant, in the searing fireball of a nuclear explosion. Adam Threadgill had mentioned growing up in this area and being scared of such a thing when he was a kid. Larkin’s childhood had been spent in Kansas and Nebraska, without any military targets nearby, but even so he could remember what that Cold War paranoia felt like.

Only it wasn’t paranoia if somebody was really out to get you, he reminded himself, and for a while there, the United States and the Soviet Union hadn’t been all that far from actually launching nukes at each other. Larkin had been born a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so he didn’t remember that incident himself, but it had had enough of an effect on the nation’s consciousness that he had been aware of it for as far back as he could remember. He remembered hearing fear in his father’s voice when he talked about the Russians… and in young Patrick’s mind, his dad had been invincible, never afraid of anything. If he worried about being bombed, there must be something to it.

Then that anxiety had receded after the fall of the Soviet Union, only to resurface with new faces behind the bombs. It wasn’t missiles people worried about now, but rather truck bombs or suitcase nukes or drone payloads being wielded by Islamic terrorists. As so-called “refugees” from the Middle East continued to flood into the country over the objections of nearly everybody except the politicians in Washington, people couldn’t help but wonder how many of those young men came to America seeking not sanctuary but rather an opportunity to sow carnage.

The trouble didn’t necessarily have to come from overseas, either. Plenty of it was already here in the form of homegrown terrorists, the children of legal immigrants from earlier generations who had been corrupted by a ceaseless barrage of hate coming from their Middle Eastern cousins. And so there were bombings, shootings, stabbings, all sorts of violence, and the worst part of it was… you never knew where it was coming from. No wonder people were stressed out.

Throw in the racial unrest relentlessly stoked by politicians, so-called community leaders, and the media, and it was hard to leave home without thinking, Well, this might be the time when I don’t come back.

That didn’t even take into account all the little things that could kill you, like some new superbug resistant to any treatment, or the rising tide of cancer—God, Larkin couldn’t even begin to count all the friends and acquaintances he had lost to one form or another of cancer !—or the dementia that seemed so much more prevalent than it used to be, or an allergic reaction to some common, everyday food or item, or the stress and depression that led people to medicate themselves into a stupor until it finally seemed that ending it all was the easiest way out…

Were there still good things in the world? Sure, logically Larkin knew that there were. But sometimes it was hard to pick them out from the tsunami of crap that seemed to be washing over everything.

By the time he got back to his nice, comfortable house, he was feeling anything but comfortable. Graham Moultrie had made plenty of good points, and from what Larkin could tell, the Hercules Project was being developed into the sort of safe, secure place where somebody really could ride out all sorts of catastrophes.

He glanced down at the brochure lying on the seat beside him. The prices were high, but not out of reach. One of those apartments in the old missile silos could be had for $80,000 per person. The more spare accommodations along the main corridors went for $60,000 per person, and space in the barracks-like lower level was 50 grand per. Kids under the age of fifteen were half-price. The down payment/deposit was 20 percent of the total. It could be done, Larkin thought as he parked in the garage and then picked up the brochure from the seat.

Susan’s sedan was parked in the garage, too. He had left the house before she was awake, but she would be up now, getting ready to head to the hospital for her shift. He went in through the garage, into the kitchen, and found coffee in the old-fashioned coffeemaker. He’d never cared for those new ones with the plastic cups and pods and things.

As he poured himself a cup, she came into the kitchen fully dressed in her scrubs but toweling her hair dry. “I saw your note saying you’d gone to run an errand,” she said. “Get it taken care of?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“What’s your plan for this afternoon? Going to get some pages done?”

“Thought I would.”

“Maybe you could unload the dishwasher, too?”

“Sure,” Larkin said. After everything he had seen and thought about this morning, worrying about dirty dishes seemed almost trivial beyond belief, but Susan was right: life went on, and that included all the mundane chores that went with it.

Yeah, life went on… until it didn’t.

“If you’ve got a few minutes, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Susan looked at him and frowned. “This isn’t a situation, is it? I hate situations.”

Larkin laughed and shook his head. Any time one member of a couple announced that they had a “situation,” it almost always wasn’t good.

“No. You know I went to lunch with Adam Threadgill the other day.”

“You have lunch with Adam every week unless something comes up.”

“Yeah, but this time he was telling me about this new place west of town—”

“A new place to eat? Ooh, I like the sound of that.”

Larkin made a face and shook his head. “Well, they have food there, but it’s not exactly a restaurant.”

“A bar? I’m not much on bars, you know that.”

“It’s more of a place you go and stay.”

“A bed and breakfast? A resort? Those places are expensive. Although, if you wanted to call it, like, a second honeymoon…”

Larkin sighed and held out the brochure to her. “Just take a look and think about it, all right. I took a tour of the place and can tell you all about it.”

Susan glanced down at the brochure, which had a mushroom cloud on the folded front. She looked right back up and said, “No. This is some sort of crazy fantasy, Patrick.”

“I wish it was.”

She pushed the brochure back in his hand and snapped, “I have to get to work.”

“Then we’ll talk about it later—”

“There’s nothing to talk about. However much this costs, we can find better ways to spend the money.”

“Better ways than survival?”

She just looked at him, shook her head, and walked out of the kitchen.

That was the way it had been ever since, Larkin bringing up the subject from time to time, Susan refusing to even talk about it… but gradually getting less steadfast in her refusal. Larkin hoped that was because some of his arguments, even the snippets of them she listened to, were getting through to her. The fact that the news seemed to be getting worse and worse all the time probably had an effect, too.

In making the arguments to her, he realized he was making them to himself as well. When he’d driven away from the Hercules Project, he had been undecided about what was the right thing to do. Moultrie had made a compelling case, and so had the things Larkin had seen with his own eyes. But he’d been raised to be frugal, and spending a chunk of money that big just went against the grain for him, even when it was in a good cause. He’d had doubts about nearly every big purchase he had ever made in his life, he recalled, and most of them had turned out just fine. Not just fine, but in some cases downright great. So history told him—in more ways than one—that he didn’t have any reason to drag his feet about this.

No reason other than getting Susan to see the practicality of it, too.

After their conversation about “the new normal” the night before, he hadn’t said anything else about the idea. This morning he had coffee and breakfast—pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon—ready when she came into the kitchen. He wasn’t trying to suck up to her; since retiring, he had discovered that he actually liked cooking… as long as it was basic stuff and didn’t get too complicated.

She was still in her nightgown and looked great to him. He enjoyed the casual intimacy of their decades-long marriage. He was about to say good morning to her when she walked through the kitchen and on into the living room. The open-concept design of the whole living area allowed him to watch her as she picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV. The big screen came on.

“I had the TV on in the bedroom,” she said as she glanced over her shoulder at him. “This was on.”

“—shooters’ motive is unknown at this time,” a solemn voice was saying over an apparent live shot of what appeared to be a mall somewhere. A graphic listing the town of Pembroke Pines, Florida, was at the bottom of the screen. Emergency vehicles were parked around the mall, but that was all that could be seen because members of the media were being kept back a considerable distance. “There are reports of multiple fatalities, and at least a dozen injured have been transported to nearby medical facilities. There appear to have been at least three shooters, and as far as we know they are still active inside the mall. Police have cordoned off the area, and we believe that SWAT teams have gone in—Oh, my God! What was that?”

The live shot bounced on the screen as the camera was jolted. Larkin gripped the edge of the counter hard as smoke and flames erupted from the mall and people screamed and shouted. The view tilted and careened as the person with the camera fled. For a split second, the camera caught sight of a massive fireball rising and enveloping the mall. Larkin felt sick.

Susan muted the sound on the TV but left the picture on, although there was nothing to see but chaos. She turned, looked at Larkin, and said, “That place out in the country… I’m ready to talk about it now.”

Chapter 6

The destruction in Florida was massive, even though the newscasts kept harping on the fact that it hadn’t been a nuclear explosion that had destroyed the mall and killed the hundreds of people still inside it when the blast went off. The fact that it was a conventional bomb didn’t make them any less dead.

Since all the security cameras inside the mall had been destroyed as well, it was thought at first that the exact chain of events would remain unknown. However, within hours of the attack, cell phone video shot and sent out from inside the mall during the incident began to surface. Although the footage was often shaky, naturally enough, since the innocent people taking it had been terrified, it was clear enough to show the three young men of Middle Eastern descent opening fire on shoppers with semi-automatic pistols. No one else in the mall seemed to be armed; no one returned the fire anyway. People screamed, ran, and tried to hide instead.

Mall security guards showed up and engaged in a gun battle with the shooters. One of the men was hit and apparently killed. The others retreated into a store. Emergency personnel began to arrive and evacuated some of the wounded. The mall was effectively in lockdown, however, with most of the customers who’d been in there when the violence started still there, hiding, afraid to venture out and maybe become a target. Then the police had lobbed in tear gas and stormed the store where the remaining shooters had holed up…

And all the streaming video ended at that point.

Eventually the investigation into the attack determined that the three suspects (they were seldom, if ever, referred to in the media as terrorists) had parked a rental truck at the loading dock of one of the mall’s anchor stores. It had been packed to bursting with explosives and had been triggered with a remote detonator. The horrific blast destroyed more than half the mall, including the area where the attackers had taken shelter. It was a classic suicide bombing on a huge scale. If they hadn’t been trapped, if they had gotten away somehow, they might have waited until they were clear to trigger the bomb, but the consensus was that they’d had no real intention of surviving.

Identifying the three men hadn’t taken long, either. Two were Syrian refugees; the other had been born and raised in Encino. But all were fervent jihadists, according to their social media pages. All had predicted their own deaths.

And all had vowed that the bloodshed would go on no matter what happened to them, until a worldwide caliphate was established that would usher in peace.

The country was shaken. The previous holiday season, another mall had almost been destroyed in a terrorist attack. The pattern was forming. When it wasn’t even safe to go to the mall anymore…

The attack was the top story for a week. Then the North Koreans staged another nuclear test that put the entire Far East up in arms. The Iranian government issued a stern warning to the United States not to respond to the North Koreans’ action. The Hydra virus ramped up, with scores of new cases reported and a 90 percent mortality rate. Seven police officers were ambushed and killed in Kansas City, Missouri. The President made a speech from the Oval Office saying that in order to quell the rising tide of violence in the country, some constitutional rights might have to be suspended, but only temporarily, of course.

And the winner of Singing for Dollars was announced: Jodie Swain. Leading to immediate howls of protest that Taneesha Hamilton should have won and had been robbed because she was not only black but transgender. That story trended even more than any of the others.

In Texas, Patrick Larkin took his wife Susan to visit the Hercules Project.

“I have to say, you’re an absolutely perfect candidate for residency here, Susan,” Graham Moultrie said after taking them on the same tour of the project that Larkin had gotten a couple of weeks earlier. “It’s vital that we have people in the community with hands-on medical experience.”

“She’s got plenty of that,” Larkin said. “Fifteen years as an ER nurse. I’d say she’s seen just about every kind of medical emergency there is.”

“Hardly,” Susan said. “I’m sure there are all kinds of things I’ve never encountered.”

“But you’ve seen plenty,” Moultrie went on. “And it’s not like you’d be in charge of our medical unit. We already have several doctors and their families signed up. You’d be joining a great team.”

“Assuming that we’d ever have to take shelter down here.”

“Of course,” Moultrie said. “And we hope that never happens, don’t we? Just like we buy car insurance and home insurance to protect us against things that we hope will never happen.”

“So this place”—Susan gestured at their surroundings—” is nuclear war and plague insurance.”

Moultrie looked like he was thinking it over, then he nodded. “You could call it that, I suppose. I prefer just saying that it’s survival insurance, because there are all sorts of things out there that could threaten our survival.”

Larkin thought about everything that had been happening in the world recently and knew Moultrie was right about that, anyway. There was no telling which direction catastrophe would come from next. But there were getting to be so many potential civilization-ending disasters that the odds were tipping further and further in favor of something bad happening.

Susan looked around the main corridor where they were standing and said, “Well… it does seem like you’ve thought of just about everything.”

“We tried,” Moultrie said modestly. “And it’s not just Deb and me, either. I’ve hired some of the top survival experts and futurists in the country as consultants, to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything. I know that having a place down here isn’t cheap. One of our goals is to make sure that each of our residents gets his or her money’s worth.”

“Of course, who would anybody complain to?” Larkin asked. “If it’s bad enough on the surface for everybody to come down here, there won’t be any Better Business Bureau left.”

Susan said, “Patrick, that was rude.”

“No, not at all,” Moultrie said quickly. “Your husband is right, Susan. Ultimately, there’s only one person to be held accountable.” He poked a thumb against his chest. “Me. That old saying about where the buck stops is true. It’s right here. The Hercules Project is my baby, no one else’s.”

A moment of silence went by before Moultrie resumed in his usual affable tone, “Well, what do you think? Can we sign up the two of you?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “It’s a lot of money.”

“It is,” Moultrie agreed with a solemn nod.

Larkin said, “We have our daughter and her husband and our grandkids to think of, too. I’m not coming down here without them. If things are bad enough to need a place like this, there’s no way I’ll abandon them.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Susan said. “Our family is, well, a package deal.”

“Just the way it should be,” Moultrie said without hesitation. “Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want anybody down here who could just leave their loved ones behind. We’re talking about… four more people, I believe you said, Patrick?”

Larkin nodded. “Our daughter Jill, her husband Trevor Sinclair, and their kids Bailey and Chris. Bailey’s twelve, Chris is eight.”

“Sounds like a fine family,” Moultrie said. “There’ll be quite a few other kids down here, so they’ll fit right in. And if you’re worried about their education, I knew starting out that I’d definitely have to recruit enough teachers so that we can have our own school. If the world falls apart, it’s going to take educated people to put it back together again.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Susan said. “Let us talk to Jill and Trevor and see what they think.”

“Of course.”

Larkin said, “Aren’t you going to warn us not to wait too long to make up our minds?”

Moultrie smiled. “You’re a smart guy, Patrick. I know you’re not going to be rushed into anything, but at the same time, you’re not going to drag your feet when it’s time to take action. I trust you to figure out what’s right for your family.”

“Fair enough,” Larkin said.

“So, unless there’s something else down here you’d like to see… ?” Moultrie looked at Susan and raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head. “No, I think you’ve covered everything very well.”

“Let’s go back up to the office and have a cup of coffee, then. Deb makes great coffee.”

“He’s really slick, isn’t he?” Susan asked as they drove away from the Hercules Project in Larkin’s SUV.

“Slick as snot,” Larkin agreed.

“Don’t be crude. And yet he’s not really as oily as… as…”

“A snake oil salesman?” Larkin supplied.

“That’s right. I’ve always wondered, though… who would buy snake oil in the first place?” Without waiting for Larkin to answer, Susan went on, “He’s a salesman, no doubt about that, but he also seems very sincere. I can usually tell when somebody’s just trying to talk me into buying something.”

“Exactly. Moultrie really believes in what he’s selling.”

“And his wife is lovely.”

“Is she?” Larkin said.

Susan laughed. “Don’t try acting like you didn’t notice. I know you have a thing for gorgeous redheads.”

“I’m not sure I’d say she’s gorgeous—”

“She’s considerably younger than Graham, though. I suspect she’s not his first wife.”

“And I suspect that’s none of our business,” Larkin said.

“And it really doesn’t have anything to do with whether we sign on the dotted line.”

“Not a thing.”

“We need to get Jill and Trevor to come over for dinner so we can talk to them about this.”

Larkin nodded. “I agree completely. They’re smart kids. We’ll lay it all out for them and see what they think.”

“If they come in on it with us, though, we’re going to have to pay some of the cost. I won’t have them raiding the college funds they’ve set up.”

“We can do that. Of course, if we all wind up down there, they won’t be worrying about college, probably for a long time.”

Susan looked out the passenger side window at the beautiful countryside rolling past. “Don’t remind me. We’re talking about the end of the world, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Larkin said. “And I don’t feel fine.”

Chapter 7

Jill Sinclair lined up the sights of the Walther CCP 9mm pistol she held, and in a deliberate fashion, not rushing the shots, put four rounds center mass. The spread at ten yards was six inches. Not bad, she thought as she lowered the pistol, but it could be better. Accuracy could always be improved upon.

She dropped the eight-round magazine, set the Walther on the shelf in front of her, and started reloading. With ear protectors on, she didn’t hear the step behind her, didn’t know anybody was there until a hand lightly touched her shoulder. She had thought she was alone on the range.

She closed her left fist around the partially reloaded magazine, ready to bring it around and punch if she had to. She resisted the impulse to do so blindly and looked over her right shoulder instead. Probably a good thing she did, she thought. Her husband wouldn’t have appreciated it if she’d punched him in the face and broken his nose.

She pulled the ear protectors down so they hung around the back of her neck and asked Trevor, “What are you doing here?”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose and said, “I was on my way home from work when your mother called me. She’s been trying to get you.”

Jill nodded toward her range bag. “My phone’s in there. I didn’t hear it.”

“Yeah, I told Susan that’s what I guessed.”

“There’s not anything wrong, is there?” Jill caught her breath a little. “The kids—”

“The kids are fine. I talked to Bailey just before I left the office.”

“Oh. Okay. What did my mother want, then?”

“Your folks want us to come over for dinner.”

Jill looked down at her outfit: running shoes, yoga pants—she’d never been to a yoga class in her life, but she loved the pants—and T-shirt. “Not like this,” she said. “I’ll have to go home and shower and change.”

“Your parents wouldn’t care.”

“Maybe not, but I would. What’s going on? Is there some sort of urgency about this invitation?”

Trevor shrugged. “I don’t know. Your mom didn’t sound like there was anything wrong, exactly, but she did sound like she and your dad want to talk to us about something.”

“They didn’t just get the urge to have dinner with us and the kids, then.”

Trevor frowned and said, “Actually… she said it would be a good idea if it was just you and me, without Bailey and Chris.”

Jill raised an eyebrow that matched her long, light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She had inherited a blend of her father’s dark hair and her mother’s blond.

“No kids? That sounds sort of ominous, don’t you think?”

“Maybe they’ve got some news they don’t want the kids to hear. Like something about… illness, maybe.”

Jill caught her breath. “Oh, God, one of them has cancer.”

“Now, don’t jump to any conclusions—”

“What else could it be?”

“All sorts of things,” Trevor said. “Maybe they’re getting a divorce.”

Jill gave him a disgusted look. “That’s ridiculous. My parents couldn’t last a month without each other, and you know it.”

“Well, that’s the way it seems, but you never know.”

“Yeah. Sometimes you do know.”

“All right, but just because it’s not divorce doesn’t mean it has to be cancer.”

Jill sighed. “I suppose not. There’s only one way to find out. What did you tell her?”

“I told her I’d have to talk to you. I saw your car when I was driving by here and thought it’d be better to stop and let you know now, instead of waiting until we met up at home.”

Jill nodded and said, “Good idea. I’ll call her, just in case she was worried.”

“I think that’d be a good idea.”

“And Bailey can make something for her and Chris for supper.”

“We could see if Marisol can come over—”

“They don’t need a babysitter, Trev. They’re too old for that.”

“Chris is only eight.”

“And Bailey’s twelve. My parents didn’t helicopter me, and I’m not gonna helicopter my kids. They’re going to be self-reliant.”

“Just like their gun-toting mother.”

Jill gave him a look. She didn’t want to have this… argument wasn’t the right word. Discussion, maybe. Trevor wasn’t opposed to guns, and he had never told her she shouldn’t carry one. He just didn’t feel that comfortable with them himself. She had persuaded him to try shooting a few times, and honestly, he wasn’t very good at it. In his case, it was probably better that he didn’t carry.

Jill, on the other hand, never left the house without her Walther, or her Baby Glock, or her S&W Shield…

“Let’s just head home,” she said. “I’ll call my mom on the way and let her know we’ll be there. I can shower and change pretty quickly.”

“Okay.”

Jill packed her gear away in the range bag and led the way out through the pair of doors, one closing before the other opened. She smiled at the guy behind the gun shop’s counter and said, “Since when do you let non-shooters back on the range, Ed?”

“Since you were the only one back there and the guy’s married to you, I figured it would be all right.”

“Yeah, it is,” Jill said. “Just kidding.”

“I’m just glad she didn’t shoot me,” Trevor said.

“Not a joke to make here,” she told him solemnly.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

Jill and Trevor lived about five miles from her parents, both homes being on the west side of Fort Worth but in different suburbs. When her dad retired from the Marines and they made plans to move to the area, Jill hadn’t been sure she liked the idea of having her folks so close by. She didn’t want to fall into the trap of using grandparents as built-in babysitters, as so many people did, and she didn’t want them judging her, either.

As it turned out, though, things had been good. Her parents had given them plenty of space, although everyone was close enough that it was easy to pitch in and help out whenever needed, not just with babysitting but with anything else that came up. And with modern life the way it was, something always came up. If the day-to-day stress level ever went down too much, Jill wasn’t sure she would know what to do.

Trevor parked his hybrid sedan in the driveway of the Larkin home. Looking presentable again, Jill got out and went up the walk with her husband. Her mother must have been waiting for them, beause she opened the door before they got there.

“Come on in,” Susan said. “Dinner’s almost ready. Your father made meatloaf.”

Jill smiled. “I never would have thought Dad would turn out to be a cook.”

“It shocked me, too, to be honest.”

From behind the island that separated the kitchen from the living room and dining room area, Larkin raised a bottle and called, “Want a beer, Trev?”

“Sure,” Trevor said as he walked into the kitchen. Larkin got a beer from the refrigerator, opened it, and handed the bottle to him.

Susan and Jill sat down on the sofa. The TV was on, with the sound down. Susan turned it off and said, “There’s no point. All the news is bad these days.”

“I expect people have been saying that as long as there’s been any sort of news being reported.”

“Probably,” Susan replied with a shrug. “I appreciate the two of you coming over on such short notice.”

Jill looked back and forth between her parents and said, “This isn’t about bad news, is it? Because if it is, I’d just as soon not postpone it until after we’ve eaten.”

“No, not bad news. Although, in a way…”

“Neither one of you is dying from some kind of disease, right?”

Susan looked surprised by that blunt question. “No. Not that I know of, anyway. Why in the world would you ask that?”

“And you’re not getting divorced?”

“What? No! Certainly not.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Larkin said from the kitchen. “Although if that’s what it was, I would have hoped that you’d tell me first.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Susan said.

“And I don’t have cancer?” Larkin asked.

“How would I know that? You haven’t even been to the doctor in months.”

“Wives know things,” Larkin said with exaggerated gravity.

“Stop that,” Susan said. “You know good and well why we asked Jill and Trevor to come over here.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I do,” Larkin admitted.

“It was your idea.”

“No, it was Adam’s idea.”

“Wait a minute,” Jill said. “I’m confused. Your friend Adam Threadgill? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“He’s the one who told me about this place.”

“Oh, man,” Trevor said after he took a pull on his beer. “This isn’t some timeshare deal, is it?”

“No,” Larkin said. “It’s more of an… end of the world deal.”

Chapter 8

After that cryptic statement, of course, there was no way Jill and Trevor were going to wait to hear what this get-together was all about. Dinner was ready, though, so they ate as they talked, and pending apocalypse didn’t make for the most appropriate conversation.

“Don’t you think the whole thing is really… far-fetched?” Trevor asked when Larkin had laid out the facts about the Hercules Project. “I mean, I can understand being worried about some of the things going on in the world, but you don’t actually believe anything really bad is going to happen, do you?”

“I can’t guarantee that it’s not going to, either,” Larkin said.

“And you can’t guarantee that the sun’s not going to go nova tomorrow, either.”

“Actually,” Jill said, “there aren’t any signs to indicate that the sun will go nova in the next billion years or so.”

“And if it does, even a place like Moultrie’s got out there won’t do any good,” Larkin added, “so that’s one thing I’m not worried about.”

Trevor tapped the brochure that was lying on the table next to his plate and said, “Okay, given that the world is a dangerous place these days—”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Jill said.

Trevor ignored the interruption and went on, “How do you know this… refuge or whatever you want to call it… will offer any real protection?”

“We’ve both gone out there and taken a look at it,” Larkin said. “I’ve been there twice.”

“And you’ve seen what the owner wants you to see and listened to what he wants to tell you.”

Larkin inclined his head in acknowledgment of his son-in-law’s point. Trevor was a smart guy, a likable guy. Larkin had gone through a little of the usual dad’s feeling that nobody was good enough for his daughter, but logically, he knew that Trevor was. The two of them were a fine match.

“Yeah, but I took a good look around and asked a lot of questions. Maybe you two should go out there and do the same thing.”

“And the cost of it…” Trevor said.

“Yeah, it is pretty expensive,” Jill added.

“True. But you don’t have to pay the whole thing up front, and if you needed it, we thought we could maybe help you out with the down payment.”

“Oh, no,” Trevor said instantly. “We couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Larkin asked. “We’ve never loaned you a dime. There’s not many people our age who can say that about their kids.”

Jill made decent, but not spectacular, money as a pharmacist. Trevor made decent, but not spectacular, money working for a computer consulting company. Together, their incomes had allowed them to live comfortable lives, although in recent years it had become more of a challenge because of constantly rising taxes and the cost of everything else going up as well. Still, Larkin figured they were doing all right. But probably not all right enough to come up with the chunk of money the Hercules Project would require.

“We have the money,” Susan said. “Helping you out wouldn’t be a hardship. Well, not enough of one to worry about, anyway.”

Jill looked at her mother and said, “What do you really think about all this, Mom? You’re the most level-headed person I know.”

“Hey,” Larkin said.

“You’re level-headed most of the time, Dad, but we all know you can go off on a tangent now and then.”

“My tangents always turn out to be right. Well, nearly always.” Larkin reached over and picked up the brochure, held it up as he added, “This is one time I really hope I’m wrong, but I’m not sure we can afford to take that chance.”

Jill was still looking at her mother. Susan said, “I started out telling your father it was far-fetched, just like Trevor did. I even said it sounded paranoid.”

“She did,” Larkin said. “Took great pleasure in it, too.”

“But I don’t know,” Susan went on. “After what happened in Florida… that terrible attack and the people responsible for it promising there would be more… I just wasn’t sure what to think anymore. I started listening more carefully to the news, and there are just a lot of things going on in the world that could cause a real catastrophe. I mean, there are at least two countries with nuclear bombs that would like to see the United States blown off the face of the earth. Then when you think about the terrorists who might be able to get their hands on a nuclear device, or some biological weapon…”

Trevor said, “They make movies about that stuff. In real life, the government always finds a way to stop such things from happening.”

“Yeah, the same government that runs the IRS and the VA,” Larkin said, “and all the other alphabet soup agencies that can’t quite seem to do their jobs. If you want to put all your faith in the government, Trev, you go right ahead. I’ve dealt with them too much to do that.”

“Dad’s kind of got a point,” Jill said. “The FDA and the other agencies we have to deal with have put some good safeguards in place, but they’ve also weighed the whole process down with so many needless, contradictory regulations that sometimes I think it makes the public less safe in the long run by wearing out the people who have to cope with the bureaucracy.”

“See?” Larkin said. “I raised a smart girl.”

“You say that because she’s agreeing with you,” Trevor said.

“What more proof do I need?”

Trevor sat back in his chair and raised both hands as he said, “Look, objectively, intellectually, I have to agree with you that the world is a dangerous place. Anybody would have to have their head completely buried in the sand not to realize that.”

“Or stuck up somewhere else. I believe the technical term is Rectal Cranial Inversion.”

“But casting your lot with these… survivalists… I’m not sure that’s a good idea, either. I mean, they’re kind of extremists, aren’t they?”

“Some people might say that. Some people might wish they’d been a little more extreme themselves, if things really go as bad as they could.”

“I guess I can understand stockpiling some food and water—”

“Won’t do you much good in the case of a nuclear explosion or a virus that’s going to wipe out ninety percent of humanity.”

“Maybe not, but what if none of those things happen? Then you’re stuck with some really expensive real estate that’s under the ground.”

Jill said, “Look, we can go around and around in circles like this all evening and not get anywhere. Maybe what we should do is make an appointment to go out there and look at the place.”

Trevor gave her a surprised look. “Really?”

“It can’t hurt anything, and if my folks feel this strongly about it, maybe it’s not a bad idea.”

He shrugged and said, “Well, sure, if that’s what you want. Maybe this weekend?”

Jill nodded. “I’ll call and see if I can set it up.”

“You want us to come with you?” Larkin asked.

“No. We can make up our own minds, Dad. But we’ll take everything you’ve said about it into consideration.”

Susan said, “That’s about all we can ask.”

Trevor said, “Have you actually signed up yet, Patrick?”

“Not yet,” Larkin said. “We wanted to talk to you two first.”

“Because we wouldn’t want to live in a world without you and our grandchildren,” Susan added.

“Well,” Trevor said as he lifted his wineglass, “I’ll drink to that.”

They were on their way out to the Hercules Project that Saturday afternoon, listening to NPR—Jill often got annoyed with the station, but Trevor liked it—when a news bulletin came on. Jill was driving—they were in her crossover—so she thumbed the button on the steering wheel to increase the volume.

“—reports that the North Korean missile destroyed an American fishing vessel in the Bering Sea. The North Korean government issued a statement a short time after the incident declaring that the firing of the missile was only a test, not an aggressive action, but it stopped short of apologizing for the loss of life and the destruction of the vessel. Nor did the statement actually say that the American vessel was struck by accident.

“With tensions already in a heightened state, the Pentagon immediately placed the American fleet in the Pacific on high alert. The President, in a statement from the White House, said that it would be a mistake to jump to any conclusions and that a full investigation of the incident will be carried out. In the meantime, he assured the North Koreans that the United States will not overreact to this incident.”

“Overreact?” Jill said incredulously. “They blow one of our boats out of the water, kill who knows how many Americans, and the President practically falls all over himself telling them not to worry about it, it’s all good, we won’t do anything about it!”

“He didn’t actually say that,” Trevor pointed out.

“He might as well have.”

“You’re starting to sound like your father. The President said we were going to investigate the incident fully.”

“And when we find out that they did it on purpose—which it sure sounds like they did—how are we going to react? Are we going to go in and blow up a few things, too?” Jill snorted. It wasn’t very ladylike, but there was no other way to express her contempt. “You know good and well that’s not going to happen. If anything, the guy in the White House will apologize to the North Koreans because our boat got in the way of their missile!” She took a deep breath. “And here’s what really worries me… If that missile reached the Aleutian Islands, it wouldn’t take much more for it to make it to Alaska. That’s the United States, Trev. You want that dictator lobbing nuclear warheads at the United States?”

“Nobody said anything about nuclear warheads. I’ll bet the missile was unarmed, if it was just a test like the North Koreans say. Just the impact was probably enough to sink the ship.”

“You think they’d have a missile that they couldn’t put a warhead on if they wanted to?”

“I don’t know. I’m no expert on nuclear armaments.”

Neither was Jill, but even so, the latest incident was enough to make her glad they were taking this little excursion today. If nothing too terrible ever happened, at least it was a pleasant drive in the country.

If worse came to worst, though, it might wind up saving their lives…

Chapter 9

The tour of the Hercules Project went a little better than Jill anticipated. She didn’t mind Trevor asking hard questions of Graham Moultrie. The man had to expect those and be able to provide honest, complete answers if he was going to ask people to invest that much money. She had been concerned that Trevor might be a little obnoxious about it, though. Sometimes he could come across as condescending and arrogant. In point of fact, he often was the smartest guy in the room, and he’d been known to act like it.

As it turned out, however, Trevor was on his best behavior. That might have had something to do with Deb Moultrie going along with them on the tour. The redhead was distracting, to say the least. Trevor was able to focus on what Moultrie was saying, but he couldn’t work up the energy to be annoying. That was Jill’s theory, anyway.

Anyway, Deb wasn’t that much more attractive than her, Jill thought, so there was no need for her to feel threatened by Trevor’s reaction.

They went through the place from top to bottom, seeing everything there was to see, as far as Jill could tell. She knew from talking to her parents that they were thinking about getting an apartment in one of the missile silos. Those were more expensive, and Jill wondered if she and Trev and the kids wouldn’t do just fine in one of the four-person units along one of the main corridors. The lower level barracks-style arrangement was out of the question. There would be little enough privacy in the four-person unit.

When they were finished with the tour and had paused near the staircase leading back up to the surface, Trevor said, “Can I ask you one more question, Mr. Moultrie?”

“Sure,” Moultrie said with a smile, “if you call me Graham like I asked you to.”

“All right, Graham.” Trevor waved a hand at their surroundings. “This is a big operation. When you get right down to it, it’s a real-estate development.”

Moultrie thought it over and nodded. “I think it’s fair to say that. What’s your question?”

“Every real-estate developer I’ve ever run into has had salesmen working for him, trying to move the property. I didn’t see anybody around here except you and your wife. Where are your salesmen?”

“I don’t have any,” Moultrie replied without hesitation. “Don’t need ’em. The Hercules Project is my baby. Well, mine and Deb’s. You see, Trevor, a guy who buys a big piece of property, cuts it up, and slaps fifty or a hundred houses on it, he’s looking to do one thing: make money. I want to make money, too, but for a different reason. I want to funnel that money back into this place and make it even better. Because in the long run, the goal is to save humanity. You might say we’re trying to save humanity from itself. I know people talk about climate change and natural disasters, but my gut feeling is, if things ever get bad enough to need something like the Hercules Project, it’s going to be because of a war or a man-made plague or something else that we’ve done to ourselves out of sheer greed and stupidity and lust for power.”

Jill said, “That makes it sound like you don’t have a very high opinion of people in general.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Moultrie said, again without missing a beat. “I don’t. No offense, Jill, but you and Trevor aren’t old enough to remember the way things used to be. People had some common sense that’s missing today.”

“Every generation says that about the generation that comes after them,” Trevor said.

Moultrie shrugged. “More than likely. But think about politics. Neither side is willing to admit that the other has any good ideas, isn’t even willing to consider that possibility. If one side does something, the other side says it’s the worst thing that could ever happen. Then they switch around and the dance goes on. They’re so consumed with that and their never-ending quest for power that they’ve let our place in the world slip.”

“You mean nobody fears the United States anymore.”

“It’s not fear so much that I’m talking about. It’s respect.” Moultrie chuckled. “But I’ll be honest with you… a little good old-fashioned fear isn’t a bad thing for your enemies to have, either.”

“Wouldn’t it be better not to have enemies?”

“Now you’re just denying human nature. There will always be people who hate and resent the United States. As messed-up as we are now, as little of a threat as we’ve become compared to what we used to be, there are still plenty of them out there, just hoping something terrible will happen to us. And if they can nudge along whatever that is, they’ll do it, gladly. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that today.”

“That North Korean missile hitting our fishing boat,” Jill said.

“Exactly,” Moultrie said. “That was a test, all right, but it wasn’t an accident. They aimed that missile right where it landed, just to see how far they could push us. And based on Washington’s reaction so far, now they know: they can push us a little farther.”

“You could be jumping the gun,” Trevor said.

Moultrie shook his head. “I wish I was. But I don’t believe that I am. And that’s why I believe in this place enough to handle every aspect of its development myself. Because things are just going to get worse, a lot worse, before there’s ever a chance of them getting better.”

A strained silence settled over the four of them for a long moment before Deb said, “That’s enough doom and gloom for right now. Let’s go back up to the office. I’ve got a nice bottle of wine. Maybe we could have a drink and talk about something pleasant.”

“Like getting us to sign on the dotted line?” Trevor asked. The bluntness of the question made Jill wince a little. She was usually the more outspoken of the two of them.

Moultrie answered smoothly, though. “Not at all,” he said. “I don’t want you making any decisions today. This is an important step, a very important step, and I want anyone who decides to join us in the project to be absolutely certain they’re doing the right thing. Because who knows…” He smiled again. “I could turn out to be totally wrong about the direction the world is headed.”

Jill might have hoped that was true, that Moultrie was totally wrong.

But looking back over everything that had happened, she was afraid he wasn’t.

Bailey and Chris were smart kids. They knew something was going on. The way their mom and dad had gone to their grandparents’ house for dinner on such short notice, the trip out on Saturday afternoon without any explanation of where they were going… Those things were just enough out of the ordinary to tell the kids that something was up, and there was a strong chance it wasn’t anything good.

Jill could tell that from the way they looked at her. She hated keeping them in the dark, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell them that Mom and Dad were trying to figure out what to do in case the world came to an end. Kids had enough… kid things… to worry about without piling that on top of them as well.

She and Trevor hadn’t talked much on the way home. Despite how pleasant Graham and Deb Moultrie had been, the whole experience was a sobering one, starting with the North Korean missile incident.

Jill ordered pizza. They sat around and watched some cheesy old monster movie on TV. Just a pleasant Saturday evening at home. Then Bailey and Chris, both of them yawning, had gone off to bed. Trevor got a beer out of the refrigerator, carried it into the living room, and sat down next to Jill.

“We have to talk about this,” he said.

She was watching the news with the sound off. The police in Ohio were digging up some guy’s backyard and had found seven bodies so far, with the prospect of more to come.

“Has the world really gone mad,” she said, “or are we just better informed?”

“You mean because we have twenty-four-hour news and more social media than anybody can keep up with?” Trevor shook his head. “I don’t know. I’d really like to believe the world isn’t worse than it used to be, but I just don’t know anymore.”

Jill couldn’t keep a certain savagery out of the gesture as she pushed the button on the remote to turn off the TV. She said, “We have to do it.”

“What? Buy space in that… project? We need to talk about it, sure, but—”

“We talk things to death, Trev. We debate, we ponder, we mull, we think it over. And usually we don’t pull the trigger on anything.”

“That’s not true. We’ve built a fine life for ourselves.” He waved the bottle he held. “Just look around. Nice house, good jobs, great kids.”

“And all of it could go away in a flash. Literally.”

Trevor swallowed some of the beer, sat back on the sofa, and frowned. “We live in Tornado Alley, you know. There’s a lot more of a chance that an F5 will come along and blow us all away than there is of nuclear war.”

“And there’s a safe room in the garage, isn’t there?” The bedrock in their neighborhood was less than two feet under the ground. The cost of blasting it out and building a storm shelter was prohibitive, or at least they had decided it was. The safe room built into the back corner of the garage was a viable alternative. “A tornado might destroy the neighborhood, but with even a little warning, we can at least survive and rebuild. But if there’s some worldwide disaster, or even something that was confined to this country, there won’t be any rebuilding for a long time. You know what they say: The people who are killed right away in a nuclear war will be the lucky ones.”

“Nobody knows that for sure. It’s all theory.”

“One that I’d just as soon not test,” Jill said. “Just before the story about the serial killer came on, they were talking about how the Russians and Iranians have warned us not to overreact to what happened with the North Korean missile. Not that we were going to do anything anyway, but now they’ve put us on notice that if we take action against North Korea, they’ll take action against us. Can’t you see where this is going?”

“It’s not going anywhere,” Trevor insisted. “Even in the old days, before our government started apologizing for everything it’s ever done or ever might do, all that would happen is that we’d talk tough, and then the Russians would talk tough, and then we’d all move on to something else. It’s a game. A show.” He laughed. “A game show. Who Wants to Rule the World?”

“Also not funny.”

“It was a little bit funny.”

Jill didn’t say anything. Her phone was lying on the coffee table in front of her. She leaned forward and reached for it.

“I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “You can do what you want.”

Trevor took a deep breath. “I’m going to do what I always do,” he said. “I’m going to be with you.”

Chapter 10

June 5

Writing a check that big was painful for Larkin. Literally painful, because he was gripping the pen so hard it made the little touch of arthritis in his thumb joints twinge.

But he wrote it anyway, then tore it out of the checkbook and slid it across the desk to Graham Moultrie. He and Susan had already signed a big stack of forms that came from the printer wirelessly connected to Deb’s computer. Larkin hoped the check for $68,000 would be the last thing he’d have to sign today.

“That should do it,” Moultrie said as he picked up the check and put it in a desk drawer.

“You understand that covers Susan and me, plus Jill and Trevor and their kids,” Larkin said.

“Of course. When they came in to sign their contracts, they explained that you’d be writing one check for the entire family. That’s fine, Patrick. However you want to arrange things like that, it makes no difference to me.”

“I just don’t want there to be any question about, uh, who gets let in. You know, when the time comes.”

“If the time comes.” Moultrie smiled. “We all hope and pray it never will.”

“Sure. But you know what I mean.”

“Of course.” Moultrie tapped the fingerprint scanner on his desk. “That’s why we have everyone’s prints in our system now. That’s your key to get in, so to speak, if there’s ever any question.”

“What if there’s a power failure?” Susan asked. “Or an EMP that knocks out all the computers?”

“That’s why our mainframes and servers are all down below, behind not only digital firewalls but literal walls hardened against electromagnetic pulses. I want our systems to be as secure as the government’s systems.” Moultrie grunted. “Actually, more secure, I’d hope, considering how many times the government’s computers have been hacked in the past ten years. However, in the unlikely event that everything goes down, we’ll have a master hard copy list of all our residents. Nobody who’s supposed to be here will be turned away, you have my word on that.”

“Turned away,” Susan repeated quietly. “I hadn’t thought about that. If things go bad… really bad… people may try to take shelter in here.”

With a solemn expression on his face, Moultrie nodded. “That’s true. It’s liable to be a very unpleasant situation.”

“Like people fighting over lifeboats on a sinking ship,” Larkin said. “Could get ugly in a hurry.”

“That’s one reason our outer perimeter is so secure,” Moultrie said. “You remember, Patrick, we talked about that the first time you came out here.”

Larkin nodded. “Yeah, you thought of that, too.”

Moultrie clasped his hands together on the desk and said, “I can tell what you’re thinking, Susan. You’re thinking, how can we just turn people away in case of a disaster? How can we refuse to let them in when it means they’ll probably die?” He shook his head. “I don’t like that possibility any more than you do. But there’s a term that someone used once as the title of a story... “The Cold Equations.” Numbers have no emotion. They add up, or they don’t. You can’t negotiate with them and convince them to mean anything other than what they do. Only so many people can survive down here. One or two might not make a difference. An extra hundred means that everybody starves to death a couple of years earlier… and that couple of years might make all the difference. That’s assuming that overconsumption might not cause the air and water recycling plants to break down. Everything is figured to a certain tolerance level. Go much beyond that level and it’s not going to work.”

“I understand that,” Susan said. “But I’m in the business of helping people and saving lives.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do here, too. I know it sounds cold-blooded as hell, but yes, I’ll turn people away—whatever it takes to do that—in order to save the people who are depending on the project for their survival. I’ve been aware of that possibility right from the start.”

A grim silence settled over the four people in the room. It was easy to talk about the end of the world in abstract, Larkin thought, harder to accept just how much death and destruction might be lurking out there in the darkness, waiting to strike senselessly and wantonly.

“All right, that’s enough brooding,” Deb said. “Maybe nothing happens except that Graham and I get rich and everybody goes on living.”

“That’s the spirit,” Moultrie said with a chuckle. “You’ve got the installment-payment paperwork?”

Larkin tapped the stack of documents on the desk in front of him. “Got it, along with all the other disclaimers and waivers and guarantees and indemnifiers.”

“You’re all set, then.” Moultrie stood up and extended a hand. “Welcome to the Hercules Project. Come visit us any time you like while we continue working on the place, and we’ll all hope and pray that visiting is all you ever have to do.”

“Amen to that,” Larkin said as he stood up and gripped Moultrie’s hand.

The death toll from the destroyed American fishing boat was seventeen men. Their bodies were never recovered from the icy Bering Sea. A memorial service was held for them, but the President did not attend. He issued a statement that expressed his regret for the incident, then went on to deplore the rhetoric employed by members of the opposition party who considered the boat’s sinking to be an act of war, rather than an unfortunate accident in the cause of furthering scientific research. The President did not call on the North Koreans for an apology, nor did they offer one.

Reports were that they were readying for another missile test.

The death toll in Ohio rose to fourteen as authorities continued to recover remains from the backyard of Lorenzo Stanwick. Forensic tests revealed that some of the recovered bones bore teeth marks, as if from gnawing… by human teeth.

The death toll from the Hydra virus climbed to eighty with more patients in Texas and Florida succumbing. The surviving patients were under strict quarantine, but it was still uncertain how long the virus was communicable before symptoms began to appear. Spokespersons for the Centers for Disease Control were always grim-faced when the subject of vectors came up at news conferences.

In the aftermath of the mall attack and explosion in Florida, more bodies were discovered during the cleanup. Other, smaller attacks by young, Middle Eastern men followed in the wake of that tragedy, taking place in Boston, Atlanta, and Denver, and in each case the attackers had posted material on their social-media pages linking them to Islamic terrorist groups. The administration and news media barely acknowledged this fact.

A ship in a French port was sunk by a suicide bomb carried next to it in a motorboat by a pair of Syrian brothers.

Russian troops massed on the border of one of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. Officials of that government appealed for help but received no reply.

Rocket attacks were carried out on Israel. The American President blamed the Israelis for bringing it on themselves.

Iranian troops advanced on the Turkish border. Missile batteries were moved into position, and satellite surveillance appeared to show increased activity around Iranian facilities supposedly involved in producing fuel for nuclear power plants. The United Nations issued a request for clarifications from the Iranians regarding their actions. The Iranians ignored the request.

Earthquakes rattled the Midwest, causing extensive damage but few casualties. An outbreak of violent tornadoes a week later produced more damage and a dozen fatalities.

A large hurricane made landfall in Mississippi, and two more were percolating out in the Atlantic, taking aim at the East Coast. Rioters began looting in several coastal cities, laughingly declaring in videos posted online that they were just getting a jump on the storm.

Students at a college in New England attacked a writer and historian invited to the campus to give a lecture, claiming that his racist, sexist, ableist, cisgender-normative views of history—he had once written a book about the causes of the Civil War and raised the possibility that other things were involved in addition to slavery—were intolerant and a violation of the safe space the students were owed by the university. The writer was left in a coma, and the student union building suffered heavy damage in a protest prompted by the university’s failure to issue a trigger warning about the lecture. The university president immediately issued an apology to the protesting students and filed a lawsuit against the writer, who could try to defend himself when and if he came out of his coma.

Email hacks uncovered a plan by one of the major political parties to create as many as ten million entirely fictional voters before the next presidential election, since steps had been taken in many of the states to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants and dead people to vote. The news media mentioned the story briefly, then ignored it.

The governor of a northeastern state announced that police would soon begin confiscating legally owned firearms, and that if anyone didn’t like it, they could sue him.

Russian troops moved into the neighboring country, which put up a bloody resistance for two weeks before collapsing. The U.S. adminstration expressed grave concern over this reckless action. The Russians moved in a large occupation force, then began shifting their troops to another border.

Turkish planes bombed the Iranian missile batteries, destroying them but not before several missiles were launched into Ankara. Those missiles carried conventional warheads, not nukes, but still caused widespread destruction. The United States decried this destruction, then blamed Turkey for provoking the Iranians with the bombing raid.

Rockets landed on Tel Aviv again. There was no comment from the administration.

The turmoil caused the stock market to plummet. Chinese interests moved in, buying up huge blocks of American companies and real estate. By executive order, the President committed trillions of dollars to propping up failing banks. To finance this, an emergency tax would be levied on the “wealthy,” with the bottom cutoff for such tax being a $40,000 annual income. The legality of these executive orders was widely debated, with most pundits agreeing that the President had no authority to do such things. But the orders were carried out anyway, as Congress debated but took no action.

The North Koreans prepared for another missile test…

Chapter 11

September 17

“Don’t put your hand like that,” Jill said. “Slide it up a little. Now move your thumb over… Ah, right there. Perfect.”

“You’re sure?” Trevor said.

“Yes. You’re good to go. Just… gently. Don’t rush it. No, wait—Keep both eyes open. Take a breath… squeeze…”

The Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm boomed as Trevor fired. Jill had him standing and holding the gun correctly, so the recoil wasn’t bad. She could tell that he was a little surprised.

“That was loud,” he said, his voice muffled some by the ear protectors she wore. “But it didn’t kick as much as I thought it would. What do I do now?”

“You’ve got six more rounds in the magazine,” she told him. “That one hit a little low and to the left.” Actually, it was quite a bit low and left, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell him that. “Adjust your aim a little.”

“Okay.” He started to line up the second shot.

“Your arms are too stiff. Bend your elbows slightly.”

“How’s that?”

“Better. Go ahead.”

It had been so long since Trevor had been on the range that this was almost like the first time for him. He’d never practiced enough to have any sort of muscle memory for it. He didn’t seem to have any natural aptitude for it, either, so Jill had always figured it was better not to push him.

Since they had taken the big step of committing to the Hercules Project, though, she had started thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to get him a little more familiar with firearms. The fact that the situation in the country, and in the world beyond the U.S., had gotten steadily worse over the past few months made her more determined than ever to be prepared if something terrible happened. At her father’s suggestion, she had prepared bug-out bags containing nonperishable food, first-aid supplies, extra clothing, blankets, water, and weapons for her and Trevor: a pistol, ammunition, and a multifunction knife/tool.

She wasn’t going to arm her children. A part of her thought she needed to teach Bailey and Chris how to shoot, too, but at this point, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. Maybe that was stupid—well, no maybe about it, she realized when she thought about it coldly and intellectually, but right now that was where her head—and her heart—were.

Trevor fired out the magazine. His shots were so widely scattered that Jill couldn’t even think of them in terms of a grouping. He would get better, though, with practice… she hoped.

“Okay, push that button right there,” she told him. “That releases the magazine. Now you can reload.”

“How’s that work again?”

She picked up the loader and showed him. “The top of the magazine goes in there… push down… the bullet goes there… release… Now do that six more times.”

“It takes a while, doesn’t it?” he said as he struggled with some with the technique.

“That’s why you have multiple magazines and keep them loaded. You can switch them out and release the slide in a second or so.”

“Maybe you can.”

“You’ll get it,” she said.

“You think so? Is it really so important that I can do this?”

“Well, if you never need to, you haven’t lost anything except some time.”

“And maybe part of my hearing,” he muttered.

“But if it ever comes down to you being able to shoot in order for you to save your life… or to save the lives of me and the kids… wouldn’t it be better for you to know what you’re doing?”

He looked at her for a long moment, then started to slide the loaded magazine into the pistol’s grip.

“Finger away from the trigger first,” she reminded him. “Finger never goes in until you’re ready to shoot.”

“Now you’re just talking dirty.”

“Slide that on in there, big boy,” she told him, “and let’s go.”

Larkin had grown accustomed to writing the checks to the Hercules Project. He still winced at the amounts, but just like the mortgage on their house, they were paying off the debt in big chunks and would have it off their back sooner, saving money in the process. It was the prudent way to handle things. Of course, thrift was no longer in fashion, starting right at the top with a government that spent money in mind-boggling amounts, faster than seemed humanly possible.

The work of finishing the Hercules Project had continued. Several times, Graham Moultrie had invited the people who had signed up as residents to come out and take a look at what had been done. Larkin had to give him credit for transparency. He had never really warmed up to Moultrie, but the guy seemed to be genuinely devoted to what he was doing.

Moultrie had made his money in commercial real estate, Larkin had discovered through doing some online research into the man’s background, so this was hardly the first big project he had tackled. It was maybe the biggest and most important, though. Building a shopping center didn’t really compare to the survival of the human race.

Those visits to the project had given Larkin and Susan the chance to meet some of the others who would be there in case of an emergency. Larkin was glad to see that his old friend and fellow Marine Adam Threadgill was among them, along with Threadgill’s wife Luisa, their daughter Sophie, and Sophie’s husband Jack. If it ever came down to something bad enough to need the refuge, it would be good to have friends there.

In the meantime, life went on, including mowing the lawn, and Larkin was doing that when his next-door neighbor Jim Huddleston pulled into the driveway separating their yards. The door on the Huddleston garage started rolling up, but Huddleston stopped his car in the driveway and got out.

Huddleston waved and looked like he wanted to talk, so Larkin cut the engine on the lawn mower. Huddleston’s wife Beth hated that lawn mower, claiming that it was not only noisy but produced an incredible amount of pollution. Larkin had tried to explain to her more than once that he kept the engine tuned up so it worked efficiently, but she drove one of those tiny electric cars, so there really wasn’t any reasoning with her. He hoped Huddleston wasn’t about to scold him for using the mower. That seemed unlikely. Huddleston tolerated his wife’s opinions but had never come across as passionately devoted to them.

“How long have you been out here mowing, Patrick?” Huddleston asked as he walked over.

Maybe he was wrong, Larkin thought. Maybe his neighbor was going to gripe at him after all.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes is all,” Larkin said. “I’m almost done.”

“Then you haven’t heard.” Huddleston scrubbed a hand over his face and looked tired. “I’d just left one of the stores when there was a news bulletin on the radio.”

Huddleston owned a regional chain of pizza restaurants, one of which was close by and was the “store” he referred to, Larkin knew. He was about Larkin’s age, with a brush of sandy hair and the still handsome face of an aging frat boy. Larkin liked him well enough. They’d been to barbecues at each other’s houses, drank beer together, gone to the same Super Bowl parties. It was a typical suburban friendship, more of a casual but extensive acquaintance than anything else.

“News bulletins these days are never good,” Larkin said.

“There’s been another terror attack. Somebody crashed a light plane filled with explosives into the stands at a college football game in Michigan.”

Larkin took a deep breath as his jaw tightened. “Good Lord,” he said. “I’m sure there were fatalities.”

“More than a hundred so far, they said on the radio. Could go as high as a thousand, people are speculating.”

“What the hell is wrong with those bastards?” Larkin burst out. “What are they trying to accomplish?”

“They’re trying to scare us,” Huddleston said. “And they’re succeeding. Any time, anywhere I’m around a crowd these days, I worry that something’s going to happen. Whether it’s a crazy terrorist or a kid who’s had his mind messed up by ADHD drugs and video games, it seems there’s always somebody out there who wants to hurt innocent people.”

“Yeah, it sure seems like it,” Larkin said. “But hell, you can’t just curl up in a little bubble and stay there. You’ve got to keep on living your life.”

“I know. But then you think about the Russians and the North Koreans and the Iranians, and you never know what they’re going to do, and I tell you, it just…” Huddleston shook his head, unable to find the words. “Sometimes I just want to give up and go crawl in a hole, that’s all.”

The irony of what they had both just said hit Larkin hard. Was that what he and Susan were doing by their involvement with the Hercules Project? Giving up and crawling into a hole?

No, he told himself. It wasn’t the same thing at all. The project was a last-ditch option, never to be used unless the shit really did hit the fan. It wasn’t like they would be going down there just in case something happened. Disaster would have to be imminent.

The place wasn’t a damn resort, after all.

But when he looked at Huddleston, a thought suddenly hit him. He hadn’t said one word to the man about the Hercules Project. Huddleston probably didn’t even know about it. Graham Moultrie had mentioned that he was relying on word of mouth to inform people, because he wanted to have some control over who applied for residence there. As Moultrie had pointed out, there had to be balance as far as skills and occupations went in order for the community to function.

Huddleston was a good guy, though, competent and dedicated enough to be quite successful in the difficult restaurant business, and his wife Beth, though annoying in some of her opinions, was an experienced elementary school teacher. They were going to need teachers in the Hercules Project, Larkin recalled Moultrie saying, and probably Huddleston would be good at whatever job they gave him. He could always cook pizza, if nothing else, Larkin thought.

All that went through his mind in a second while Huddleston was still standing there shaking his head gloomily over the latest terrible news. Larkin reached out, put a hand on his neighbor’s shoulder, and said, “Listen, Jim, there’s a place I want to tell you about…”

Chapter 12

October 5

“What a horrible thing,” Beth Huddleston said with an expression of revulsion on her face. “Jim, you can’t be serious about actually taking part in such madness.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” Huddleston said. “Patrick explained everything to me in detail. Surely it wouldn’t hurt just to go take a look.”

Beth glared over at Larkin, who was sitting in a recliner across the living room from where the Huddlestons sat on a sofa, and said, “I think even considering such a cruel, callous thing coarsens our culture and harms the country’s collective consciousness.”

Larkin managed not to grimace, both at what Beth said and the way she said it, but he had to work at controlling the reaction. He’d had plenty of practice, though. He was, after all, white, straight, middle-aged, and retired military, to boot, which meant he was to blame for everything bad that happened anywhere in the world… at least in the eyes of some people.

“Look, it’s like having insurance,” Huddleston said to his wife, unknowingly echoing one of the arguments Graham Moultrie had used. “You don’t think having insurance is bad, do you?”

“It’s a manifestation of white privilege, but I suppose it could be considered a necessary evil.”

“And you’ve got to admit, with the way things are going—climate change, pollution, and all that—the world could be in for some rough times.”

Huddleston knew the right buttons to push, Larkin thought. Bringing up terrorism and rogue nations overseas wouldn’t do any good, because that would just prompt Beth to launch into a tirade about how all that was the fault of the United States and how the rest of the world would leave us alone if we would just leave them alone… while continuing to funnel billions of dollars of aid and outright payoffs to them, of course.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to make sure that we survive, do you?” Huddleston went on.

“I suppose not.” Beth frowned. “But what about everyone else? How many people can this… shelter… hold?”

Huddleston looked at Larkin, who wished the guy had left him out of this discussion. Huddleston had insisted that Larkin come into the house with him, though, and help him talk to Beth. If it was a good cause—and Larkin truly believed that the Hercules Project was—then he supposed he had to try.

“The project is designed to support approximately four hundred people,” he said.

“Four hundred?” Beth stared at him, as obviously aghast as if he’d just taken a dump on their carpet. “Four hundred? What about all the millions of other people in this area?”

“Well, Beth, they won’t all fit in there.”

Her glare darkened even more. “Are you making fun of me, Patrick?”

“No, not at all,” he said. “It’s just a simple fact. The room for people and supplies is limited, and so is the capacity of all the equipment necessary to make those quarters livable. You’re talking about physics and math. You can’t make numbers stretch any farther than they do.”

“So everybody else except your select few can just die, is that it?”

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen. People just want to have a place to keep themselves and their families safe. That’s just human nature.”

Beth sniffed contemptuously. “Animal nature is more like it. And people should be trying to rise above that, not pander to it.” She looked at her husband and shook her head. “No, Jim, absolutely not. We won’t have any part of this, and honestly, I’m a little offended that you would even bring it up. I had a higher opinion of you than that.”

Well, that was pretty cold, Larkin thought. Huddleston looked like he might be used to it, though. He shrugged and said, “We can talk about it later—”

“No, we can’t.” Beth stood up. “I’m not talking about such a disgusting thing ever again.”

She stalked out of the living room, casting a glance at Larkin as she went out that told him very plainly he fell into that “disgusting thing” category.

It was good that he didn’t give a crap how Beth Huddleston felt about him, or he might have been offended.

“I’m sorry, Patrick,” Huddleston said. “I should have kept you out of it. She didn’t have to be so… so…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Larkin said, as much to save his neighbor from having to come up with an accurate word to describe his wife as any other reason. “Beth just has strong opinions, that’s all. Nothing wrong with that.”

“It’s nice of you to see it that way. I was hoping I could appeal to her logic. You actually can convince her to change her mind if you can point out logical reasons for it.”

Larkin couldn’t recall Beth ever changing her mind, or even modifying an opinion slightly, about anything, but he didn’t see any reason to mention that. He just stood up and said, “Hey, you gave it a try. That’s all you can do, right?”

“Maybe.” Huddleston frowned. “Maybe not. I’ll work on her.”

“Well, good luck.” Let the guy take that however he wanted to.

“In the meantime, I can go out there and have a look at the place myself, right?”

“I don’t see any harm in that.” As long as Beth doesn’t’t find out about it, Larkin added to himself.

“There are still units available?”

“I’m pretty sure there are. The project’s getting pretty close to being finished, though. You’d have to come up with a big chunk of change in fairly short order, I think.”

Huddleston waved a hand. “Not a problem.” He laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “Not compared to some I’ll have.”

Huddleston had his own problems. So did Larkin. The world might be falling apart, but he still had a book due. He retreated to his office every morning and afternoon to get some pages done, and the manuscript slowly progressed toward completion. It was a little difficult writing about super-competent characters who never seemed to have any trouble solving their problems when most of the time he looked at what was going on in the news and felt utterly helpless to change anything… but that was the nature of the game. Dramatic license, he told himself.

The death toll from the attack on the football game in Michigan leveled off at 937. Of course, there were still people in the hospitals who’d been critically injured and might still die. Some of the survivors were maimed for life, and it was unlikely that anyone who’d been in the stadium on that fateful Saturday afternoon would ever be the same. Larkin knew that if he’d been there, any time he heard an airplane he would start looking for cover. He supposed people who had been in Manhattan on 9/11 were the same way.

Nine-eleven seemed relegated to the dim, distant past now. Kids who hadn’t even been born then were adults. The attack that had seemed so horrifying, so beyond belief, was now only noteworthy because those who hated the United States hadn’t been able to achieve anything of quite the same magnitude again, although the mall bombing in Florida didn’t lag that far behind. It hadn’t been as visually spectacular, though.

But the hatred, the vicious lust to deal out death and suffering to innocent people… that was just commonplace now. People were still shaken when there was a new attack, like the one in Michigan, but then they shrugged their shoulders and asked what did anybody expect when the country had thrown itself wide open to welcome such killers, and then they went on about their business.

The New Normal. Larkin shuddered every time he heard that phrase, but he didn’t doubt its truth.

He was surprised to answer the doorbell one afternoon and find Jim Huddleston standing there. Huddleston looked excited and scared at the same time.

“I did it,” he said without waiting for Larkin to say hello or invite him in.

“Did what?”

“Got a place for Beth and me at the Hercules Project.”

Larkin couldn’t stop his eyebrows from climbing pretty high. He said, “Really? I thought Beth was completely opposed to the idea.”

“She doesn’t know.”

You poor, dumb son of a bitch, Larkin thought. But he said, “Come on in and have a beer.”

When they were sitting on stools beside the kitchen island with beers in hand, Huddleston said, “I went out there and had a good look around the place, like I told you I was going to.”

Larkin nodded and said, “Yeah, sure.” He hadn’t given the Huddlestons much thought, since he’d had his own work on his mind.

“That guy Moultrie is really impressive. Definitely smart and dedicated to what he’s trying to do.”

“And he has a good-looking wife.”

Huddleston laughed. “Well, yeah. But that’s not enough to make me plunk down a hundred and sixty grand.”

“You got one of the silo apartments?”

“That’s right. Silo A, Apartment Three.”

“That’s right below us,” Larkin said. He wasn’t sure he wanted Beth to be that close by, but hey, he told himself, they were next-door neighbors now, so things wouldn’t really change that much. “You didn’t tell your wife?”

Huddleston took a long drink from the bottle, as if fortifying himself, and said, “I’ll tell her tonight when she gets home from school. She won’t like it, but damn it, Patrick, this is important. Especially after what the North Koreans did today.”

Larkin frowned. “I’ve been in my office, working. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The attack on South Korea.”

Larkin looked blank and shook his head.

Huddleston took a deep breath and said, “Seoul has been nuked.”

Larkin rocked back on his stool like he’d been punched.

“And they’ve warned us to stay out of it,” Huddleston went on. “They claim they have missiles armed with nuclear warheads that can reach the West Coast. There’s no proof of that, but—”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. There hasn’t been any official response yet, but the Russians have told us to butt out… So I imagine that’s what we’ll do.”

Larkin figured as much, too, given the timidity that seemed to run from top to bottom in the administration. Still, if anything was going to shake Washington out of its lethargy, it seemed like an actual nuclear attack might be the thing to do it…

Something penetrated his consciousness as he was thinking that, something that made him frown and lift his head. He frowned and said, “You hear that?”

Huddleston said, “No, I… Wait a minute. I do hear something. Is that… the tornado sirens?”

Larkin turned his head to look out the kitchen window, saw the bright fall sunshine spilling over everything, telling him there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and said with a hollow note in his voice, “No. Not tornadoes.”

Chapter 13

Jill was working on a prescription when one of the clerks came over to her and said quietly, “People are saying the North Koreans dropped a nuclear bomb on the South Koreans.”

Jill’s hand jerked a little, causing some of the pills she was counting to scatter across the counter in front of her. “What?”

“It’s true,” the clerk said. “Well, I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, but they’re really saying it.”

Jill swallowed hard. Eighty years had passed since anyone had dropped a nuclear bomb in anger. Her parents hadn’t been born the last time it had happened. Her grandparents had barely been teenagers. It had happened countless times in fiction, but in reality it was the stuff of history.

As Jill’s heart slugged in her chest, she wanted her kids. She felt an instinctive need to put her arms around Bailey and Chris and draw them to her. She thought about Trevor, too, mere seconds after that, but the kids came first.

“What are we going to do?” the clerk asked, her voice a nervous whisper.

“We can’t do anything,” Jill said. “Even if it’s true, it happened on the other side of the world.”

“The fallout—”

“The fallout from one blast won’t get this far. It might have some effect on Hawaii. And of course, Japan, Taiwan, the other countries over there, I don’t know what will happen in them.” Jill stiffened her back. “But right here, right now, we have people waiting on their prescriptions, Mandy, so we’re going to go ahead and fill them.”

Despite the fact that what she really wanted to do, more than anything else, was to run out of the store, jump in her car, and head for the kids’ schools.

“Oh,” the clerk said. “Okay. It’s just… the whole thing makes me scared.”

“Me, too,” Jill said. “Me, too.”

It was about five minutes later when a man ran into the store shouting that the storm warning sirens were going off. Jill knew good and well, though, that no storms were in the forecast for today.

Trevor was hunched forward in his chair, squinting at the monitor. Bad for the back, bad for the eyes. He knew that. Occupational hazard, he sometimes told Jill.

A little chime announced that he had gotten an email just as the notification sound came from his phone. He hesitated for a second, unsure which to look at first, then went with the phone. There was a text from Jill. When he tapped it, at first he couldn’t quite comprehend the words he was reading.

Nuclear attack on South Korea.

What? A nuclear attack? By who? Well, North Korea, of course, Trevor thought with a little shake of his head. Although he supposed it could have been some other country besides the usual suspect. But not likely.

He was about to respond but decided to check the email first. It was a news alert from one of the sites he subscribed to, and a click took him right to their front page, where there was a bulletin about the same thing, the nuclear bomb that apparently had gone off in Seoul. It was still uncertain whether the bomb had been dropped from an airplane or delivered via missile, although the latter was considered the most likely. Trevor took in that much at a glance.

He saw, as well, that North Korea was also threatening the United States, and so was Russia. Trevor didn’t know if the Koreans had any weapons that could reach the U.S., but the Russians did. Russia was still a credible threat.

A very credible threat.

Trevor picked up his phone again to respond to Jill’s text, but before he could do anything, another message from her came in. It was just one word.

Hercules?

Trevor’s thumbs moved swiftly as he answered: Now? You think?

There are sirens going off.

The pit of Trevor’s stomach suddenly felt cold. He swallowed hard, looked around. He was alone in the office right now. Most of the people who worked for the company did so from home. He did, too, most of the time, but he liked to come into the office some days. It made him feel more like he had a real job. He was alone today, though, as far as he knew.

Jill had better survival instincts than he did. He knew that, and he trusted her gut. If she thought it might be a good idea to head for the Hercules Project, then maybe that was what they ought to do.

I’m closer to Bailey’s school, he texted. I’ll get her.

I’ll get Chris. Bug-out bags in car?

Yeah. We’re good.

He wondered how long it would be before he could say that again and actually mean it.

The sudden commotion that ran through the mall made Adam Threadgill take hold of his wife Luisa’s arm and pull her behind one of the big pillars next to the entrance of a store. She said, “Adam, what—”

“Stand there,” he told her as he tried to look along the mall to see what was happening. The disturbance was up toward the food court.

Ever since malls had started proving to be such attractive targets for terrorists, he hadn’t liked coming here. He never set foot in the place without his carry gun being snugged in its waist holster. Not that his lone gun would really make much difference if the mall came under attack by suicidal, homicidal lunatics, but at least he could put up a fight and maybe, just maybe, save Luisa’s life.

Of course, these days terrorist attacks didn’t have to be large, well-coordinated affairs. It could be as simple as one nut with a gun or a knife, in which case two or three well-placed rounds could make all the difference in the world. Threadgill didn’t unholster his pistol because he didn’t want to start a panic, but his hand was close to it as he told Luisa, “Stay here and I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“Adam, I’m scared,” she said as people continued running and shouting.

“So am I, babe,” he told her. He leaned close, put his other hand behind her head, and kissed her hard. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, but somehow that isn’t making me feel better.”

Threadgill knew what she meant. It felt like they were saying good-bye forever.

These days, that might be true.

He turned and trotted toward the center of the mall, toward whatever the commotion was instead of away from it. That was a Marine for you, he thought wryly. Too dumb and stubborn to go the other way.

Then he heard someone yell, “Nuclear war!” That put a whole different slant on things. Threadgill grabbed the arm of a guy rushing past him and jerked him to a stop. The man looked like he was about to take a swing at him, but one look at Threadgill’s solid form made him pause.

“What the hell’s going on?” Threadgill asked.

“Somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on South Korea,” the man said, “and they’re coming after us next!”

“Who? North Korea?”

“I don’t know, man. I just want to get out of here!”

Threadgill let go of the man’s arm and stepped back. He didn’t have any right to keep the guy from getting to whoever he wanted to reach before the end came. If the end was indeed coming.

And then he thought about the Hercules Project, wheeled around, and broke into a run back toward his wife.

Beth Huddleston was about to start talking to her third-grade class about fractions when the speaker on the wall crackled into life and the principal’s voice said, “Teachers, just to let you we have a code orange.”

She probably sounded normal enough to the kids, but Beth heard the little quiver in the woman’s voice and knew something actually was wrong. This was no drill. There was a good reason to put the school on lockdown, which was what code orange meant.

After all the shootings over the years, Beth had taught herself not to think about the possibility of something like that happening at her school, but the little twinge of dread was always there in the back of her mind. She was firmly convinced that such things would never happen if the country would just wake up and make it illegal for anyone to own guns except the police and the military—and they shouldn’t have nearly as many guns, either.

As it was, the school had an armed security guard on duty at all times during the day, so Beth listened intently for the sound of shots as she tried to keep her voice calm and said, “All right, children, we’re all going to stand up and move over on the other side of the room.” Forcing herself not to rush and spook the kids, she walked to the door, locked it, and turned the lights off.

“Oh, my God!” one of the little girls cried. “It’s a lockdown! There must be a killer in the school!”

“Hush!” Beth told her as she motioned for everyone to be quiet. “We don’t know what’s going on. We’ll all just stand here quietly, and I’m sure everything will be all right…”

Her voice trailed off as even through the school’s walls, she heard warning sirens begin to wail.

Jim Huddleston tore out of the house like his tail was on fire. Larkin didn’t try to stop him. He was too busy calling Susan.

A glance at the clock had told him that it was late enough for her shift at the hospital to have ended some forty-five minutes earlier. At least, he hoped she hadn’t had to stay on duty for some reason. Maybe one of the other nurses couldn’t come in and Susan was covering for her. Maybe there had been a bad wreck and Susan didn’t feel like she could leave with the place swamped. Working in an ER wasn’t like punching a clock in a lot of jobs. You did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done, even if it meant staying past the end of your shift. At least, the dedicated nurses did.

Larkin knew that if his wife was still at the hospital with an emergency breaking, she might not leave. She would want to, but her sense of duty might not let her.

He was a little ashamed, but as he called her he was praying that she’d already started home.

She answered when the phone had barely started ringing. “Patrick?” she said. He heard the anxiety in her voice. “What’s going on? I hear sirens, and some people are even running around in the street.”

“You’re on your way home?”

“Yes, I’m like a mile away.”

Larkin closed his eyes for a second in relief, then said, “Thank God. Get on back here as soon as you can. I’ll have our bags ready. Grab the spare one from your car when you get out.”

“The bug-out bags?”

He didn’t answer her directly. Instead he said, “South Korea got nuked.”

“Oh, my God.”

“And North Korea and Russia say we’re next if we do anything about it.”

“But we won’t… will we?”

“I don’t know. Lord help me, I don’t know.”

“So we’re not actually in… a nuclear war?”

“Not yet. It could happen any time, though.”

“Maybe I should go back to the hospital—”

“No!” Larkin forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. “Come on home,” he went on. “Whatever happens, you’ll be where there are people who need your help. Just remember that.”

“You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Larkin broke the connection. He didn’t want to—he would have preferred to stay on with her until she got home—but there was too much to do. He hurried through the house, grabbing not only the specially prepared bug-out bags but also his computer bag and a carrying case with several pistols in it. He had already taken a number of rifles and pistols out to the Hercules Project and stored them in one of the gun vaults there, along with a large supply of ammunition. The anti-gunners could call him a gun nut all they wanted to. He didn’t care. Being well-armed was a lot more important than what some people thought about him.

As he carried the bags into the garage, he looked down at the one containing the computer. His backup USB drives were in there, except for the one that was in his pocket. He was paranoid about losing his work and perfectly willing to admit it. He recalled that earlier he had backed up the current manuscript to the cloud.

Would there be a cloud left by the time this day was over? Would there be anybody left to read his books?

Did any of it even matter anymore?

But on the chance that it would matter, he was taking his computer with him.

The garage door rattled and started up. He needed to oil it, he thought as he saw Susan turn in at the end of the driveway. Couldn’t have a noisy garage door for the apocalypse.

She pulled into the open space next to his SUV. He had already opened the back gate and was piling the bags inside. She got out of her car, opened the trunk, and took out the bag she kept in it. Larkin took it from her and added it to the cache in the back of the SUV.

“Is this it?” she asked, tense but calm.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to the kids?”

“Figured we’d call them on the way.”

“I’m not going in without them, Patrick.”

“I know,” Larkin said. “Neither am I.”

He slammed the SUV’s gate closed.

Chapter 14

Jill could hear the sirens continuing to wail as she drove toward Chris’s school, counterpointed by the screech of tires as she took the corners as fast as she could without rolling the crossover.

She had to do a lot of dodging, too, because people weren’t paying much attention to things like stop signs and traffic lights. In this crisis, everybody had somewhere they wanted to be right now. And she was the same way, gunning through intersections if there was enough of a gap in the chaos for her to make it.

The incessant honking of horns assaulted her ears, too. People were just driving down the streets leaning on their horns. What good that was going to do, she didn’t know, but obviously they felt compelled to do it.

She veered around a wreck that had the edge of the road blocked. Somebody had lost control of a pickup, jumped the curb, and slammed into a fire hydrant. A plume of water shot into the air, splattering Jill’s windshield as she went by. She hit the wipers to clean it off. She had to be able to see.

Chris’s school was only three blocks away now, but the road was getting more clogged with traffic. Everybody with a kid there wanted to reach their child or children. Jill had to slow down, then let out a groan as the vehicles in front of her shuddered to a halt.

This wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. She couldn’t reach the school, and if she stayed here, she’d be trapped in the traffic jam.

But there was a cross street just a couple of cars ahead, and she knew if she could reach it, she could circle around and come up behind the school. A drainage ditch blocked that side of the campus, so she couldn’t drive right up to the rear of the school, but she could get close enough to retrieve Chris. She hoped the smaller street back there wouldn’t be blocked like this main boulevard was.

That plan formed in her mind in an instant. She wrenched the wheel over and jammed her foot down on the gas. The crossover bumped up over the curb and tore across somebody’s front lawn at an angle. Jill was sorry for any damage she did, but every instinct in her body told her it no longer really mattered.

As she jolted off the curb into the cross street, she checked the rearview mirror, worried that other people would follow her example and flock to the back of the school, creating a logjam over there, too. The idea didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else just yet, though. The street was clear of vehicular traffic, although panicked pedestrians ran here and there.

Jill took the next two corners hard and fast. She rammed the crossover ahead on the street that ran next to the drainage ditch. When she could see the school on the other side of it, she hit the brakes and skidded to a stop on the side of the road. She was out of the vehicle in a flash, although she paused just long enough to lock it. One thing an emergency always brought out was the lawless element interested only in looting.

The sides of the ditch were concrete, the bottom covered with a couple of inches of mud and scummy water. Jill slid down, splashed through it with no thought for her shoes, and bounded up the other side. A high chain-link fence separated the ditch from the school’s playground. She hit it on the move and scrambled up it, grateful now for all the hours she had spent working out. Thankfully, there was no barbed wire at the top. This was a school, after all, not a prison.

She landed, running, in the playground.

The first door into the school she came to was locked. Of course it was, she thought. As soon as the sirens went off, the place had probably gone into lockdown. Since this was a fairly new school, it had been designed to make it difficult for intruders to break in. She couldn’t shatter a window or kick down a door.

Muttering bitter curses, she ran around the building to the front and found chaos waiting for her.

Dozens of parents had made it to the school and demanded to be let in so they could get their kids. From the looks of things, the principal was maintaining the lockdown, though. Men and women yelled and pounded on the glass doors at the entrance. As Jill forced herself into the mob, she peered through the glass and saw several terrified women inside. They had to be able to recognize at least some of the parents, but they still didn’t know what to do. The threat of a lawsuit hung over so much of modern life, including the educational system, that anything out of the ordinary tended to paralyze bureaucrats.

Behind Jill, someone screamed and a man shouted, “Get out of the way!”

She looked back and saw the crowd scattering in a frenzy as a van plowed through, picking up speed as the path cleared. Jill scrambled out of the way. The van flashed past her and crashed into the locked doors, blasting them open, shattering glass, spraying shards everywhere. The vehicle came to a stop in the school’s foyer.

People fought their way past it, ignoring the carpet of broken glass on the tile floor, and scattered through the school in search of their children. The principal and other administrators screamed at them to stop, but no one paid any attention to them.

Jill certainly didn’t as she wedged her way into the school and then dashed along one of the corridors toward Chris’s classroom. She knew where she was going, knew this school quite well from all the Meet the Teacher nights, the Open Houses, the field trips, and the special days when the parents could come and read with their kids or eat lunch with them, and she felt a sharp pang of loss as she realized she would probably never experience any of those things again.

There was Chris’s room. The door was closed. Jill appeared to be the first parent to reach it. She grabbed the knob and twisted it. Still locked. She slammed her palm against the glass and shouted, “Mrs. Fletcher! Mrs. Fletcher! It’s Jill Sinclair. I have to get Chris. Let me in!”

A middle-aged woman with eyes so big they seemed about to pop out of her head appeared on the other side of the glass. She looked past Jill, maybe to make sure no one was forcing her to do anything, and then reached down to throw the bolt on the door. She stepped back quickly as Jill flung it open.

“Is it true?” the teacher said. “Is it a nuclear attack?”

“Maybe. We don’t know yet. But you have to let me take Chris.” Jill thought about the Walther in its holster inside the waistband of her slacks and had a crazy vision of her sticking the gun in Mrs. Fletcher’s face to force her to back off and give her her son.

It didn’t come to that. Mrs. Fletcher turned her head and said, “Chris! Grab your things and go with your mom!”

Jill’s heart pounded hard in relief as she saw Chris hurrying toward her. Then she looked at all the other kids, who were scared out of their minds, and wished she could take all of them with her.

But the only thing she could do was grab Chris’s arm, look at Mrs. Fletcher, say, “Good luck to you,” and then run along the hall toward a door that led out onto the playground. Like most of the school doors, it would open from the inside even though it was locked from the outside. The two of them burst through it and started at a run toward the drainage ditch.

“You’re gonna have to climb, kid,” she said as they approached the fence.

“Mom…” Panting a little. “Are we gonna be all right?”

“You bet.”

The sirens still howled. Jill looked at the sky. Clear, blue, beautiful. No sign that devastating, fiery death might lurk up there.

Behind them, the cry of the mob mixed with the sirens.

In the third-grade hall, Jim Huddleston thought he saw Larkin’s daughter Jill going out the back door with her son, but he only caught a glimpse of them as he started hammering on the door of Beth’s classroom.

“Beth, open up!” he shouted through the glass. “It’s me!”

She jerked the door open while he was pounding on it, so suddenly that he stumbled forward and bumped into her. He grabbed her, held her to him.

“Thank God! Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “What is it, Jim? I heard people yelling, and those awful sirens… The principal said something about an attack—”

“The North Koreans and the Russians are threatening to nuke us,” Huddleston said. “We’ve got to go.”

“But… but surely the President will do something… This can’t be happening…”

“The President is an incompetent asshole! He always has been. You just can’t see it with those blinders you wear!”

“Jim! Everyone has a right to an opinion, but talking like that isn’t productive.”

Huddleston wanted to rage at her, but he caught hold of his surging emotions and put his hands on her shoulders.

“We have to go,” he said again, trying to stay as calm and reasoned as possible because that’s what Beth responded to.

“Go where?”

“The Hercules Project.”

Her eyes got big in a way that even the threat of nuclear annihilation hadn’t been able to accomplish. “You went against what I told you to do?”

“Damn right I did, and now I’m glad. We’ve got a place to go. We can live through this, but you’ve got to come on, now!”

“But I can’t…” She turned her head to look at the children huddled against the far wall. “I can’t leave the class.”

“Their parents will get them.” Huddleston couldn’t help himself. He gave her a little shake. “If we stay here, we’ll die!”

For several seconds that seemed like an eternity, she just stared at him. Whether she didn’t understand or just refused to accept what was happening, he didn’t know. Finally, she said, “I’m sure if we just try to talk to them—”

“The Russians and the Koreans?” Huddleston laughed and heard the hysterical edge in the sound. “They don’t care! This is the excuse they’ve been waiting for to blow us off the face of the earth!”

All the children were crying in terror now. Huddleston knew he was scaring them, but he didn’t care. He damn well wanted to scare his wife right now.

“Oh, God!” Beth cried in a broken voice. She threw her arms around his neck. “We’re going to die!”

“Not if we get out of here now,” Huddleston said grimly.

She pulled back a little and asked, “There’s a chance?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Then let’s go!”

She shoved him out the door, followed him from the classroom, and never looked back, even though several of the children were screaming her name.

Chapter 15

Trevor was halfway to Bailey’s school, fighting crazed traffic and looking for shortcuts every foot of the way, when his phone rang through the car’s Bluetooth system. He saw Jill’s name on the dashboard display, although he would have recognized the ringtone he had given her anyway. It felt like his heart was at least halfway up his windpipe and trying to crawl the rest of the way as he thumbed the button on the steering wheel and said, “Jill! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” her answer came back, stopping his heart from its ascent, at least for the moment. “I have Chris, and he’s okay, too.”

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Trevor said. He had never been much of a religious person, veering from agnostic to atheist and back again, but right at this moment he believed every word he said. Today, the whole world was a foxhole.

“We’re on our way to the project,” Jill went on. “I heard from Mom and Dad. They’re heading out there, too.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can get Bailey. The traffic is insane!”

“I know. I went through the same thing around the elementary school. Just be careful, okay? People are getting more panicky by the minute, and when people panic, they get desperate.”

“Yeah. It might help if they’d turn off those awful sirens. Surely everybody knows by now what’s going on.”

In point of fact, though, nobody knew what was going on, he realized, and that made things even worse. It was still possible this crisis could blow over. The President would find the right words to say to the Russians and the North Koreans, and things would calm down. It was a shame about Seoul and all the South Koreans who had been killed, of course, but even so, that wasn’t sufficient reason to plunge the entire world into a nuclear holocaust…

“Trev.” He shoved those hopeful thoughts away as he realized she was still talking to him. “Trev, you’ve got the Shield in the car, don’t you?”

“Shield? What—Oh, the gun! Yeah, I have it. It’s in that little case under the seat.”

“You should have two loaded magazines with it. I put them in there. Get it out and load it. Release the slide.”

“But then it’ll be ready to shoot.” He remembered that much from the trip to the range.

“That’s right. Keep it handy in case you need it. But don’t act like you’re going to use it unless you’re really ready to use it. You don’t want to start waving it around just to scare people, because they’re liable to get scared and start shooting at you. So be sure of what you’re doing.”

He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. “I don’t like this, babe—”

“Nobody does. But you bring me my daughter, whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

Trevor swallowed. “I understand.” He’d been driving while they were talking, gunning the gas, slamming the brakes, trying to take advantage of every opening in the traffic he could find. “I’m getting pretty close to the school now—Oh, crap.”

“What is it?”

“Looks like traffic’s at a standstill up ahead.”

“I encountered the same thing. Go around, Trev. Find a back way. Get as close as you can, stop somewhere it looks like you can still get out, and then go the rest of the way on foot if you have to.”

“All right. I understand. Once I have Bailey, I come straight to the project?”

“That’s right. Don’t stop for anything—or anybody.”

Trevor swallowed again, even harder this time. That was maybe the most difficult part of this whole terrible thing. Knowing that so many people would be left to whatever fate had in store for them. Logically, he knew he couldn’t save anyone except his daughter, but at the same time, that knowledge gnawed at his guts.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too. Get our daughter.”

“On my way,” he said. “I’ll call you when I have her.”

He broke the connection, then yanked the wheel hard to the left and roared along a side street. He didn’t know these roads around the school as well as he should have, considering all the times he and Jill had been here for various activities. He didn’t have the greatest memory for directions and landmarks, though.

Frustration was mounting in him when he spotted the school between two houses. Somehow, he had managed to get close to it. He stopped and stepped out, leaving one foot in the car. All he had to do was cut through a side yard, climb a fence, and he’d be on the school grounds. He reached back into the car, cut off the key, and was about to head for the school when he remembered what Jill had said about the gun.

Trevor looked around. Some people were running in the street in the next block, but there was nobody close to him. He didn’t think he’d need the gun, but still he hesitated. She had told him to load it and keep it with him, and she was usually right…

He sat down behind the wheel again, reached under the seat, and found the hard-plastic case that held the 9mm pistol and two magazines.

It didn’t take him long to slide one of the loaded magazines into the gun. He was about to release the slide when he realized he didn’t know how to put the safety on. He didn’t want to carry around a loaded gun that could go off with just a little pressure on the trigger. Better to leave the slide locked back, he decided, than to take a chance on an accidental discharge.

When he stood up again, he started to tuck the pistol in the waistband of his jeans. Texas was an open-carry state, so he wouldn’t be breaking the law by doing that. Or would he? He seemed to remember that open carry was legal only as long as the weapon was properly holstered and secured. He didn’t have a holster, and sticking the gun in his pants didn’t seem very secure. Maybe if he pulled his shirttails out and let them hang over, that would count as concealed carry. He could try to look it up on his phone, he supposed…

“Hey! Hey, buddy, I need your car! I gotta get outta here!”

Startled, Trevor swung around and saw a man running toward him. The man’s face was twisted and grotesque, and for a second Trevor had the wild thought that this wasn’t a nuclear war, it was the zombie apocalypse.

But then he realized the guy was just scared out of his wits, and the stranger suddenly looked even more terrified as he stumbled to a halt, threw out his hands toward Trevor, and started backing away. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot!” he cried.

Trevor looked down and realized he had the Smith & Wesson in his hand, gripped firmly and pointed in the direction of the man who’d accosted him. Evidently the man hadn’t noticed that the slide was locked back. He turned abruptly and sprinted the other way, obviously figuring it would be easier to steal a car from somebody else.

“Huh,” Trevor said.

He shoved the pistol into his waistband, slammed the car door, and locked it. Then he hurried through the side yard toward the fence that ran along the school property.

Jill would have been up and over that fence in a matter of seconds, he thought as he struggled to climb up, threw his leg over, and make it down the other side without falling and breaking his neck. He let go and jumped the last couple of feet, stumbling as he landed. People were running around the school from the front. Trevor joined them. One man had what looked like a tire tool of some sort. He jammed it into the gap next to a door lock and heaved on it. Two more men rushed to help him. With a grinding squeal, the door came open, and there was a chaotic stampede into the school as people shouted for their children.

Trevor realized belatedly that he had no idea where Bailey would be at this time of day. He stumbled along in the mob thronging the hallway, hoping he would spot her, when instead he caught a glimpse of a girl named… Ashley? No, Amber. That was it. She was one of Bailey’s best friends. He lunged and caught hold of her arm.

She screamed and tried to pull away, but he hung on and raised his voice to say, “Amber! Amber, calm down! It’s Mr. Sinclair! I’m Bailey’s dad, remember?”

She ought to remember. She had gone to enough ice cream parlors and pizza places and bowling alleys with them for various parties. She stopped jerking against his grip when she recognized him.

“Mr. Sinclair! Have you seen my mom or dad?”

Trevor didn’t recall what either of Amber’s parents looked like, so he just shook his head. “Where’s Bailey?” he asked. “Do you know where I can find her?”

Amber pointed with her free hand. “I think she was in math class, but she may not be there now.”

If she wasn’t, he was screwed, Trevor thought. He would just have to keep searching for her.

Because there was no way he was going to the Hercules Project without her.

“Go find your folks,” he told Amber as he let go of her and started toward the classroom she had pointed out. It was like swimming against the tide, but he made it eventually.

The door was wide open. Half a dozen kids were still inside, looking scared and lost, but no adult. The teacher must have cut out as soon as he or she got a chance.

“Dad!”

The cry made Trevor’s heart jump. He turned and saw Bailey running toward him from a corner. He opened his arms and she came into them with a flying leap. She hugged him tight, and he returned the embrace, holding her so that her feet were off the floor.

Then she wiggled a little and said, “Dad, what’s that?”

He realized he had her pressed up against the gun. Quickly, he set her down and said, “Don’t worry about that, let’s just go.”

“That’s one of Mom’s semi-automatics. Why do you have a gun? What’s going on? Is it really the end of the world?”

“What? No! Not the end of the world, not at all. But we’ve got to go now. We need to meet up with Mom and your brother.”

“At that place out in the country? The one where we’re supposed to go if anything really bad happens?” They had told the kids a little about the Hercules Project, without going into all the details that might prove to be too disturbing.

“That’s right. We may have to stay there for a while.”

“Then it is the end of the world!”

“Not if your mom and I have anything to say about it, honey,” he told her, wishing that he was really as confident as he was trying to sound. If Jill had been here, she could have said it and meant it.

But then he realized that he did mean it. Whether he was cut out for things like this or not, he was going to get his daughter to safety, one way or another.

Chapter 16

“Thank God,” Susan breathed as she lowered the phone from her ear. “Jill just talked to Trevor again. He has Bailey, and all four of them are headed out here.”

“That’s good,” Larkin said as he turned the SUV’s wheel and veered around a car stopped on the side of the road so that half of it stuck out into his lane. Nobody was around or inside it, as far as he could tell. He had seen a surprising number of stopped, apparently abandoned vehicles. He wasn’t sure why the threat of nuclear war seemed to make cars quit running, but evidently it did.

Maybe there were so many people driving, it was just a matter of averages. He had traveled on this winding country road hundreds of times and never seen it like this, almost bumper-to-bumper heading away from town. At least the cars were moving on, although at a much slower speed than usual. The line of traffic stretched as far ahead and behind him as he could see. People honked from time to time, but it wasn’t the cacophony Larkin might have expected.

“This is like that time we were down at the coast and the hurricane came in,” Susan said. “Everybody just wanted to get away from there as quickly as possible.”

“Yeah. People figure big cities will be the main target in a nuclear attack, so they’re heading for the sticks. Not sure they can get far enough away in the time that we’ve got, though.”

Susan leaned forward slightly in the seat and turned her head to peer out through the passenger window at the sky. “It looks so peaceful,” she said. “Nothing up there but a few fluffy white clouds.” She looked over at Larkin. “But we won’t see anything coming until it’s too late, will we?”

“We probably won’t see anything coming at all,” he said.

“Well, that doesn’t make me feel the least bit better.”

A humorless grin stretched across his face. “Another couple of miles and we’ll be there. Then I’ll feel better.”

“I won’t. Not until Jill and Trevor and the kids are there with us.”

Larkin nodded. She was right about that. As long as their loved ones were out there, unaccounted for, he couldn’t rest easy. And just because Susan had talked to their daughter didn’t mean they would all make it safely to the project.

Another vehicle was stopped on the side of the road ahead, this time a pickup. At least, with everyone trying to get away from the city, there was little if any traffic coming the other way, so there was room for the cars to get around the ones that were stopped.

In this case, though, three men ran out into the road just as Larkin started to go around. They were yelling and waving their arms, and Larkin had no choice except to hit the brakes unless he wanted to run over them.

One of the men hurried around to the driver’s window. All of them were in their thirties, dressed in jeans and work shirts. The pickup had a sign on the door for a landscaping company, and a zero-turn mower and other pieces of equipment were in the back.

“Thanks for stopping, man,” the one who came to the window said. Larkin had lowered the glass a few inches. “You wouldn’t believe how many times we had to jump out of the way of people who didn’t. We need a ride.”

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Larkin said. “We’re not going very far.”

“Not going very far?” the man repeated as he stared in disbelief. “You need to get as far away from the Metroplex as you can! They’re gonna nuke the place!”

Larkin wasn’t about to tell this man about the Hercules Project. The fewer people who knew about that, other than the residents, the better. He was starting to wish he’d kept going and made these guys jump out of the way again.

“We don’t know that they’re going to nuke anybody. Anyway, you’ll have to get a ride with somebody else.”

“You got room in there, man. We can see that.” The man’s face twisted angrily. “And we’re gettin’ tired of bein’ ignored. We got a right to live just as much as anybody else.”

“Patrick,” Susan said in a low, worried voice.

Larkin glanced in her direction. Through the glass on her side, he saw that the other two men had taken shovels out of the back of the pickup and assumed vaguely threatening stances. This was just a standard SUV. A few swings with those tools would break the windows out.

Larkin turned his head back toward the man on his side and started to say, “Sorry—” when the man reached his hand in through the gap, fingers clawing at Larkin’s face.

Larkin hit the button that raised the window, pinning the man’s arm. He howled in pain and outrage, the sound blending with the impatient honking that came from the vehicles stopped behind the SUV. Larkin’s foot came down hard on the gas. The SUV leaped forward, and the man whose arm was caught in the window had to run and try to keep up or lose his balance and be dragged. At the same time, his two companions lunged at the SUV and swung the shovels. Larkin’s quick move had caught them unprepared, however. Instead of hitting the windshield or the passenger window, the shovels clanged off the vehicle’s top.

Larkin kept accelerating. The man just a few inches away on the other side of his window was screaming now. Larkin pushed the button again, and as the window lowered, the man’s arm came free and he fell and rolled on the asphalt, out of control from his momentum. Something banged off the back of the SUV, and when Larkin checked the rearview mirror he saw a shovel lying in the road. One of the men had flung it after them in fear and rage.

The man who had tried to grab Larkin through the window was still on the ground. One of his friends ran up to him and started trying to haul him to his feet. Both of them had to scramble to get out of the way of an accelerating car.

Larkin couldn’t see any of them after that and turned his attention ahead again.

Susan was breathing hard. Her eyes were wide. “They were going to hurt us,” she said. “They were going to hurt us and take the SUV.”

“Yeah,” Larkin said. “They would have tried.”

He glanced down at the Colt 1911 .45 lying on the seat between them. He hadn’t reached for the gun back there… but he would have if he’d needed to in order to shed themselves of the would-be thieves.

What was troubling was that a few hours earlier, those guys probably weren’t thieves at all and wouldn’t have been so quick to grab tools and try to turn them into weapons. They were just guys who’d gone to work that morning not worrying about anything other than getting through the day and then going home to their families, if they had them, or spending their evening however they usually did. Nobody got up thinking, Well, the world’s going to end today and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

After the brief stop, Larkin had caught up to the traffic in front of him. Now the vehicles ground to a halt in the road. Susan, recovered a little from her fear, leaned forward and asked, “What is it?”

“Don’t know,” Larkin said. “I can’t see.” As he watched, though, peering up the line of cars, he spotted figures reeling back and forth between some of the vehicles. Men flailed at each other with fists. “Oh, crap! It’s a fight. Somebody else must have tried to take somebody’s car.”

“There’s no way around this, is there?” Susan asked, her voice tight with anxiety.

“No, this is really the only road in. Moultrie probably didn’t think about that, since everything else about the site is perfect.”

“I didn’t mean that, necessarily. I meant… there’s no way to keep people’s worst nature from coming out in a crisis, is there?”

Larkin grimaced. He had thought the same thing, but he said, “That’s not always true. It depends on the person. Think about all the disasters, natural or man-made, where people rise above what they usually are and perform great acts of heroism. Sometimes they save a lot of lives, even at the cost of their own.”

“But even in a hurricane or something like that, people know it’s not the end of the world.”

“If you don’t make it, it’s the end of your world. That doesn’t stop most people from pitching in to help.”

“But some don’t. I mean, look at all the looters every time there’s a riot. Some people are always out just for themselves, and that just gets worse when there’s an emergency.”

Larkin couldn’t argue with that. He just said, “That’s why we’re prepared… and why we’ll do whatever it takes to save our family.”

Susan sighed. “I wish they were all with us right now.”

“So do I, babe. So do I.”

A few minutes of tense silence went by while Larkin watched the brawl up ahead. If the violence spilled in their direction, he wouldn’t take any chances this time. He would grab the 1911 and be ready for trouble.

More men got out of their vehicles and shoved a stalled car out of the way as the battle moved onto a grassy hillside next to the road. Larkin wondered if the stalled car was what had started the fight. The traffic began to move forward again. Overall, the clog was getting worse, though. They measured their progress now in feet. At this rate, it might soon be inches.

And it might take too long to reach the Hercules Project. Larkin glanced up at the sky, wondered what was up there. What might be speeding toward them at this very second ...and the news on the local radio stations was scrambling to stay on top of the different scenarios, some accurate, some fake… but it was impossible to know the difference.

“The hell with this,” he muttered. “There’s gotta be another way.”

“Can you get around on the shoulder?”

He shook his head. “Too many stalled cars. The ground drops off too much on this side, and there are too many culverts. We’d get stuck if we got too far off the road.”

“Maybe the other shoulder?”

The lack of traffic inbound toward Fort Worth made that a possibility, Larkin thought. There was a double line of outbound traffic now, but as far as Larkin could see, the far shoulder was at least partially clear. If he took off over there, other people were bound to follow him, and that would just create three lines of traffic. It wouldn’t be long before that third line stalled for some reason, too.

But it wouldn’t matter if he and Susan could get close enough to the project before that happened. They could get out and carry the bags and guns if they had to. He’d been stashing extra food and supplies in their apartment for the past few weeks, ever since the place was close enough to completion for him to do so, so they hadn’t had to bring too much with them on this last mad dash for safely…

This mad dash that had turned into a crawl.

Larkin checked his side mirror, saw an opening, hauled the wheel over. Somebody honked as he veered left, but nobody ran into him, so he didn’t care. Let ’em get mad. It didn’t matter anymore. When he got over in the second lane, he could see the other shoulder even better. It was empty.

He hit the gas and popped out, still only moving about ten miles an hour, but it seemed faster as he passed the other vehicles. In the rearview mirror, he saw others following his example, as he had known they would.

“We’re on the wrong side of the road now,” Susan said. “I guess we should have thought of that. We’ll never be able to get back over and turn into the gate.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Larkin said. “We’ll ditch the SUV and go in on foot. We can take everything with us that we really need. If things get as bad as it looks like they might, we won’t be driving anywhere for a long time anyway.”

“You’re right.” Susan took a deep, shuddery breath. “Oh, Patrick, I’m so scared. I keep thinking that at any second there’s going to be a bright, blinding light, and then… and then…”

“Try not to think about it,” he told her. “I know that’s hard, but we’re alive, the kids are alive, and nothing’s really happened yet—”

The windshield exploded inward, shattering and spraying glass at them.

Chapter 17

It wasn’t a bomb, because he was still alive. Some small part of Larkin’s brain knew that. The blast wave from a nuclear explosion would have killed them, possibly even vaporized them. But other than shock and some stinging pain on his face and hands where flying slivers of glass had cut them, he seemed to be all right. Instinct and reflexes had closed his eyes in time to protect them.

Susan was screaming, though, either in shock or pain or both. He forced his eyes open and reached over to grab her, fear making his heart pound as he saw the blood on her face.

Before he could get his hands on her, something else crashed into the driver’s side window and sprayed him with more glass. Larkin flinched away from it, but something made his hand drop to the seat and scoop up the Colt.

He twisted toward the window, bringing the gun around and shoving down the safety with his thumb as he did so. A man stood there, a long tire iron gripped in both hands as he swung it back to strike again. The window was already broken out, so this time that blow would be aimed at Larkin.

Larkin shoved the Colt at the man and fired twice. The shots were deafening inside the SUV.

The two rounds struck the man in the body and knocked him away from the vehicle. He landed on his back and slid down into the ditch. Larkin jerked his head around to look for any other threats but saw none. He turned back to Susan.

“I’m all right!” she cried before he could ask if she was hurt. “Just drive! Go!”

Larkin punched the gas and lurched ahead before any of the other vehicles could pull out in front of him. He gripped the wheel with his left hand and kept the pistol in his right.

“The blood—” he said without taking his eyes off what was in front of him.

“The glass cut me in a few places, that’s all. You have blood all over your face, too, Patrick.”

He did? A glance in the mirror told him she was right. He looked pretty gruesome, too. He lifted his right arm and sleeved some of the gore from his face. Susan found some tissues and wiped at her face, but he didn’t care about getting his shirt blood-stained.

“Why did that awful man do that?”

“I guess he wanted a ride,” Larkin said. “Or to kill us both and steal the SUV.”

“You… you killed him.”

“We don’t know that.”

But the chances of anybody surviving two rounds from a 1911 at close range in the midsection like that were pretty damned small, Larkin realized. It was almost a certainty that he had killed the guy with the tire iron. He knew that he’d been acting in self-defense, and in defense of his wife, too, and he had killed the enemy during wartime…

But this wasn’t a war, and that guy hadn’t been an enemy, at least not when the day started. He’d just been another Texan until terror had driven him to lash out.

Dear God, was this what they were all doomed to become? Animals rending and clawing at each other?

Larkin shoved that thought out of his head. This was no time to debate morality, even with himself. The only thing that really counted was survival. His survival, and that of his loved ones.

Everything else could be hashed out later… if there was a later.

A couple of times he was forced to swing far enough out that his left-hand wheels were off the shoulder and coming dangerously close to either a drop-off or a culvert. But they had covered at least half a mile this way before people ahead of him saw him coming in their mirrors and began to pull out, following his example even though they were in front of him. Larkin glared futilely.

“You can’t blame them,” Susan said. “They just want to get to somewhere safer, too.”

“I know, I know.”

She had slipped off a shoe and used it to brush broken glass off the seat between them. Little trails of drying blood gave her face a striped look. She leaned over and reached toward him. “You’ve got a little piece of glass stuck in your cheek… hold still…”

She plucked it free. He said, “Ouch.”

“Don’t be a big baby.”

“Yes, ma’am. You’re a trained medical professional, though. It shouldn’t have hurt.”

“Just be thankful I’m not picking broken glass out of your butt. I’ve had to do that at work, you know.”

“Could be interesting, depending on whose butt it was.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t the least bit interesting.”

Larkin grinned tightly. It said something for the human spirit that they could banter like this when they’d been under attack just a few minutes earlier—and when the ultimate doom could fall on their heads at any second, with no warning. But what good would it do to curl up in a ball and cry? Wasn’t it better to keep fighting?

One of the cars up ahead got too close to a culvert. Its left front wheel fell in with what must have been a bone-jarring thump, and the car came to a dead stop, tilted so its right rear tire was off the ground.

“Oh, hell!” Larkin said as he smacked his left hand against the steering wheel in frustration. Enough of the car was still on the shoulder that no other vehicles would be able to get by.

“Can’t they back out of there?” Susan asked.

Larkin shook his head. “Not with that wheel off the ground. If somebody could get a jack under the front .. . or maybe enough guys lifting…” He looked around, then turned the .45 and extended it butt-first toward his wife. “Here, take this.”

“What?” Susan stared at the gun. “I don’t shoot.”

“The safety’s off. All you have to do is point it and pull the trigger. Hold it with both hands if you have to fire it. It’s got a kick to it. And don’t fire it unless you’re absolutely sure you need to.” “Patrick, what are you going to do?”

He opened the door. “See if I can get the way cleared so we can go on. And I’m counting on you to stand guard while I’m doing it.”

Susan looked like she wanted to argue, but Larkin was already out of the SUV. There was a woman behind the wheel of the car that had gone into the culvert, and she had several children in there with her. Larkin turned to the vehicles in line behind him and waved, then pointed to the stuck car and shouted, “Come on! We’ve got to get it out of there!”

For a couple of seconds, nothing happened. Then a few doors swung open and several men climbed out of their vehicles. “Come on!” Larkin called again, and they trotted forward.

Larkin led half a dozen men to the culvert and pointed to where they needed to stand. As they positioned himself, he gestured to the driver for her to roll down the window. She looked like she didn’t want to because she was so shaken and frightened, but after a moment she complied.

“We’re gonna lift on the front end,” Larkin told her. “Watch me, and when I nod, you put it in reverse and give it some gas. Not too much, though. There’s not a lot of room between you and the car behind you. When you’re out of this hole, you can cut your wheels back to the right and ease around it. Understand?”

“I… I think so,” the woman said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble—”

“It’s okay. Just keep an eye on me. You’ll get out of here.”

Whether that would be enough to save her life and the lives of the kids in the car with her, Larkin had no idea. Like everybody else out here, all the woman could do was hope.

Larkin took his place among the other men, reaching under the car’s bumper and finding a place to grab hold. “Ready?” he asked, and got nods and grunts of acknowledgment. “Lift!”

More grunting as they put their backs into it. Larkin felt his muscles straining and creaking. But the car’s front end came up, and he could tell that both rear wheels were on the ground again. He nodded to the driver.

She was too nervous to follow his advice about taking it easy. She tromped the gas hard, and the car lurched backward, banging heavily into the sedan behind it. The driver of that car, an older guy who hadn’t gotten out to help, opened his door and leaned out to yell, “Hey!”

One of his headlights was broken, but Larkin didn’t figure that was going to matter. He and the other men let go of the car and Larkin checked to make sure the bumpers hadn’t locked. They hadn’t, so he thumped the top of the car a couple of times and told the woman through the open driver’s window, “You’re good to go, lady. Just be careful.”

“Thank you!” she called. She eased forward, missing the edge of the culvert this time.

“What about the damage to my car?” the older man said.

“If that’s all that happens to it,” Larkin said, “consider yourself one lucky bastard.”

Larkin ignored the glare the man gave him and walked back to the SUV while the other men who had pitched in returned to their vehicles. He brushed more glass off the seat and then got in.

Susan heaved a sigh of relief and said, “I was afraid someone would try to jump you while you were out there, Patrick. I… I don’t know if I could have shot anybody.”

“Not even to protect me?” he asked with a grin.

“Well… even if I tried, I don’t know if I could have hit them. I might have shot you instead.”

“Don’t think I didn’t worry about it,” he said as he took the Colt back from her. His smile took any sting out of the words, but there was some truth to what he said. He really should have insisted that she go to the range with him more often.

The slow procession rolled on.

There was plenty of news on the radio, of course, but at the same time, there was no news. Nobody seemed to know anything about what was going to happen. The South Korean army and air force had tried to strike back against the North, resulting in an all-out war between the two countries, but from what Larkin could gather, the nuclear strike had been such a crippling blow that South Korea wouldn’t be able to muster much of a fight. It was likely the “war” would be over in a day or two.

What worried Larkin was the tone of everything the Russians said. The statements had a threatening stridency to them, as if the U.S. had already declared that it was going to attack North Korea and the Russians were foaming at the mouth to jump in. Washington’s official stance was that the “incident” was “still under investigation.” As with any crisis, the administration wanted to pretend to investigate until the problem went away on its own. With the attitude coming from the Russians, though, Larkin had his doubts about this one going away.

As they started slowly down a hill, Susan pointed and said, “I can see the gate up ahead!”

So could Larkin. The entrance to the Hercules Project was about a quarter of a mile away now, close enough that they could walk the rest of the way if they had to. Part of him wanted to climb out now and start in that direction, figuring they could move faster on foot.

But they had quite a few bags, including the gun bags, and he didn’t want to load Susan down with any more of a burden, for any farther, than necessary. So they stayed where they were for the moment, with the SUV rolling forward a foot or two at a time.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they were just about even with the gate. Larkin could see Graham Moultrie’s Jeep parked on the other side but no sign of Moultrie himself. The man had to be somewhere close by, though. Larkin couldn’t imagine that Moultrie would be anywhere else under these circumstances. The project was the man’s baby. He would want to protect it and see that everything functioned the way it was supposed to.

“Good enough,” Larkin said. He turned the wheel to the left and ran the SUV out onto a grassy, fairly level spot clear of the shoulder so others could get by. “Let’s get the gear.”

He stepped out of the vehicle and holstered the .45 on his right hip where he had clipped its holster earlier. Susan got out of the other side and joined him at the back of the SUV. Larkin opened it and started taking out the bags, slinging the heavier ones on his shoulders and handing the lighter ones to her.

“Are we just going to leave the car here?” she asked.

“It’s no good to us in there,” he said. “If nothing happens, maybe we can retrieve it later. If it’s gone, well, I’ll trade a stolen SUV for the world being safe.”

“You’re right. There are a lot of things it just doesn’t make sense to worry about anymore, aren’t there?”

“Almost everything,” Larkin said.

They were both pretty weighed down when they started across the road toward the gate, stepping between the barely moving cars. Larkin hurried them along as much as he could, wishing there were some way they could do this without drawing attention to the gate that was their destination.

No one tried to stop them. The AR-15 he carried, the. 45 on his hip, and the grim look on his face probably had a lot to do with that. But it was inevitable that someone would notice him and Susan, and sure enough, he heard somebody shout, “Hey! Where are those two going?”

Someone else yelled, “They must know where it’s safe!”

“Follow them!” a third voice chimed in.

“Shit,” Larkin muttered. He told Susan, “Come on, fast as you can.”

Ahead of them, with a faint rumble of its motor, the gate started to open, the two halves sliding apart. Larkin and Susan broke into stumbling runs. Behind them, angry shouts and howled curses filled the air. Larkin heard footsteps rapidly slapping the ground as people ran after them.

Graham Moultrie appeared from somewhere, a weapon of some sort in his hands. He shouted, “Come on!” to Larkin and Susan, then the gun he held began to chatter and spew flames.

Chapter 18

Moultrie was off to one side, so he was able to fire through the iron bars past Larkin and Susan as they hurried toward the gate. Larkin threw a glance over his shoulder, thinking that surely Moultrie wasn’t mowing down the people from the road. They were all fellow Americans, after all.

The slugs from the automatic weapon chewed up the asphalt in front of the charging mob and made them all throw on the brakes. Some of them might have been hurt by ricochets or chunks of flying asphalt, but at least it wasn’t wholesale slaughter.

Larkin and Susan reached the gate, which was open barely wide enough for them to get through, one at a time. Larkin hung back a step to let Susan go first. She slipped through the gap, one of the bags she carried catching for a second before she tugged it free. Larkin was right behind her. The machine gun had fallen silent, but Moultrie still stood there pointing it at the crowd, and the grim look on his face made it clear that if he had to pull the trigger again, it might not be for warning shots.

The gate began to rumble closed. Moultrie hadn’t moved, so Larkin figured someone else was probably close by with the remote control, probably Deb. She could easily be hidden in the brush close to the entrance.

A man yelled, “You son of a bitch!” and the next instant a shot blasted from the crowd. Larkin looked around to see that the press of people had scattered, leaving one man holding a revolver. Larkin wasn’t surprised that somebody else on the road was armed. There were probably plenty of guns out there in those stalled cars.

Larkin didn’t know where that lone bullet had gone, but he knew where the burst Moultrie fired in return landed. The handful of slugs punched into the gunman’s chest and knocked him backward as blood sprayed from the wounds. Screams came from the crowd as they scattered even more.

“Get in the Jeep and go,” Moultrie snapped at Larkin and Susan. He swung the machine gun back and forth, menacing the crowd outside the gate.

Deb raced from the brush and jumped behind the wheel while Larkin and Susan were piling their gear into the back. Larkin hung on to the AR-15 and told Susan, “You go with Deb! I’ll stay here and help Graham!”

Deb looked around from the driver’s seat and told him, “No need! Help’s on the way!”

Larkin looked along the road leading to the project’s buildings and saw several more Jeeps heading toward the gate, each with several armed men in it. Rifle and shotgun barrels bristled from the vehicles, and on the back of one of them was mounted…

“Good Lord!” Larkin said. “Is that a .30 caliber machine gun?”

It certainly was, he saw as the first of the Jeeps raced past and then slewed to a stop with a screech of brakes. The gunner on the back fired a long burst over the heads of the mob. People scrambled to get back in their cars and started driving again, closing up the gap that had opened while they were trying to get into the Hercules Project. There were plenty of curses and angry shouts hurled at the gate as the vehicles slowly rolled past, but nobody was willing to face the threat of a dozen armed men and a high-powered machine gun.

A thoroughly illegal machine gun, Larkin thought, but right now he was glad Moultrie had broken that law.

With society falling apart around them, the law of the gun might soon be the only one that counted for anything.

Susan was in the Jeep’s front passenger seat. Larkin swung into the back, and Deb punched the gas. She handled the wheel expertly on the winding road.

“Are you two all right?” she asked as she drove. “You look like you need medical attention.”

“Just cuts and scratches from broken glass,” Larkin said. “A guy busted out our windshield and one of the windows trying to steal our SUV.”

“You stopped him?”

“Yeah,” Larkin said, thinking about the way the guy had flown backward when those two rounds from the. 45 struck him. He was stopped, all right.

“I never dreamed people would act so crazy.”

“They’re crazy with fear,” Larkin said. “I suppose I can’t blame them… too much. Who were those guys in the other Jeeps?”

“Our security force. They’re all residents here. Cops, military, ex-military like you, Patrick. Graham was going to ask you to join, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. And then this happened…”

“We knew something like it was coming. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any need for the Hercules Project.”

Susan said, “Our daughter and her husband aren’t here yet, are they?”

Deb shook her head. “No, I’m afraid not. I’ve been trying to keep track of everyone checking in. It went pretty fast at first, before the traffic got backed up so badly on the road. Nobody even seemed to notice that some of the cars were turning in here. What happened to your SUV?”

“We left it on the other side of the road,” Larkin said. “Couldn’t get through with it, and well, we don’t really need it anymore, do we?”

“Not unless this is a false alarm. God, I hope it’s a false alarm!”

“We all do,” Larkin said. But whether the bombs fell or not, right now the world was an immensely more dangerous place than it had been earlier today, and now that Susan was safe, all he could think about was Jill and her family.

Jill wanted to know what was going on, but she kept the radio in the crossover turned off because she didn’t want to scare Chris even more than he already was. He bit his bottom lip and kept looking around like he expected some sort of monster to jump at him without warning.

But monsters weren’t real… unless you wanted to count the human race. On this day, Jill thought, at least some of humanity definitely fell into that category.

Impatience made her want to bang her hand on the steering wheel. She suppressed that urge, too. It wouldn’t make the traffic in front of her move any faster. It had been bad enough on the Interstate and then on the loop around Fort Worth, but once she had gotten off onto the country road that led into the hills west of the city, her progress had slowed down even more.

Trevor and Bailey were somewhere in this mess, she thought. She hoped her mom and dad had already made it to the bunker, but given the geography, it was too much to hope that her husband and daughter were there by this time. They probably weren’t even ahead of her. Their cell phones were useless—the wireless networks were likely overloaded.

“We’re going to that underground place, right?” Chris asked.

“That’s right. We’ll be safe there.”

“Dad and Bailey will be there?”

“Of course.” Jill managed to smile reassuringly—she hoped—as she said it.

“And Grandma and Granddad?”

“Yep. We’ll all be there.”

“Good. Maybe it won’t be too bad, then.”

“It won’t be bad at all,” Jill said. “It’ll be fine.”

Chris was quiet for a minute, then he said, “You know, this is the first time I’m glad you didn’t let me get a dog after all. Because if you had, we were in such a hurry we’d have had to leave him behind in the backyard to get blown up along with all the other dogs and cats and people.”

Jill’s heart seemed to twist painfully in her chest. She swallowed hard and said, “I hope nobody gets blown up, including all the dogs and cats.”

“That’s what some of the kids said was gonna happen. They said the bad guys were coming to blow us all up. Is that what’s gonna happen, Mom?”

“No,” Jill said firmly. “We’re going to be just fine, Chris. You have to believe that.”

He nodded and said, “I’ll try.” He didn’t sound convinced, though, and his obvious fear made Jill feel that awful pang in her chest again.

It just wasn’t right. The grown-ups in the world owed it to the kids not to do stupid shit like this. Somebody should have realized what was going on and never let things get this far.

But that would have required the politicians and the media to act like reasonably intelligent adults, she thought bitterly, and nothing in the past seventy or eighty years indicated they were capable of that anymore.

Jill had been out to the Hercules Project several times. She and Trevor had taken a few things out there and stored them in their unit. She knew the roads, knew there was only one way to reach their destination. At this rate, they might not get there in time.

Of course, there was no way of knowing just how much time they had, she reminded herself.

Since they were moving so slowly, she pulled out her phone and opened the maps app. It didn’t take long to find the map of the area where they were. She switched to satellite view and zoomed in on the Hercules Project.

What she saw made Jill catch her breath. She zoomed in more just to be sure she wasn’t imagining things.

A number of years earlier, with the advent of fracking, a natural gas boom had swept through north central Texas as companies tried to reap the bounty of a geological feature known as the Barnett Shale. That had resulted in scores of gas wells popping up all over the countryside. In order for the gas company trucks to get to those wells, roads had to be put in. Most were just primitive gravel roads, but they crisscrossed the area and didn’t show up on maps.

Very few drilling rigs were to be found these days, but the wells already put in were still producing and there were dozens of storage tanks. The companies still needed access to them, as well, so the roads were still there.

Those narrow gravel lanes showed up on satellite view, and Jill saw that one of them led from the road she was on up into the hills alongside the property occupied by the Hercules Project. It came close enough that she and Chris could reach the boundary on foot… if they could get in that way.

Jill lifted her eyes from the phone and realized she was almost to the spot where the gas company road turned off. In fact, she could see the gate that closed it off up ahead. The gate was fastened with a lock and chain, but they didn’t look like they were meant to keep anyone out who really wanted to get in.

There was only one way to find out.

As she drew even with the gate, which was set back about forty feet from the road, she turned the wheel, poised her foot to press down on the gas, and told Chris, “Hang on, kid.”

Chapter 19

“Whoa!” Chris exclaimed as the crossover leaped toward the gate. Jill floored the accelerator to get up as much speed as she could before the front end of the vehicle crashed into the wood and aluminum barrier.

The chain snapped under the impact and the gate flew open. The crossover lurched through and came to a stop as the airbags deployed.

Jill was shaken but still clearheaded. She pushed against the airbag and said, “Chris! Chris, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” came the muffled reply. “Dang, Mom!”

The engine was still running, so she pushed the airbag down until she could see again, then started up the gravel road.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked Chris.

“Yeah. I saw what you were gonna do, so I was ready when the airbag came out. It didn’t hit me very hard.”

“Good. I hated to do that, but I think this way will get us to the project quicker. I’m just glad the engine’s still running.”

There had been a chance the collision with the gate would damage the vehicle so much she wouldn’t be able to drive it. The cars on the road were barely moving, though, and her impatience had gotten the best of her.

Trevor had told her many times that she was a little too reckless and impulsive. Under the right circumstances, it could be an appealing quality, but it could also get her into trouble.

This time, the gamble had paid off… at least so far.

The little road twisted and turned through the hills with their scattered clumps of trees. It went past leveled-off clearings with three or four or more natural gas storage tanks on them. Those clearings were usually near large, muddy wallows that were the remains of pools where water from the fracking process had been collected. The gas boom had left its scars on the landscape, but right now Jill was grateful for all the drilling. Without it, this road wouldn’t be here.

“Can we get in this way, Mom?”

“I don’t know, kid, but we’re gonna try.” Jill thumbed the phone on, and said, “Call Trevor.”

All she got was “Call Failed” on the dashboard display.

“Crap.”

“That’s a bad word.”

“I could’ve said worse. We were probably doing good to stay in touch as long as we did. I’ve got to let your dad know about this road, though. He may need to take it, too.”

“I can try calling Bailey on my phone while you drive,” Chris offered.

Jill had never been a strong proponent of giving little kids phones, but everybody did it these days, and for once she was glad she had gone along with a helicopter parenting technique.

“You do that, Chris. This road is narrow and has enough holes in it, it’s probably better if I concentrate on where I’m going.”

Chris’s call to his sister wouldn’t go through, either, he reported, but he kept trying. When they had gone a half-mile or so on the gas company road, Jill spotted a high brick wall on her left, a couple of hundred yards away. That had to be the edge of the project’s property, she thought, remembering how the terrain had looked on the satellite map.

“Mom, I got her!” Chris said as Jill braked to a stop.

She reached over for the phone, took it from him, said, “Bailey, honey, give the phone to your dad.”

“Okay, Mom,” Bailey said, and Jill felt a pang of relief just hearing her daughter’s voice again. She wished she could have talked to Bailey for a moment and tried to reassure her, but there might not be time for that.

“Jill, are you and Chris still all right?” Trevor asked as soon as he had Bailey’s phone.

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“We just passed… let’s see… Verna Trail, but the traffic’s barely moving now.”

“All right, listen close. In another mile or so, you’re going to come to a gas company road on the right side of the road you’re on. It had a gate blocking it, but that gate is broken open now.”

“Did you do that?” Trevor asked quickly. He knew her pretty well, all right.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Jill, are you crazy—”

“I told you to listen to me,” she cut him off. “Take that road, follow it until you come to my car, then get out, bring all the gear if you can carry it, and hike toward the brick wall you’ll see off to the left. I’m pretty sure that’s the border of the project’s property.”

“‘Pretty sure’? Jill, our lives may be at stake here!”

“Stop that. You’re probably scaring Bailey. If you stay on the road until you come to the main gate, it’s going to take you an hour or more. You can cut that time in half by coming this way.”

“You don’t know if you can even get in where you are.”

“They’re not going to keep me out,” Jill said. “Please, Trevor, do like I asked.” She paused. “We don’t know how much time we have left.”

She hated to say that in front of Chris, but it was true.

“Oh, all right,” Trevor said. “I’ll look for the broken gate—What’s that?”

She heard the alarm in his voice. Her hand tightened on the phone. “Trev, what’s wrong?”

“The warning sirens… they had stopped, but they started again just now.”

Jill opened her door and stepped out. She could hear the sirens’ howl floating over the hills. She didn’t know what they meant, but it couldn’t be anything good.

“Hurry, Trevor,” she half-whispered. “Please.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he promised, and then the connection went dead.

Panic tried to well up inside Jill, but she forced it down. She handed the phone back to Chris and said, “Come on. We need to get moving.”

They grabbed the bags from the back of the crossover and started walking at a fast pace toward the wall. As they did, Jill thought she heard several bursts of gunfire in the distance, but that wasn’t possible, was it?

Of course it was. On a day like today, anything was possible.

Deb drove around the administration building to the bunker’s main entrance. Scores of vehicles were already parked back here on the wide grassy area to the left, and people were moving back and forth between them and the concrete building housing the stairs, as they unloaded personal belongings they had brought with them. Steady streams of worried-looking men and women came and went from the building’s open door.

“The two of you can go on in and unload your gear,” Deb told Larkin and Susan as she turned halfway around in the driver’s seat. “Don’t worry, Patrick. Graham’s got everything under control. We’re monitoring developments constantly—”

She stopped and lifted her head as the sirens in the nearby housing developments, which had gone silent, started their keening wail again.

“That can’t be good,” Susan said.

“Wait a second.” Deb picked up a walkie-talkie from the console between the seats and keyed it. “Talk to me, Andrew.”

“England’s been hit!” a man’s frenzied voice replied. “Russian missiles! At least five nuclear blasts!”

Susan moaned in horror.

“More missiles launched at our west coast from Siberia and North Korea,” the man continued on the walkie-talkie. “Our anti-missile defenses will try to stop them, and we’ve launched strikes of our own, but this is it, Deb!”

A death-like pallor washed over Deb’s face, but her voice was still composed as she asked, “What’s the time frame?”

“Not sure. If they do fire any at us, it’ll take approximately twenty minutes after launch for them to reach us.”

Alarms inside the project began to clamor, and the people unloading their vehicles started moving faster.

“So we have a twenty-minute minimum window,” Deb said.

“Yeah. I’ve advised Graham. He’s going to start withdrawing from the main gate. Deb… we’ve got an encroachment along the eastern boundary of the property.”

“What kind of encroachment?”

“A woman and a little boy, approaching on foot. Looks like they’re carrying go-bags, like they know what they’re doing.”

Larkin leaned forward sharply when he heard that. He touched Deb’s shoulder and said, “Is he watching them on surveillance cameras?”

She turned her head slightly and nodded.

“Ask him what they look like,” Larkin urged.

“Description on the two?” Deb said into the walkie-talkie.

“Woman’s mid-thirties, brown hair, little boy around ten, blond hair.”

Susan said, “That could be Jill and Chris!”

Deb told the man in the command center, “Send a screen cap of them to my phone.”

“Will do.”

Mere seconds later her phone chimed and she held up the screen so Larkin and Susan could see it. Susan said, “Oh, my God!”

“That’s them,” Larkin confirmed. “Our daughter Jill and our grandson Chris.”

“They must have taken one of the old gas company roads to get close, then tried to get here on foot,” Deb said.

“Can they… can they get over that wall?” Susan asked.

“The ground inside it is mined.”

Susan groaned in fear and desperation.

Larkin gripped the back of the seat in front of him, hard. “Can the mines be deactivated?”

“I believe so. They weren’t activated until Graham turned them on earlier, when things started to go bad. The pressure sensor in them sends a signal to the computer in the command center, and that sends a detonation signal back.”

“Turn them off!” Susan cried. “For God’s sake, turn them off!”

Deb hesitated. “I don’t know… I wish Graham was here…”

On the walkie-talkie, Andrew said, “Deb, the woman and the little boy are on the wall. The woman’s about to jump down inside… There she goes!”

Chapter 20

Jill’s feet hit the ground. She stumbled a little as she nearly lost her balance. She threw out her arms and caught herself.

There was a little clump of cactus close by. Wouldn’t want to fall on that.

She turned back to the wall and said, “Okay, Chris, toss the bags down to me, one at a time.” She had left the bags balanced up there until she was down on the inside of the wall.

Chris dropped the bags to her. She caught them and set them aside, then said, “All right, you can turn around and slide off of there. Hang by your hands and then drop. I’ll catch you.”

“Are you sure, Mom?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve never dropped you, have I?”

“Dad said you did once when I was a baby.”

“That’s because you were as slippery as a little eel. Now come on.” She didn’t like the way those sirens had gone off again, and now some alarms inside the Hercules Project had added their clangor to the racket.

Looking pretty dubious about the whole thing, Chris turned around, slid backward off the thick wall, and hung for a second before letting go. The wall was only eight feet tall, so he didn’t have far to fall before he landed in Jill’s arms. She was braced for his weight, but she still had to take a quick step backward to compensate for it.

From somewhere not far off, she heard what sounded like a car horn honking. She turned and saw that it wasn’t a car but rather a Jeep, bouncing as it came across country toward them.

Was that…? Yes! Graham Moultrie’s redheaded wife Deb was driving, but Jill’s mom was in the passenger seat. And peering anxiously between the two women from the rear seat was her dad. His rugged face was as drawn and haggard as Jill remembered ever seeing it.

“Grab one of the bags and come on,” she told Chris. “They’ve come to meet us for some reason.”

The Jeep’s tires threw up a small cloud of dust as it came to a stop. Susan was out of the vehicle in a flash, throwing her arms around both Jill and Chris, pulling them against her.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Susan said. “That was so close.”

“Close?” Jill repeated. “What do you mean?”

Larkin had gotten out of the Jeep and come over to stand next to them. He put a hand on Jill’s shoulder and said, “This area is mined. They have electronic detonators, so the project’s command center was able to turn them off, but not before you jumped down from that fence. You were just lucky enough not to land on one.”

Jill looked at the ground and felt like her stomach had dropped all the way to her feet. “Mines?” she said, her voice weak.

“Yeah.” Larkin squeezed her shoulder. “But it’s safe now… until they’re activated again.”

“That’s right,” Deb said from the Jeep. “So we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t afford to leave the perimeter unprotected for long.”

“But I told Trevor and Bailey to come in this way,” Jill protested. “They never would have made it to the gate in time by staying on the road.” She saw the look on her dad’s face and knew there was something else she wasn’t aware of, something bad. “What is it?”

“The Russians have nuked England,” he said. “And there are missiles from them and the North Koreans targeting the west coast right now. It looks like they may try to march those missiles right across the country.”

“You mean right across us,” Jill said. Her insides felt more hollow than ever.

“Yeah. We’ll try to knock them down with anti-missile defenses, of course—”

“But some of them will get through.”

Larkin sighed. “More than likely.”

An explosion sounded not too far off, making all five of them jump. It wasn’t a nuclear blast, though. Deb looked toward the main road and said, “That was one of the mines along the front of the property. Someone made it over the electrified fence, although I don’t see how. We’ve got to go, so the command center can turn these mines back on.”

Susan said, “You mean someone died over there, just because they were trying to get to safety.”

“There’s nothing right or fair about it,” Larkin told her. “But that’s just the way things are. If Graham let in all those people out there, then we’d all die. It’s that simple.”

Susan caught her bottom lip between her teeth. A couple of tears rolled down her cheeks. “I know,” she said. “It’s just—”

“I’m telling command to activate the mines,” Deb said as she held up the walkie-talkie. “Come on !”

Larkin pushed Jill and Susan toward the Jeep. “You girls get out of here,” he said. “Take Chris with you. Deb, how far back does the mined zone extend?”

“It’s fifty yards wide along the entire perimeter.”

Susan clutched at Larkin’s sleeve. “Patrick, what are you going to do?”

Larkin didn’t answer her directly. Instead he told Deb, “Tell command to reactivate the mines, then leave the walkie-talkie with me while you take my family back to the bunker. I’ll stay here and wait for Trevor and Bailey. When they show up, I’ll call command and they can turn off the mines again until they get over the wall.”

Deb looked skeptical. She said, “I don’t know if Graham will approve that…”

“You’ve got to give the rest of my family a chance to get in,” Larkin argued.

“What if people who aren’t residents here try to come over the wall?”

Larkin went to the jeep and picked up his AR-15 from the back of it. “I’ll stop them,” he said.

Susan stared at him in horror.

Jill was more pragmatic. She took her mother’s arm and urged her into the Jeep. “Come on, Mom,” she said. “We need to get inside while we still can.” She had to swallow hard. She was heading for shelter without knowing if her husband and daughter were going to survive. But they were beyond her help now. Their fates were in the hands of God… and Jill’s father.

They had to make it.

Larkin watched the Jeep jolt off toward the buildings and the entrance to the underground bunker. The worry crossed his mind that he might never see his wife, daughter, and grandson again, but the knowledge that they had a good chance of survival bolstered his spirits some.

Not many had even that much of a chance, he thought as he looked around the hills. He was up just high enough to catch a glimpse of the skyscrapers in downtown Fort Worth poking up from the southeastern horizon, about ten miles away. It was mid-afternoon, and by nightfall the city might be a flattened, smoking, radioactive ruin. These hills could be swept clean of vegetation, all of it burned away by the blast wave. Radioactive fire would consume everything above ground, leaving only ash. Not even memories, because no one would be alive to have them.

From where he was, he could see part of the old gas company road Trevor would have to use to get here. He forced his attention onto that short stretch and kept it there, praying he would see his son-in-law’s car come bumping along the gravel lane. Trevor was a smart guy. He would be able to find the road…

The walkie-talkie Deb had left him crackled. She said his name.

“I’m here,” Larkin replied as he keyed the mike.

“Patrick… there are reports that missiles aimed at Texas have been detected in the upper atmosphere. You have to get back here now.”

“Trevor and Bailey aren’t here yet.”

“The bunker will be sealed in fifteen minutes or less. There’s no more time.”

Larkin felt sick, but Deb was right: there was no time for that. He said, “Are Susan, Jill, and Chris safe?”

“They’re all down here, and they won’t be allowed to leave.”

“Good. I’m staying put for a while longer.”

“Patrick—”

“Deb, tell Graham I really appreciate what the two of you have done. And if things don’t work out, tell my family I love them.”

“Patrick, you need to—”

A flicker of movement from the road caught Larkin’s eye. He interrupted Deb again, saying, “Wait a minute! I think I see—Yeah! That’s Trevor’s car. Tell command to deactivate the mines.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I recognize the car. Please, Deb.”

For a moment, there was silence on the walkie-talkie, broken only by the faint crackle. Then Deb said, “The mines are deactivated. But the time is very short, Patrick.”

“Got it. I’ll let you know when we’re clear.”

“No need. Surveillance cameras, remember? Just get out of there and back here as quickly as you can.”

“Will do.” Larkin turned the walkie-talkie off. He didn’t need any more distractions now.

He got them anyway, as more movement caught his attention. Trevor’s car was out of sight from his position by now, but he could still see that other stretch of road.

And several vehicles had just roared along it, obviously following Trevor, no doubt in the hope that he knew where he was going and that there was some sort of sanctuary at the other end of the gravel road.

Larkin’s heart sank even more. For those people, it was a false hope. They were doomed and didn’t know it yet. All along, Larkin had tried to keep his emotions hardened against what might be coming. Now that it was actually on the way, that was even more difficult.

Maybe… maybe it would be better to stay out here and die along with everybody else. What kind of world was it going to be for the survivors? Empty, devastated, depopulated. Humankind had never dealt with the sort of disaster this promised to be.

Not since the last extinction event, anyway.

But that was why the success of the Hercules Project and other, similar projects was so important. So that this wouldn’t be an extinction event. So that the torch of humanity on Earth wouldn’t be extinguished. Even if only pockets of people survived here and there, life would continue and one day the world would be fit for living again. Education, history, some semblance of culture could be preserved. It was all a slim chance, of course… but better than no chance at all.

Larkin heard car doors slam not too far off and ran toward the wall. “Trevor!” he shouted. “Trev, over here!”

“Patrick?”

The sound of his son-in-law’s voice made a surge of relief go through Larkin. “This way!” he called. “Throw your bags over the wall!”

The heavy canvas bags sailed over the rock wall. Trevor said, “I’ll boost Bailey up! Can you catch her on that side?”

“Yeah. Come on, there’s not much time!”

Larkin leaned the rifle against the wall as he saw his granddaughter’s head appear at the top of it. Bailey scrambled onto the top of the wall, which was about a foot wide, and balanced there precariously with a frightened expression on her face.

“Granddad!” she said when she saw Larkin.

“Turn around, slide off, and drop, honey,” he told her. “I’ll catch you.”

She swallowed, nodded, and followed his orders. Her weight made him stagger a little as he caught her, and he couldn’t help but think about the mines under his feet. He hoped whoever was in charge of activating and deactivating them back in the command center was on the ball.

Trevor climbed onto the fence, swung a leg over, and dropped, falling to his knees as he landed. He was up in a hurry, though, grabbing both bags.

Larkin set Bailey on the ground, grabbed the rifle with his right hand, and took Bailey’s right hand with his left. “Let’s go,” he said.

Trevor said, “Patrick, has something else happened?”

Larkin looked at his son-in-law and said, “We’ve got less than fifteen minutes.”

Trevor practically gulped. “Come on, Bailey.”

They had just turned away from the fence when Larkin heard a man shout, “Hey, over here! That’s where they went.”

“Go!” Larkin said as he urged the other two toward the bunker. “Bailey, stay with your dad! Don’t slow down! Both of you keep moving!”

“Patrick, what are you—” Trevor began.

“Just get underground,” Larkin said, his jaw tight with strain. He turned around and faced toward the fence again. He gripped the AR-15 in both hands now.

He heard Trevor and Bailey running away and was glad of that much, anyway. More shouts came from the other side of the fence as Larkin backed away from it. He stopped when he was certain the distance was more than fifty yards.

A man’s head appeared suddenly at the top of the fence. He pulled himself up and rolled onto the narrow perch.

“Go back!” Larkin shouted at him. “It’s not safe!”

That was just about the stupidest thing he could have said, he realized, although it was certainly true.

There was very little safety to be had in the world today. Not enough for all its billions.

The man on the fence ignored him and turned his head to shout, “There’s some sort of compound in here. Hurry!”

Larkin lifted the rifle to his shoulder. The man glanced at him but in his terror didn’t seem to comprehend the threat. Larkin swallowed. Already, Moultrie and his security force had killed people today in order to protect the Hercules Project. It didn’t matter that they had been fellow Americans. As of today, that concept didn’t really exist anymore. Once the missiles and the bombers were in the air, there was only us and them.

And them included not only the Russians and the North Koreans but everyone who wasn’t a resident of the Hercules Project.

Larkin’s finger was about to take up the slack on the trigger when the man on the fence shouted to whoever was on the other side, “Helen, bring the kids! Now!”

Larkin couldn’t shoot.

But as the man swung his legs over the fence and poised to drop, he shouted, “No, don’t—”

The man leaped.

Chapter 21

His feet hit the ground and he disappeared in a blinding flash of flame and noise. Larkin flinched away from the blast as rocks and dirt clods sprayed through the air. Other things might be spraying, too, but he didn’t want to think about that. A cloud of smoke and dust billowed up from the site of the explosion, hiding the grisly results.

Larkin turned and raced after Trevor and Bailey. There was nothing more he could do here. He hoped the mine going off would discourage anyone else from trying to climb over the fence, but it didn’t really matter, he supposed. Die in an explosion now, die in an explosion in ten or twelve minutes, what was the difference?

But all the missiles might not make it through, he reminded himself as he ran. Some of them undoubtedly would. The United States would be changed drastically and forever. But would it be wiped out? Would the U.S. and Russia keep lobbing nuclear death at each other until everything was gone?

Larkin had no way of knowing. None of them did. All they could do was try to save what they could. Save who they could.

He was aware of the seconds ticking by with each running stride he took. He couldn’t help but glance at the sky, although he knew it was unlikely he would actually be able to see doom descending toward him. If it was all over for him, he wouldn’t know it when the time came, unless there was a split second of awareness, the tiniest shaved fraction of time when he felt his atoms being blown apart…

There was the concrete building that housed the bunker entrance. The door was still open, with armed men standing around it. Graham Moultrie was one of them. He waved Larkin on. Larkin wasn’t surprised to see Moultrie. He figured the man intended to be the last one in, the one to close the door on whatever happened in the outside world.

More explosions sounded from around the property. More mines going off as fear-crazed people scrambled over walls and fences and tried to find shelter from the storm, somewhere, anywhere. Breathing hard, Larkin pounded up to the small group at the entrance. Moultrie gripped his arm and said, “Glad you made it, Patrick.”

“My son-in-law… and granddaughter…?”

“Inside with the rest of your family.” Moultrie summoned up a grim smile. “Go and join them. Everybody’s gathering on the lower level right now.”

Larkin managed to nod. He hesitated long enough to say, “You don’t need… more help here?”

“We’re all right. Go on, Patrick. You made sure they had a place to come, and they all got here. You should be proud.”

“The missiles?”

“Some have been knocked down or blown out of the sky. But more than half look like they’ll get through.” Moultrie’s face was bleak as he added, “I’m giving it two more minutes, then we’re buttoning up tight here.”

Larkin nodded. A few people were still trying to get things out of their vehicles and carry them into the project, but if they had any sense they wouldn’t make any more trips out of the building.

Carrying the rifle, Larkin went into the building and started down the steps. Several people were in front of him, and others followed. When he reached the landing where the stairs turned back, he paused for a second to look back up at the entrance with the afternoon sun shining through it.

How long would it be, he wondered, before he saw sunlight again?

Would he ever? Would anyone inside the Hercules Project?

Larkin didn’t know the answer. He took a deep breath and kept going down.

A lot of people were in the lower bunker, but the cavernous space was so large it didn’t seem particularly crowded. The noise level was pretty high, though, since plenty of them seemed to be talking at once. Once Larkin had been passed through the double blast doors, including a fingerprint scan to confirm his identity, he searched for his family, his size allowing him to move through the press of people without much trouble.

A hand came out of the crowd and clasped his arm. Larkin looked over and saw Adam Threadgill standing there. Threadgill’s wife Luisa was with him, and beyond them Larkin saw their daughter Sophie and her husband Jack Kaufman.

“Patrick!” Threadgill threw his arms around Larkin and pounded him on the back with one hand. “You made it.”

Larkin said, “Yeah, and I’ve got you to thank for telling me about this place, buddy. I might not have known about it otherwise, and we’d still be… up there.”

Threadgill’s face grew solemn. “Yeah. Your family is all here, safe and sound?”

“They’re somewhere in this crowd, all right.” Larkin put his arm around Luisa’s shoulders and gave her a quick hug, then reached past her to hug Sophie and shake hands with Jack. “Good to see you, son.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jack said. He looked pale and scared, but so did just about everybody else down here. There was a definite undercurrent of fear to the hubbub.

“You haven’t seen Susan, have you?” Larkin asked Threadgill.

The other former Marine shook his head and said, “No, not so far. But if you’re sure she’s down here…”

“I am, but I want to see her with my own eyes, and Jill and Trev and the kids, too.”

Threadgill nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“I’ll see you later,” Larkin told them. He resumed his search.

Before he found his family, he spotted another familiar face, one he didn’t really expect to see down here. He made his way over to the man and woman who stood near one of the walls, talking to each other. The woman saw him coming and frowned.

“Jim, Beth,” Larkin greeted the Huddlestons as he came up to them. “I, uh, didn’t know you were going to be here.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he realized how lame they sounded. He might as well have said, I figured you’d get blown to Kingdom Come.

“We almost weren’t,” Jim Huddleston said. “Got through the gate at the last minute.”

“Even then I thought some of those goons were going to shoot us,” Beth said. “Give a bunch of rednecks guns and some power, and it’s a bad situation.”

Larkin ignored that. He was sort of a redneck himself, in many ways, but he knew what Beth was like. Instead he clapped a hand on Huddleston’s shoulder and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Jim.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Beth said before her husband could respond. “Jim got me all spooked with his talk about nuclear war, but now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’m sure it’s not going to happen. Why, the President is much too smart to ever allow things to get to that point.”

“Then… you haven’t heard?” Larkin said.

“Heard what?”

“The Russians hit England with at least five nukes. They and the North Koreans launched missiles aimed at our west coast.” Larkin thought about how much time had passed. “Some of them have probably struck by now, unless we were able to stop all of them. And the odds of that are pretty slim, as gutted as our defenses have gotten over the past few years.”

Beth’s mouth tightened. “I don’t believe that. You’re just using that as an excuse to complain because your side didn’t win the last election.”

Huddleston said, “Beth, I don’t think Patrick would make up something like that just to score political points.”

“Of course he would. Those people will stop at nothing.”

The longer this conversation went on, the more difficult it was going to be to remain civil, Larkin realized. And having a partisan political argument under these circumstances was just asinine. After today, there was a good chance there wouldn’t be any more political parties. Not for a long, long time, if ever.

“I need to find my family, so I’m going to keep looking for them,” he told Huddleston.

“Thanks again, Patrick.”

Beth didn’t look grateful, just pissed. Larkin was glad he wasn’t going to have to deal with her.

His nervousness grew as he continued searching for his family. Moultrie and Deb had assured him they were safe for the moment, but like he had told Huddleston, he wouldn’t relax until he saw them for himself.

Of course, relax was a relative term. None of them could be absolutely certain that the Hercules Project was as safe as Graham Moultrie claimed it was until it was tested. It might turn out that their doom was only postponed briefly. One of those missiles might land right on top of them. Not even this bunker could withstand being ground zero, Larkin thought. But if the end came, he wanted to be with his family when it did.

He still had the rifle in his right hand. Someone took hold of his left. He looked around and then down and saw his grandson there, smiling up at him.

“Granddad,” Chris said. “We’re over there.”

He pointed, and Larkin saw Susan, Jill, Trevor, and Bailey about twenty feet away. His heart slugged like a jackhammer for a couple of seconds as his wife smiled at him. He didn’t trust himself to speak as emotion swept through him.

Then he grinned down at Chris and said, “How’re you doin’, kid?”

“I’m all right. Scared, but… you know. There are a lot of scary things in the world, Mom says. You have to live in it anyway.”

“Smart girl, your mom. I taught her everything she knows.”

“That’s what Grandma says. That she taught Mom everything she knows, I mean.”

“We can hash that out some other time. Right now, let’s just go see ’em.”

Susan hugged him as he came up to them, then so did Jill and Bailey. Larkin set the rifle on one of the bunks and returned the hugs. The bunks would be occupied later, but for now none of the residents who’d be staying here had claimed a place.

Trevor patted Larkin on the shoulder, an awkward gesture but one Larkin appreciated anyway. The younger man said, “Thanks for helping us out there, Patrick. We couldn’t have gotten in here safely if not for you. I guess that’s true in more ways than one.”

“We’re here, that’s all that matters.”

“Have you heard anything?” Jill asked. “I mean, about what’s going on?”

Larkin knew what she meant. Nobody had anything else on their mind today. He shook his head and said, “No, but by now Moultrie’s got the place shut up completely. Maybe he’ll make some kind of announcement soon.”

“All those people out there…” Susan said.

Larkin put his arm around her shoulder again and drew her against him. “If there was a way to save all of them, we would,” he said. “All we can do is save what we can.”

She nodded in understanding, but he saw the sheen of tears on her face again. A lot of people down here were crying, he saw. How could they help it? The world they had known all their lives was dying, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

There were little clusters of hilarity here and there, people laughing and joking, celebrating because they had made it into this refuge and at least had a chance to live through the disaster. Those happy notes didn’t really ring true, though, Larkin thought. It was easy to be relieved that you might live, harder to act as if the deaths of billions of people didn’t bother you.

An abrupt silence fell as Graham Moultrie’s voice came from loudspeakers mounted on the walls of the bunker.

“Welcome to the Hercules Project. All entrances are now closed and securely sealed. No matter what happens from here on out, we are all in this together. We are, potentially, the citizens of a new world. The future is impossible to predict, but one thing we do know is that it will be very, very different from the lives that all of us have known until today.”

Jill moved up on Larkin’s other side and pressed her shoulder against his. One hand reached out and clasped Trevor’s hand. Her other hand rested on Bailey’s shoulder as the girl stood in front of her, looking up at the speakers. Trevor had his free hand on Chris’s shoulder, holding the boy against him.

“I know all of you are anxious for news. Here in the command center, we’ve been monitoring all the reports we can from around the world, via the Internet. I will not lie to you: the situation is grave. Within the past half hour, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have all been hit by nuclear missiles launched from Russian and North Korean naval vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Destruction is widespread, and the loss of human life is incalculable.”

Gasps and moans came from the crowd assembled in the bunker. Larkin’s arm tightened around Susan’s shoulders.

“This follows Russian attacks using high-level bombers as well as missiles on England, France, and Germany. No word has come from any of those countries in the past hour. Total destruction is feared. In addition, Iranian missiles carrying low-yield nuclear warheads have landed in Israel and Turkey, and Iran is now carrying out conventional bombing and missile attacks against those countries. American vessels in the Persian Gulf have attacked Iran but so far have been unable to stop their assault.

“The Pentagon reports that retaliatory strikes by U.S. naval and air forces are being carried out against Russia and North Korea. The President has urged calm from the citizens of this country who have not yet come under attack and has pledged that the United States will be firm and resolute in its opposition to such wanton aggression. He also said that this is not the end of the world.”

Larkin was willing to bet that no one down here believed that, and probably no one anywhere else did, either. The President might be clinging to some hope that it would turn out to be true… otherwise he wouldn’t have anything left to be president of.

Moultrie went on, “I want to express my deep appreciation to each and every one of you for placing your faith in the Hercules Project. You have my word that I will do everything in my power to make sure we all remain safe in these very trying times. As long as there is news to report, we’ll keep you informed.”

Larkin knew what he meant by that. Sooner or later, the Internet would go dark and quiet. The infrastructure to support it would be gone. Then, it would be the same as living underneath a dead world, because they would have no way of knowing what was going on above them.

Or else silence would reign because the rest of the world actually was dead. That possibility couldn’t be discounted, either.

The concrete floor suddenly shuddered under Larkin’s feet, the lights flickered, and startled screams filled the bunker. Susan clutched Larkin and said, “Patrick, was that…”

“That was a hit,” Larkin said. “Close.”

Chapter 22

The lights didn’t go out, and after a moment the screaming trailed off, but the hubbub was louder and people milled around more. Evidently their growing fear drove them to move, even though those movements were aimless for the most part.

Graham Moultrie’s voice came back on the speakers. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that a missile armed with a nuclear warhead has struck between Fort Worth and Dallas. We’re picking up that news from Internet postings elsewhere in the country, via underground cable from servers in West Texas that are still online. The electromagnetic pulse from that explosion has knocked all technology in this area off-line. We have no reports regarding casualties or destruction at this time, but it’s safe to assume that both are catastrophic. Whenever we have new information, we’ll announce it right away. Until then… remain calm. Pray for this country. For the world.”

The speakers went off with an audible click.

Susan shuddered against Larkin. “All those people…” she breathed.

He tightened his arm around her shoulders. “I know.”

Nearby, a woman sank onto one of the bunks and began to sob. Larkin didn’t know if she had friends or family in the blast area or if she was just crying for the loss of life in general, and he supposed it didn’t matter. All around the giant, cavernous chamber, more sobs began to be heard. Sorrow thickened in the air like a visible fog.

Bailey was crying, too, although she did it quietly, the tears trickling down her cheeks in silence. Chris sniffled but was trying to be brave. Larkin felt the dampness in his own eyes. He was no more immune to what was happening than his grandchildren were.

Not far away, a man laughed and said, “Biggest bomb to hit Arlington since the Dallas Cowboys.”

Another man grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him around, demanding, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Get your hand off me! We’re safe, aren’t we? Don’t expect me to feel sorry for all those losers out there!”

“My brother lives in Grand Prairie!” a third man yelled.

“Not anymore, I’ll bet!”

Larkin listened to the interchange and muttered, “Stupid…”

The third man said, “You son of a bitch!” and threw a punch.

That was all it took. A wild melee erupted in that part of the chamber as men slugged and cursed at each other. Women and kids weren’t immune from the madness fueled by fear and grief. Larkin herded his family away from the brawl in case it spread in their direction.

The chaos didn’t last long. Members of Moultrie’s security force showed up to put a stop to the fighting. They wore red vests and looked like guys who might have been working in a discount store, but they were good at their job, getting between combatants and grabbing the ones they had to in order to settle them down. Within a few minutes, the fight was over.

Moultrie wanted him to be part of that force, Larkin mused. That was probably a good idea. There would be plenty of trouble down here to take care of. That was just human nature. You couldn’t put this many people together in a limited amount of space and not expect problems.

He was glad, though, that he didn’t have to step in today. He wanted to be with his family as much as he could, this first day of their self-imposed exile.

A woman pushed through the crowd, calling, “Nelson! Nelson! Are you here? Nelson!” Her voice held a frantic, almost hysterical edge. She came up to Larkin and grabbed his sleeve. “Have you seen my husband? His name is Nelson Ruskin.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t know him,” Larkin said. “I wouldn’t know if he’s here or not.”

“I have to find him,” she said with painfully obvious desperation. “He’s supposed to be here. We made plans… we had an arrangement… If it looked like anything was going to happen, we were both supposed to head out here as quickly as we could…”

“There are a lot of people here,” Susan said. Larkin could tell she was trying to be as gentle with the woman as she could. “I’m sure you just haven’t found each other yet. He’s probably looking for you, too.”

The woman didn’t seem to hear. She turned away and pushed into the crowd again, crying, “Nelson!”

“That poor woman,” Susan said quietly as the press of people swallowed the searching woman. “What if her husband didn’t make it?”

“Everyone’s fingerprints were scanned as we came in,” Larkin said. “We’ll know soon enough who got here in time and who didn’t.”

He looked around the big room. He was pretty good at estimating crowds, and he would have said there were almost four hundred people here… but not quite. That meant some of the residents of the Hercules Project hadn’t arrived before Moultrie locked everything up. They’d been left outside to wait for whatever fate had in store for them.

So far he hadn’t felt the vibrations from any more nuclear explosions. American anti-missile defenses had been able to take out some of the attackers. Maybe the missile that had fallen between Fort Worth and Dallas would be the only one to strike the area. That would give some hope, however slight, for survivors aboveground, although the fallout and residual radiation might render the entire Metroplex virtually unlivable for years.

The speakers came on again and hummed for a second before Graham Moultrie said, “We have more news. Multiple missiles armed with nuclear warheads have struck San Antonio and Houston here in Texas, as well as Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. Also, tactical nuclear devices have been detonated in Washington, D. C., New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Miami. It’s thought that these devices were planted and set off by terrorists affiliated with ISIS and other Islamic groups. The timing and the planning required to coordinate such attacks indicates that the terrorists were working with Russia and North Korea, and that a concentrated effort is underway to destroy the United States. There are reports that our counterattacks have caused widespread devastation in those countries. In addition, there have been nuclear exchanges between Israel and Iran, and between Pakistan and India.”

Everyone in the now hushed bunker heard Moultrie draw in a deep breath. When he resumed, the strain that they were all feeling was evident in his voice.

“The entire world is at war. There can be no doubt about that. The lines of communication are becoming more spotty with each passing minute. All conventional broadcasting is off the air, likely as the result of nuclear airbursts and the ensuing EMPs. Wireless networks are down as well. Satellite Internet connections are failing, doubtless due to infrastructure damage, but the fact that we’ve been able to maintain a connection here at the Hercules Project tells us that our aboveground equipment is still functioning. There are also operators sending on old-fashioned ham radio rigs that don’t depend on computers, and we have radios in the control center to pick up those transmissions as well. But I won’t lie to you, my friends.

“The world is going dark and quiet even as I speak to you now. On the eve of World War I, a British government official said, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ The first part of that statement is true now for our entire planet. But I refuse to believe we shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes. Certainly, some of us will not. But as human beings, we cannot give up hope. That is why each and every one of us is here: because we still have hope that our world has a future. This is not the end, my friends. The Hercules Project is the beginning.”

The speakers clicked off again.

“Do you believe him?” Susan asked as she huddled against Larkin. “Do you think he’s right about there still being a future?”

“What other choice do I have?” he said.

The human mind can cope with only so much tragedy and trauma before retreating into a stunned state. So it was in the vast underground bunker as people began to sit down and talk quietly as they waited to see what was going to happen. There were still some sobs, but the terrified screams and angry shouts had subsided.

Susan, Jill, and the kids sat on one of the bunks while Larkin and Trevor stood nearby. Larkin saw the way his son-in-law kept swallowing hard and wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. He kept his voice down as he asked, “You’re thinking about your folks, aren’t you?”

Trevor swallowed again and said, “You know, I tried to get them to move up here so they’d be closer. And then, when the deal with this place came up, I tried again. I wanted them to invest in it. But they didn’t want to leave their home. They’d been there for forty years.”

“Can’t blame them for feeling that way,” Larkin said. “And listen, when you stop and think about it, Midland is a long way from where any of the bombs went off. Given the prevailing winds, the fallout might not even be too bad where they are. They can make it through, and when things calm down—”

“They’re in their seventies, and the electromagnetic pulses have wiped out technology,” Trevor interrupted. “How long do you think they’re going to survive once everything goes back to a nineteenth-century level?”

“People in the nineteenth century did okay.”

“Did they really? Life expectancy was a lot shorter then. Almost any little thing can kill you without modern medical attention. Besides, people back then didn’t know any different. People today aren’t equipped, either mentally or physically, to live under those conditions.”

Larkin knew Trevor was right about that. “Maybe so,” he said, “but I don’t think you should give up hoping that they’ll be all right.”

“I’m not going to. I’m just not sure it’s going to do any good.”

Larkin didn’t know what to say in response to that, but he was saved from having to say anything by a sudden commotion over near the stairs that led down from the upper level.

At first Larkin thought another fight had broken out, but then he spotted a group of people coming down the stairs, led by Graham and Deb Moultrie, who were holding hands. Several red-vested members of the security force followed them.

Moultrie stopped while he was still several steps from the bottom, so he could look out over the crowd. All over the bunker, people moved in his direction, eager to find out what had brought him down here and hear anything he had to say. He lifted a bullhorn to his mouth and his amplified voice filled the chamber.

“Please, gather around, my friends. I have more news, but I wanted to tell you face-to-face.”

“Is it over?” a man yelled. “Will there be any more bombs?”

“I can’t tell you for sure,” Moultrie replied, “but I believe the attacks have ended. The reason for my uncertainty is that we’ve lost all communication with the surface.”

Larkin glanced up. The surface was less than a hundred and fifty feet above their heads, but right now it might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

“All Internet and wireless networks are off-line,” Moultrie continued through the bullhorn. “We have no satellite or cable connections, and the ham-radio frequencies have gone silent as well. Our hope is that some of those ham operators will resume broadcasting at some point, so we’ll have some idea what’s going on in the world, but until then all we can do is wait.”

“What about your instruments on the surface?” a man asked, raising his voice to be heard.

“They’re functioning. Approximately half an hour ago, immediately following the detonation of the warhead in the Arlington area, thermal sensors detected a temperature spike to just under five hundred degrees lasting fifteen seconds. According to our calculations, our location here should have been on the outer edge of the thermal blast radius. We also detected wind speeds in excess of two hundred miles per hour from the concussion blast.”

Susan moaned softly as she stood next to Larkin. She knew as well as Larkin did that nothing living could withstand a heat wave like that. Not caught in the open, anyway. People hiding in basements or storm cellars might have lived through such a fiery burst.

But that didn’t mean they were safe, because as Moultrie went on, “Our sensors have also picked up extremely high levels of radiation, and while the winds and the heat have subsided, the radiation has not. We’re shielded from the radiation here—our internal sensors continually monitor the levels, and we’re perfectly safe—but anyone on the surface who somehow survived the initial blast will suffer from radiation burns and poisoning that will prove fatal, probably sooner rather than later.”

“You’re saying we’re the only people left alive!” a woman cried out in a strident voice.

Moultrie shook his head. “No. I’m saying that we can be relatively sure of what happened in this area, but we don’t know what’s happened elsewhere, and unless and until we get word from outside, we won’t know anything more. I firmly believe that in the short term, there will be survivors from this attack. But with the widespread death and destruction, the collapse of civilization as we know it, the inevitable rise of disease, and the lingering threat of radiation… over time, we may well be the last ones left in this part of the world.”

People began to cry again.

“I want to assure you that the Hercules Project is secure,” Moultrie continued. “All of our equipment is functioning perfectly, just as we designed and intended. We will remain down here, safe and together, until our instruments indicate that it’s safe to begin exploring the surface. When the time comes, that will be done on a very limited basis until we can be absolutely certain what the situation is. I will not do anything—anything!—to risk the security of the project until I’m sure that—”

A woman lunged from the crowd and started up the stairs, hands held like claws and reaching out toward Moultrie as she screamed at Moultrie, “Murderer! Murderer! You left Nelson out there to die!”

Chapter 23

Larkin recognized the woman as the one who had come up to him earlier looking for her husband. Ruskin, that was her name, he recalled. It was obvious she hadn’t found Nelson, or else she wouldn’t have attacked Moultrie.

As the woman charged him, Moultrie moved quickly and protectively to put Deb behind him, even though the woman’s anger was directed at him. He lifted the arm holding the bullhorn to protect his face from Mrs. Ruskin’s hooked fingers, but he just shielded himself instead of striking back as she rammed into him and knocked him back against Deb.

By then, a couple members of the security force had moved around Moultrie. They sprang to his defense. Each grabbed one of Mrs. Ruskin’s arms and pulled her away from Moultrie.

“Don’t hurt her!” he shouted.

Mrs. Ruskin started screaming curses. Moultrie jerked his head toward the stairs and went on to his security men, “Take her up to my office. Somebody stay with her to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

The woman tried to pull away from the men in the red vests, but they had good grips on her. Moultrie and Deb moved over to the edge of the stairs to give them room as they forced Mrs. Ruskin up the steps. The assembled residents of the Hercules Project looked on in mingled shock and horror. The security men reached the landing and went around it, out of sight. Everyone could still hear Mrs. Ruskin’s screamed oaths, though. The staircase muffled them, and after a moment they went away.

Moultrie took a deep breath and heaved a weary sigh. “This is a terrible thing,” he said. He wasn’t using the bullhorn now, but the bunker was so hushed and quiet that his voice carried to everyone. “You can’t blame the poor woman. I certainly don’t.”

A man near the front of the crowd asked, “Was she right?”

Moultrie smiled, but there was no humor in the expression. It was more like a death’s-head grimace. He said, “Do you mean about me being a murderer? I’d like to think she wasn’t.”

“But her husband didn’t make it?”

Instead of answering directly, Moultrie turned to Deb and held out his free hand. She gave him a sheet of paper. He faced the crowd again and lifted the bullhorn.

“As you know, we have the fingerprints of all the project’s residents in our files. We’ve been matching them against those of the people who entered the project today, so it’s a simple matter to isolate the ones who are… unaccounted for.”

“Dead, you mean,” a woman said.

“Not necessarily. As I mentioned earlier, we’re far enough from Ground Zero that it’s possible there were survivors.”

“But if the bomb didn’t kill them, the aftereffects will,” a man spoke up. “That’s what you said.”

“It’s all speculation at this point,” Moultrie said. “We don’t know what the long-term result will be.” He swallowed hard. Watching from the crowd, Larkin could tell that Moultrie was almost overcome by emotion. Moultrie lifted the paper and went on, “These are the people who were not able to be with us today. David Ahearne. Melissa Ahearne. Jacob Ahearne. Tamara Bradley. Matthew Beckerman. Teresa Beckerman. John Eldridge. Samantha Eldridge. Peyton Harwell…”

He continued reading names, among them Nelson Ruskin. For the most part there was no reaction from the stunned crowd, but at some of the names, someone gasped or cried out, and sobs began to be heard, grim counterpoints to the list Moultrie was giving them.

Finally, Moultrie lowered the paper and said, “That’s all. Thirty-three of our residents are unaccounted for. The current population of the Hercules Project is three hundred and seventy-four. Three-hundred and seventy-four souls… and God bless each and every one of us.” His nostrils flared as he drew in another deep breath. “Right now, my friends, and until we know differently… we are the United States of America.”

Moultrie and Deb went back up to the command center. Larkin assumed that’s where they were headed, anyway. A short time later, Deb’s voice came over the loudspeakers announcing that everyone should begin moving to their assigned areas. That was good, Larkin thought, because it gave everybody something to do. They needed something to occupy their minds and their energy, instead of just sitting around thinking about what had happened. He had seen the same thing in combat. All hell could be breaking loose, but if somebody had a job to do—and it had been drummed into them that they should do it, no matter what the circumstances—they were a lot more likely to stay alive and prevail against the enemy… whoever that enemy happened to be.

At this point, the enemy wasn’t really Russia or North Korea anymore. They had shot their bolt, done the worst they could. The main enemy of the residents of the Hercules Project was fear, ably abetted by grief, resentment, and anger.

Susan said to Jill and Trevor, “Let’s find your place first. Your father and I have everything ready in our apartment.”

“I could have used some more time to move things into our quarters,” Jill said with a sigh. “But I suppose we were lucky to have as much time as we did.”

That comment made Larkin think of the old saying about how the lucky ones in a nuclear war would be the ones killed outright.

He hoped that wouldn’t turn out to be true in real life.

Several sets of stairs led from the lower bunker to the main hallways above. People began trooping up the steps, mostly couples and families. The ones who had chosen to live in the barracks-like lower bunker were overwhelmingly single. Space couldn’t be wasted. Anyone who was single but wanted to live in one of the main corridors or a missile silo apartment had to accept that they would have roommates.

The H-shaped main corridors ran roughly east and west. The quarters that Jill and Trevor would be sharing with Bailey and Chris were in the southern corridor, designated Corridor One. The northern corridor was Corridor Two. The four silos were called Silos A, B, C, and D, starting with the one at the western end of Corridor One and running clockwise. The door of the Sinclairs’ quarters was labeled 1A09, which meant it was actually the fifth door on the left, going toward Silo A, directly across the broad hallway from 1A10.

Down at the end of the corridor were wide double doors that opened into a reception area for Silo A. Apartment 1 in Silo A was located at this level, with four apartments underneath it, accessible by both elevator and stairs. Larkin and Susan were in Apartment 2, just one level down, with Jim and Beth Huddleston directly below them. Larkin wasn’t too fond of that idea, but he was glad that Jill, Trevor, and the kids would be so close.

When they went in, a door on the left opened into a small bedroom with two bunk beds in it. That wasn’t the optimal arrangement for the kids, but again, a certain level of privacy had to be given up. Along a painted concrete wall and around a corner, also to the left, was the small kitchen and dining area. A door in the left corner of that room led into the “master bedroom,” as Larkin wryly thought of it, another chamber on the cramped side with a full-size bed in it, along with a closet and a tiny bathroom barely big enough for the toilet and the combination bath/shower. Another bathroom and a storage area were beyond the kitchen.

Everything was pretty spartan. No living space other than the kitchen/dining room, but the dining table had space for six at it, so that was a little bigger than what they actually needed. The table would serve as a desk for Bailey and Chris, too, where they could do their homework. Larkin wasn’t sure how long it would be before the school was up and running, but he didn’t expect Moultrie to wait too long about that.

They could prepare food here, eat, sleep, study, read. The project had a good-size library of physical books, as well as a huge collection of e-books, movies, and TV shows that could be downloaded onto just about any device anyone could think of. Larkin wasn’t sure how the kids would get along without the latest popular social media site, but they would figure it out. Kids always did.

Under the circumstances, cramped though they might be, the quarters in the Hercules Project were quite possibly the most luxurious accommodations left anywhere in the world. A crazy thought, but it was true.

The family stowed the gear from their bug-out bags in the storage area, then Bailey and Chris sat down at the dining table and got out their phones. There was no Internet, of course, but Trevor had explained to them that there probably wouldn’t be, while they were inside the bunker, so they had already downloaded movies, games, and plenty of other apps to keep themselves occupied for a while. Their parents, along with Larkin and Susan, stood in the doorway watching for a moment, then retreated to the main corridor.

“They look so solemn,” Jill said. “Like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. I can’t stand it. They shouldn’t have to be going through this.”

“No one should,” Trevor said as he put his arms around her. “But—”

“I know. They’re alive. And I’m so thankful that’s true. So thankful that… that all of us are here and safe, at least for the time being.”

“We’ll be all right,” Larkin said. “Everything’s worked just like it was supposed to so far.”

Susan said, “Except for the thirty-three people who couldn’t get here in time.”

Larkin put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed reassuringly as she dabbed at her eyes. The brain couldn’t really grasp the millions of people who had died today, but it could understand a number like thirty-three. Thirty-three people who had gotten up this morning to go about their lives and now were nothing more than ashes tossed around on a nuclear wind.

“Come on,” Larkin said quietly to his wife. “Let’s go on and let the kids get settled into their place.”

“That’s right,” Trevor said. “This is our place now. And for who knows how long…”

He and Jill went back into their quarters while Larkin and Susan walked on toward the entrance to Silo A at the end of the corridor. People were moving around, but with a little less than four hundred of them spread out through the two main corridors and the huge lower bunker, it didn’t seem crowded now. Once folks settled into their lives here, Larkin mused, it would be possible to go for long stretches of time without seeing very many of their new neighbors. He knew from talking to Moultrie and Deb that there would be activities to help maintain a sense of community and social connection, but those wouldn’t be mandatory. Larkin had always had to fight the hermit tendency in his own nature, but at least he had Susan to goad him into not being completely antisocial.

Larkin had both of their bags slung over his shoulders and carried the AR-15 in his left hand. The Colt 1911 was still holstered on his hip. All guns were supposed to be locked up in one of the vault rooms except for practicing or if they were needed for defending the project, but no one had asked him for the weapons yet. He supposed they would come around and do that later.

He wanted to talk to Moultrie about volunteering for the security force, too, although the idea of wearing one of those dorky red vests didn’t appeal to him that much.

Besides, red made a good target. Somebody needed to talk to Moultrie about that, and maybe advise him about a few other things, too. Larkin wasn’t going to be pushy about that, however. Anybody who made too many noises about the way things were done often wound up being put in charge, and he sure as hell didn’t want that.

They walked through the double doors at the end of the corridor. The entrance to Apartment 1 was directly in front of them. The elevator was to the left. Back in the days when this underground chamber had held a Nike Hercules missile ready for firing, that had been a service elevator, so it was fairly large. Susan pushed the button to open the door, and as they stepped in, Larkin said, “Jim and Beth Huddleston have the place right under us, you know.”

“Really?” The door slid closed as Susan went on, “I didn’t think Beth would ever agree to getting involved in something like this.”

“Jim did it behind her back.”

“He did?” Susan laughed hollowly. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but I never would have thought that he had the balls.”

“They’re lucky he did. Beth may come around to seeing it that way sooner or later. From the brief conversation I had with them earlier, she’s probably still waiting for the announcement that there really wasn’t a war and it was just some dirty, underhanded trick of the right-wingers instead.”

Susan sighed. “Do you think that now, down here, people will just forget about all that nonsense?”

“We can hope, baby. We can hope.”

Larkin wasn’t convinced of it, though. Some prejudices were so deeply ingrained that maybe not even a nuclear war could blast them out of existence.

Not without blasting humanity completely out of existence as well.

Today might have been a good start on that. It was too soon to tell.

The elevator stopped and let them out into the reception area on their level. Larkin set down the bug-out bags to get the chip-enabled key card from his wallet. Residents in the Hercules Project were able to lock their doors, although Moultrie and his security and main-tainence staff could get in wherever they needed to, of course. Larkin and Susan went into the apartment. Larkin thumbed a switch on the wall.

The indirect LED lighting sprang to life, revealing a small but comfortably furnished living area. A love seat, two armchairs, a desk. Some framed photographs and paintings they had brought from their house hung on the walls. A bathroom and storage area was to the right, kitchen and dining area straight ahead, and the bedroom and second bathroom to the left.

Larkin heeled the door closed behind them, set down their gear again, and put his arm around Susan’s shoulders as she stood there looking at the place.

“Home, sweet home,” he said.

Chapter 24

It had been early afternoon, a little after one o’clock, when Jim Huddleston had told Larkin about the North Koreans nuking Seoul. As incredible as it was to believe, not quite three hours had passed since then. Three hours that had changed the world forever.

Larkin and Susan were sitting on the love seat, leaning against each other, quietly drawing strength from the human contact, when the soft chime of the doorbell sounded.

“Are you expecting company?” Susan asked.

“Actually, yeah. Somebody’s probably come to tell us that we need to lock up any guns we brought in with us.”

“I remember you saying that nobody would ever take your guns away from you.”

Larkin frowned. “I know, and honestly, I don’t like it very much. But I understand. In such a confined area, under such high stress, Moultrie doesn’t want people running around armed. Besides, there’s a range down here, and we’re supposed to be able to get our guns whenever we want to practice.” He paused, then went on, “Actually, it would be a good idea to set up classes so that all the people who don’t know how to shoot can learn. There may come a day when we’re relying on everybody in here to defend the place.”

“From what? You heard the things Graham said about the damage and the radiation. There’s no one left up there, Patrick.”

“Probably not,” Larkin said. “But I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. I especially don’t want to bet the lives of you and the kids on it.”

The doorbell chimed again. Larkin sighed, stood up, and went to answer it.

A tall, burly black man with graying hair smiled and nodded as Larkin opened the door. Larkin had never seen him before. The man wore one of the red security vests.

“Patrick Larkin?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

The man stuck out his right hand. “I’m Chuck Fisher. Graham asked me to come and collect you. We’re having a meeting in the Command Center.”

Larkin shook hands. Fisher had a strong grip, and he also had the brisk air of a military man that Larkin instinctively recognized. Larkin said, “Corps?”

“Army,” Fisher replied.

“Dogface, eh?”

“That’s right, jarhead.”

Susan had come up behind Larkin. She said, “You two aren’t going to fight, are you?”

Fisher smiled again and sketched a little salute to her. “Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Larkin. We’re on the same side. We’re just upholding a long tradition, that’s all.” He looked at Larkin again. “You need to bring any firearms you have in your quarters as well.”

“Yeah, I expected that.” Larkin had leaned the AR-15 against the wall near the door. He picked it up and said to Susan, “I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be here,” she said, and her tone made it clear enough that she didn’t have to add, Where else would I be?

As Larkin and Fisher went up one level in the elevator, Larkin commented, “I’m surprised Moultrie didn’t just send somebody around to collect the guns. I didn’t figure I’d have to turn them in in person.”

“It’s not just about the guns,” Fisher said.

“Then what is it?”

“I’ll let Graham explain that.”

“You retired or active duty?”

“Retired. You?”

“Same.”

Fisher nodded. Larkin felt an instinctive liking for the guy. He came across as tough, no-nonsense, and not the type to waste time with unnecessary talk.

The Command Center was at the eastern end of the upper-level corridors, a huge complex of offices, hallways, and chambers that began between Silos C and D and extended deep under the rolling hills. The generators and air- and water-purification systems were located here, along with the medical and dental facilities, the pharmacy, the hydroponics gardens, even the big warehouse-like space where rabbit hutches and chicken coops were located.

Those animals were not pets. Over the coming months, they would be a vital supply of fresh food. The people entrusted with raising and caring for them had very important jobs. A great deal of nonperishable food had been stored down here, but the chickens and rabbits, along with the gardens, meant the difference between mere subsistence and a truly healthy diet.

The Command Center was also the beating heart of the Hercules Project, where staff members monitored the equipment that measured surface conditions, along with all the life-support systems. They also searched for any signs of life coming from the surface, any communication via Internet, wireless, broadcast, or amateur radio. All the surveillance cameras up top had been destroyed by the blast, so the project was blind… but not deaf.

Larkin was able to pick up on that when he and Fisher entered a large room reminiscent of news coverage he used to see on TV of Mission Control at NASA in Houston. Most of the big monitors on the walls were dark. The ones that were lit up displayed data, not visual images. Ranks of computers were set up on tables where men and women worked with them.

“Looks like you could launch a rocket from in here,” Larkin commented.

“There was a time you could,” Fisher said. “Or a missile, anyway. This was the original fire control center. Graham expanded and updated it, of course, and added a lot of equipment.” He pointed to a steel door. “The meeting room is over there.”

As they went in, Larkin saw ten men seated at a long conference table that looked like it should have been in some corporate boardroom. The place could have passed for one of those boardrooms, in fact, with its dark paneling and a few sedate landscapes hanging on the walls. All that was missing was a fancy portrait of the chairman of the board and maybe the company president. Graham Moultrie wasn’t really the sort to indulge in such vanity, though.

Adam Threadgill was one of the men at the table. He grinned when Larkin came in but didn’t say anything. The other men had the same sort of competent, experienced look to them.

Moultrie stood at the head of the table with his hands resting on the back of the leather-upholstered swivel chair positioned there. He said, “Come on in, Patrick. You’re the last of the men I’ve summoned here right now. You can put your rifle over there.”

He nodded toward a smaller table next to the wall. Several rifles lay there already, so Larkin assumed they had been brought in by the other men. As he added the AR-15 to the collection, he said, “What about my Colt?”

“Keep it for now,” Moultrie said.

Larkin wasn’t going to argue with that. Even though he didn’t expect to need the .45 down here in the bunker, the whole experience was nerve-wracking enough that it felt good to have the gun on his hip.

“Have a seat,” Moultrie went on. Larkin took an empty chair diagonally across from Threadgill. Moultrie stepped away from the head of the table and walked along it as he continued, “I would have gotten around to talking to all of you in the near future, if events hadn’t unfolded the way they have. I’ve been putting together my security force slowly and carefully, making sure that I have just the right personnel. You men will complete that force, if you agree to take part.”

This came as no surprise to Larkin. In fact, it was what he’d expected as soon as Chuck Fisher showed up at his door and told him about the meeting.

“Every man in here is experienced, either in law enforcement or the military. You’ve dealt with trouble. You’ve dealt with bad actors. You’ve put your life on the line to protect others. That’s the sort of man I want responsible for the safety of the Hercules Project.” Moultrie gestured toward the man standing at the other end of the table. “Chuck Fisher is the director of this group. Chuck was an Army Ranger and since retiring has worked as a private contractor on a number of high-risk operations. He’s an old friend and the top man at what he does.”

So Fisher was a mercenary, Larkin thought. He had known men who wanted to get into that line of work. Some were as solid as could be, others… not so much. Fisher struck him as the solid sort, which was good.

“Of course, you don’t have to accept appointment to this force. It’s not mandatory, and needless to say, the job doesn’t pay anything.” Moultrie smiled. “Not financially, anyway. You do get the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping keep everyone safe, and you get more leeway in being able to have firearms in your possession. Right now, people are too stunned by what’s happened today to cause any trouble, but starting immediately, I want all of you to be armed whenever you’re on duty—and you need to have a gun pretty handy when you’re not on duty, too. Because we’re all going to be on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Understood?”

Nods came from the men around the table. Moultrie had started pacing back and forth as he spoke, but now he paused and rested a hand on his security chief’s shoulder.

“Chuck will be in charge of setting up duty shifts. In this area, he’s my second-in-command. He’ll get together with all of you and make sure you know the schedule. I’m hoping you’ll all see fit to join this effort, but like I said, it’s up to you and if you choose not to, it won’t be a problem. Anyone who doesn’t want to be part of the security force can go ahead and return to your quarters now.”

None of the men at the table stood up.

Moultrie grinned and went on, “That’s just the response I was hoping for. But I’d understand anybody who didn’t want to throw in with us right now. It’s been… a bad day. Everyone is shaken up. Horrified. Some have lost loved ones. I think it’s important for us all to settle into our new routines as quickly as possible, but folks who have been through what we’ve been through today… well, you’ve got to give ’em a little leeway.” He rubbed his hands together briskly, looked around the table again, and asked, “Any questions?”

“Not a question, really, but a comment,” Larkin said. “I look around the room, and one thing strikes me right away.”

“Go ahead, Patrick. I’m very interested.”

“You don’t have any women here. Having the security force be a boys’ club is gonna cause trouble somewhere along the way.”

Chuck Fisher frowned and said, “This is a chance to get rid of those politically correct notions that never really worked but were forced on us anyway.”

“But, as a matter of fact,” Moultrie added, “there are a couple of female members of the security force. They’re on duty now. We didn’t set out to exclude females, but you’ve got to work with the best personnel you have available.”

Larkin nodded and said, “In that case, you ought to talk to my daughter Jill. She was out on the gun range with me when she was in elementary school, and she’s as good a shot as I am. I raised her to be able to kick my ass, too.” He smiled. “She can’t quite do that, mind you, but she can give it a good try. Most guys, she could put on the ground without much trouble.”

“An excellent suggestion,” Moultrie said. He looked at Fisher. “Chuck, you’ll talk to Mrs. Sinclair?”

“Sure,” Fisher agreed. “If she doesn’t have any military or law enforcement experience, though, I’d have to see enough to be sure she can handle herself.”

“She’s a pharmacist,” Larkin said dryly, “but I don’t think she’ll disappoint you.”

Moultrie nodded and said, “Fine. If any of you know anyone else you think would be a good candidate, talk to me or Chuck. We want things to run smoothly down here.” He leaned forward and rested his hands on the table. “I don’t have to tell you men that it’s going to be rough, even if everything works just like it’s supposed to. Put this many people in close quarters, throw in all the emotional turmoil they’re going through, and there’s going to be trouble sooner or later. All of you saw the incident earlier with Mrs. Ruskin.”

“Yeah, how’s she doin’?” Threadgill asked.

“She’s fine. We had to give her a sedative for her own protection. She’s in her quarters now, resting. There’s a staff member with her to help her in case she needs anything.”

A tiny frown creased Larkin’s forehead. Moultrie’s response sounded reasonable enough on the surface, but it could also be interpreted to mean that Mrs. Ruskin had been drugged to shut her up and locked in her quarters with a guard on her. That was probably stretching things and not giving Moultrie the benefit of the doubt, but at the same time, somebody like Beth Huddleston, with her paranoia, might see it that way.

Susan might, too, Larkin realized, and that thought was even more disturbing.

So far, though, he had no reason to suspect Graham Moultrie of anything except wanting to save humanity.

“If there are no more questions,” Moultrie said, “I need to get back to my rounds. I’m trying to keep up with what’s going on in all the sections, and also, Deb or one of my other lieutenants will let me know right away if there are any problems. So far, nothing has happened that we didn’t expect and prepare for, and I’d like to keep that record going.” He started toward the door but then paused. “I’m sorry about the residents who didn’t make it here in time. But honestly, I thought the number might be higher than it turned out to be. We’re going to be all right, gentlemen. I can feel it in my bones.”

With that declaration, Moultrie smiled and left the meeting room.

“You fellows can go back to your quarters now,” Chuck Fisher told the men at the table. “I’ll be in touch with each of you and give you your duty schedule. I want to echo what Graham said and thank you for stepping up to make things better here.”

They filed out, leaving the long guns behind to be locked up, and walked back through the Command Center to get to the main hallways. Threadgill walked beside Larkin, hurrying a little to keep up with his friend’s longer strides. Quietly, he said, “What do you think, Patrick? Is everything going to be all right?”

“Sure,” Larkin said, “as long as everybody down here ignores human nature and is on their best behavior around the clock.”

Threadgill grunted. “What do you think the chances are of that happening?”

“Slim and none, but we’ve got to try to make it work. For better or worse, this is our home now.”