The Doomsday Bunker by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

May 23

Living underground like this, night and day didn’t mean much. It would have been easy to lose track of time completely. Knowing that, Moultrie insisted on an ironclad schedule. He had programmed the times of sunrise and sunset for the next year into the computers that controlled the lighting in the Hercules Project, and each day at the appropriate time the lights dimmed to almost nothing—many of them went off entirely—or brightened to simulate the dawning of a new day. Large monitors located in various places displayed the date and time. One thing he didn’t worry about was Daylight Savings Time, sticking with what it had been when the bunker was closed up.

The temperature went down at night as well, not proportionate to what it would have in an uncontrolled environment, but rather just enough to give a suggestion of what would have been natural. If there had been any way to replicate rain that wouldn’t cause too much trouble, he probably would have provided that as well, but some things just had to be done without.

Larkin hadn’t forgotten what it was like to feel the sun and the wind on his face. He hoped they would be outside again soon enough that he wouldn’t forget, and no one else would, either.

He and Susan were in their apartment in Silo A one evening, watching a movie streaming from the project’s library, when a knock sounded on the door. Larkin paused the movie and went to answer it.

Chuck Fisher was there, and Larkin was a little surprised to see that Jill and Threadgill were with the security director. Fisher’s expression was grim.

“What’s up?” Larkin asked.

“Charlotte Ruskin and her friends are having a rally downstairs this evening. They went around putting up signs about it. They’re going to demand a vote to replace Graham.”

“They can’t do that. This isn’t a political system. Graham wasn’t elected to start with. How can they have an election to replace him?”

“They seem to have the idea that if they have the numbers on their side, they can do whatever they want.”

Larkin grimaced and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Go down there and put a stop to it,” Fisher answered without hesitation.

Larkin glanced at his daughter and saw the worried frown on her face. Threadgill didn’t look too sure about this, either.

“Don’t you think that confronting them might just make things worse? They stand around and shake their fists in the air and yell a little, and it blows off steam.”

“Yelling and shaking their fists in the air like Hitler did? That didn’t work out very well, did it?”

Larkin winced this time. He said, “Don’t play the Hitler card, Chuck. You never win an argument by playing the Hitler card.”

“I’m not arguing,” Fisher snapped. “I’m telling you, as the director of security, what I’m going to do. I’d like for you to come along, Patrick, but if you don’t want to be part of the force anymore—”

“My dad didn’t say that, Mr. Fisher,” Jill put in.

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