The Collector

Chapter One-5

Garrett’s carefully designed redoubt was not, of course, built against full-blown Armageddon any more than an automobile seat belt was made to protect against a plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge. However, against more likely, yet still seemingly remote, scenarios like an accidental missile launch or a terrorist attack or a strike by some embittered rogue state, the shelter then could serve more than adequately, provided he only had time to duck down the hidey-hole. Thus the nearness to his business headquarters and his homes was why he chose this location rather than somewhere in the depths of the wilderness, which would be farther from potential targets and yet also infinitely harder for him to reach in a hurry. As with any business venture, there was a tradeoff of risk and reward.

Even though hundreds of thousands had been killed in the previous thirty-six hours alone and fallout was being tracked all the way across the Pacific, he had felt a little foolish that day for watching the news so closely. Yet the occurrence of such periods of instability was exactly why he had spent so many millions against the counsel of his long-faced financial advisors, so he had flipped back and forth across news websites all morning. Really, despite his preparations and the sudden wariness he had tried to dismiss, Garrett had been lucky to be out driving to a business meeting in the city in the middle of the day. Because then he saw those strange lights in the sky, way high up beyond the atmosphere— It was a pre-attack blinding strike against early-warning and communication satellites, and though he tried to tell himself that it was a solar storm or a flare-up in the Van Allen Belts, he knew those eerie flashes were nothing natural. The internet suddenly went dead, and so did his global positioning system, and he was deeply frightened in a way that he had never been before.

Every instinct told him to go home. Home, after all, had always meant safety and security. And also, though the majority of his collections were stored underground at the Marin site—really, it was more for safe storage that he had it constructed than for the thought that some emergency would ever truly occur—he still had many priceless acquisitions at his main home, including some recent ones that he had planned on transferring to the bunker soon. And while the storage facility contained a small fortune in cash just in case, he also had plenty back at the house as well, more than he would willingly part with. For an instant he bit his lip uncertainly.

But nothing could be worth fighting his way back through the city and up the highway, he told himself, not with those fireballs way out in space, not when every second might count. If somehow this was just some strange atmospheric phenomenon, then he would simply go home once everything was sorted out, and he could laugh at himself for a jittery fool tomorrow. But if it was what he thought… His stomach felt sick. White-faced, he forced himself to turn around, and even now he could hardly understand how he made it north across the Golden Gate in time and then up the winding, innocuous-looking road into the hills, shaking so hard at the end that his sweaty, ice-cold hands could barely hold the wheel, then running to the hidden blast door, running and falling, skinning his knuckles as he fumbled with the special locks…

Garrett swallowed. Even now he trembled a little just to remember that terrible day. What happened, perhaps no one knew now, except maybe survivors in Cheyenne Mountain or the deep bunker under Mount Yamantau in the Urals, or a similar installation somewhere in China. It had not been a full-scale war, apparently, for even from where he stood, it was clear that many of the multilayered weapons of overkill had remained sheathed. He believed, for example, that only one bomb had struck San Francisco Bay, surely to hit the naval base—and that made him suspect China, though perhaps it could have been anyone—but no other missiles had followed to turn the whole region into radioactive glass. The political-military spasm lasted only one or two days of utter confusion and panic, but that was all it had taken to reduce the world to shambles. It was just possible that some sort of government still believed it existed somewhere in the United States, but in the almost two years since then, he had never seen even a hint of any rescue, recovery, or decontamination efforts in the bit of the world he could observe, and his remaining radio antennas when extended picked up nothing intelligible.

Still, in his impregnable bunker dug deep into the Marin Headlands he had everything a man could want. Everything except a wind that was fresh and soft and smelled of clean, earthy, natural things, and an open sky in which clouds free of poison might drift and sail, and cause rain that was good and wholesome instead of deadly. Everything except the soft green land to tread and touch, a land where things grew and frogs and crickets sang at night. Everything except companionship. The only companions he had now, after all, besides his useless circular thoughts, were his vast collections—of old books, of art, of firearms, of artifacts of history and modern culture, and of impressively wide-ranging pornographic materials as well.

Aside from other stray survivors, therefore—those unfortunate’s who could only scrabble upon the ruined earth as best they could, starving and poisoned and sick—Garrett was, essentially, alone. Grimacing at the murky fog that crept through the rocky chokepoint of the Golden Gate below, he finally snapped off the periscope viewer and flipped the switch that retracted the armored electronic cameras into their blast-proof housing. The arms of the naked man, unaccountably, suddenly were covered with goose pimples, so he rubbed them briskly and then, trying to keep up his spirits, he smiled to himself, and he turned down the hallway toward his matchless collection of soft-eyed, warm, gently smiling high-end love dolls…