Free 12|21|12 by Larry Enright

underneath the White House, where their train was parked at the platform. They entered the maze of whitewashed hallways, passing directories listing briefing rooms, situation rooms, and numbered conference rooms, finally seeing “Monitoring Center” listed among them. They found the infirmary on their way there. They were outside the monitoring center’s locked steel doors when a deep-throated rumble passed through the complex like a distant thunderstorm.
    “The access card isn’t working,” said Loeb. “I don’t understand. I rekeyed it for full clearance back at Camp David.”
    “Try it again,” Cameron suggested. “Maybe it’s a glitch.”
    “Lick the little brown strip, Doc,” Ferret said. “That’s what they do in the FoodMart when the cards don’t swipe.”
    “I didn’t realize they had card readers on dumpsters, Ferret.”
    A vibration like the bass turned up too loud rattled the corridor.
    Bowen drew his gun. “What the hell was that?”
    Something stirred inside the room, and time stopped for the five men. The doors slid apart, releasing the scent of cinnamon, oranges, and cloves into the hall. Into the doorway stepped a woman. She had long black hair and dark olive skin, unnaturally elongated features, and six fingers on one hand. In the other she was holding a device no larger than a cell phone pointed directly at them.
    A single shot rang out. The smell of gunpowder filled the corridor, and a dark red stain spread across the woman’s chest. The device clattered to the floor, and she collapsed.
    Loeb knelt down beside her. “Bowen, what have you done?”
    “She was going to shoot. You saw it. It was self-defense.”
    The woman opened her dark eyes and grasped at Loeb’s arm.
    “Don’t,” he said. “Try to stay still.”
    Ferret picked up what the woman had dropped. “This ain’t no ray gun, but it’s got a big hole in it where dumb ass here shot it.”
    “It looked like a gun. I swear.” Bowen grabbed the device. The symbols on its keypad meant nothing to him. “It looks like some kind of TV remote.”
    Cameron knelt down beside them. “We’re the ones from Camp David.”
    She smiled at him and whispered two words.
    “What did she say?” asked Bowen.
    “It sounded like ‘Camp David,’” Cameron said.
    “Camp David,” she repeated and nodded.
    “I’m Cameron. Who are you?”
    She smiled and whispered, “Maya…” Pain spread across her face, and she closed her eyes.
    “Did she say ‘Mayan?’” Michael looked upward. “Thank God. We’re saved.”
    The rumbling began again, and the corridor seemed to roll sideways. Hairline cracks snaked across the walls, and chunks of plaster came crashing to the floor.
    “We’ve got to get out of here,” Loeb said.
    “What about her?” asked Cameron.
    “Leave her,” Bowen said. “We’ll never make it if we have to carry her.”
    “We can’t just leave her here. She’ll die. I’ll be right back.” Cameron ran off down the hall.
    “Who gives a damn about her?” Bowen said. “I say we leave her, get on the train, and get back to Camp David. That was the plan, right?”
    A ruptured steam pipe hissed somewhere above a hole in the ceiling.
    “It was never the plan to kill innocent people, Bowen.”
    “Where I come from, she ain’t people, Loeb. Just look at her.”
    “I don’t care. I am not a murderer.”
    Cameron came back with a stretcher, and they lifted her onto it. The complex was coming apart, the corridors collapsing behind them in clouds of broken concrete and drywall as they retraced their steps back to the train. The tunnel there had caved in, and the train was crushed beneath tons of rock and cement.
    Bowen found no way around it. “What the hell do we do now?’
    “Looks like it’s time to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye,” Ferret laughed.
    “We passed some fire stairs in that last hallway,” said Cameron.
    The door to the fire stairs gave way with some coaxing from Bowen’s foot. The metal