James Axler – Stoneface

She halted only because of an ear-knocking explosion behind her. The air shivered with the concussion. She heard screams and saw the Washington Monument swallowed by a cloud of smoke and flame. At least Ryan was still active, hell following in his wake.

After the echoes of the explosion and the crash faded, a mausoleum silence fell over the city. She found the quiet more disturbing than the noisy shouts and gunfire that had preceded it.

Gritting her teeth, clinging to buildings for support, Mildred changed direction. There was no way she could scale the Lincoln Memorial and climb back into the ventilator system. She could barely walk, and she couldn’t help but fear a ruptured disk in her spine. There had to be another way out of the miniature city.

She staggered across Independence Avenue in the general direction from which her assailant had come. There had to be an entranceway somewhere.

Mildred paused to rest in Garfield Park. While she tried to distance her mind from the agony in her body, she gazed unfocusedly at the ground beneath her. She suddenly realized she was standing on real dirtdensely packed, but genuine soil just the same. An idea popped into her head.

Unsteadily she bent, dug up a handful of the dirt, rolled it and worked it between her fingers, crushing the larger clods to fine powder. She pitched it into the empty air, watching it whirl, the heavier granules separating from the dust. As the smaller particles settled, they drew into a neat vertical strip of light gray powder, about three feet wide. The band of dust slid across the ground, moving over and around obstacles, still keeping its vertical shape.

Rising painfully to her feet, Mildred followed the strip of powder through the city, losing it a time or two when it blended with other ground cover, but always managing to find it again. Inside of a minute she had reached the outskirts of the city. Where the Navy Yard and the Anacostia River should have been was vanadium alloy floorplates joining with a wall.

If she didn’t fear injuring herself further, Mildred would have patted herself on her back for her ingenuity. She had guessed that an electrostatic field was a standard feature in every room and on each level of the installation. She had followed the invisible broom as whisked the detritus toward a built-in dustpan.

The opening was about two and a half feet wide and two feet high, covered by a meshed screen. Kneeling before it, Mildred gripped the rim of the cover and tugged. It gave an inch or two, then popped out, connected tiny hinges flush with the floor.

The duct was clean, made of a smooth metal sheeting that looked new. It stretched straight ahead, out of sight in the darkness. Taking a deep, nervous breath, Mild removed a small pen-flash from a pocket, tested it, then holstered her revolver. Reluctantly she decided that the MP-5 would be an encumbrance in such a confined space. As it was, she feared the combat harness beneath her coat might slow her, but she didn’t want to jettison the grenades or even the extra clips of ammunition. They could be crucial pieces of ordnanceif not to her, then to Ryan.

She took off Doug’s ID badge, clipped it to the trigger guard of the autoblaster and flung it back toward the city. angling it away from the direction in which she had come. Distantly she heard it clatter against stone.

Lying flat, she elbow-crawled into the duct, holding the penlight between her front teeth. It was easier going than she imagined, due to the electrostatic field’s reduction of friction, and it lessened the strain on her damaged back muscles. She could feel her flesh tingling and prickling from the field effect, as if a multitude of tiny ants crawled all over her.

It wasn’t as cold in the duct as it had been in the ventilation shaft or even the city. There was no smell to speak of, beyond a faint whiff of ozone.

Half crawling, half sliding, Mildred moved forward, the light in her teeth dimly illuminating the darkness only a foot or so in front of her. There was a darker darkness ahead, and she approached it cautiously, every sense alert.