Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

The city trembled with violencegunfire, screams and shouted profanities. The hue and cry passed Mildred where she lay in the shadow of the National Gallery of Arts building.

 

She grinned wryly. Reliable old Ryan, who seemed to have a plan for every contingency, had drawn away the rat pack, his guns blazing like an action hero in some old movie.

 

She waited for a count of thirty, then began moving in a crouched duckwalk J.B. had taught her. The MP-5 kept banging her shins, and she realized why Ryan had passed on choosing it. It was bulky and a little unwieldy. She headed back toward the Lincoln Memorial, planning to return to the ventilation shaft and make her way to another level, hopefully to the primary circulation station.

 

The psychologist in Mildred despaired of ever reasoning with the Anthill inhabitants. The very existence of the cunningly crafted miniature model of Washington, D.C., indicated a severe disassociative disorder; it was obsessive-compulsive behavior taken to a frightening degree. The people inside Mount Rushmore had lived too long in isolation to feel emotions beyond contempt for the outside world or anger if their wants weren't immediately gratified. In that, they were very similar to the people of Helskel.

 

A shadow flitted over her, and Mildred froze in mid-scuttle, not daring to move or even breathe. A beetle skimmed slowly above the rooftops, not pausing or slowing as it floated past her position.

 

Doug's ID badge clipped to her coat had saved her from detection, but she realized it was a two-edged sword. The tracer lozenge on it could just as easily be used to pinpoint her location anywhere inside the complex.

 

After the beetle was out of sight, she began moving again. The heavy exchange of gunfire seemed to be tapering off to a sporadic crackle. Something rammed into her lower back. The air shot from her lungs, fierce agony filled her body and tears sprang to her eyes. She sprawled facedown across Constitution Avenue, crushing the six-inch-tall hedgeline around Stanton Park.

 

Mildred tried to push herself over, only to feel her upper arms vised by a pair of hands that felt like hydraulic-powered steel clamps. She allowed herself to be pulled to her feet, and she managed to keep her revolver in her hand. The force of the blow had knocked the headset loose, and it dangled between her legs.

 

Her assailant mashed her in a crushing embrace, fingers kneading her breasts. What little air remained in her lungs was squeezed out.

 

A hoarse, angry laugh sounded close to her left ear. "I found a black woman, didn't I? I heard they still existed, but I never thought I'd feel one."

 

Mildred sagged in the man's arms, shifting her weight into an unresisting, unstruggling mass. She went completely limp, and her attacker tried to reposition his grasp, hugging her close. His grip loosened for a split second, and she snapped her head back, butting the man's face with the top of her skull. She felt and heard the crushing of cartilage.

 

The man grunted, stumbled back a half pace, the tension in his arms lessening. Mildred wriggled free, dropping through his arms, landing on her knees and lunging forward. She lashed out behind her with her legs.

 

Her feet clipped the man's ankles, and he staggered backward. He kept himself from falling only by grabbing the cornice of the Supreme Court building.

 

Before he could regain his balance, Mildred flipped herself over and squeezed the trigger of the ZKR. The bullet caught the man in the neck just above the top button of his white collar. The slug traversed his throat, smashing vertebrae and exiting from the occipital area of his cranium. He backflipped over the building, propelled by the impact. Mildred saw his hands paw convulsively at empty air before he died.

 

The woman didn't rise for a long moment, striving to clear her body of its blurring pain. She breathed heavily, every inhalation hurting. Her heart pounded wildly. Finally, when the pain had faded to a tolerable level, she checked her headset. Her knees had cracked it, the earpiece breaking loose from its plastic casing, exposing the wires beneath. One of the wires had been snapped, and she didn't have the time to splice the ends back together. She and Ryan were incommunicado.

 

Using the pair of Senate office buildings as crutches, she slowly levered herself to her feet, biting her lip against the fierce pain lancing through her lower back. The man had to have kicked her there, probably with a bionic leg. She couldn't crouch, so she began a shambling walk.

 

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.

 

She reached the edge of the duct, where it slanted down at an angle, disappearing into yawning blackness. She groped around in the gloom before her and touched nothing but smooth metal. Mildred laid her head on the cold metal and groaned, then cursed her ingenuity.

 

It only stood to reason that dust, crud and other foreign particles would have to be swept somewhere, to a container very much like a high-tech Dumpster. Crawling back out the way she had come wasn't an option, but the concept of creeping headfirst into the chute frightened her more than the most monstrous mutie she had ever encountered.

 

Raising her head, she looked forward. The duct still slanted away into blackness. She placed both hands flat against the walls of the duct and pressed the sides of her feet against them. By pushing, it was possible to gain the leverage needed to keep from sliding uncontrollably down the chute, assuming, of course, the angle of the incline didn't become any steeper.

 

A few inches at a time, Mildred wormed herself into the downslanting duct, expanding her shoulders, using her hands and feet to grip the sides. She slipped a time or two due to the reduced friction on the metal surface. Once, she slid forward over a yard before she could brake herself.

 

Sweat collected on her face and beneath her clothes, and she was grunting with the exertion and pain in her lower back. Her teeth bit into the plastic casing of the pen-flash, nearly breaking it.

 

She kept at it, over and over with her hands and feet, losing all track of how far she had descended. Her feet and shoulder sockets began to ache, then screamed in silent protest at the strain placed upon them.

 

She experimented a few times, allowing herself to slide along under the momentum of her weight, sighing in relief at the ebbing of the pain in her back, shoulders and legs. When she began to pick up speed, she caught herself, came to a complete halt, then started the entire laborious process over again.

 

After the fourth moving rest stop, Mildred realized she was having difficulty slowing her descent. The incline of the chute had sharpened. She slapped at the sides of the duct, spreading her legs, pushing with her feet to stop herself, but the braking effect was marginal. She couldn't get a grip, and her body picked up speed. Then she was sliding out of control, diving headfirst down the black duct. She saw nothing below her but thick darkness.

 

She couldn't repress a cry of fright and the pen-flash fell from her mouth. It bounced from all four walls of the duct, the light jumping crazily, like a wild comet following a mad trajectory through the black gulfs of outer space.

 

The duct walls vanished beneath her gloved hands. Mildred clawed for a handhold, then she was diving headlong into a sepia sea. She didn't dive very long. A shattering crash numbed her body from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. The darkness momentarily turned the color of blood. She was dimly aware that she was tumbling head over heels.

 

By the time her thrashing tumble ended, the world was spinning, tilting to and fro, and she wasn't sure if she was sitting up, lying down or standing on her head. She wasn't at all positive that she was alive.

 

When Mildred's senses finally regained control of themselves, she found she had landed against a soft heap of something and was in a half-prone, half-sitting position. Her head, her shoulders, her neck and especially her back, all ached abominably. She tasted blood sliding warmly from a laceration on her forehead, down her face and over her lips. Her hands smarted from the impact on whatever she had landed upon. The air was heavy and cloying, and she sneezed, sputtered and coughed.

 

Groaning, wanting to weep, she pushed herself away from the yielding heap and wobbled to her feet. Amazingly, despite the waves of pain washing over her, nothing seemed broken. As she stood, she felt a slight sinking sensation, as though her footing wasn't solid. She couldn't see what lay beneath her. The darkness was completely impenetratable. Patting herself down, she made sure all her personal equipment was where it was supposed to be.

 

She took a step forward, and something gritted beneath her boots with a crunch that sounded unnaturally loud. She sneezed, and that sounded frighteningly loud, too. Taking off a glove, Mildred reached down and felt powdery granules, finer than sand, all around her. She was in the central dustbin, the detritus dump of the Anthill. Though the motes irritated her nose and eyes, they had cushioned her fall and probably saved her life.

 

Walking through the dust was difficult, like striding through snow. She had to lift her feet clear of the layer of grit and place them down carefully, or else a cloud of dust would mushroom up and send her into a paroxysm of coughing and sneezing.

 

Dabbing at the flow of blood from her forehead with a sleeve, Mildred wetted a forefinger and tested the air currents. She detected a faint movement from her left and began a high-stepping shamble in that direction. She groped through the blackness, both arms extended so she could touch any hidden obstacles.

 

After a time she became aware of a peculiar click-clack noise. It took her a moment to attribute it to the wooden beads in the plaits of her hair. Normally a small, almost unnoticed sound, the silence of her surroundings was so complete that any noise seemed like a band striking up a fanfare. She consciously tried to quiet her ragged breathing.

 

Then, far away, Mildred saw a tiny white spark of light. It was very distant, but she headed for it, the crunch of her footfalls sending up ghostly, reverberating echoes.

 

Long before she thought she had come anywhere near the source of light, she stumbled and saw the spark almost at her feet. It was the pen-flash, lying half-buried in the acres of dust.

 

Gratefully Mildred picked it up and fanned the light around. As she had expected, she saw nothing but gloom and dust. She continued sifting her way through the powder toward the air current. She walked only for a short time before she felt the flow of air growing stronger. She stopped, right before she walked into a black metal wall. By shining the penlight around and groping with her free hand, she found a metal bracket in a flattened U shape, like a ladder rung. There were several more leading up the face of the wall, beyond the illumination range of her light.

 

Mildred swung onto the rungs and began to climb, ignoring the fires of pain the effort ignited all over her body . She estimated she had climbed less than twenty feet before the rungs ended at a narrow ledge, maybe two feet wide. She stepped out onto it, flattening her back against the wall, digging the fingers of her free hand into the uneven metal surface. She edged out in the direction of the air current. Affixed to the floor of the ledge, in regularly spaced intervals, were threaded strips of rubber. These helped her gain traction as the ledge angled upward.

 

The ledge made a sharp turn to the left after a few dozen steps, and its pitch descended steeply. Putting the pen-flash into her mouth, she crabwalked along it, hands gripping the wall tightly. Mildred wondered how deep beneath the mountain she was, and realized she couldn't hazard even an uneducated guess.

 

The ledge suddenly widened, opened and led out to a metal railed apron, and she realized with a leap of relief that she had been traversing some sort of maintenance walkway. There was still no sign of anything approximating a door. As she pushed against a wall, something brushed the top of her head.

 

Craning her neck to look up, she saw a length of heavy, rust-flaked chain, with a handle attached. She couldn't see what it was anchored to, but she grabbed the handle and tugged gingerly. Nothing happened, so, using both hands, she pulled harder, putting all her weight into it.

 

Mildred's effort was rewarded by a loud, shuddery creaking, as of long-disused gears or pivots struggling to turn. Feeble light suddenly appeared, a thread-thin outline tracing a tall rectangular shape in the wall before her. Hand over hand, she hauled on the chain, and a wide, flat slab broke away from the wall with a shower of grit and rust. Grinding, screeching noises accompanied the lowering of the slab as it slowly fell outward. Blinking through the rust flakes swirling around her face, Mildred saw the slab was like the drawbridge of a medieval castle, only this one was made of thick sheets of welded and riveted iron.

 

With a shriek of metal clashing against metal, the slab stopped moving, jamming at a forty-five-degree angle. No amount of pulling, hauling or hanging on the chain would budge it further.

 

The surface of the slab was by no means smooth or featureless, so Mildred half crawled, half climbed up it Judging by the oxidized streaks, she was pretty sure it was a very old accessway, a maintenance hatch to the detritus dump. It probably hadn't been opened in nigh on to a century, perhaps considerably longer.

 

She struggled to the lip of the slab, grasping the edge and carefully pulling herself to eye level to get a quick recce of her surroundings. There was very little to see. Mildred looked out into a small enclosed space, not much more than a module with convex-curved walls. It was bare, everything coated with a thin patina of dust that had seeped out of the dump over the decades. So much dust floated in the still air that the light from a ceiling fixture was only a faint yellow blob. A spiral staircase stretched up from the floor to a dark opening. The small room appeared to have been unoccupied for a long, long time.

 

Mildred pulled herself up, squirmed over, hung by her hands and dropped to the floor. She landed easily, dust puffing up from beneath her boots, but shivers of pain stabbed through her. But at least the room wasn't cold. In fact, it felt close to normal air temperature. That would explain why the module appeared to be in disuse. The cryonically altered people of the Anthill would find it very uncomfortable.

 

She considered staying where she was long enough to repair the transceiver, but the dust irritated her eyes and dogged her nostrils. She could even taste it. Without much surprise she saw that her clothing was completely filmed by gray powder, as though she had been dipped in ashes. She assumed her face was the same color.

 

At the foot of the staircase, Mildred peered upward. She saw nothing but a dim light, so she went up the steps, treading quietly and cautiously. The staircase curved up and around, like a corkscrew. There was a faint luminosity above, and it grew brighter the farther up the staircase she climbed.

 

She was pleasantly surprised when the last step brought her to a door with an ordinary, standard-issue, commonplace doorknob. Before turning it, she drew the ZKR, emptied it of spent cartridges and plugged fresh rounds into the cylinder. Thumbing back the hammer, she crooked her finger around the trigger, turned the knob and inched the door open. After peering and listening for several seconds, she opened the door wide enough to enter a corridor.

 

The walls were white and dingy and not composed of the vanadium alloy. The floor looked like dirty linoleum, with a black-and-white-checked pattern. This level was obviously part of the original floor plan, constructed well before skydark. Though the air was crisp, with a hint of a chill, it wasn't the Arctic atmosphere of the upper levels.

 

There was a sign on the wall, written in faded red letters, reading Know Your Emergency Exits! An arrow pointed to Mildred's right, so she followed it. The corridor curved toward a distant set of double doors that looked like an elevator stand, so she quickened her pace. As she passed a door, she heard a sharp, hissing sound, and she whirled.

 

A very tall naked figure stood framed in the door. She couldn't tell the sex of the figure, and her heart gave a great lurch. The body was gaunt and stripped of all fatty tissue. The texture of the pale skin suggested a pattern of scales, as if the figure had been spawned under conditions that were abnormal, even unhuman.

 

There was almost nothing human at all about the head above the tendon-wrapped neck. A coxcomb of thin blue-black hair twisted up from a low, sloping forehead. Eyes that were hugered pupilless disksblazed out of a narrow-chinned face. The nose barely qualified as a sharpened nare, and the lipless slit of the mouth gaped open, revealing spittle-wet, toothless gums.

 

Mildred immediately had the bore of her ZKR trained on the low forehead, when, in a high-pitched, squawky voice, the figure exclaimed, "Took you long enough, didn't it! Where's my goddamn brains?"