“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 steps inside the fire tower were intact, but the block walls were covered with a spider web of stress fractures. Another tremor shook the facility, and the door behind them buckled and crumpled beneath the weight of the concrete. They climbed hundreds of feet to a door at the top and ran into the open from the small block enclosure hidden in some tall bushes on the South Lawn of the White House. A fiery yellow sun glowed high in the sky behind thick rolling clouds, and wind whipped across the open space, lashing at them mercilessly. Devastation was everywhere: massive old trees lay toppled and thrown about like twigs, the east wing of the White House had caved in and smoke was rising from a crater next to it, fires were burning throughout the city. The earth shook again, and the White House groaned as it shifted on its foundation.
Cameron steadied the stretcher. “What’s happening, Dr. Loeb?”
“I don’t know. This whole area is unstable. We can’t stay here.”
The woman on the stretcher grabbed his arm. “Camp David,” she said.
Loeb showed her the device that had fallen from her hand. “What is this?”
She took it and pressed a few buttons. Nothing happened. She held it out to him and nodded: “Camp David.”
A helicopter sat on a pad across the lawn.
“That’s our ticket out of here,” Bowen said. “Let’s go.”
“Can you fly that thing?” asked Michael.
“You bet your ass I can.”
They made their way through the debris to the helicopter. The sky darkened in disapproval, and the air temperature turned subarctic. The earth rolled in waves underneath their feet, and Loeb’s world spun wildly.
“We’ve got one problem,” Bowen said. “That helicopter won’t carry all of us. It’s a four-seater. We’ve got too much weight. Unless one of you can fly this thing, you four have to pick which one stays behind. I vote her. She’s not going to make it anyway.”
“Maya…” she whispered. “Camp David.”
“We can’t leave her,” Loeb said. “It’s our fault she’s like this, and she’s the only one who can save us. Don’t you see? She’s trying to tell us something about Camp David.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe her ship is there, or maybe she has another one of those handhelds. It could be the transporter device. Maybe there are others like her there.”
“And maybe you’re full of crap. What about the rest of you? What do you say?”
“What good is saving ourselves if we lose our souls?” Michael said. “I’ll stay.”
Cameron shook his head. “No. I’m not going unless we all go. There has to be a way. Isn’t there anything else we can get rid of, like the seats or something like that?”
A fierce wind rocked the helicopter as Bowen cast off the last of the lines. “There’s no excess cargo, and we don’t have time to unbolt the seats. If we’re going to make a run for it, we’ve got to go now.”
“You can’t run from this, Mr. Bowen,” Cameron said. “We need to do the right thing here.”
The woman squeezed Cameron’s hand and closed her eyes.
His voice cracked: “As humans, that’s all we’ve got.”
They lifted the stretcher onto the helicopter.
Michael shook his head: “I’m dying. Don’t you see? It makes perfect sense for me to stay. At least the rest of you have hope.”
“This is absurd,” Loeb said. “Only one of us has to stay behind, and it should be me.”
“The captain going down with his ship? No, I can’t let you do that,” said Cameron. “It’s all or none.”
“If you three want to die here, suit yourselves.” Bowen started up the helicopter and shouted: “Ferret, you coming?”
A light came on in the Oval Office, and a window over the South Lawn opened. It was Ferret. He waved to them.
“Ferret!” Loeb shouted.
“Look at me, I’m the president of the world!”
“Get down here!”
“No sir, I ain’t going in no helicopter and I ain’t going in no spaceship. I’ll die right here on good old Mother Earth, thank you very much, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Looks like you’ve got yourselves a hero,” Bowen said. “You others coming or not?”
The temperature was dropping fast and the city crumbling around them as they took off for Camp David, flying low over the trees in Rock Creek Park.
12|21|12
December 21, 2012. 12:15 p.m. Loeb watched an angry storm building to the north as the helicopter flew low over the trees in Rock Creek Park. He didn’t like flying and he particularly didn’t like flying in helicopters. They made him sick to his stomach for hours afterwards, but he had missed his flight, and it was the only way to get to the conference in time. The world below was a dreary lifeless gray, and the imprint of man had receded behind a thickening drape of snow. The craft thumped over a ridge of high pressure.
“Looks like we’re in for some weather,” the pilot said over his shoulder.
“Mr. Bowen, how soon will we be in Philadelphia?”
“We have to make a stop near Hagerstown, Doc. A couple hours, I’d say.”
The scent of cinnamon, oranges, and cloves filled the cabin. It made Loeb sick to his stomach.
“Can’t you do anything about that smell?”
“Ask them. I’m just the pilot, Doc.”
Seated next to Loeb was a young clean-cut man in his early twenties. Loeb figured him for a college student or a recent grad. “I’ll be getting off there,” the man said. “I’m spending Christmas at Camp David. Cameron’s the name.” He extended his hand. “I’m one of the president’s speechwriters. You’re Dr. Philip Loeb, aren’t you?”
Loeb accepted the handshake. “Yes, is it that obvious?”
“I recognized you from that photo of you with your arm around that three-headed alien.”
“Presidential speechwriter — you seem a bit young for that kind of work.”
“And that coming from a man who got his first Ph.D. at eighteen?”
“Touché.”
“Are you speaking at the conference in Philadelphia, Dr. Loeb?”