Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  Terry sat cross-legged (what a long-ago army base teacher named … Mrs. Benjamin … called “crisscross apple sauce”) in the middle of the empty street, staring at it.

  One after another the glass-and-steel boxes of the office buildings surrounding him dissolved, replaced by older, wooden structures.

  And then some of those disappeared, leaving stores and houses more spread out, with wide spaces between.

  Then those buildings were replaced by peach groves.

  And those by forest.

  Terry sat on his mat of leaves and ferns, unable to stop crying. He knew that the vision would go deeper, to a world before life. To a universe before stars. There was … no end to it all.

  Turtles, all the way down.

  Who was he? What was true? He was falling, tumbling, with no net to catch him. Nothing connecting him to a universe that seemed to have no actuality at all.

  After a time a car rumbled toward him down the street. When the headlights touched him, the driver leaned on the horn. Terry waved it away.

  He looked up with huge eyes. “Not this one,” he said. “Not today.” Oddly, he felt no fear.

  “Asshole!” the driver yelled, weaving around him.

  Terry could only smile. Asshole. Yes, he certainly was. He tensed his hand, felt the tendons and muscles hardening into a spade-like weapon. Formed it into a fist like a mace, tensing harder than he ever had, with specific constrictions never before mastered, and smashed it into the cracked asphalt. The hardened tar yielded. Again he struck. And again, until it was arrayed in chunks. He tenderly pulled the sunflower up, cradling it like a newborn, which perhaps it was.

  With trembling fingers, he peeled away as much of the asphalt as he could, leaving an area as broad as a comic book.

  Then he carried the tiny seedling away in his cupped hands, walking down the middle of the street, cars blaring their horns at him.

  He did not know how far or how long he walked, only that he was following a green scent in the wind. Finally, he reached a tiny park, a quarter-block of flowers and grass. There, in a shelter amid a cluster of trees, he squatted and dug a hole with his hands, and deposited the precious sprig. Heaped earth around it, and patted it down.

  He stood.

  It was not important, just another plant among countless billions. There was no reason to care about it, or think it special. No one had noticed its sprouting, and no one would grieve its death.

  And yet … he had decided to care about it. Just … decided.

  What a marvelous, miraculous thing, to care. To decide to feel a connection to something else. A simple act of will. That was the antidote to nothingness. Simple caring.

  No one would notice the little sunflower here, he knew. But perhaps … just perhaps … he would come back one day, just to see how it was growing.

  CHAPTER 19

  It is odd the way panic spreads, once a certain threshold is breached. The “End of the World” headline had been repeated around the globe, in every media, like some viral YouTube dancing cat video.

  Myanmar tried to conceal the death of its minister of finance, and when the reality came to light it was worse than if they had told the truth to begin with.

  From a stronghold somewhere in the mountains of central Africa, the leader of a notorious guerilla faction appeared grinning in a handheld video pronouncing his health. It took only fifty-seven minutes before CNS technicians determined that the dating codes had been falsified.

  Not a good day.

  * * *

  Olympia returned to an office dominated by a creeping, barely contained current of dread. Around the world in the last twenty-four hours, five powerful and dangerous men and one woman had died by means unknown, in custody and in front of doctors, guards, and scientists. If the threat could be taken seriously, somewhere in the world at least two more unknowns had died in the same bizarre way, and who the hell could say otherwise? To their knowledge, not a security service in existence had so much as a single solid lead.

  Who the hell were the “Elite,” for God’s sake? She certainly didn’t believe it was the end of the world, but something was going on, that was for sure.

  “As has happened thrice before…” What tradition spoke of three apocalyptic events in human history?

  “On December 13, our high holy day.” Whose “high holy day”? The twelfth was the “Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe” but that was the closest she could get.

  “I heard about it all over the radio,” Joyce Chow said, interrupting Olympia’s thoughts. “The manifesto is all over the Net. Everybody’s connected the dots.”

  “And?” she asked.

  Joyce took another sip of coffee. “Making elephants and unicorns. The markets are starting to wobble. It isn’t good.”

  “That makes a total of thirty-one dead?” Olympia asked.

  “At least. There are rumors that the numbers are much higher.”

  Sloan poked his bald head into the room. The fringe of red hair gave him a disturbing resemblance to Bozo the Clown, though she had never mentioned the comparison to a soul. “Conference room in five.”

  The first news stories hit, connecting conspiracy theory Web sites with the original list, reports of dead leaders, and attempts at cover-up. Panic had begun to boil up around the edges of the calm conversation and polite smiles and neutered news bulletins.

  Joyce Chow’s face dominated the wall-sized projection screen. “According to WikiLeaks, at least twenty individuals on the infamous ‘Dead List’ have actually perished. It is unknown how many others there might be.” Olympia looked back and forth from her friend to the screen, disoriented by seeing the familiar face so grotesquely expanded. “The stock market today took another dip, and some analysts worry that unless this situation resolves, it could enter a tailspin that makes the 2008 crash look—”

  Sloan turned the television off, looked sourly at Joyce, and then cleared his throat. “This is what we’re up against. We need to jump ahead of this curve. I’ve arranged for an exclusive video feed, and it cost me a lot of favors.”

  A test pattern followed, and then a flicker of colors. This was replaced by a PowerPoint message saying that the footage they were about to see was classified.

  “Oslo, Norway.” A heavily accented voice. For this one, English was perhaps a third language, behind … Swedish and German, she thought. “I will narrate the autopsy footage obtained from sources in Sweden. Arms merchant Thor Swenson died recently in a road accident. That is the official story. But there is more. As you can see…”

  Olympia gasped.

  A naked male human corpse lay upon a steel pallet. The body was misshapen, as if half the bones were broken, the splintered fragments poking through pallid skin. He looked as if someone had stuffed him into a piñata and beaten it with a bat.

  “What in the hell could do that?” she muttered. “Electrocution? Poison? Some kind of torture?”

  “We have no idea how it was effected,” the discordant voice continued. “Only that it happened. There are difficulties, since his body was mutilated in an automotive incident. To complicate further, his corpse was entangled with that of his secretary, so that it became difficult to determine which wounds were pre- and which postmortem.”

  Olympia tapped her pencil against the desk. “Have you inspected dental records? Medical records? Seeking…” She searched for words. “Some sort of mechanism? Something could have been implanted during some procedure requiring general anesthesia.”

  Sloan nodded approvingly. “That’s good. As far as I know dossiers are still being compiled. There are no obvious points of commonality in terms of their timetables in the previous month.”

  Office-mate Christy Flavor chimed in, but Olympia noticed that she seemed to be struggling to maintain calm. “And is this the same as the Mexican television show? Quinones? Was that his name?”

  “Ramone Quinones, the drug lord. As far as we can tell it is the same. The information is still being coordinated.”
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  Olympia watched through her fingers as, with clinical dispassion, Thor Swenson’s epidermis was pulled away from the underlying fascia, glistening muscles examined and split and probed.

  She closed her eyes, trying not to gag as the dispassionate voice described injuries as if reading ingredients from the side of a bottle of disinfectant.

  * * *

  When the voice concluded she opened her eyes again. The images had vanished from the wall. Luckily the pastry dish was empty. She might have thrown up if that cherry-filled blintz had still been oozing on the plate. Sloan glared at the empty glass disk, ran a finger across it to pick up a little sugar glaze, and licked the frosted digit wistfully.

  “I don’t want you to think like citizens. I need you to think like reporters. Or like kids playing a game. It isn’t quite real.”

  “What … do you mean by that?” Olympia asked.

  “Like a kid’s game. Specifically Clue. Remember that no matter what the story, the answer is always the same: it’s Colonel Mustard, in the basement, with the lead pipe.”

  A few hollow chuckles.

  This isn’t real. It isn’t real. Or if it is, it is some kind of horrible trick. It will end. We will all wake up. And then … and then Madame Gupta will heal Hannibal, and everything will be right with the world.

  “I need your logic, not your emotions. Nobody knows what’s going on here, but my instinct tells me that somehow, human beings are at the root of it. Maybe using machines. Maybe … something else. But there is a someone, a somewhere, and a how. There is a motive and a means. Somewhere.” He paused, glaring into them, as if trying to infect them with his will.

  “I have something you need to see,” he said. “Just came in from a station in Arkansas.”

  “What is it?” Olympia asked carefully. She had just about convinced herself that the whole thing was some kind of terrorist act, designed to create panic.

  No one could kill the world.

  Could they?

  “Just another tiny thread coming unraveled,” he said. “This is what happens when you let yourself forget you’re a reporter.” That sardonic edge to his voice, the thing she’d always noticed that no one else seemed to hear, was a blade. More terror than irony.

  The male and female co-anchors on the next news program looked nervous, not hiding their fear at all. Hogging the story, she thought, like when her network’s stars in combat and hurricane zones made their own danger the focus of the broadcast. But this time, it didn’t look like theater. It looked like a reason to run and hide.

  “So, again, Premier Mumbai is dead—” the male anchor choked out. Olympia flashed back to J-school recordings of Walter Cronkite announcing President Kennedy’s death in 1963, which had given her chills—as the broadcast now did again, but for very different reasons. President Kennedy had died before she was born, already a symbol. This was her era’s tragedy, monstrous because it was just getting started.

  The newscaster’s hands trembled, fumbling with a few pages of a script, but recovered quickly. He wasn’t a main anchor; Olympia didn’t know his face.

  “There are already reports of riots in the streets of the capital—the army out in great numbers. Mumbai was accused of using his military in an ethnic massacre in ’03. We have several credible reports that he’d been hiding in the main vault of the national bank when struck down. Further reports—and we’re waiting for a video feed from a security camera—including the U.N. observer’s account from inside the bank—maintain that he was alone at the time.”

  His emphasis on the last word made it the point of his story. “I repeat—President Mumbai is dead. Precisely as it was predicted on the Dead List. Precisely.”

  Neither anchor spoke for some time.

  “Anything to add, Lucy?”

  Lucy, the co-anchor, had painted a plastic mask over a barely restrained rictus of terror.

  “I … I’m supposed to read this bulletin, Frank.” Her hands trembled like a malaria victim’s. “But I’m not sure I should. I’ve been thinking about all of this, and maybe it’s time to put aside trivial things.”

  She paused for a beat. He tried to act as if it was a joke, smiled uncomfortably at the camera. “Uh…”

  “Have you accepted the Lord Jesus into your life, Frank? If these were the last days, would you be ready to meet Him?”

  Frank’s face was creased in one of those holy shit, this woman is a loon expressions. The screen went blank for a moment, and then they cut to a commercial.

  Sloan turned it off. “Wasn’t that lovely?”

  Good thing it was the end of the world, Olympia thought, or Lucy would be so fired from Little Rock or wherever that station had been. And she marveled at how easily, how logically, the phrase “end of the world” had crept into her mind.

  CHAPTER 20

  Nicki had decided not to accompany them to the Salvation Sanctuary, preferring to attend her drama club’s three-day Shakespeare camp for the first few days of Christmas vacation. She’d spend the night with a friend, engaged in an all-night “Memory Bash” running lines from The Taming of the Shrew. Olympia had wanted to protest. This was a time when a family should be together, but Nicki wasn’t impressed at all with the horrendous news, had erected her own fortress of denial, and seemed happy to be with friends.

  And Olympia was grateful for that, and for the fact that Hannibal was oblivious to it all. And if she could shoulder the entire burden of anxiety for her family, she would happily do so.

  Big Sister had kissed Hannibal goodbye, told him to enjoy the helicopter ride, and dashed off when the school van honked for her.

  Olympia was just finished dressing when the doorbell rang. “Be right there!” she called down. “Hannibal, are you ready?” She expected no answer, of course—one day, she told herself, one day, and followed up immediately with direct observation.

  He was brushing his teeth, eyes dreamy, when she entered the bathroom. “Sweetie, you need to hurry a little. Today might be a pretty important day. I think that’s our ride.”

  Instead of speaking his reply, he sang. “Okay.”

  She ran downstairs, and answered the door to find a smiling, square-jawed Germanic woman with blond cornrows wearing an immaculately tailored blue chauffeur’s uniform.

  “Olympia Dorsey? I’m Maureen Skotak, your driver.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Be just a second. Hannibal, honey!”

  Hannibal was already coming up behind her, grabbing her dress, squinting up shyly at the woman with the Dick Tracy jawline.

  “This is my son, Hannibal. Hani, this is our driver.”

  “Maureen,” she repeated. She smiled and extended her hand to Hannibal. Hannibal looked at the hand and then up at his mother, hesitating. It was a notably longer hesitation than he had given Terry on their first meeting.

  “It’s all right,” Olympia said.

  He shook hands. The driver smiled again, Olympia smiled. Somewhere beyond their bubble the world was wobbling at the edge of something almost unfathomably hideous, and everybody was smiling. Wasn’t that nice?

  “Well,” the driver said, “we have a chopper to catch!” A helicopter ride to spend a few hours with a remarkable woman. A medicine for madness, just in the nick of time.

  They walked out to a white Rolls-Royce limousine, Hani’s small hand in hers. Maureen held the passenger door open.

  Nicki retreated into the house. Olympia watched as the front door closed, wondering if Nicki’s first independent steps were just the beginning of losing touch with her daughter. Her own relationship with her mother had never stabilized after her father’s death, after they had moved from Liberty City. After the excessive life insurance he’d purchased to buoy a drowning cousin had bought a new home and a college education, and destroyed the woman who had once seemed so lithe and lovely, she’d withered into bitterness and finally death.

  But long before her mother died, their relationship had cooled to ashes. She would not let that happen with Nicki.r />
  No. Never. Not after the last three terrible years.

  But what if some catastrophic event yet to be felt tangled traffic, triggered an evacuation, and somehow prevented her from seeing her daughter again? The thought felt too damned plausible. Olympia stared at the closed door.

  Maureen swung around to the driver’s side, then dropped the partition and looked back at them. “Buckle up, little man. Someone very important is waiting to see you!”

  The interior of the car was black leather and stainless steel. It was beautiful, comfortable, and functionally elegant. She sank into the seat, sighing, and fastened Hannibal’s safety straps.

  They pulled out of the driveway, and then the complex. Vaguely, Olympia noted the cable truck, still parked at the curb outside the complex. It had been there, with minor shifts from one position to another, for five days. Someone must have been ordering a lot of HBO.

  * * *

  Their limo moved out onto Atlanta Road, heading east toward the 85 freeway. “There’s a PlayStation back there, and a bar with ginger ale,” Maureen said cheerfully.

  That, Hani understood immediately. Needing only a little help from Olympia, he booted up the PlayStation. Sonic the Hedgehog bounced onto the screen and promptly commenced hopping hedges.

  “Do you work for the limo company?” Olympia asked.

  “No,” Maureen replied. “I work for Madame Gupta.”

  “You’re one of her … what? Students? Acolytes?”

  Olympia caught the edge of a cool, remote smile in the rearview mirror. “No. Just handle odds and ends.”

  The limo cruised along the freeway for ten minutes, then pulled off. Eight blocks through an industrial district took them to a fenced helicopter pad the size of the Foothill Village basketball court, marked like a rifle scope.

  “All out!” Maureen chirped, and oddly, again Hani didn’t complain or resist. Olivia had never been in a helicopter before. It was smaller than she would have expected, and the body juddered as she stepped up into the passenger compartment. She tested her weight, then decided that the yielding she felt from the steel and Plastiglas was part of the design. Hannibal’s grin was as wide as the horizon. They climbed into the back of the ’copter, which was almost as plush as the limousine, although the buckles were more elaborate, almost like a webbing.