Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  The adjacent room seemed quiet and dark.

  If what the unfortunate Torrence had said was true—that the security force was moving people out, then there was a chance this might work. The apartment next to theirs might be unoccupied.

  Hell, it might even be unlocked.

  Olympia took a deep breath, leaned out, and whirled the knotted sheet again. It took four attempts before the glass on the adjoining window broke, then another ninety seconds got most of the glass shards out. Chunks of pane fell down to the garden below them, making blessedly little noise.

  While walking around the edge of the maze she had looked up at the castle and seen the narrow ledge under the windows, and she relied upon it now.

  Yes. No more than four inches wide, and she was four floors up. A fall was probably fatal, and even if by some miracle she survived, her chances of helping Hannibal would have evaporated.

  The next window over was only about three feet away, just slightly farther than she could stretch her arms while holding onto her own window. She examined the frame, plucked out another sliver of glass, and realized that she couldn’t be as picky on the far side. Olympia ripped the other half of the sheet into quarters, and wrapped her hands.

  When she stuck her head out again, the snow was falling harder, prickling her cheek and brow. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out onto the narrow ledge, gripped her window frame, and flung her right arm out feeling for the next room’s raised metal frame.

  There. She had it, but could feel glass under the sheet’s merciful buffer. Olympia knocked the glass out and grabbed the window frame. She was completely outside her room now, balanced on the narrow ledge, trying to press her stomach and chest into the wall as tightly as possible. When she shifted her grip, her feet slipped and she almost fell, one arm pinwheeling before it slapped against the frame again and her bandaged fingers found purchase. Exhilaration, the simple joy of taking some kind of positive action, was intoxicating.

  She caught her breath for five seconds, then managed to find a new grip that gave her better balance. She used her right arm to pull herself against the stippled wall, then got her left hand between herself and the wall to grab alongside her right. She changed grips again and finally gained the position to step through the window.

  A bright ribbon of pain told her that she had sliced her leg, but the gash was only a quarter-inch deep, and she had the sheets to bandage it.

  The apartment was empty, dark. The same size and shape as hers, but furnished much more simply, and with an extra wall where it had been divided into a dorm for perhaps four students.

  If anyone had been in residence recently, they had abandoned the room leaving few clues: unwashed cups in the sink. A dish of ramen atop a microwave, cooked but uneaten.

  Now came the critical part, and she prayed she was right: that no one would bother locking an empty room. That was half of it, and she was right. With a twist and a bit of pressure the front door opened.

  Now came the next part, and for once luck seemed to be with her: the doors were indeed locked from the outside, with a bolt instead of a key. She slid it back, crying with relief.

  Hannibal hadn’t even noticed she was gone. He was still watching robots transform into trucks and planes on the television. She picked him up, and he didn’t fight her. His arms circled her neck, his breath soft and sweet upon her cheek.

  Tiptoeing back to the door, Olympia poked her head out. Nothing. She scurried down to the end of the corridor, and the door was locked. “Damn.”

  The roof access on the other end of the hall was open. “Come on.”

  “Okay.”

  The two of them crept up the stairs. Up two levels, including one that said PRIVATE RESIDENCE, NO ENTRANCE. Madame Gupta’s quarters. She felt a chill as they climbed past that level, smiling in Hannibal’s face, whistling past the graveyard. The door at the top of the sixth-floor landing was stuck. For a moment she despaired, but then it opened.

  “Thank God.”

  They made it out onto the roof. Snow twirled down from a darkened sky. She looked for a fire ladder. Anything. Nothing. She looked down over the edge of the roof, and saw something heartening: on the north side of the castle, a fire escape rose up to the fourth floor, but no farther. She looked around frantically, and then remembered the fire hose they’d passed in the stairwell. “Wait here.”

  She went back into the stairwell and unreeled the hose, uncoupling it from the spigot. Carried it out and tied it to a stanchion at the roof’s edge.

  “Baby,” she said softly. Snowflakes crusted his eyelids, and he blinked against their twinkling. “I don’t want you to look down. Can you do that?”

  “’Es.”

  She tied the fire hose around his waist and braced herself, lowering him two floors to the fire escape landing. He landed there and looked up at her, his round, dark face shining with love.

  Olympia tied off the other end of the hose. “Come on, girl,” she whispered to herself. “You can do this. You have to do this.”

  And hand over hand, she lowered herself off the edge of the roof. “It’s just a climbing wall,” she whispered to herself. “Just Atlanta Rocks!”

  Suddenly, two Gold Robes appeared, walking along the path beneath them. She hung there, holding her breath, back and shoulders and biceps aching. Hannibal stared down at the maze.

  Faintly, she heard: “And the others? What happens?”

  “I don’t think we want to think about that now.”

  “Someone needs to,” the woman said.

  “It’s the woman and the kid I’m worried about.”

  The reply was almost reverent. “Not just a kid. The kid, maybe. The way Madame talks about him, you’d think he was the Second Coming.”

  “That’s not what bothers me.”

  “No?” the woman replied. “What bothers you?”

  He paused. “What if she’s right?”

  They disappeared around the corner. Olympia breathed a deep sigh of relief, and lowered herself the rest of the way.

  Her breath scalded her throat, and her arms felt as if the skin had been peeled away, and the muscles sandpapered. This was the hardest thing she had ever done, by a painful margin.

  But despite the fatigue, the words she had just heard haunted her. What if she’s right? What in the world was so special about Hannibal? Why was he so important? She knew that if she could solve that puzzle, it might mean survival. And if she couldn’t …

  “Love you, Mommy.”

  She held him tightly, self-doubt crushed by his answering embrace. They crept down the rest of the fire escape, the snow falling thicker and harder. Their breath curled in front of them like plumes of exhaled smoke.

  “If we get a car, they’ll hear it. If we walk, we won’t get as far. What do you want?”

  “Quiet,” he said. Looking directly at her.

  She hugged him, and he let her. “We walk, then.”

  They could take the walk around the maze … or go right through it. She’d been decent with maze books as a kid. From the window, it didn’t look too complicated. There would be places to hide, and relatively easy ways to avoid accidental encounters. There were four entrances, one in each cardinal direction. They crept from the tower across to the maze without incident, but a voice drifted through the snow just as she passed the Ganesh elephant topiary marking the maze’s western entrance.

  “… and if we finish by the first of the year, I’d reckon…” a man’s voice. A second set of footsteps, but no voice to accompany it. She didn’t recognize the voice. And she had slipped inside the maze before they were close enough to see her.

  “Maze!” Hannibal whispered.

  She held her finger to her lips. “Yes, maze. I think we go right here.”

  “Yes, Mommy. Right.” They crunched softly through the snow, now a four-inch carpet of frozen white. The maze was composed of seven-foot-tall evergreen shrubs of some kind, cloaked in ivory. The walls were about two feet thick with a four-foot pa
thway marked off by the twists and turns.

  They reached a hedge lion, rearing back with white mane and frosted head, roaring silently. The path forked: left or right?

  “Left,” Hannibal said.

  “No, right,” she said.

  He shrugged, and she took him right … and the path dead-ended in another twenty feet.

  Sheepishly, she retraced her steps and turned left. Hannibal was humming. When the snow began to fall more briskly, he started catching flakes on his tongue, licking them happily out of the air. “Hani was right,” he said.

  Yes, indeed. Hani was right.

  Had it not been for her frying nerves, the hedge maze would have been beautiful. Olympia heard another voice, too indistinct to make out the words, close enough to have been inside the maze or outside. She just wasn’t certain.

  Closer.

  No, it was someone inside the maze, a single set of footsteps. Someone talking on a cell phone?

  She pulled Hannibal back into the shadows, and wrapped her hand around his mouth. Blessedly, he seemed to understand exactly what she needed from him, and did not struggle.

  The phone-talker was a woman, the big security woman with the square jaw. Maureen? She had just finished a phone call, and flipped it closed as she plodded by, humming, never seeing the two refugees crouching in shadow behind her.

  As soon as Maureen was gone, they hurried forward, and within a few steps came to another split in the path. Hani had seen the maze from the helicopter, and from the window. Yes, she had as well, but she had begun to suspect Hani’s memory was superior to her own.

  “Which way?” she whispered.

  Hani’s thin outstretched arm pointed to the right.

  He was correct. Two more twists and they were in the center of the maze. A concrete pond bracketed by a pair of marble fish spitting water at each other. Low floodlights rotated colors from gold to green to blue as she watched. “Pretty,” Hannibal whispered. It might have been. At another time in another mood the snow-crested hedges and sculptures, the pool and cascading lights might have been wondrous. This wasn’t that time. She pulled him onward.

  Hani was correct at every turn, and they emerged at the maze’s east end three minutes later.

  She kissed him. “Good boy.”

  She paused, looked left and right and listened hard, and when her heart stopped leaping they snuck up to the guard’s gate. The road was fenced and chained. If they tried to climb that fence, they’d be right in plain sight, helpless and trapped. She went north around the inside edge of the fence until they reached a stand of trees. One of them was climbable, and its branches reached right over the fence.

  Beautiful.

  “Hold on tight,” she said, and he wrapped his arms and legs around her so tightly it seemed he wanted to become part of her again. In the last hour she’d had more contact with Hani than he’d allowed her in the previous six months. For another such hug, she would climb the Empire State Building, and roar at the world like Kong.

  Pretending she was again on the Atlanta Rocks! wall, Olympia climbed the tree. She stopped to calm her breathing, then shimmied out over a branch. It scraped at her legs, bit at the cut on her leg, and she had to stifle a cry. Then she rolled down, holding onto the branch until her hands held all her weight and Hani’s as well, and her numbed fingers lost purchase. They fell, and as her feet crunched through the snow she deliberately tumbled facedown to protect the precious cargo clinging to her back.

  When she opened her eyes, Hani had dismounted, crouching beside her, staring into her eyes with adoration. “’Ommy.”

  “I’m all right, Hani.”

  Distantly, down the slope, Dahlonega’s lights twinkled and shone below them, a Christmas display in miniature.

  “We can make it, baby.” Her breath puffed out before her in little clouds. “We can make it.”

  As they descended the slope, behind them, the first alarm bells were sounding.

  * * *

  Olympia and Hannibal slid, staggered, and crunched their way down the slope southwest of the Salvation Sanctuary through the thickening snow toward a distant Dahlonega. How far did they have to go? Five miles? Six? They weren’t dressed for this kind of cold. What would the temperature do to her stamina? Hani’s? Whatever it did, it wouldn’t stop her, wouldn’t stop them. She swore that to herself as indistinct shouts of alarm drifted from the gate behind them. Clanking. Cars leaving. Flashlight beams sweeping through the darkness.

  “The snow is bad. But it might cover our tracks, if we’re lucky.”

  “Cold,” Hani said.

  She shucked her coat and bundled him in it. Carry him? No, he was eight, and strong, and seemed eager to use that strength. “Here.” A house not fifty meters distant, smoke curling from a brick chimney, lights in the windows. If they could make it that far, there might be safety.

  They banged on the door. “Help! Help us, please.”

  A pause, and then a voice from inside. “Here, here … what’s all the fuss?”

  “Please let us in. We’re freezing.”

  The door opened fractionally. The man who opened the door would have to stand on a case of Wheaties to see eye to eye with a cricket. “Yes?” he said.

  His hair, what there was of it, was as white as typing paper, even his bushy eyebrows. Behind him, a Mrs. Cricket appeared and shared his evident curiosity.

  “Please,” Olympia repeated.

  And miracle of miracles, the door opened to admit them.

  CHAPTER 44

  Mrs. Cricket’s name was Margerie, and Jiminy’s was Franklin. As they entered, Olympia scanned the room, looking for signs that they were alone, or safe. A Christmas-themed picture of young adults holding babies on the mantel. Shelves filled with books, and a smaller rack half-filled with DVDs. A rifle on a rack over the fireplace. Could she get her hands on it? And ammunition?

  “We have a fire,” Franklin said. “Come in. Your boy must be a Popsicle. Come in!”

  “Thank you.” She was shivering. “Do you have something warm for my son?”

  “We have cocoa,” Franklin said. “All he can drink.”

  “I’ll just be a minute,” Margerie said.

  Hannibal wandered around the room in a rough counterclockwise circle. Couch, fireplace, bookshelves, past the kitchen door.

  “Here by the fire, hon,” Olympia said.

  Hani grinned. “Warm.” He dawdled, running his finger along a long row of ancient Encyclopedia Britannicas as he wandered over.

  Olympia rubbed her hands briskly. “Do you have a phone?”

  “Yes. Of course. What happened to you?”

  Hannibal shook his head. Just a bare left-right-left, but for Hani, that wag was as good as a neon sign.

  She improvised rapidly.

  “My car hit a deer. I spun off the road. Need to call the police.”

  Margerie brought a pitcher of cocoa and a pair of mugs. “Here you go, sweetheart. Have all you want.”

  “Where was the accident?” Franklin asked.

  “Mile down the road. We waited in the car until it got cold.”

  “The engine stopped?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I hit a tree.”

  “I thought you said a deer,” Franklin asked.

  “A deer,” she replied. “And then I hit a tree.”

  “Poor darling,” Margerie said. “Here’s the phone.”

  Olympia called 911. Busy signal. She thought of the chaos that had consumed the world, and understood. “Is there a local police number?”

  “It’s on the refrigerator,” Franklin said. “I have to tell you that things have been bad. Even with just the weather, they’ve been bad. But with all this end of the world craziness … I just don’t know.”

  She dialed again, receiving another busy signal. She looked at Hannibal. He mouthed the word: Nicki.

  Finger trembling, Olympia Dorsey dialed Nicki’s number.

  CHAPTER 45

  Nicki sat scrunched in her seat in th
e car, enjoying the steady stream of dry, warm air from the heater as Terry went into the 7-Eleven, seeking coffee and a tourist map, something that might display local roads.

  Standing on the backseat, Pax began to bark in her ear. “Ow!” she said, jerking her head out of the way. “What is it, girl?”

  Then she realized her phone was buzzing. She turned it on, and her ring tone thumped with the bass of a song so old she barely remembered caring about it. The number was unfamiliar. “Hello? Hello?”

  The line was full of static. “Nicki? Baby? Are you all right…?”

  The phone crackled and popped, battery dying. “Where are you calling from? I’ll call you right—damn! I mean, darn!”

  Fighting panic, Nicki realized she had a possible way of calling her mother back. Nicki dug in the glove compartment, hoping to find a compatible charger … and found Terry’s phone. And next to it, the battery. She frowned. Why would he take the battery out?

  She fumbled and clicked the rectangular battery package back in. After a moment of searching, the status window displayed two bars! She squinted, dialed the number, and punched buttons. “Mom?”

  “Baby?”

  “Mom, it’s me!”

  * * *

  In the warehouse eight miles north of downtown Atlanta, Father Geek had been slumbering by his computer screen, deep in a dream of childhood, running through narrow Johannesburg backstreets that kept transforming into Fallujah’s cobblestones. He was yanked out of it when the screen blossomed into a grid with a radiating green dot beeping against the map of a mountainous area. “What…?” he said groggily. And then: “Well, lookie here!”

  The others were sprawled on cots around the room. One at a time they muzzily rose to their feet. Mark rolled over and up, his face heavily creased, wiping at the snail-trail glistening at the corner of his mouth with the back of one meaty hand. “What is it?”

  “I think Mary’s little lamb just wandered back into the fold.”

  “Ooh, I love lamb,” Pat said. “Let’s go shoot it.”