Chapter 9: Saturn Rules

We woke to heavy banging on the door. Junior answered in his pyjamas, to be faced by armed troops and a fired taser to the chest. I was still in bed and had no clue what was going on, only that there was a lot of shouting noise downstairs, gruff voices full of anger. I threw on my PJs and a dressing gown and ventured into the hallway. From the top of the stairs I could see that Junior was on his back and shivering, the red wires from his chest snaking back to a helmeted solder in light white and grey camouflage gear holding a gun-like weapon. He was surrounded by four or five other similarly garbed soldiers and I could hear others going through the house smashing things like the vases of flowers that had adorned the house for the last week.

They looked like men rather than monsters, but I knew that they had to be behind the monsters that attacked last weekend. Somehow they had either laid low and hidden for the last week or they were newly arrived through wherever the monster portal had been hidden. I knew I was powerless to do anything, I am just a businesswoman playing housewife while studying to be someone I had never envisaged being only a year ago. I had no powers, I wasn’t even able to teleport myself away, I wouldn’t get that ability for another two weeks and five days, apparently.

On the positive side Junior was alive but captured by presumably the Old People wanting their paradise back. On the negative side, they had already tried to assassinate Junior’s parents, so the prospects for their heirs weren’t great. I was greatly outnumbered but realistically, even if there was only one of the soldiers I was at a severe disadvantage in size, strength and my combat skills were zero.

The only thing I could think of was firstly to avoid capture. They hadn’t seen me, presumably they had not done any reconnaissance and might not be aware I was here or even existed. They certainly hadn’t used stealth so far, so either they knew I was here and powerless to avoid capture or they were unaware of me. So my first step was to keep them from knowing my presence, avoiding capture, then get away and warn the others as quickly as possible before these soldiers spread and captured anyone else. I didn’t know then but later found out that the whole North Pole had been taken over by force on Saturday night and we had escaped notice until morning due to being built in a hollow and some distance away from the centre of population.

While searching the house yesterday, Junior and I became quite intimate with the design of the house. Being a steep-roofed alpine chalet design, so that snow never builds up dangerously on the roof, there was no attic space tall enough to stand up in, other than a small crawl space between opposite bedrooms where small boxes containing things like Christmas decorations could be stored. We had looked in all these, even finding a wooden box full of beautifully carved and painted wooden Christmas decorations that must’ve been 200 years old. You would have needed a ladder to get into them from the corridor if there was even a loft hatch, but there didn’t appear to be one, but from the master bedroom the access was via the exposed horizontal wall beams that could be used as a ladder and carved elf faces on the vertical corner beams as hand holds.

I gathered my yesterday day clothes from the top of the chest in our bedroom, shinned up the wall quickly and quietly and carefully opened the tiny doorway into the roof space, crawled in and closed the door behind me. It was kneeling room only, literally a crawl space.

Brrr! It was cold in there. I moved to the other side of the wooden box by feel in the pitch dark, just in case the soldiers looked in, and quietly dressed in the dark over my PJs for warmth, with a pair of jeans. A tee-shirt, and a thin sweater and put my dressing gown back on top. My underwear and bra were in the bathroom clothes basket and my outdoor coats and footwear were in the utility room next to the kitchen. Then by feel I felt all around the roof space, to see if there was a doorway to the bedroom opposite, but no, it was solid rough plaster not a door.

The space ran along the complete roof ridge but by the time I’d dressed I’d heard the soldiers stamping around in the corridor below me and I thought that if I could hear them, if I moved too much in the total darkness up there they may easily hear me. My plan to escape and warn the others was stymied. I was helplessly trapped there with no plan and no escape route.

I must have laid down and slept, because I suddenly awoke in the dark to silence. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes but it was still pitch black dark. It was cold, not freezing, but neither was it warm up in the roof space either. All the houses in the North Pole have underfloor heating, using geothermal heat pumps, the airspace warmed by the supplemental heat from open fireplaces burning wood gathered from the local forests and stacked to dry out and mature.

Our bedroom was at the front of the house with double aspect windows. It was a long house shape, designed to be a family home for a large family, so it had four big bedrooms each with bathrooms, one on each corner, with three smaller bedrooms and a shared bathroom in the middle. I moved slowly and carefully to the back of the house after first taking my bearings from the Christmas decoration box above the main bedroom. At the very end of the roof space I came up to the outer log wall. There was a grill set in the wall for ventilation. I’d seen it before from the ground when we surveyed the house the day before. Now, was it big enough fo me to squeeze through? And could I dislodge the grill without making a noise leading to my discovery?