12 Hours Novels & Stories

We both stand there in the middle of the living room listening to it fade down the street and then there’s silence and I press both hands over my face and try to remember how to breathe normally. “That wasn’t him,” Edmund says. “I know.” “We have time.” “I know.” I drop my hands and look at the couch and start fixing the cushions because I need something to do with my body right now or I’m going to lose my mind. “How much time do you think we actually have?” He checks his phone. The cracked screen lights up. “He said six. It’s just past four.” Two hours.

"Tell her we're coming. Tell her to hold on just a little longer. Tell her we love her more than anything in this world." "I will," Dr. Thorne promised. The call ended. Dr. Thorne moved to Eve's side, smoothing the sweat-soaked hair back from her burning forehead. "Did you hear that? They're coming home. They're ending this now and they're coming home to you. You just need to hold on a little longer." Eve's eyes opened....just a crack, barely conscious, but aware enough to understand. "How... long?" she whispered. "Twelve hours," Dr. Thorne said. "Can you give me twelve more hours?"

She wondered, staring at her ceiling in the gradually deepening darkness as night approached, what exactly Billings had known, and whether he'd realized, in the final moments of his life, that he'd gotten too close to something he should never have gone near. She looked at the clock on her phone and did the math without meaning to, the way she'd started doing every night now — five hours left, then four, then three, whittling down toward the one number that had stopped feeling like a time at all and started feeling like an appointment. Whether it would bring another call, or, this time, a silence heavier than anything that voice could say, she wouldn't know until it arrived.

When he shakes his head no, it aches for my mate. “Our flight today is about ten hours.” Our pilot Mitch says before he tells us before he goes into the cockpit. “I’m sure you’re all in a hurry to get home. I need to get back to my mate and our new pup too, so I’ll make it as fast as possible.” “How many minutes is that?” Ghost asks. “Six hundred.” “Oh.” He sits and thinks for a moment. “How many seconds is that?” “Umm, thirty-six thousand.” “I can count that high. I’ve counted higher.”

This is the mess you got our people into, father. “DON RALPH… please… p-please… just give me one sniff… just one fucking—GIVE ME!” His arms shot out like a dagger—and our upper bodies jolted back, out of path, as those bony hands kept stretching desperately, grasping fruitlessly for us. “How much longer?” I asked. “About 12 hours—until he wears out and zonks out. Then he wakes and it’ll start all over again.” “Jesus Christ….” I sighed in exasperation.

countered Gray. Zia sneered. “Really? Like what?” “I have a three to five hours schedule of resting after breakfast, five-hour nap after lunch and ten to fifteen hours of sleep after dinner.” Gray leaned back on the chair, still yawning. “How rude of you to assume I have nothing else to do.”

The papers I published graced national journals, and the research initiatives I joined achieved monumental milestones. My life had become luminous entirely on its own. I no longer needed anyone's favor or salvation. After working myself to the bone, the project I was heading finally made a breakthrough. At last, I was able to return with my team to the coastal research base in the Southern Hemisphere for some well-deserved rest. Yet, I never could've imagined that Evan had already been waiting for me at the base for three solid months. Our first encounter occurred at dusk. The setting sun was melting into liquid gold over the sea, the evening breeze was gentle, and layers of waves were lappi

They had twelve hours before they moved. Twelve hours in a sealed apartment in the eighth district, with the blinds drawn and two phones between them and enough information to bring down an organization that had spent thirty years making itself impossible to bring down. It should have been a planning session, structured and operational. For the first four hours, it was.

"Exactly." He nods once. Slow and certain and decided. "Seventy two hours," he says. "Seventy two hours," I agree. Down the corridor in the main room Eli is eating his second helping of whatever Tiara directed Lena to make and Cass is talking to Soren in the low careful way of someone testing whether normal conversation is still available to them, and I think about what we are building toward in seventy two hours and what it will mean when it is done. Not just for me.

Let them have their six hours. He's already won.