Multiversum (27 page)

He who wore the black cloak was dominating the stage. He would shroud humanity in centuries and centuries of silence. He was the last judge of men and women, come to dictate the last law they'd ever know. For the first time, the law truly would be the same for one and all. Even those who owned fallout shelters wouldn't escape their fate; no one could hide in a secure basement and survive. Even the city-sized bunkers that were reserved especially for politicians, religious leaders, scientists, and human guinea pigs, the elect few preparing to restart civilisation in the aftermath of the asteroid crash, would be engulfed by oblivion. The most devastating impact in the history of the planet Earth was coming, and there was no way out for anyone.

Alex passed Piazza Piola, disoriented, pushing his way through the crowd of people looking up at the sky. He knew that there was only one way to get to Jenny: he had to mentally reconstruct her dimension, just as he had done to make his way back to Heathrow. But his mind was like a room that had been turned upside down. Images, memories, and emotions of all kinds were twisting and whirling inside him. There was only one place where he could hope to find the bridge that had taken him to Jenny: the Planetarium, in the gardens of Porta Venezia.

He had no way of knowing that it would work for certain, that this strategy could take him to her. But he had to try.

Alex broke into a run and took off through the crowd.

He ran the length of Viale Gran Sasso, heading for the intersection with Corso Buenos Aires. The cars abandoned on the street, the bikes and scooters lying on their sides, the broken-down traffic lights, and the people stunned by the apocalyptic vision gave way to a grim and silent cityscape. The human race had laid down its arms.

The murmurs from the crowd resumed softly, fearfully, cautiously. As if the crowd really had elected that asteroid their god and they were afraid of disturbing its awful advent.

Alex was already in Piazza Argentina by this point. The shop windows were nothing but mute depictions of humanity's shallow materialism, and they were a procession of empty offers. Before Alex's eyes, there was a stream of bewildered children, resigned elderly people, and terrified adults. The mass hysteria was building up again, as if the moment of stillness that had just seized the city were nothing more than the calm before the storm.

By the time he was almost in Piazza Lima, a shirtless guy, with long hair stretching halfway down his back and a baseball bat, was staring wildly at the sky and shouting: ‘Come on down, you sons of bitches! Come on down and fight! I'm not afraid of you!'

Alex sidestepped him by running around behind him. A few metres further on, he noticed that a number of people were holding up their mobile phones and using them as video cameras, filming the spectacle. These memorable images, Alex mused, would never appear in any special editions of the evening news.

When people finally regained the use of their voices, Alex heard a vast array of disparate comments as he continued to run towards Porta Venezia. There were those who claimed that there was no reason to be afraid, for the Americans must have foreseen the arrival of the asteroid and that a missile would surely be launched any minute now to take it down — they were just waiting for it to come within range. Others believed that with the passing hours the Earth would rotate onto an angle that meant the asteroid would plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, triggering a tsunami that would flood the entire Iberian Peninsula. ‘Oh well,' they were saying. ‘As long as the water doesn't come this far.'

Alex didn't stop or even slow down to listen. When he reached the gate outside the public gardens, it was locked. He was forced to climb over.

He hauled himself up with all the strength he had left. The dry branches of a tree inside the stone wall got tangled in his hair. He pushed off with both arms and landed on the gravel.

The domed structure of the Planetarium loomed before him.

The front door was open. Alex took a few cautious steps beyond the signs announcing a school lecture series that would never take place, then he crept past the second set of doors inside, slipping through a set of heavy curtains and into the auditorium.

The hall was shrouded in darkness, but it didn't seem to be deserted. On the other side of the stage, several homeless people were stretched out on three or four seats in the distance. Luckily, they were asleep.

‘I've got to do this,' he whispered as he sat down in a corner where the people wouldn't see him, even if they did wake up.

When he was finally able to close his eyes to find the proper concentration and block out all outside stimuli, his mind kept showing him the cold and powerful picture of the asteroid. He tried to get rid of it, but it stayed there, like a slide that was stuck, preventing the carousel from turning and projecting anything else.

Then he settled back in his seat and opened his eyelids ever so slightly, looking up at the ceiling. The artificial reconstruction of outer space had been turned off, but that was the same ceiling where he had first seen Orion's Belt, when he was little. The same ceiling that he had admired with Jenny not so long ago, in the dimension he was now trying desperately to get back to.

In an instant he glimpsed the entire sequence of events again. Jenny's eyes. Their first kiss. The triskelion. The Milky Way. Her fingers intertwining with his.

The vortex seized him with extraordinary force. It flung him into a tunnel of blurry voices and colours, as thousands of nameless faces hurtled towards him and shot through him.

He woke up with a stabbing pain on the right side of his forehead.

He was sitting in a bed.

When he focused on his surroundings, he understood that he was now in his bedroom in a parallel dimension. His eyes flew immediately to the shelf next to his desk. The Athlete of the Year award was gone. In its place, there was a gold medal hanging on the wall. He got up and went over to read the inscription:
Regional Basketball Tournament — First Place
.

Alex smiled for a moment. In his dimension, they'd lost that championship game by one point, with a three-point shot by Alex that had hit the backboard and rebounded, out of play just as the horn sounded, ending the game: he'd been only a few centimetres off. In Jenny's reality, those centimetres had shifted slightly in their favour.

Her voice perforated his eardrums without warning.

Alex, I can hear you! You're back! Please, please, tell me it's true.

Yes, I'm here. I just woke up in my own bedroom. Why aren't we together?

I ran away. You didn't know who I was anymore
.
You practically attacked me at the Planetarium.

I wasn't myself, Jenny. I'd lost control. Where are you now?

I'm hiding. There's some kind of curfew all over the city.

What do you mean?

Everyone's locked up inside, I don't know why, but the sky's turned all weird
—
apparently a hurricane is about to hit, or maybe something worse.

Damn it. It's going to happen here
,
too. Where can I find you?

What's going to happen here, too?

I'll explain when I see you. How can I get to where you are?

I don't know. I walked and walked, I ended up in front of a train station. There was a blue signboard that said Lambrate. Then I kept walking straight ahead.

Did you see the name of the street?

Yes, Via Rombon. It's like a war's going on out there: the army is on every street corner …

The army?

Yes, there were loudspeakers issuing orders to stay inside. Government orders, as far as I can tell. It's a matter of national security.

That's crazy …

Please come, as fast as you can. You'll find me underneath a bridge, next to a highway sign.

Got it. You're right underneath an on-ramp to the ring road.

Hurry, Alex. I'm afraid. There are some hedges next to the road. If army trucks come by, I'll hide behind them.

I'll be there as quickly as I can.

Alex rushed into the street and started running as fast as he could. He ran towards Piazza Piola and turned into Via Pacini, heading for Lambrate. The silence that had settled over the city imparted an icy sense of death to him. Looking up at the sky, he saw only big black clouds piling up, preventing him from catching a glimpse of the asteroid. A siren suddenly broke the silence, followed by an incomprehensible warning shouted over a megaphone. The voice came from behind him, but it sounded fairly distant.

In the meantime, Alex could already see the train station. As he cut diagonally across the piazza, he noticed that the blinds on the windows of all the apartment buildings were shut tight. He thought of his parents, barricaded in their apartment, back in his original dimension.

The deserted city echoed back only the sound of his footsteps and his panting breath. Now and again, the siren went off, followed by the warning. Alex didn't slow down at the intersections, nor did he even bother to check whether the traffic lights were green or red. There was no need. There wasn't the shadow of a car on the streets. When he shot under the bridge and emerged on Via Rombon, he heard someone shouting. He slowed down and tried to peer into the distance, to where the shouts seemed to come from. To his left, he could see the street that ran into Piazza Udine. The voice was coming from there. Now he could see him: a man stood there, completely naked, with long hair and a rifle in his hands. He was in the middle of the road, at least two hundred metres away. Alex made sure he wasn't being observed, then went back to watching the man, wondering what on earth he was up to.

‘And the time of the Last Judgement will come upon us,' he was shouting, in the throes of hysteria, ‘and the chariots of the Lord will come to take the souls of the damned! And the Angel will come, to bring redemption! Accept me, O Jesus Christ, take me into Your arms, and with me my brothers, and with me my people …'

Alex didn't even have time to hear the end of that plea, because an army truck appeared out of nowhere and two soldiers opened fire on the man, who collapsed to the ground.

‘Damn it,' Alex whispered, before turning and taking off at full speed again.

He continued running as hard as he could, racing past a service station, a market, and a series of shops. He finally reached the bridge that Jenny had told him about. He turned around. The army truck was at the far end of the street. Heading straight for him. They'd spotted him.

‘Jenny! Jenny! I'm here, Jenny!' he shouted in the loudest voice he could muster.

She popped up from behind a bush, but Alex looked past her to where a second army truck was coming from the opposite direction.

The two of them ran straight into each other's arms.

Alex hugged Jenny tight as the truck continued coming towards them. She surrendered to his embrace and saw, over Alex's shoulders, the truck full of soldiers who had killed the man. It was about a hundred metres away.

They were surrounded.

There was no place to run.

In the deserted setting of that part of the city, a boy and a girl, locked in an embrace, found themselves caught between two army trucks full of soldiers, ready to open fire.

A huge man in uniform leaped out of the first truck, and a number of soldiers got out and arranged themselves in a semicircle around Alex and Jenny.

‘Fire!' the man ordered.

Alex looked Jenny in the eye. These men wanted to kill them. But why? They weren't a pair of crazy fanatics shouting in the middle of the street. They weren't armed. They were just two kids looking for shelter. It made no sense. Just as it made no sense that a six-year-old child should be subjected to shock therapy by his own parents. The two thoughts merged, while a new truth emerged in Alex's mind. What could his parents have in common with a platoon of soldiers? Nothing. And perhaps that was exactly the answer. There was no enemy: it was the very end of life itself that pursued him like a black hole swallowing everything in creation.

Jenny's eyes opened wide; her knees were trembling as she wrapped her arms around Alex's body.

Look inside me
, thought Alex.

They gazed into each other's eyes as the soldiers trained their rifles on them, fingers resting on the triggers, ready to execute them both.

A sudden ray of light burst out of their embrace and filled the area immediately around them. A series of light beams exploded in every direction, creating in the space of a few instants an enormous white dome that illuminated the streets, the buildings, and the sky overhead.

‘What the h-hell is g-going on?' a soldier stammered.

‘I don't understand it …' responded his commanding officer, who had just issued the order to fire.

The sun had already set on that chilly afternoon in early December, but the light blazing from Alex and Jenny was strong enough to light the entire neighbourhood.