Multiversum (32 page)

Jenny looked down the street as a furious dust storm started brewing. The families who lived in the neighbourhood were all there, hugging and holding hands. Women, men, and children. No one was running away; no one was letting themselves descend into the meaningless panic that had spread through the heart of the metropolis. It wouldn't have done any good, and they knew it.

‘What are we going to do?' Alex turned to look at Jenny, fearfully, as a vague noise in the distance came closer and closer, breaking through the surreal silence.

‘I don't know … What's happening over there?'

From the other end of the street a mob of people was running towards them, surrounded by twisting funnels of dust and detritus. Shouts and cries were echoing through the air. They had come from the city, there were lots of them, and they were coming closer and closer.

‘Jenny, let's get out of here!' Alex shouted. His gaze was still locked on the frantic crowd running flat out in the grip of panic, but his body had already swivelled in the opposite direction and was poised for escape.

‘That way!' she exclaimed, and took off running. The minute she did, a roar of enormous proportions swept through the quarter, shaking the earth for several seconds and rocking every house and building around them. It was like a thunderclap, and it seemed to mark, with all the majestic reverberation of an orchestral timpani, the beginning of the spectacle. The wind began to gust harder, while the dust spun and swirled with the force of a tornado. People in the streets looked each other in the face in pure terror, and then started to run en masse in the same direction as the two of them. As they ran, Alex and Jenny realised they were being chased by the crowd from the city, who were following them hard on their heels, like an all-consuming tidal wave.

There was no longer any law.

No curfew, no evacuation plan.

There was nothing but a world in the grip of hysteria.

Alex and Jenny ran until they were breathless. Every so often they'd turn and glance at the mob close behind them. People would fall and be trampled underfoot; occasionally an elderly person would be swept under or left behind. Everyone was screaming, but their shouts were lost in the din that followed the thunderous roar, a dull and terrifying noise as if the earth were quaking.

A few minutes later, Alex and Jenny found themselves in open countryside.

‘Look … look at Milan!' Alex shouted, as his eyes focused on the sight that lay just past a highway overpass. A black mantle of smoke lay over the city, engulfing it.

‘Damn it, it's getting closer! What are we supposed to do now?' asked Jenny as she looked up at the trajectory of the asteroid in the sky.

Alex said nothing, but he stopped running for a second and stood there exhausted, panting. Deep inside him, he saw the clever, inquisitive eyes of his best friend, trapped in an apartment that before long would be crushed into dust along with the rest of the city.

Marco, my old friend
, Alex thought, as he shut his eyes briefly, doing his best not to think of the fate in store for the only person who had ever really believed in him.

Another rumble shook the ground beneath their feet, even more deafening than the one that had preceded it.

‘Down there!' shouted Jenny, stretching out her arm to point to a service station by the side of the highway. Her voice couldn't carry over to Alex: it was drowned out by the dull roar that was washing over their eardrums. Alex only saw her lips move, and the direction she was pointing in. They started running towards the service station together.

In just a few seconds they were on the other side of the building. They ran around it and found themselves at the front door of the Autogrill, just as hail starting pouring like shrapnel out of the sky, cutting through the blanket of smoke and dust overhead. The hail was accompanied by dazzling flashes of light, as if someone out in space were using an enormous flashbulb to immortalise every instant of that disaster.

As soon as Alex shut the door behind him, they both saw what things were like in there. Six or seven people stood in front of the windows, looking up, hypnotised. Others, mostly women and old men, had thrown themselves on the floor. They were huddled behind the counter or near the shelves, their hands over their ears in an attempt to protect themselves from the explosion of decibels that was deafening them all.

Through four speakers mounted on the wall, a radio was playing ‘Moon River', but Frank Sinatra's voice barely made itself heard, drowned out as it was by the hailstorm raging outside the windows.

‘May God carry you to glory …' said a woman, grabbing the bottom of Alex's jumper and staring at him, eyes wide open and brimming with tears. Her words were almost inaudible, while the windows of the Autogrill were shaking and seemed on the verge of bursting into a thousand bits.

Alex gave Jenny a quizzical look, then pulled her towards him by one arm and stared at her intensely.

I don't want to die in here. We're going to find that damned place!

Alex took a deep breath, then he nodded. An instant later they were back outside.

They ran down the four-lane highway, away from Milan. More importantly, away from the furious gusts of wind. Their legs were heavy, and the force of the storm was pushing them in the other direction.

They stopped under a bridge, in an area that appeared to be deserted.

‘I can't go on …' said Alex, his hands on his knees, his shoulders hunched forward. His face was covered with dust, the dust that had taken the place of normal air, making it hard to breathe.

Jenny went over to him with a determined look on her face. ‘Becker said that the only hope of salvation is Memoria,' she said. ‘But how do we get there?'

‘If only he'd told us what the hell it is … We're all going to be roasted alive here before long!'

Alex shot a look beyond the bridge. Where they were was exactly like the eye of a tornado. Lightning flashes and thunderclaps were now following on the heels of one another, echoing through the improvised shelter where they were huddling.

‘Marco's down there. In the middle of all that smoke. He can't possibly survive.'

‘We're not going to survive either, if we don't find that place at once.'

39

Alex glanced out from under the bridge and realised that time was running out. In the sky, the fiery ribbon seemed to announce the imminent end of its trajectory. Closing time, ladies and gentlemen, last orders, last round.

It all happened in an instant. Alex's eyes closed as the words of the Malaysian fortune teller began whirling through his head.

I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean.

Then a flash took him back to the night before, when he had seen the symbol on the hardhat worn by the father of the family that had taken them in.

That symbol … it was on the fortune teller's card. He showed it to me. It was my future.

‘Follow me, Jenny! We have to get to the excavation site!'

Alex grabbed her by the hand and they started to run past the bridge, along the highway, as the land on either side of the road was enveloped in flames. Now and then they went past burning cars and clusters of people fleeing to nowhere in particular. The hailstorm intensified, kicking up more and more dust. They realised that there was no rain in that thunderstorm. There was nothing but grit and detritus. Millions of tiny fragments that pelleted in all directions, like a mass of pawns preceding the arrival of the king.

And the king was about to make his last move.

Alex and Jenny ran through the middle of that tornado of whipping shrapnel, their arms bent over their foreheads to protect their eyes. He knew the area, which was the same as it was in his original dimension: the construction site for the new shopping mall was just a few hundred metres away, a place he knew well, a place that he had visited frequently with his father. It was one of those details that both his and Jenny's realities had in common. In both worlds, at the same point along the highway, a new mall filled with shops of all kinds was being built.

They moved as fast as they could, never stopping, going past a small supermarket with a sign reading
Ben's Corner
and a shattered window. Both their minds went to the story they'd heard about looting. They realised that the last meal they'd ever eat in that lifetime had been stolen from that ravaged supermarket.

When the excavators with the logo Caterpillar written on them first heaved into view in the distance, next to a construction crane, Alex started running even harder. Jenny kept pace with him, panting, her heart in her throat and her hair flying in the wind that filled it with dust and grit.

‘This is it,' he said, slowing down when he came up to a line of blue portable toilets. ‘The fortune teller already knew where we'd be today. It's incredible …'

‘Why are we here, Alex?' Jenny asked after they made their way past a series of barriers, and the gigantic excavation for the foundations of the shopping centre gradually appeared before them: an enormous cavity in the earth at least one hundred metres wide, two hundred metres long, and a good twenty-five metres deep. The wall of fire coming towards them out of the countryside was getting dangerously close to the crater.

‘Because so it is written,' Alex replied, staring into space.

I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean
, the voice of the fortune teller continued echoing through the walls of his skull. Now even Jenny could hear it.

‘Everything we've done has led us here. It
had
to lead us here.'

I'm afraid, Alex
, thought Jenny.

It was at that moment that their eyes flew to the sky: the fiery trail that the asteroid was tracing over their heads suddenly veered earthwards. It took no more than a couple of seconds: the red-and-yellow wake that had just penetrated the atmosphere widened rapidly and vanished behind the mountains of Bergamo that rose on the distant horizon. If there had been roars capable of drowning out all other sounds before this, the sound that ensued this time was a hundred times louder. The shock wave was terrifying, so powerful that it shook the earth beneath their feet as if someone out in space were shaking the planet like a giant snow globe, to create a toy blizzard of shredded plastic. An enormous cloud of smoke rose from the other side of the mountains and started pushing into the sky, as Jenny and Alex stood watching the scene in amazement, holding each other tight.

‘We're out of time!' shouted Alex, turning to Jenny and staring her in the eye. The fury of the wind seemed like the powerful breath of an invisible giant that was hurling flames in their direction from the countryside.

‘This is the end,' she whispered, as she clutched the triskelion in her hands and lost herself in Alex's eyes.

‘I love you, Jenny,' Alex said, his eyes shining. He was trembling with fear.

‘I love you too. I always have …' she said, leaning into him, both hands on his chest, as their lips met in one last kiss. A moment out of time, a promise of eternal union. They kissed as if for the first time. As if they were on Altona Pier, alone in that silent, magical place, with the waves all around them. But there was no constellation of Orion watching over them.

They suddenly both opened their eyes wide.

‘We're going to burn, Jenny! We have to jump,' said Alex as he worked his way around the last barrier at the edge of the cliff. She grabbed his hand even tighter; she'd never let it go, for anything on earth.

‘One …'

A gust of heat enveloped them, as if the asteroid had opened a gash in the Earth's atmosphere so large that it could no longer stand up to the sun's rays.

‘Two …'

Alex and Jenny looked down at the abyss beneath their feet, as dozens more fireballs shot across the sky, as if in some gigantic fireworks show. These fragments had broken away from the asteroid at the moment of impact with the Earth's atmosphere, and now they were hurtling in all directions at immense velocities: hundreds of atomic bombs poised to raze the continent to the ground. The most incredible manifestation of her infinite power that Nature had ever displayed to humanity. The cosmos's ultimate demonstration of its power, as if to emphasise the crushing superiority of the laws of the universe over the insignificance of the human race.

Alex shouted: ‘Three!' and Jenny's hand practically became one with his.

With a brief running start they leaped into the void, just an instant before a burst of incandescent rock projectiles ravaged everything around them, burning the words ‘game over' onto the remnants of the history of civilisation.

As they fell, the most intense images and memories of their lives played in their heads.

There was Roger Graver telling little Jenny the stories of the constellations, using funny voices and dramatic gestures to impersonate the gods of Olympus.

There was Marco, a broad smile on his face, his colour-coded remote controls in his hands, grilling Alex on what functions each control performed.