“December 21, 2012,” repeated Tess in a whisper.
Exactly nineteen hours away.
The facade of the Institute of Anatomical Forensics on the campus of Madrid’s Complutense University flashed and twinkled beneath the glow of its Christmas lights. It was an odd sight to behold: a gray, somber-looking edifice so gaily illuminated at eight o’clock in the morning. But despite the early hour, the activity contained within its walls was at full pitch.
Eileen Garrett had found her way to the building in a sleepy haze, unaware of why she had been summoned with such urgency. Doctor Aguirre was waiting for her at the entrance to the building with a folder in his hands.
“I’m sorry for waking you in the middle of the night, miss,” he said. He seemed like a circumspect sort of man. “Last night the police asked us to phone the embassy as soon as we completed the autopsy on Ruiz.”
“Yes?”
“Well…” The doctor’s pause banished the last traces of slumber in Garrett’s head. “To tell the truth, we don’t know quite what to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“The method used to remove the heart of this poor man. We believe it was done with an obsidian knife. Under the microscope we identified a few particles of the volcanic rock. What’s so odd is that this is the kind of weapon used by primitive cultures, like the Mayans or the Aztecs. The skill with which it was used requires a tremendous degree of strength.”
“Are you trying to tell me, Doctor, that this man was stabbed with an Aztec sacrificial knife?”
“I know it sounds bizarre, miss, but there’s no doubt in my mind. And it was done by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.”
Four people in the world knew all the details of the Big One. All four were connected to Jack Bennewitz—including Juan Martorell, according to the article Tess had found on the Internet—and three of them had been found dead, victims of some sort of ritual murder, in the last few hours. The only one left alive was Tess Mitchell, who spent a fitful, sleepless night thinking that before midnight on this new day of December 21, her name would be added to that macabre list. She had to do something to stop it from happening. Anything. Something that would keep her hidden from a bunch of murderers who, just like the ancient Aztec sun-worshippers, believed that the end of the day would mark the end of the world.
Could this really be happening? Or was she just going mad?
It was barely four in the morning when Tess quickly packed her laptop and notes in her car, along with the images she had obtained from the Kitt Peak observatory, and headed for Nogales. For a moment she thought if she could cross the Mexican border within an hour or so and then get herself to Mexico City, it would be very hard for anyone to locate her in a city of nineteen million. She did not warn the police, nor did she realize that what was behind the deaths of Jack, Juan and Francisco was about to crash onto her with all the weight of the laws of physics.
What Tess did know, however, was that at noon on December 20, 2012, a massive solar eruption or Coronal Mass Ejection—CME—had been recorded on Sunspot 1108 at approximately 60° west longitude, perfectly aligned with Earth. The resulting proton storm, picked up by the monitors of the National Astronomical Observatory, was heading toward Earth at that very moment, and would crash into the planet’s surface in a short period of time. This was—what else could it be?—the first sign of the Big One that Professor Bennewitz had been talking about for years: an indeterminate sequence of solar eruptions with a subsequent magnetic emission that was heading straight for planet Earth. Tess had little trouble seeing that the sheer force of the event would be enough to plunge half the planet into total darkness, paralyze radioelectronic emissions in the hemisphere where it landed and destroy no less than eighty or ninety basic communications satellites in its path. But it was also possible that this occurrence might be the sign of something far worse: it still remained to be seen what, exactly, the relationship was between those proton storms and certain climate and chromosomal alterations. That was why she had gone to Jack’s office that morning. That was why his death had left her so perplexed.
As she drove her gray Ford Mustang onto Interstate 19 and headed south for Mexico, she had no idea that she was being followed. The vehicle tailing her was a modern red Nissan Quest minivan with a Yucatán license plate. Tess drove for the remainder of the night, as did the red minivan. When the young physics student finally stopped to sit down to a hearty breakfast at a roadside restaurant near Ciudad Obregón in Sonora state, the men following kept an eye on her from afar. There was no way she could have known it, but the apathy with which she gazed at the cybercafé across the way from the restaurant saved her life. She was far more transfixed watching CNN on the television set there.
“To date, power outages have been reported in seven European countries, to greater and lesser degrees, for reasons that are still unknown,” announced the voice of morning newscaster Terry White, jolting her out of her ruminations. “And in addition to what appears to be the most significant simultaneous blackout in the history of Europe, we are now receiving reports of problems with telecommunications, trains and air traffic. We are now advising anyone with plans to travel to the Mediterranean coast area…”
“Holy Mary mother of God!” exclaimed an old indigenous-looking woman, who crossed herself as she looked away from the television. Despite the early hour, she was already nursing a tall glass of tequila. “Did you see that, young lady? That’s just the beginning!”
“The beginning?” Tess swallowed hard. She spoke very little Spanish, just enough to maintain a short conversation. “The beginning of what, ma’am?”
“Come on, honey! Are you the only person in the world who doesn’t know about what’s going to happen tonight?”
“What is supposed to happen?”
“The end of the world, honey! That’s what the Mayan prophecies predict. And from the look of things,” she said, pointing to the television, “it’s already started in Europe. The land of our executioners.”
Two sharp beeps emanating from her cell phone forced Tess to turn her attention to the liquid crystal display of its tiny screen. It was an RSS message from the Kitt Peak observatory.
“Sunspot 1108 has entered into eruption again. Colossal. The CME are increasing in number now.”
The cell phone went dead.
“I’ve found something, Eileen. Luckily before this damn blackout cut off our access to the internal network.”
Bill Dafoe’s face was radiant. Despite the fact that electricity lines in Spain—and, along with them, those of Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Holland—were completely down, the embassy’s emergency generators had given him a window of time to finish what he had been working on. He went on to explain to Eileen that he had been nosing around the archives of Madrid’s Complutense University in search of information on Francisco Ruiz, when he hit upon the professor’s e-mails, which included a number of messages to a certain Professor Bennewitz, who had been murdered in Tucson at almost the exact same time as Ruiz, and in the very same manner.
“So?”
“Bennewitz was working with a talented student by the name of Tess Mitchell. I’ve been trying to locate her but last night she disappeared from her apartment and her neighbors haven’t seen her since. The Tucson police interrogated her a few hours earlier, but found no reasons to name her as a suspect in the murder. They’re searching for her now, though.”
“Do you think she left town?”
“Well…” Bill still had another piece of information in his possession. “According to border control in Nogales, a vehicle with her license plate left the U.S. and entered Mexico at around five-thirty this morning.”
Eileen’s face suddenly lit up.
“We have to find her, Bill. That girl knows something. I’ll put out a search order for her right away.”
The drive to Mexico City dragged on until well after 11:00 p.m. The vehicle’s radio, oddly enough, was unable to tune
in to a single radio station, just a lot of empty static. Tess’s cell phone had lost reception as of Ciudad Obregón and none of the electronic signs on the road to Mexico City were working. Though these were clearly the symptoms of the fallout from the first proton storm, the physics student decided not to overestimate their importance.
As she approached the highway into the Mexican capital, Tess Mitchell decided that it would be more practical for her to find a hotel somewhere near the Teotihuacán archeological complex. There, at least, she could be sure of finding a room, and she knew the area relatively well. She had spent an entire week there, visiting the ruins with a research team from the university, and Jack Bennewitz had shown her some of the best and cheapest places to stay in the vicinity. As she turned off the ignition in front of the Albergue San Juan she was overcome by a torrent of mixed emotions: her evening strolls with Jack along the Avenida de los Muertos in the heart of the pyramid complex, gazing up at the Milky Way; his explanations of the relationship between each of those monuments and the planets known in pre-Hispanic times; even his remarks about how the people who built Teotihuacán believed that they were feeding the sun with every heart they pulled from someone’s body. All these memories passed through her mind, more vivid than ever. How ironic that Jack would surrender his life to the sun, in the very same way that people did all the way back then, she thought.
“Are you Tess Mitchell?”
An indigenous-looking man nearing forty, with a thin beard and a face weathered by the sun, yanked her out of her thoughts as he stepped out of a red minivan that had just pulled up alongside her car. He wore a brightly colored poncho with geometric motifs that she could barely make out, because his headlights were still on.
“How…?”
“What? How do I know your name?” He smiled. “A good friend of yours told us. Professor Jack Bennewitz.”
As he spoke, two other men stepped out of the minivan and walked over to her. She had a difficult time seeing them because, despite the clarity shed by the first-quarter moon, the hotel lights suddenly went out, and with them all the lights in the neighborhood. Tess jumped with a start.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, miss,” the indigenous man said.
“Anymore? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That time has reached its end and the cosmic clock has done its job. We have just crossed the threshold from the twenty-first to the twenty-second of December.”
Then he added, “Welcome to the Fifth World, Miss Mitchell.”
Tess shook her head.
“Please don’t be afraid. Yesterday we paid a visit to your physics professor to convince him not to publish the information he had regarding the solar storm that the two of you detected. The same information that you are carrying right now in that laptop of yours.”
“You…you were the ones who killed him?” Tess was incredulous. More than reproach, what echoed in her voice was fear.
“Oh, come on! We only sped up his passage, Miss Mitchell,” the man said, without a trace of emotion. “We couldn’t risk allowing Doctor Bennewitz to reveal his findings to the scientific community because, without realizing it, he would have prevented the sky from opening up as it just did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about….”
“I’m sure you understand the scientific jargon better than I do, miss. But what just happened, though you and many other people may not realize it, is that the planet Earth has experienced a blast of cosmic energy so powerful that it produced a dimensional leap. Our position in the universe has shifted, and just as was foretold thousands of years ago, a new world has been born.”
“That’s ridiculous!” replied Tess. “Who are you people? Where did you come from?”
“We are the survivors of the Mayan people, miss. Descendants of those few people who remained on this plane of reality when our ancestors transcended dimensions at the end of the Third World. The world that just left us—forever, in fact—was the fourth.”
“Well, I…I haven’t noticed a thing!”
“Oh, really?”
The man’s ironic smile, fixed on his face, made her wary.
“Have you tried to make a phone call? You won’t be able to,” he said, laughing as he watched Tess unsuccessfully dial the emergency number from her cell phone. “Have you heard anything at all on the radio in the past few hours? No. And from now on you won’t, not ever again. Have you tried plugging anything into an outlet? You might as well say goodbye to all that forever. In the Fifth World none of that will work anymore. The sun has altered the electrical balance in the ionosphere and, as such, in the entire planet.”
“Just like that?”
“Look!” One of the other men with them pointed upward. The night sky had transformed into something phantasmagoric, surreal. The silvery sky seemed to have morphed into a spongy substance that flowed as if dragged by the wind. It was a kind of aurora borealis, one that was nothing like anything any human had ever before seen on Earth.
“Now do you believe us?” the man asked. “Everything is mutating. Even you. You don’t realize it, but your entire molecular structure and DNA are changing at this moment.”
“Right…” she said, quivering. “So, what do you want from me?”
“We’ve come to deliver you a message—Professor Jack Bennewitz is waiting for you at the Teotihuacán ruins. He wants to explain everything.”
“Jack…?” Tess was unable to finish her sentence.
For the umpteenth time, Bill Dafoe checked, but without luck. The conventional communications grid, including the high-resolution microwave signal, was down. The order to search for Tess Mitchell hadn’t made it beyond the four walls of the embassy. Instinctively, he leaned out the window of his office on the sixth floor of the building. To his surprise, all the Christmas lights lining Serrano had gone dark. Not a single bus traveled down this street, one of Madrid’s main arteries, and even the many Santa Clauses that just a few hours earlier had been clogging the sidewalks of this commercial zone, had disappeared into thin air. The city seemed deserted.
“I have to check something,” he said to Eileen, and bounded down the stairs. The elevator, along with all the electricity in the building, had gone dead, as well.
When he arrived at the building’s front gate, the Marine Corps guards and the National Police in charge of watching over the embassy precinct were in a state of distress. Everything had stopped working. Even—and this was the strangest thing of all—the diesel engines of the two assault tanks that the Spanish police used to guard the surrounding streets.
“Bill! Now that’s funny!” shouted the officer responsible for allowing outsiders to gain access to the building. He knew Dafoe from their years as schoolmates back in Lexington, Kentucky. “With this damn blackout I had no way of calling up to let you know. You’ve got a visitor. In the waiting area.”
“A visitor?”
“Yeah…let’s see,” he said, automatically glancing down at the embassy’s entry and exit list. “His name is Francisco Ruiz, and he says that you and your partner have a folder of his that he’d like to pick up.”
“Francisco Ruiz?”
A solemn atmosphere pervaded the ceremonial complex of Teotihuacán. The grayish silhouette of the massive pyramids and the hulking magnificence of Cerro Gordo on the horizon shone dramatically beneath the powerful glow of the moon. Next to the smallest pyramid, in a plaza adorned with reliefs of the Quetzal, a curious cross between bird and insect, Tess just barely made out the familiar image of a man dressed in white. It seemed as though he’d been standing there for a millennium, waiting for her.
“The best place in the world for us to find each other again, Tess!”
Jack Bennewitz’s booming voice reverberated between the empty structures. Tess Mitchell didn’t understand anything, and her face showed it. Right at that moment, she was tempted to think that everything she had been through in the past few hours had been nothing more than a bad practica
l joke.
“It’s me—Jack!” he said, opening his arms wide. “I don’t know what the boys told you, but this is real! At midnight the planet entered into a totally new vibrational phase. All matter, including dark matter, has begun to resonate at a frequency that was unknown up until now. Do you understand, Tess?”
“But…you’re alive!” she exclaimed.
“Alive, dead…what does it matter? Those are states of being that belong to the old world. We’re in a new dimension now.”
The young woman’s hands stroked the soft white cotton of Jack Bennewitz’s suit. It had to be an illusion.
“Come on, Tess! Okay, maybe I didn’t enter this dimension voluntarily, but the men who killed me knew that they were just speeding up my passage by a few hours. They even left you a sign so that you wouldn’t worry….”
“They didn’t leave me anything!” she protested, stepping away from him.
“Yes they did, Tess. They left you a Quetzal butterfly, like the ones on these reliefs. Don’t you recognize it? For the people that built Teotihuacán, as well as the ancestors that established the Mayan calendar, the butterfly symbolized the passage of time. The shift from one dimension to another. I just stopped being a larva before you did. But now both of us are like them….”
The young woman touched her handbag, feeling around for the little box she had taken from Jack’s office. Jack looked at her, content.
“And the rest of the world, Jack? What’s happening to them? Are they all butterflies now, too?”
“The rest of the world, too, Tess. Little by little they’ll all begin to realize it.”