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“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 begi
“The begi
“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 Be
“So?”
“Be
“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 Be
“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 Be
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 Be
“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.”