Andrea Lepri - The Last Christmas On Earth

James raised his head surprised, she turned and pulled him towards her. It was a fleeting and silent moment, in the dark as always, it lasted barely enough time to count to ten, without exchanging a kiss or a caress, nor a single word. Immediately afterward, Eve fell asleep and he stayed awake to wonder why the weirdness just seemed not to want to end. First, she suggested a vacation all together and then they had sex, and that could be the prelude to a new beginning. But he did not dare to really believe it. Deep down inside him, he thought that he didn't even know anymore if that was what he really wanted.

While waiting for the unpleasant meeting that awaited him, the President had begun his usual relaxing chess game against the PC, and slowly he filled in his mind with reflections. "Benjamin Hope ... sometimes life really enjoys playing with people's names. How can a man, with a profile similar to that of a vulture and with a zombielike complexion, have such a name? Not to mention the few times we met was just to tell me the bad news ... how can a man so similar to a scavenger be called Benjamin Hope?" He was wondering, when the sudden "bip" of the intercom startled him. He checked the time on the PC application bar and snorted in resignation, the time for the dreaded appointment had arrived.

"The people you were waiting for arrived," the secretary informed him via intercom.

"Thanks, Elisabeth. Please let them sit in the anteroom, I will receive them in two minutes," he replied.

"As you wish, Mr. President."

The President saved the game and closed the computer, finally sorted out the desk and placed two large files on it, as to make a good impression. He tidied up his shirt and walked to greet his guests. Walking along the short stretch that separated him from the door, he passed in front of the United States flag, placed between a philodendron and a pachira plant, and stopped to look at her perplex. How in a lightning movie trailer he relived the path that, starting from so far away, had brought him there, and for a moment he wondered if all the efforts and sacrifices he made to be in front of that flag in that precise moment were really worth it. Aware that there was only further delay in his torment, he shook his head and decided to go and open the door.

Helen was lying on a metal table and two voices kept telling in her head she had nothing to fear. She could not remember how she ended there, she only knew that the contact of her naked skin against the cold steel was horrible and that she wanted to escape, but her body did not respond to her commands; she felt like a piece of iron resting on a magnetic surface.

She opened her eyes and looked around, but what she saw let her wish to have never done it. She was in a laboratory, strange machines were hanging from the ceiling next to a lamp, it was so powerful as to blind her and some metal tentacles were threateningly leaning towards her. Shining surgical instruments were arranged in order of size on the top shelf of a trolley on her left, and on a metal shelf, just a little further back, there was a collection of crystal jars containing human fetuses. Helen suddenly felt completely lost and a sensation she had never had before, a completely resigned terror. One of the two silent figures in white coats grasped an instrument and stretched his arm towards her belly, meanwhile, he mentally kept repeating to her to stay calm. She felt a kind of tickling and when she finally managed to figure out what they were going to do she tried again to rebel but she couldn't, everything seemed muffled and she felt helpless, the only thing she was able to do was crying. She closed her eyes, so as not to see what they were doing, and tried to gather all her energy, tried to scream as hard as she could, and her own voice woke her as she fell from the cot. Not even the time to touch the ground and she was already on her feet, she turned the light on and ran towards the bathroom because she almost shitted herself. Going out of the bathroom, she stopped in front of the mirror in the anteroom and rinsed her face with trembling hands, continuing to look around hallucinated. Although she had been awake yet for a few minutes, those terrible sensations had stuck to her like a second skin, almost as if they weren't the fruit of her stressed mind but rather memories of a truly lived experience. She repeated to herself to calm down, it was only her cursed recurring nightmare. She knew that in that dream there was also Harry, she had never been able to see him, but she was sure he was there too somewhere. Suddenly she realized when she had really tried that kind of annoying tickling in his lower abdomen: that nightmare had brought back the memory of when, years before, she had thought she was pregnant. She had lulled the dream of becoming a mother for a few days until Dr. Parker, just on the third check-up, informed her that there was no fertilized ovum in her womb and dismissed her saying it was a simple hysterical pregnancy, brutally extinguishing all the emotions she had blossomed in her mind. The woman began to cry again, when she calmed down she sat at her desk and took out a sheet and pen with the intention of finding a rational way to go with her mind. She thought back to Larry's and coroner's words scribbling notes about it, and the more she thought about it, the more obvious it seemed the chemist must have been wrong about it. The worst thing of all was that there was probably at least one killer among them and, surely, it was the author of the anonymous call. All the faces of her fellow villagers passed in her mind one by one, in one line. She tried to imagine each one of them in the guise of a homicidal maniac. She was sure that none of them could go in the woods in the middle of the night to kill a couple in a moment of intimacy, but if it really had been one of them, how could he have done it without leaving a single trace?

Such a job was worthy of a professional and certainly not a beet grower or a skipper. And then, what was casing the fact those corpses were mummifying? Perhaps a malfunction of the morgue cells? And that phosphorescent powder what was it? And her finger? What was happening to her finger? She looked at the clock and realized that it was barely one o'clock in the morning, she decided that she had to do something practical immediately or once finished her shift her colleagues would have found her completely and definitively out of her mind.

"As you certainly know Dr. Benjamin Hope is the coordinator of the working group that completed the Project Earth, which NASA itself commissioned to the National Academy of Sciences during the previous presidential term," the Chief of the National Security Department, Jason Ross, began after the customary pleasantries.

"I know Mr. Hope very well," the President replied, extending his hand. "Over the past few years, our roads have crossed more than once. And it is a pleasure to see him again because I respect him greatly both as a man and as a scientist" he lied in order to flatter the scholar. The way in which Hope had insisted on meeting him had given the President the certainty that he had come to bring him a very bitter pill to throw down and he hoped that, if he had flattered him a little, he would at least have the foresight to sugar coat it a little. Doctor Hope nodded his lips in a vague smile, but the firm expression of his eyes did not change by a thousandth because something in the words of his interlocutor had sounded out of line.

"In our opinion, we can begin to talk," announced Ben Kowalsky, Jason Ross's deputy.

"At least let me offer you something to drink first, to cool you off, you walked a long way," the President proposed.

"No compliments and no offense, Mr. President, but we know this will not be a five-minute thing. We are all very tired and the sooner we go straight to the point the sooner we can go to sleep," said Ross, certain of interpreting the thought of everyone present.