The Last Christmas On Earth - Andrea Lepri

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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.

      "Well then, let's not waste any more time," the President agreed, pointing to the seats.

      "The Ring of Fire is a forty-thousand-kilometer-long belt that borders the Pacific Ocean basin, it looks like a horseshoe and is characterized by an uninterrupted series of oceanic trenches and volcanic chains that generate a strong instability, due to the continuous plate tectonic boundaries," Dr. Hope began. Then he paused and looked directly at the President to make sure he was following him. The President thought "as I predicted he has come here to talk about misfortunes" and for a moment he was tempted to send him away. Instead, he invited him, with a slight nod, to continue.

      "About ninety percent of earthquakes in the world occur along the Ring of Fire, where, among other things, about seventy-five percent of the Volcanoes on Earth are located. And it is precisely in that area that the most devastating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions recently have occurred: the 2012 tsunami caused by a major earthquake in Indonesia, with the consequences that we all know; the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in 2010; and then there was the tremendous episode of the Fukushima earthquake. But it seems that Earth is awakening everywhere. In the opposite hemisphere, exactly in the same period, there was a great earthquake that devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And then there are Kamchatka volcanoes in Russia and Indonesian ones like Merapi, Krakatoa, and many others, which since then have consistently increased their volcanic activity. Recently the Fuego and the Santiaguito also erupted in Guatemala ... and then many other incidents occurred that it is useless to mention," stressed Hope interrupting the rosary of catastrophes he was counting one after the other because he realized that the President had assumed an indecipherable expression on his face. He turned to Ross and Kowalsky hoping to get some help, he had been in that room for less than ten minutes and was already deeply uncomfortable.

      "Go ahead, please, we don't have all night," Ross urged him, and he obeyed.

      "Our planet intensifies periodically its seismic and volcanic activity, it is something more than normal, but we suspected that generally climatic changes could not have been caused exclusively by this phenomenon, that even if very intense it was not however sufficient to justify this significant changes in every part of the globe," said Hope, but immediately afterward he paused again. He had talked while everyone present was listening to him in silence without blinking; the way they looked at him made him feel more like a guest than ever before.

      "Come on, don't stop right on top of it," the President urged him. Hope could not have said if he was really interested in what he was saying or if he was ironic about it, in any case, he continued to have the feeling that man actually blamed him, but he just couldn't understand the reason. "Very well" he resumed after drinking a glass of water, more to stall than to thirst. "The first thing we found out is that climate change is partly due to the fact that many places on the planet are no longer present where they were until recently."

      "Explain that better please," the President invited him.

      "Tectonic plates movements, a slight shift of Earth's rotation axis caused by all the events I mentioned earlier, and finally a slight variation of Earth's orbit due to an alteration of gravity fields. The result of the sum of the effects of these three changes, as I said earlier, is that many places are no longer in the geographical position they were in until a few months ago. And so now they are subject to different climatic situations."

      "It's incredible," Kowalsky said. Ross nodded silently.

      "I suppose you didn't ask to see me just to talk about the weather ..." the President said.

      "Yes," agreed Hope, "here the climate changes are the minor problem."

      "Are you kidding? So what would be the biggest one?" Kowalsky asked.

      "What really opened our eyes was a sudden and drastic reduction of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which we accidentally discovered during a research session on the thinning of the permafrost layer at the North Pole. When we arrived at the site, in order to find out the causes, we were stunned, the surface of that floating plastic island, thousands of square kilometers wide and thirty meters high, had reduced its size by about forty percent in just a few weeks. This phenomenon resulted from an intense overheating that caused the island to crumple upon itself. Whole shoals of fish floated upside down, literally boiled, and in many parts of the ocean, we recorded temperatures well above fifty-celsius degrees. And while we kept monitoring sky and sea and discussing several hypotheses, other scientists were making a series of discoveries that I would call scary," said Hope. Then, feeling more and more uncomfortable, he stopped again.

      "... What are you talking about?"

      "It's about solar activity."

      "Explain yourself better."

      "The

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