"We're not," she whimpered. "He's already there. It'll happen any second. We're not gonna get out in time."
I set her down, one arm around her, so I could get a hand on the doorknob, open the door. I lifted her into my arms again and carried her into the stairwell.
I went up the stairs quickly, taking them two at a time, rising toward the brighter light above. I could feel now how unnaturally strong I was, how quickly my mind was working, outstripping time. I thought about what I would do when I got upstairs. Would I be able to save Serena and come back to try to clear the theater? No. I knew there was no time to do both. I had to choose. I either had to get her out or try to get everyone out. As I took that single flight to the upstairs door, whole worlds of tragedy flashed through my mind. There was the world in which I rescued the girl but all the others in the auditorium died; the world in which I tried to save everyone, but Serena was killed for my useless heroics; the world in which I got some people out, but not Serena…
I crested the flight, reached the landing, the door. This time, I managed to turn the knob without putting Serena down. I pushed the door open with my foot and held it open with her body. I stepped out into a dark corridor.
At once, there was a loud blast, a huge explosion. Serena cried out. The floor rattled under my feet.
I froze, eyes wide, mouth open. I felt Serena's body seize and stiffen in my arms.
But nothing happened. No gust of wind and flame, no destruction. Music rose. A patter of small arms fire sounded.
"Shit!" Serena said. "The movie."
I gave a quick, silent laugh.
The exciting music soared. I took one quick look around, this way and that.
There it was: the red light of an exit sign to my right, a guard standing underneath it. It was our chance of escape. I could get out that way. I could save Serena's life and my own.
To my left, I saw the swinging doors into the auditorium. There was a uniformed usherette standing there-a tiny old woman with black and silver hair.
I looked toward the red light. I looked back to the swinging doors. I made my choice. I barreled down the hall toward the auditorium. I had to try to clear the place. Even if it killed us both, I had to try.
I reached the doors. I turned my back to them. Serena's feet swung around and the ancient usherette had to leap out of their way.
The usherette began to say something. It sounded like "Ut-"
Then I hit the doors with my back. I carried Serena through, into The End of Civilization as We Know It.
The End of Civilization as We Know It
The music surrounded us, brash and loud. We were bathed in strobic light and shadows. I charged through the flicker, up an inclined aisle, gathering my breath, gathering my courage.
I started shouting even before I reached the auditorium, my voice nearly drowned by the music.
"Bomb! There's a bomb in the building! Get out! There's a bomb!"
I plunged into the center of the movie.
It felt like that. It felt as if I'd crashed through the surface of the show and become a part of it. I had broken out of the aisle onto the stage of a vast amphitheater. Tiers and tiers of seats rose into the glimmering darkness all around me. Eyes gleamed up there, gazing down at me. Hundreds of faces came halfway into view then vanished as the shifting light from the scene below played over them and passed by.
I was in that scene. I was lost in that light: light and color and shapes and figures ringed round by the tiers of gazing eyes. There were the pyramids of Giza rising toward the sky; and there the sphinx of living rock standing its ancient guard. Trucks were rumbling past in the distance. Men in khaki uniforms ran here and there. Other men in flowing white Arab robes strode past. On every side of me the lone and level sands stretched far away.
Apparently, the way the new 3-D technology worked, no matter where you were in the seats above, the images seemed clear and life-sized and bizarrely real. But down where I was, the picture was distorted. The buildings were slanted, some huge, some too small. The people were stretched and blurred and of different sizes. Vehicles and running men became elongated as they went past, then suddenly vanished. Images became more and more transparent the closer they came. The effect was swirling, dazzling, phantasmagorical-yet even for me, at moments, it was completely three-dimensional, thoroughly alive.
I was dazzled by it all. Confused. I had stepped in an instant from present-day New York into ruins and sand. The scene surrounding me was at once utterly unreal and utterly present. The scene above me was all faces-faces rising into infinity-flickering in the flickering light-climbing tiers of eyes staring down at me. It was more than I could take in. It stopped my thinking cold, shut down my mind. All I could manage to do was turn from place to place, holding Serena in my arms, and shouting wildly:
"Bomb! Bomb! There's a bomb in the theater!"
A man stepped right up to me. Startled and afraid, I spun to him. I recognized him at once: It was the actor, Todd Bingham. For a second, he seemed enormous and elongated like pulled taffy. The next second, he snapped into his proper shape but became transparent. It was the phantom of Todd, his character in the movie.
"I've had enough of being afraid," he said to me.
Other people were shouting around me, running past me, soldiers and natives and sheikhs.
"There's a bomb!" I screamed at Todd.
A woman behind me spoke, her voice very loud. I swung around to her, Serena's tear-streaked features going bright and dim as they slashed through the center of a nomad's skirt. There was Angelica Eden on the other side of me, solid and vital. She looked cool and witty in khaki slacks and a purple blouse open on her famous cleavage. She laughed around her cigarette. She said, "You can never have enough fear, Jason. Fear is how America rules the world. If we can make them fear these Muslims, all their oil will be ours!"
I blinked, confused. She'd used my name. Was she real? Was she speaking to me? No, dimly, even in my confusion, I realized she was part of the scene. I realized, too, that the scene-its music, its dialogue, the rumble of its stretching, moving, vanishing trucks-was swallowing my shouts, was encompassing my presence altogether.
This, I later learned, was the part of the film in which Todd, playing a hard-boiled CIA agent, first begins to realize that the terrorist explosions bringing chaos to the Middle East are in fact being engineered by American political and business interests who are then putting the blame on innocent Muslims in order to start a war and take over their oil fields.
"There's a bomb in the theater!" I screamed, my voice cracking.
"Wait! Jason, wait!"
Again, disoriented by the sound of my own name, I turned to see a woman striding toward me-striding toward me and shrinking from a monstrous taffy string into the transparent image of Juliette Lovesey. She looked strong now, clear-eyed, dynamic; not the fragile creature I'd seen on the red carpet outside. "Before you make up your mind, there's someone I think you need to talk to."
Suddenly another man was standing beside me. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He was an Arab man about sixty years old with a black beard and a black turban. His face was lined but kindly. His eyes twinkled with wisdom.
"This is Muammar al-Qadi," said Juliette.
"Of Hezbollah?" Todd said in terse surprise.
"Listen to me!" I shouted up at the flickering faces in the surrounding dark.
"You must listen to him," said Juliette.
"They don't know we're real!" Serena cried to me.
"I should've killed you when I had the chance," said the evil Angelica to the Arab man. Her father, it would turn out, owned a controlling interest in an oil company.
Now, yet another man rushed beneath the base of the gazing sphinx and stumbled toward Todd with flying footsteps. He was all in black, black jeans and a black hoodie. The outfit seemed almost to make a human-shaped hole in the surrounding scene. His face, though-his face was preternaturally bright. It was like a sunburst, burning with prophecy, ecstatic, insane.