ST PETER’S, THE VATICAN
T he White Queen couldn’t believe her eyes.
Standing at the basilica’s entrance, the world in front of her had slipped into chaos. It had begun a few hours back after Alice left yesterday. A few tourists began shouting and fighting with one another. But it wasn’t much. The police took care of the matter immediately.
And then last night the news of the plague had spread everywhere in Italy. Rome, in particular, had spiraled into a mad hole of swearing and kicking, something its people were naturally attracted to.
Then the madness escalated at the speed of light.
People everywhere were simply trying to hurt others. You couldn’t really make out what the fighting was about since it was usually caught in its last stages, where fighters uttered no coherent sentences.
It reminded Fabiola of all the wars in the history of the world. Wars that last as long as thirty years, if not more. At some point in, you’d ask either side what they were fighting for, and you could not get an answer. Because none of them remembered what had started this.
This was what the Vatican was turning into. The world was turning into.
Now Fabiola was standing before the basilica, appalled by the fighting taking place in the piazza.
This was a place where people from all over the world came to share common beliefs. This wasn’t a place to fight one another, let alone kill one another.
But she had made her decision.
She was allowing the uninfected people to enter the basilica for shelter—it was easy to pick them out; they simply didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
Fabiola was about to face a peculiar decision. In a few moments, she was going to close the doors to the basilica and shelter herself with the uninfected. Something she hated to do because she hated to give up on anyone, even the damned – like her.