"And to conclude, the structure had gone through a renewal during the second half of the twentieth century; now, if you would please follow m-"
These were the last words Mauro heard before the tour guide silently dropped to the ground, as well as the rest of the group. Under normal circumstances, he would have rushed immediately to get rescue, but the deafening silence had left him utterly dumbfounded. There was no scream or chatter to be heard, anything at all. The mounting fear of having lost his hearing was abruptly dispelled by the hideous noise of hundreds of cars crashing into each other, coming from all around.
Out of despair, he let out a long cry for help, as loud as his old throat allowed him, but to no avail. Very few people had actually been left in Naples at that very moment, and certainly they weren't going to hear his call amid the overwhelming mayhem that engulfed the city.
Time passed and he hadn't received any response yet, when he decided to take the initiative, being struck by a sudden, dreadful surmise.
The leash in his hand was pulling down at a dead weight: like the rest of the group, his service dog was laying limp and unmoving by his feet. He resigned himself after a few tries, then took his cane and made his way across the fellow tourists' fallen, motionless bodies.
He fared unsurprisingly well even without the dog, like he used to do for a long time in his life — he actually took the animal with him just to appease his daughter, as she wished her old parent to be safe and sound during the long coveted repatriation. But it was already becoming clear to Mauro that something far worse than a trivial trip-over had happened to him. Distancing himself from the seemingly unresponsive group, Mauro decided to move to a more bustling part of the city, where he was sure to find someone to help them.
He didn't know how much wrong he was.
Anytime else that particular square would have been crowded with tourists, but now it was desolated, so devoid it was of anything moving; also, even oddlier for such a sweltering evening, the buzzing and stinging annoyance of the plentiful midgets and mosquitoes wasn't anywhere to be heard or felt.
Mauro started to feel genuinely scared. It had to be some kind of joke, of very bad taste indeed, but a joke nonetheless. He had to found someone: it was impossible that the whole town had literally gone at once! He took a back-halley, with the firm intent to reach the other districts, which he knew like the back of his hands. He used to live there as a kid, until the beginning of the war; for sure the city had expanded a lot by then, but in the end, down deep, it remained like it had always been.
Not now, however: everything had just changed, again.
Nothing remained but him, and the feeble crackling of the many cars burning in the distance. But they were not important, Mauro said to himself — all he wished was some human voice for him to hear, just a single one. To no avail, for hours on end he walked by the streets and squares and alleys' forlornness, for so much drained of any living sound they were.
From time to time, he prodded what appeared to be dead bodies with his cane; not that he could be certain of that, as he got anything but the courage to reach down and check.
The very act of walking started to become quite grueling for him, as he was hitting benches and signposts on his way over and over. Such occurrences had always been rare, but they were not all that strange in the end, he realised; all in all, his familiarity with the city couldn't really be demerged from the soundscape that had so abruptly been taken away from it. Or, maybe, it was just because he was panicking, and he should be needing to stop to recollect himself and breathe.
Yet, Mauro wanted to carry on regardless — because, come on, he was going to find someone sooner or later, wasn't he?
But still, after walking for who knows how long, he hadn't met anyone yet.
Was he strolling around in circles? Did he get lost? Mauro finally stopped to catch some breath. Had he lost his sanity once and for all? Had his unrelenting old age finally won the siege and taken his mind?
Definitely no: everything just didn't make any sense. It was just another evening, people were going to get out for a walk, to have dinner at a restaurant, or anything else: for God's sake, he couldn't really be alone! Was he dead, perhaps?
Uncannily, he felt the city being indeed quite much the same as it was at the time of his departure ages ago: bleak, empty, dead.
Why? Was it some sort of punishment? Did he do something bad to deserve this?
Even if he took a few steps out of the line every now and then, he was convinced he had always behaved well after all, as a man and also as a father. What could he possibly have done to deserve this kind of retribution right when he was finally coming back home?
A harrowing screech put a hard stop to Mauro's frantic flow of thoughts. Way before he could make up his mind on what was going on, he was struck by a fierce blast that sent him hurtling through the ground, and while he was getting up, another distant sound of explosion tore the stillness of the night. Then the silence fell again, and Mauro dragged himself close to a nearby wall to lean against and rest. Now all he wanted was to just find some reprieve, to put back some order in his head and dwindle the raving thoughts; but he learnt he really couldn't, such was his disheartening for the present circumstances.
He remained there, slumped on the ground, for what could have been several hours, until his phone tune began ringing out loud.
"Incoming call from Rosaria", chirped the vocal assistant. He picked up the call and answered her daughter before the phone tune could even play for a second time.
"Dad! Are you ok?"
"I-i'm good Rosie, more or less."
"Oh, thank God, you're well", she whimpered, and then she let go a deep sigh. Perhaps even more than Mauro's, his daughter's voice was shrouded in despair.
"Yes, yes love, I'm ok, kind of. Thank you for… for calling me. Do you know what is happening here?"
"Dad, they're speaking about it on the first chann-" she said, before being interrupted by a loud static sound coming from the tv. "I can't believe it… now all the channels are… gone?
"Rosaria? What happened?"
"We've just lost the tv signal… It seems other channels have gone, too. But I don't really care, all I need is to know you're safe."
"Why, honey, do you know what happened here?"
"It's about Naples, dad. They're all dead there. Everyone is dead there."
Coughing and trudging, Sara pushed herself out of her wrecked car.
The airbag should have definitely worked as it was supposed to, as luckily the collision didn't seem to have hurt her too much. Of course, such a rash accident two months after obtaining her driver license was not the greatest; but she was still alive, at least.
"You wicked fool! I totally had the right of wa-", she angrily spat, soon to be interrupted by the loud crashing sounds coming from all the other cars, colliding right in front of her eyes.
She hurried behind her vehicle, laying low until the clashing noise ceased; when she hesitantly peeked over her car, she was confronted with an apocalyptic view: there were many dozens, maybe even hundreds of wrecked cars all over the street.
As she recovered from the fright, she turned around to face the one who had hit her: she found him, a middle aged man in a suit, his face plunged into the airbag of his car. She shook him, as he looked unconscious, but he didn't react.
Sara checked for a pulse and if he was breathing, but she soon came to the terrible realization that he was, by all means, dead.
But it didn't make any sense, his body was perfectly intact: there wasn't any blood, or any sign of broken bones. Could he have had a stroke, or maybe a head trauma?
Sara cried for help, only to come into another dire realization: everything around her was perfectly quiet. In such a situation one would have expected nothing less of pandemonium, with countless voices moaning and crying and begging for help from all around the place; but instead, there was none.
Sara turned around in awe, slowed down by the sheer weight of something that she had just ascertained, but not fully realized in its unbearable entirety yet: the middle aged road hog wasn't definitely the only one who had died.
The sidewalks were littered with dead bodies, laying everywhere around, as far as she could see.
Sara was paralyzed, stricken with arrant fear, her muscles tightly clenched in a pose of terror and dismay.
She tried to calm down, but, for fuck's sake, there was no way she could manage to.
How could she? Surrounded by uncountable lifeless bodies as far as the eye could reach and probably beyond, plunged under an unbearable blanket of deafening silence, how on earth could the very idea of calming down even exist in her mind? Sara gazed away from the street, futilely trying to come up with an idea of what was happening.
She was the one and only person left on her feet, the only one in the street to — no, it couldn't be real. It couldn't be happening for real. She had to do something: yes, she had to get someone to help them. Why didn't she think about this immediately?
Sara would have soon come to understand that it was, in fact, pointless. No one even noticed the hecatomb at her feet, nor she had heard anyone else screaming; there had been no reaction from anyone.
No way it could be possible, Sara thought again, as she was about to enter the next side street. The situation there was identical, or even worse, and her doubts were kind of addressed then, somehow.
She slowly bent over the tan body of a young man in his twenties wearing a shirt, probably a tourist. She checked: no pulse, no breathing. She checked another. And another, and another again.
They were all dead, by all means, like the man in the car. It couldn't be a coincidence.
What had happened? Some kind of collective stroke? She roused herself. What the hell of a conclusion was that? There must have been some sense in all of that. It had to.
She finally resolved to call rescue, but she couldn't find her phone: here it was by the road, shattered in a thousand pieces. It flew off her car at the moment of the impact.
Her other option was to find a public phone, if there was any nearby, or…
Acknowledging that it would have probably been a very time consuming task, Sara took a phone from a dead man's bulging pocket instead. She opened up the oldish but dependable flip phone and immediately called for an ambulance; hadn't the emergency service still answered her call, she realized that there was another problem in her plan of getting rescuers on the place.
"Emergency service here, how can we help you?"
What was she even supposed to say in the first place? Everyone looked already dead, an ambulance wasn't going to be helpful at all. Nonetheless, since someone had actually picked up the call, at least she knew that not everyone had died. Maybe there was someone still alive, somewhere, likely waiting to be saved.
"Hello, I… I've just had a car accident, I think I'm well but the other driver has no pulse and doesn't breathe, also there have been several other accidents in my area, and…"
"Please go on and tell us your position."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There are a lot of people down on the ground, they do not react and I can't find any pulses."
The dispatch operator remained silent for a few, long seconds.
Did she actually overhear something like: "That's the fifth time today"?
"We understand, please remain calm. Tell us your position and we will send rescuers to your location as soon as we can".
"St. Severino Street, Naples. Mind that the road is now blocked both ways by the car wrecks"
"Yes, of course. The ambulances are leaving as we speak. Help is on the way, but they will need some time to arrive."
"Why is that?"
"Apparently Naples' emergency service dispatches are unreachable at the moment, the vehicles are on their way from Caserta"
"I see, thanks a lot."
The call ended, and she sat down by the walkway.
Ok, now, what was she supposed to do? She didn't really want to check if every single person on the ground was in fact dead, because she already felt half sure that they actually were. She was thinking about this for a few moments, when she felt the urge to call her mother, just to hear her voice and try to calm down a little bit.
She composed her number, but no one picked up the call, like the ringing phone was being ignored.
It made sense after all, she thought. One isn't supposed to answer to an unknown number; but why would her mother let the phone ring, without declining the call? That was strange indeed, as her mother used to reject unsolicited calls.
She tried once again, then twice, then five times, then ten times, but it was pointless. There seemed to be no one on the other side to pick up the call. Had she gone out to do something, and forgot her mobile at home? Of course that had to be the case, she would soon be coming back, and of course she would have called back this number ten times minimum. All she had to do was just waiting: wait for the ambulance, and wait for her mum to call back. Everything should have been well, and all manner of things should have been well.
Sara waited for half an hour.
Then a full hour.
It had been two hours and she was still waiting. No one came, and no one called.
She was simply standing by there, without moving or doing anything in hours; all she did was calling for rescue another time, only to discover that emergency service turned out to be unavailable. In the end, she resolved to go home by herself, as the sun had already set.
As she left the street again, she found what she expected: the other roads were littered with bodies too — whatever happened, it must have struck the whole city.
The way home was quite long, as her house was in the outskirts, and she probably would have arrived late in the night.
Her path was thwarted on three separate occasions.
Shortly after she started to walk, something falling from the sky hit her head, and before she could even see what it was, some other similar things had followed it, crashing down softly here and there.
She noticed it was a little dead bird, quite similar to the rest of its flock, which the impact on the ground had only rendered in slightly worse conditions.
She strode on, until she heard a feeble, hissing noise from above, prompting her to look up; she saw something looking like a plane falling off the sky; but the city's skyline blocked her view, and she couldn't see its downfall through the end.
For how much shocked Sara was, still she was resolute to not asking any question to herself.
It was already getting late when she saw a cat.
There was nothing incredible in the cat by itself, as she had seen plenty of dead felines during the miserable walk; this one though, to her surprise, was very much alive.
Slowly, she tried to get close to the animal, but of course the cat scooted away: she started chasing him down.
There was something alive other than her? Good lord, even the very flies and insects had died out, what the hell was the deal with that particular cat?
After running for not less than ten minutes, she came upon a tiny square with a small café opening into the right side, which the cat seemed to have found shelter within.
The café was nothing special, just a dull public place for old people to lazily meet up, and wear away in peace what was left of their livers.
As she expected, the place was not so populated; there was just the bartender along with a couple of old men. On the counter stood a double sign, in italian and in broken English, which read: "Attenscion: the cat is orb cant sighting"
The cat tucked himself close to his defunct owner, and started meowing when he didn't react to his effusions. Much to her surprise, she found some unexpected reprieve in the weird cuteness of the situation.
Sara receded from them and sat down by the empty side of the bar.
So, did the cat survive because he was blind? It couldn't explain it completely, she thought: there had to be something different going on. In the first place she wasn't dead, but she wasn't blind; there had to be another reason for her being left alive.
A clock on a wall caught her attention: it was a quarter past eleven in the evening.
It was very late, and still several hours of walk separated her from home. Perhaps, she would have been better to stay there and use some rest.
For all the time, she hadn't noticed the TV by the wall, and as she turned it on, it appeared to be tuned on the first channel. It was broadcasting a live breaking news, and the words "Update on the situation in Naples" immediately got her attention.
It looked like she could finally wrap her mind around what was happening!
"At this time, it looks there isn't any development or improvement about the tragedy that has befallen on the parthenopean capital tonight. Starting from today seven o'clock pm, it seems that the very view of city of Naples lead the subjects to sudden, unexplainable death"
"W-what the-"
"Police enforced a mass evacuation in the municipalities around Naples, aiming to prevent further casualties. According to all available phone calls, online messages and other pieces of communication, the number of survivors has risen to one thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three.
Emergency transmissions will be aired throughout the city by a fleet of automatic drones in hope to reach out survivors, the majority of whom are, in fact, visually-impaired."
Sara was left aghast once more. No way it could be possible, no way it could be the very litmus test of what she suspected was going on; except the fact that, by all means, it was — but how come, she wondered; Why?
"Right now, prime minister Gentiloni is meeting with other EU representatives to discuss the possibilities for rescue operations. After an unexpected interruption in his evening sermon, Pope Francis have disappeared from any public radar and still has not expressed any-"
Then the audio was cut, and the tv lost the signal a couple of seconds after, showing only static noise. Sara tried to change the channel, eager for more details, unknowing she would have been not able to.
"Director Rossi, your presence has urgently been requested by the Mind and Memetic Studies Section."
"I'm on my way, what happened?"
"Napl- the entire city of Naples has become a lethal memetic agent."
It seemed to be a joke of very bad taste, but it wasn't, it was much more than that; it was a catastrophe of colossal proportions from every point of view.
The whole Mind and Memetic Studies Section had feverishly been working for hours along with the experts from the Mother Branch to envision a solution, or even just a cause, without much success.
They "had been" until fifteen minutes ago, though; the Mother Branch had since severed any contact with the Italians', further aggravating them, confronted as they were with something seemingly so irresolvable.
Nicola Rossi was left with no other option than trying to convince the research team to push on, regardless of the desperate situation; regrettably, however, there hadn't been any improvement since the time of discovery.
The memetic agent literally came out of the blue, uniformly distributed throughout all the city, completely isotropic. There wasn't any epicentre, any distinctive or salient feature, no symbolism: nothing.
Survival ratio: apparently, seventy nine in a million, along with an immediate termination of any vital sign.
That was all they managed to come up with, after many hours spent toiling. Everything seemed to point in the direction of some kind of force awakening just to let the city plunge down to hell.
But they simply could not give up, and the Foundation did anything possible to buy themselves some time: they cut the telephone lines; they downed several sharing and social network sites; as a last resort, they blocked the largest sources of information in Italy first, and then globally.
The latter was rather pointless, actually; almost everyone in the country and worldwide already knew what had happened in Naples.
An incidental, puny but miraculous upside could have been that no pictures of Naples had also become retroactively memetic: so, at least, it wasn't the very concept of Naples to be lethal.
Nonetheless, they had to endure and go on.
It wasn't the Foundation's first ride in dealing with sudden, unfathomably mysterious events. If something didn't make sense, they were the ones in place to go and find out.
Surely Rossi could not endure for longer, as hope had already been abandoning him; even if they would somehow manage to find a way to shield, or even neutralize the memetic agent, what were they supposed to do next?
Indeed, a grand three millions people had died — and there were witnesses in the thousands, counting the immune and the visually impaired.
You can cover up the death of a family, the disappearance of a forest, the destruction of a hamlet; but what are you going to do if it's Naples? Moreover when half the world already knew about the grim event?
Rossi used to trust the Foundation, but it looked like something nigh impossible to keep as a secret.
A researcher's phone started ringing out loud, like he was receiving dozens of push notifications at once.
"I'm sorry, I thought I've already turned it o-", apologized the scientist, before stopping abruptly while he was reading.
"D-Director, mister Rossi, I… I really think you have to see this one."
Rossi approached the researcher and leaned down to look, curious to understand what could elicit such consternation in his colleague: the phone showed the Telegram app, that was full of unread messages.
Every message looked like some bot's spam, but instead of clickbait scoops, fantastic rebates or major league's matches results, there were hundreds of messages, all the same, all written in the same words: «The dire truth behind Naples and the SCP Foundation».
The poor man stared at Rossi's face in the same expression of someone who had been exposed to a class-XV memetic agent.
Reluctantly, Rossi tapped the hyperlink under that ominous header. The phone loaded a russian internet page with a live video feed already playing.
The video portrayed an imposing man in his thirties with no hair and a dark beard.
His body was completely wrapped in a precious-looking crimson robe rich in gilded embroideries, revealing only his head and crossed hands; clashing with his almost regal look, a pistachio tie was knotted at his neck and laid negligently over the stately garments.
Behind the man stood wooden panels, painted white.
They had clearly been installed in a hurried, ramshackle way: some were crooked, others cracked; still, they managed to give out a false, lulling sense of safety and professionalism.
After having adjusted his tie, the man finally spoke.
"Good evening, people of Italy. My name is Ala ad-Dunya, and I represent a group known among the occult societies in the world by the name of Serpent's Hand."
Unlike the reasonably astonished colleague, Rossi already knew about the Serpent's Hand, even if only by the books: a disgraceful bunch of terrorist thugs, proud of opposing the Foundation in pursuit of their utopistic set of ideals. He didn't hear too much too often about their whereabouts, almost never involving Italy.
What were they planning to do?
The representative of the Hand spoke again:
"On behalf of the group I represent, I offer you my utmost sincere condolences for the recents events that occurred in Naples. I want you to know that we are committed to bring help to the few survivors in the next days."
Could it be plain compassionate? No, it couldn't be the whole deal, they must had some secret end -
Then, he recalled the title.
"Oh."
"We apologize for intruding on your radio and phone devices. We had no other choice.
After all, the television network has flashed out recently.
The cause of all the present circumstances is one organization, and one only.
The SCP Foundation.
Many of you are probably going to be puzzled, but this is completely and reasonably normal.
The next words are addressed to them, not to you innocent people.
It's them who have tried to stop you from gleaning the truth.
It's them who have ignored the catastrophe, even if it's them who could have brought you the necessary help.
And, as far as we know, they could even eventually turn out to be the ones who had caused this tragedy, in pursuit of their unknown ends, or, maybe even worse, out of sheer incompetence.
Your pitiful, petty theatrics ends here, but we are offering you an alternative.
High members of the Command, we submit a simple request.
Reveal yourselves, keep that flimsy veil of security that you still have.
On the contrary, we are going to have no qualms about our course of action.
We cherish a trove of information; we have enough to reveal some other organizations on your level.
Needless to say, I highly doubt they are going to keep their mouths shut, they have never done so under these kinds of circumstances.
I really hope this announcement will be sufficient.
Dare not to censor us.
It is too late to turn back now, the damage has already been done.
Farewell."
The video ended and started playing in a loop.
Rossi threw himself on a chair, while the other researchers went into total, incoherently panicked commotion.
He wasn't able to reason.
It was a calamity; a ruinous, blightful cataclysm.
It would have been a disaster in any way, independently of any choice the Command was going to undertake.
One damn thing was for sure.
No one would have been able to put back together the pieces of their broken masquerade.
