Maxxie nervously tapped a finger to the side of their phone as it rang out in the church, which had become the official meeting place for the teens. "Danny's not answering." Void exhaled. "Neither is Mae."

"It must be good news." Octavia tried to reassure her. "They must've found something."

"Or maybe they found nothing," Maxxie argued. "Why wouldn't they say if it was good news?" Octavia didn't say a word, she just looked around at the hall filled with people. She stood up tentatively, wrapping her arms around herself as if crossed arms and a pink hoodie could serve as armour to protect herself from the outside world. "Listen up, everyone!" She stood up on a pew to give herself some height over others. "While we wait for them, there are some things we should figure out first." She could hear murmurs around the hall. She'd never had stage fright before, and now was not the time to start.

"We need to prepare for the worst, just in case it happens. For one, we can't just take things that we want. If we do, soon enough the food will be gone and we will all starve to death." The majority of the hall seemed to agree that dying was not a great idea. That was something, at least. "It's up to us. There is no civilization here. We need to make one."

"Firstly, we need to learn to share things-"

Octavia's sentence was cut off by the sound of a gunshot echoing through the church. Everyone hid behind pews, but Maxxie peaked out their head to see who it was.

EJ Fucking Blackwood.

"Fuck this, Octavia. Nobody elected you king." He walked through the aisle with an unreasonable amount of confidence, but a gun and money can get you a lot of things. "Did anyone vote for her? No?"

"I don't want to be king," Octavia said cautiously with her hands raised. She slowly took a step closer to him.

"That's not what it looks like. Is it?" He raised the gun so it pointed directly at her head.

Colette rushed to stand her sister. She wasn't needed here. Octavia was.

Octavia didn't waste a second pushing Colette away from her. No one was dying today, not if she could prevent it. And it sure as hell wasn't going to be her younger sister.

"I'm not afraid to die, EJ. You want chaos? You want everyone to be afraid of you? Fucking shoot me."

He laughed.

"I don't want to shoot you." He held up the gun like it was just a prop in his sick performance. "Just wanted to get everybody's attention." He had a smirk that Maxxie really wanted to punch off his face.

"This meeting is clearly over. Anyone that is sick and tired of this bitch can follow me out."

EJ didn't even look behind him to see who followed. He just started walking. And to the disgust of every sane person in the room, a scattered few actually followed.

As EJ approached the door, Danny opened it. They looked at him with disgust. Maxxie ran over and hugged them as tightly as possible.

Danny barely responded, just stood there, blankly looking ahead. Maxxie stepped back, held her shoulders and looked up at her, searching for an answer in her unblinking, ice-blue eyes. Their makeup was messily smeared to the right and there were clear tear tracks on their cheeks. Danny didn't even seem to realise that Maxxie was there, or that they were in the church.

Maxxie looked to void's left to see Laura carrying Antonia Fox's dead body. Gasps and murmurs of shock spread throughout the church and Laura continued forward, her gaze even more cold and unfeeling than Danny's.

"Clear that table." She said emotionlessly to Mae, who did what she was asked. If Danny had been even slightly aware of her surroundings, she would've had some sarcastic commentary. Antonia's body was laid on the table in front of the entire town, like some sort of casket-less funeral. Octavia wrapped her arm protectively around Colette, who couldn't seem to be able to tear their eyes away from the corpse. She could hear her breathing quicken, and feel her body trembling.

"She died from a snake bite," Laura announced, while Mae made her way to the back of the church to be with her sister. She couldn't stand looking at a corpse anymore, seeing how someone that had been making jokes only hours ago was now just a body, just a lifeless slab of flesh and blood.

"We're burying her tomorrow, before it starts to smell." Laura looked down at the dead girl on the table. When she lifted her head, her gaze was somehow colder than before. "There's nothing out there. We're all alone."

The church was silent. Some people apologised to Antonia's corpse, some didn't. It didn't make too much of a difference. Either way, one by one, everyone left, returning to their empty homes.