The Undead Day Nineteen by RR Haywood

hating everyone, hating everything but too numb to action those emotions.
    ‘I wanted to talk about how we should…’
    ‘We?’ Sierra cuts her off with an icy low voice, ‘ain’t no we.’
    ‘Of course,’ Lilly says, acquiescing instantly, ‘I meant how we, the people out there, how we are to get cleaned up and fix the wall.’
    Sierra goes blank, unfocussed, seeing only Darius’s brains bursting from his head. She blinks back to the now and stares full of hate at Lilly. ‘Just get it done.’
    ‘Yes we will, we most definitely will. May I ask, is it okay to…’
    ‘Don’t give a fuck,’ Sierra says, glaring at Lilly, ‘just get it done, you get me yeah?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘You’s speak like that all the time?’ Skyla asks, adopting the new number one’s cold expressionless manner.
    ‘I do, yes,’ Lilly says, sensing the tension rising.
    ‘So’s like, you go to private school yeah?’
    ‘I did for a while but then I went to a normal…’
    Skyla tuts, and rolls her eyes, ‘Yeah whatever. Like don’t go on about it,’ she looks disdainfully away as the other girls snigger and glare. All apart from Sierra who’s unfocussed gaze goes through Lilly to something unseen by anyone else.
    ‘Get out,’ Sierra whispers, not watching, not caring, not listening.
    ‘Of course,’ Lilly dips her head, almost in a bow to show she concedes the authority of the girl barely a year older than her. Out the door in a second and the room behind her cackles with teenage girls delighted at the posh girl being brought down a peg.
    Outside and the humidity hits her as hard as the impact of the confrontation inside. The savagery of it. The brutal non-compliance to order or thought for others. Young people with no education seizing power without any concept of what that means and suddenly the future looks bleak. Maddox has only been down a few hours and may wake up. Mr Howie only left this morning or late last night. If it’s this bad now what the hell will it be like in the days and weeks to come?
    Thoughts whirl. Options that present to be considered and weighed with every variable given equal consideration.
    Should she leave? Get Billy, maybe Pea and Sam and just get out. Take Milly and whoever else wants to go. Stay low and find somewhere close by to wait for Mr Howie to come back. She knows too well just how dangerous the world beyond these walls are and that’s the question right there. The offset by comparison to the danger inside against the danger outside.
    Sierra is in shock. That is obvious. Shock and grief goes through stages. Denial. Anger. Numbness. Let those emotions work their course, keep your head down and hope Sierra comes back to being a decent human being. Was she a decent human being before this? Lilly doesn’t know the girl.
    Holding that thought in her mind she then adds the next ingredient into the mix, that of the other girls in the room. Skyla and the others. They’ve obviously clustered around Sierra immediately on seeing Sierra as the new number one. They’ll feed her power. They will sycophant over everything she says. They’ll laugh when she jokes and test the boundaries with how far their own power extends. That just happened not a few seconds ago. Skyla was testing. She was seeing if Sierra would accept her passive insults to Lilly. Lenski’s words come to mind, number one, number two, number three. Who will be the next number two? The power vacuum extends beyond Sierra. Every child carrying a gun will now be jockeying for position, and there’s less of them now too. Over half were either killed or injured enough to take them out of the running. What does that mean? More competition? Less competition? Crew chiefs trying to exert control over their youths who are intent on becoming crew chiefs? How did these kids get this way? How did society fail them so much that as soon as the imposed law and order was taken away they evolved so quickly into being like this?
    Lilly’s