Survival Of The Fittest

((Getting her out of her to get her death up.))

"Ricky's dead?" Acacia seemed shocked, as she jabbed herself in the stomach with a needle. "He's dead. It's not our fault, right? We couldn't have known that the tunnels were going to become a danger zone!"

Charlene privately agreed with that statement. He'd had over a day to get out of there. Guy must have been drunk off his ass.

"Couldn't have been us. I thought he might have left, but he didn't."

"I'm sorry I didn't really say anything before. I was kind of a wreck. Thank you for letting me stay." Mary-Ann was pretty nice - Charlie chuckled bashfully - maybe it was just because she never really hung out with the drama people, Thea excluded. Another thing she should have done before she went on the trip.

"No problem. I should have talked to you earlier, but here we are."

"So, where next?" Charlene stood up, adjusted the fresh hot pink tank top she'd put on and tied her sweatshirt around her waist.

"I don't know. Maybe ... that way? Maybe we'll find someone else actually worth talking to." Charlie pointed in a random direction and started walking along the beach, bags around her shoulder.

((Charlene Norris continued in Everyday is Like Sunday))

Thea blinked up in surprise as Charlie announced that they were going and took off. She cursed Danya's announcement for bringing reality crashing back. They'd managed to do a pretty good job of ignoring their situation last night, when they'd thrown an impromptu sleep over. The only thing that had really been missing was the junk food.

"What crawled up her shorts all of sudden," Thea muttered aloud as she gathered her things. "We should probably go after her; trouble seems to find her when she's by herself."

Thea gathered the last of her belongings and slowly started after her best friend, giving the others a chance to catch up. "What's the rush," she called. "You're just going to get us lost again."

((Thea Kairos continued in Everyday is like Sunday))

As Charlie left and Thea made to follow her, Acacia moaned and started collecting her things together. Sweater, diabetic kit, bottle of water, gun, mirror. A bizarre mix of belongings that she took a couple of seconds to appraise with good humour, before stuffing everything except the gun into her bag, and tucked that into the waistband of the jeans that she'd been wearing constantly now for days. She turned to Mary Ann with a smile, glad to see the girl was more awake than she'd seemed last night.

"Yeah," Acacia said with a sigh in response to Thea, "when I said 'where next' I was thinking after we'd actually woken up," she added irritably, clambering to her feet and stretching out. The morning sun, barely risen, beat a gentle rhythm on her back as she stood facing inland, watching after Charlie and Thea as they slowly began to disappear. Acacia nodded along to a rhythm she couldn't feel, a beat to a song she wasn't entirely sure she'd ever head of. Abruptly, she turned to Mary Ann, the only other person still left.

"You know what's weird?" she said, loosing eye contact then and turning her face upwards to look at the sky. "If we'd gone on the trip, the proper trip, we'd be home by now." There was a pause, while Acacia picked her bag up and started following the others. "Funny, isn't it? I guess we should try keep up."

((Acacia Salinger continued elsewhere))