Maximillian attempted to make it seem like his administrative failure wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault that the catastrophe had begun, but he refused to take any responsibility for his inability to handle the situation.

It's not my fault, and even if it was, I didn't mean it.

“It was broken before I got here,” he shouted.

Delilah shook her head and Mary Sue sighed.

“Let’s just use the key to get in,” Delilah suggested.

“All of these objects have rules,” Maximilian explained. “ I already used it three times.”

“You didn’t think to get inside first,” Delilah said in exasperation.

Again everyone glared at him, and Maximillian for the first time in his life could not simply shove the hard work onto someone else with a singular phone call.

"So we're away from the academy, we can't get inside, no one can leave, and now we have a broken fail-safe. What are you going to do, Max," Delilah asked.

He glared at her, upset that she was addressing him in such a manner. He tried to downplay the severity of the situation. He turned to the employees and put on his charismatic public smile.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “Don’t say anything to anyone. We will take care of it.”

Immediately they knew that he was trying to find a way to shift blame onto someone else. The old outdated box might not have been his fault, but breaking it was. The electrician was not having any of it.

“I am doing whatever I want,” the electrician announced. “Everyone will know that it was you.”

Maximilian let out a laugh and everyone was confused as to what was so funny.

“Go ahead,” he purred. “Tell people. If they believe you, all they will know is that their children are doomed, and the entire town will break out into riots.”

The electrician huffed, and left, trying to decide if telling the truth was in everyone’s best interest.

“Don’t worry,” Maximillian repeated. “I’ll take care of it. It's not that bad.”

Maximillian, Delilah, and Mary Sue waited outside while their driver came to get them. Maximilian convinced(threatened) his employees to not tell a soul, and in his mind, he was thinking of many ways to find the electrician and his family.

“This is your fault, you know that don’t you,” Delilah said.

I didn’t mean it, he thought. Besides, it’s not that bad. Just a revenue loss we can recoup.

“I didn’t turn it on,” he sighed. “It was them, and not me.”

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

“Don’t you think there was a reason someone turned it on,” Mary Sue asked. “No one would trap everyone in there, thinking that whatever happened shouldn’t stay inside.”

“What if everyone inside there isn’t the worst thing that could happen,” Maximilian thought aloud.

Delilah and Mary Sue started to shout at him, angry and paranoid.

“Our children are in there, Max,” Delilah shouted. “How could you say such a thing!?”

One is degenerate and the other is clearly halfway there, Maximilian thought. We should just try again, the third time's the charm after all. They probably deserve it.

“David has been sending me text messages asking me what’s going on,” Mary Sue screamed. “What do I tell him about our children?! That you trapped them in there!?”

“It wasn’t me,” Maximilian asserted. “Even if it was, I can fix this. It isn’t that bad.”

Delilah looked like a rabid animal. She did whatever Maximillian said, went along with his strange habits and narcissism, but when it came to her children she did not bend.

“Get my children out or else I will tell everyone everything you’ve done,” she whispered. “I will drag you down with me to hell itself.”

Aggression and threats seemed to be the language that Maximillian understood. He nodded and said nothing. Mary Sue pretended like she didn't know what Delilah was talking about. There were many unspoken rules between all of them but the first was the easiest to understand:

That whatever they did never really happened, and if it did, it wasn’t that bad.

The driver finally arrived, and they got in.

The car ride was silent.

When they returned, somehow the madness had only escalated. They all ran out of the car in a rush and pushed to the front of the crowd. On the other side of the wall were children. Dead children, who had made the long trek under the autumn sun, were used to taunt their parents from the other side.

Deceit had learned of the scene outside the wall and wanted to cause as much disarray as possible.

"Please let us out," a small child whispered. His eyes were glassy, his mouth slack, and his head bent at an impossible angle that no person should have. The dead children cried and whined all to antagonize the people on the other side of the wall.

Now there was a new argument flashing through all the news outlets. They asked the nation, “Should we let children die, trapped, for the greater good of us all?”

The answer was at first, an overwhelming, no, at 87%.

As the day went on, and by late evening that had changed to a resounding yes, at 73%.

More images of dead festival-goers had circulated all over. More and more corpses were sent to the edges of the wall, more grotesque and mangled.

The doomsday harbingers outside felt a rush of moral superiority and gained supporters by then, and soon different religious leaders had come to witness it for themselves, each giving their own take, tailored to their belief system.

At the end of the second day, nothing had gotten done, the mayor was deemed to have acted in self-defense. The national guard had arrived to finally clear everyone out, a large fire was making its way toward New Springfield, and world leaders were deciding if a nuclear attack was the best option.

Maximillian's private military that was disguised as a center of learning, however, was a large source of income for them, and they hesitated, saying that a few more days could pass, as hopefully all the corpses would have gained rigor mortis, or decayed.

Corporate profits always took precedence over the lives of children, of course.