At some point she wakes up. With a confused and groggy noise, the first thing she realises with a start, is that Soul isn't next to her anymore.

Her anxiety gnaws at her and she sits bolt upright, suddenly very awake.

"Soul?" she calls, loudly but not loudly enough to attract any unwanted attention, if there was any. "Soul?"

Dammit. She doesn't have a gun. She locates a heavy baseball bat under the bed in the master bedroom and takes that with her, instead.

She slips quietly from the upstairs bedroom and begins to silently creep from room to room, checking each one meticulously. She about up to the downstairs kitchen area when a noise disturbs her.

Is someone climbing up the drainpipe?

A shiver runs through her.

"Soul?" she calls, worrying more now. Did zombies climb up drainpipes? They weren't that clever back in Colorado. But then again, they had managed to surprise her before. "C'mon, man."

It doesn't sound like Soul. Not that she's intimately acquainted with the sound of him climbing up the side of a house, mind you. It's just that whoever it is seems to be too light.

She swears to herself and then walks back upstairs, back to the foot of the stairs that lead to the attic, where the drainpipe window comes out.

She distinctly hears somebody climb through the window and fall ungracefully over on the landing below, hearing a female voice chant 'oh, shit!' before beginning to descend the stairs.

Maka grips her bat a little tighter.

"I can hear you, idiot. You'd better give up," A young, girl's voice snarls.

Maka's heartbeat thuds in her chest as the intruder rounds the corner of the stairs and she gets ready to swing her bat.

And then she freezes in place as she comes face to face with a handgun, pointed right at her face.

It's a short, stouter-built girl with a semi-automatic in one hand and her other hand casually slung in her back pocket. She snorts with laughter when she sees Maka. "Did you really think that was going to cut it?" she gestures towards the baseball bat. "Heh. You've got balls. The girls got balls, Liz!" she giggles to herself.

Maka's curious as to who she's talking to. She didn't hear another person, but she might have been mistaken.

"What do you want?" she spits.

The intruder laughs maniacally, a low cackle rising to the top. "Get down on the bed, now. Put your arms up." She instructs.

Maka's not an idiot- the girl is far better equipped than her, so she does as the interlocutor pleases. "Just tell me what you want…"

"Your weapons. All of 'em, kay?"

She breaks into a cold sweat. "They're in the truck out front."

"I don't believe you. You were just sleeping here with nothing? No weapons?" The gun-toting girl lifts her arm and Maka hears the distinct sound of a safety clicking off.

She squeezes her eyes shut and prepares for the blow; prepares for anything; prepares for the void that she's been avoiding since this whole thing first started.

It doesn't come.

Slowly, she cracks open one eye and sees it: Soul, standing behind the girl with his own handgun only metres from her temple. The girl freezes in shock as she realises her mistake, and keeps her gun trained onto Maka.

"I'll kill you," he says to her. "Put your gun down."

The girl has a wry smile fixed on her face as she slowly lowers her gun from Maka's face and points it at the ground. Soul's about to tell her something else when in a split second, she's whipped the gun back up and aimed the thing directly at his chest, squeezing the trigger before he's had a chance to aim.

There's a loud 'crack' noise.

Soul falls backwards.