Black Arrow

Ch. 1

The meeting seemed to drag on for days. I had heard this all too familiar routine. We needed food. We needed medicine. We needed gasoline. We needed and needed everything we knew we could get our hands onto. Our greedy, little, bloodstained hands never stopped yearning for more.

I knew what this entailed. Risk. Traveling. Death. Yet here I was, volunteering my life, for the millionth time. I glanced around at all the worried faces, the same worried faces I'd see almost every week, and for nothing. They had nothing to worry about except for keeping themselves happy. That was little to worry about. I wish I could live here that leisurely. Instead I did the things no one else dared to do.

It was tiring, this routine, it never changed. I didn't hear a single word that was spilling from our leader's, Matt, mouth most of the time, but I'd grown bored with the wall I was staring at so I zoned back in.

"I know we've been struggling harder lately," a pointed look cast towards me, "but we are trying our hardest to bring everything we can to make our lives easier."

I roll my eyes, Matt couldn't be appreciative of the fact that I was one of the few willing to go out into the harsh reality and face the storm.

"As usual, I'm going to ask for volunteers who'd be willing to face the expectations from our community." Matt prods, probably praying for someone other than me to raise their hand.

I smugly raise my hand, always the first to do so. Everyone around me cowered in their seats, talking about how they'd heard about so and so dying outside or what community was rumored to be roaming the streets. It made me scoff aloud, their audacity to sit back and be cowardly towards a threat that they'd never had to face and never would.

I didn't bother searching the rest of the crowd behind me, I already knew who else's hands were raised in allegiance with my own. I also could feel the absence of a hand that should be raised right next to mine, the deep and hurtful pang of sadness never seemed to fade when it came to volunteer time.

His face flashed briefly in my mind, his crooked smile and puppy brown eyes haunting my memory for the millionth time, bringing all the loss back into the present.

"Okay, it seems we've got this figured out." Matt spoke as I lipped the lines along with him, foreseeing the next sentence, "We thank Kyle, Hailey, and Jak." My mouth stopped forming the words with the last name.

There were multiple errors in that sentence: (1). It didn't contain my name. (2). Jak hadn't been on a run for years. (3). Jak was nothing but a child in a man's body.

I wasn't the only one who noticed the deficiency that was my name, people were whispering all kinds of things as my ears pounded with anger.

"Do you think it's because of her uproar?"

"Is it because of her friend's death? That was a while ago."

"What did she do to upset Matt now? That girl's troublesome."

I ignored all of their cynical comments, unusually, right now I was focused on the guy who dared exclude me from the one thing that kept me alive.

Matt was pretending to be oblivious to my presence, and dodged my objections, that were very obviously going to be spilling from my loud mouth, by simply leaving the room altogether.

I took off after the coward, knowing fully well just where he would be waiting for me and my courage to show up. I didn't get as far as I would have liked.