Survival of the Fittest

School

                                                                                            Luke

I groaned as the alarm rang shrilly making my head spin, sitting up I reached to turn it off. I really didn't want to go to school. What if the girl had gone to our school, would her friends blame us? I shook my head, even if she did how would her friends know we saw her? Would they even know why she wouldn't be there? I cringed at the thought, there was nothing to be gained through worrying; I knew I had to be careful and Lyra, who knew when he might appear to perform his promise to us?

Once downstairs I discovered more disturbing behavior for our usually quiet town: as it turned out the girl we'd seen kidnapped wasn't the only person to have gone missing in our town, she along with five others had made the front cover of the newspaper. Obviously the man was skilled at kidnapping, and my heart sunk why did Lyra or I stand a better chance than the others. True, we'd been warned but we didn't know when he planned to take us, he could still catch us unawares, like the others.

Bang!

I flinched as my father slammed his bedroom door. I silently cursed myself; I hated being scared it made me feel like a coward: the one thing I can't stand.

My dad looked too cheerful as he walked in: the opposite of how I felt. When he saw me his smile slipped a little.

"What's wrong son?" He asked.

My answer was to hand him the paper, as his eyes scanned it his smile faded. All he could manage was to shake his head in shock.

"You be careful, and watch out for your sister, I can't have anything happen to you: speaking of your sister where is she?" He walked to the door calling "Mills, where are you? You'll be late for school if you don't hurry up and eat your breakfast!"

A couple of minutes later Mills skidded into the kitchen looking rather scruffy, bringing my first smile of the day. My little sister, no matter how annoying, was really cute, and I loved her dearly.

***

The school was buzzing from the events, but only our friends knew what we'd seen, yet they still didn't know about what the man had told us: it was our unspoken secret.

As it turned out one of the missing people went or used to go to our school, a boy in the year bellow us. I was glad when the bell rang for our first lesson: English. My favourite subject was drama, but seeing as our school didn't do it my favourite was English; well, not all of it I hated the comprehension but I loved the creative writing. I mean Lyra loves it more, but still I loved to escape into worlds that weren't real which was why if I wasn't outside I was reading.

I was grateful to Mrs Gotts who today let us do some creative writing, because we all had to prepare a short story. By the end of the lesson I had written the five hundred word allowance, it was about the cloaked figure, but I tried to make it discreet so only Lyra would know its true meaning.

At the end of the school day I bid Lyra goodbye and ran to training. We had a cross country competition in two weeks' time and our PE teacher wanted the squad ready. I can't say I've ever really enjoyed running, but I am glad once it's over because it is, believe it or not, rewarding even if you're not good, which wasn't strictly the case with me.

As I pulled on my gear I wondered whether the boy from the year bellow who'd been kidnapped had been on the team: I didn't really remember those on the squad because we ran with our separate years, so I ran with year eight and had almost done for the whole school year. We only had three weeks until school finished for summer, something I was greatly looking forward to.