[FINISHED] The First Annual Arrow

Chapter 8

Zak wakes up and tells me to fall asleep and I do. I need all the energy to fight.

When I wake up, the sun has risen and some birds are chirping. It's hard to not forget that this place is meant to kill me. I'm the first to get up, with the exception of Zak keeping watch.

"Should I wake the others up? We need to be alert. All of us,"I say to him.

"Um, yeah sure. It's not safe to be asleep here,"he says.

I go over to the sleeping bodies and wake them all up.

I stop at Zander. I run my hand through his cheek. He has a scar. Mark probably hit him with his sword when Zander came rushing in to save me.

He touches my hand and opens his eyes.

    "Good morning,"he says with a smile.

    "Good morning,"I say.

Once we're all awake and alert, we begin discussing things.

"We have enough apples for all of us to last a couple of days,"Mary begins.

    "What should we do? Nothing is safe. Not here. Not anywhere. Not anymore,"I say. "There's tributes. Do we want to hunt them down, or just hide and stay away from all of them?"

    I reach for my two braids hanging down my side. Just something to hang on to. Everyone is silent for a moment, thinking about my question.

    "We need to make risks,"Carlos says.

    "And we can't stay here all the time. We need to keep moving. We can't trust any place we stay at,"Meelie, for the first time, says.

    "Then let's move,"Lukas says.

    We stand up and walk for some time.

     "Wait,"I hear Zak say after a while.

    We all stop and listen. Something is making a strange growling sound. My heart starts to pound like crazy and I breathe hard.

    "Climb a tree,"I whisper even though I don't know how to climb a tree or if these creatures can climb things too.

    Meelie, Sky, and Carlos start to climb separate trees so if the creature can climb, it won't devour all three of them together.

    Lukas starts to get out his weapon and so does Hazel. The rest follow them and so do I.

    "We need to separate,"I softly say with sadness. "I could never master climbing."

    We all sadly agree and Zak, Hazel, Mary, Zander, Lukas, and I all start running farther .But then I stop and turn to the three little kids. I whistle the Mockingjay Alliance Whistle and they get the clue. That's the signal to say we're okay. Maybe even more than that.

    The growling continues. We continue to run, us the bigger kids. But as soon as we run past some trees, we meet the cornucopia. Tributes are there, but they haven't seen us yet. The tributes are in front of the cornucopia, sitting and drinking water. They are talking and are unaware of us. We look behind us and see two huge black wolves coming towards us quietly. If we run, the other tributes will hear us and the wolves will growl and attract more attention. If we don't run, we'll get devoured and the other tributes might have a head start to run.

    I clutch my knife and prepare to throw it. The others are also getting out their weapons.

    I throw my knives. Not at the wolves, but at the tributes. We need to get rid of them. If we attack the wolves first, they'll start to attack and attract attention. My knife hits a boy and he falls to the ground clutching his side. The tributes look our direction and start to come running and pulling weapons out. Zander hits a wolf, and it goes running around while he finishes it off. I continue to duck from arrows and start throwing more knives. Zak and Zander take on the wolves as the rest of us take on the tributes. Two of the tributes run off into the woods. There is just two people left there to fight. Two girls. One has brown hair, the other is blond. They have scars on their faces and legs. They must've not had our luck.

    The brown haired one comes straight for us with a machete. Its different than Mary's though. It looks more bloody and strange. She goes straight for me and pushes me to the ground. We are both on the ground, her face determined to kill me. Her scar starts to bleed. In the corner of my eye, I can see Hazel clutching her knife and running towards the girl who's on top of me. The girl grabs her machete, but I roll over with unknown strength, knocking her over. Hazel gets a head start on jumping on the girl. The girl turns her face towards me, but Hazel knocks her back down. Hazel smashes her knife into the girl's stomach. Pain is what I feel. We have to kill people in terrible ways. The girl stops all her movement and takes hard breaths. I can see her stomach moving up and down slowly. But then she closes her eyes and her chest stops. A cannon fires.

The other girl must've ran away, because we don't see any other person.

"Thanks,"I say to Hazel, and she gives a thumbs up in return. The wolves were taken down and we all gather together.

"Now we need to go away so they can clear her..."I say without finishing my sentence.

We walk away, still alert. I whistle the Mockingjay Alliance Whistle and other birds take up my notes. After the birds are finished, another whistle comes. The same one.

"Well, now we know someone's alive,"Lukas says and we all head for the direction of where we last saw Meelie, Sky, and Carlos.

We see them and they see us. Meelie climbs down along from her tree, and I see Sky is in the same tree as Carlos. I see why when they all come down. Carlos' leg is bleeding from scratches and he is struggling to not scream in pain.

"What happened?"I ask.

"These wolves can climb pretty fast. One caught Carlos' leg and pulled it. I shot the rest with Meelie and went with Carlos,"Sky explains.

Mary tears a leaf from a tree and wipes the blood off of Carlos' leg. The blood slowly keeps on coming, but after much cleaning, I help Mary tie some leaves around the wounded leg. We make layers of it so it I'll resist all the blood, if much more comes.

"Now we know what the arena does,"Zander says.

"And can do much more, possibly,"I add.

The Mockingjay Alliance Whistle blows in the arena and all over the sky, faces are shown. One by one they appear while the Panem Anthem begins. The first face is the girl Hazel stabbed. Her district is shown below her face. District Ten. The second face is the boy from 9. The third face is Meelie's District Partner, Tony. I look at Meelie as the Anthem ends along with the faces.

"Did you know him?"I ask.

"I never actually knew him, but I saw him win the spelling bee,"Meelie says. "All the contestants on his year were pure dumb brains, to be honest. The judge never even got to say the second grade word list since those dumb contestants got out so fast. And he won."

    "Wow,"I reply.

    "Yeah,"she says as we turn back to our alertness.

    "Well,"Mary begins,"we might aswell not sleep tonight and keep moving."

    "Yeah,"I say."We should."

    We all get our weapons and start walking towards a fake sunset carefully throwing the rock so we don't make contact with the force field.