I’ve let my writing slip and now if I want to make 50,000 words by the end of November I have to average about 5,000 words a night. 
Oh like you’ve been reading these posts anyway. Don’t look at me like that.
Title change: Harrow [The Problem with Survival] - If anyone happens across this hot mess and wants to weigh in on the title, be my guest ha.
Day 6 - 19
Word Count: 1484
“I’m going to ask you one more time.” Dex was suddenly very calm. He let go of Greg’s collar and even dropped his fist. What was going on? What kind of method of interrogation was this? I was sure that Dex was going to beat an answer out of him, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Dex lowered his voice just so we could barely hear it over the sounds of whizzing arrows barely hitting their marks. “I’m tired, hungry and there are people shooting arrows at us. I’m losing patience.” Greg scuttled back into the side of the building, his glasses slightly askew. It irritated me that he wouldn’t straighten it.
“I’m starting to lose patience, myself, over here.” I muttered. Dex didn’t even seem to hear me, choosing to focus on our would-be captor.
“I don’t know!” Greg shouted back, the smug expression replaced by wide eyes and sweaty temples; I turned away to stop myself from punching his glasses off of his face. The sound of arrows either sticking into the side of the wooden building or smashing windows was making me grind my teeth in an attempt to abate the feeling of anxiety, me on edge has never made for good decisions. I needed to calm down slightly, sort my thoughts out. In order to get out of this alive I would need a little clarity. Greg continued to plead ignorance. There was no way that little sack of shit was telling the truth.
“He’s lying,” I said simply, peering around the corner surreptitiously between bouts of arrows, cursing the fact that I couldn’t see a thing. “He knows something.” Greg’s pleas and his annoying nasally voice turned uncertain. I glanced at Dex whose usual jovial expression was marred by one of contempt, his stare not once straying from the sniveling man cowering against the building wall. I went back to skimming the perimeter in search of a way out, without bothering to look at him I decided to give the man a chance one more chance come clean. “Greg, I’m going to give you until the end of my sentence to tell us about your friends shooting arrows at us, if you don’t I’m not going to be responsible for the way Dex rearranges your face or-” I slapped his face with the blade of my shovel. Ever been bitch slapped with a shovel? Well Greg has. He held his right cheek but didn’t say anything; an arrow struck the side of the building, inches from my head. I slapped him with the shovel again, harder this time. “I am so close to accidentally severing your head from your body with this shovel, don’t even thinking I’m kidding.” I slapped him again, these were going to leave bruises, and I could see the red welt forming on the side of his face. Fear and panic tend to make a potent cocktail of bad decisions when mixed, and for me the results were never great. As I readied to hit even harder, my shovel’s swing widening even further than before, the older man threw his hands up over his face before yelling
“Alright! Alright!”
Greg interrupted, shouting into his arms; panting slightly as though the mere thought of more pain made him short of breath. “I don’t know who they are but they wanted you two.” Dex, who had started to take inventory of our immediate supplies, stopped and listened. The pensive expression on his face worried me, he moved his head quickly to the side as an arrow whizzed past him. Did they just have an endless supply of arrows out there? “They said to take you two to them once we could confirm that it was ‘the Samoan girl and her friend’ and that’s what we were doing, I swear.” His voice sounded strangled like he was crying, it made me wonder what kind of person he was before the Incursion.
“For sacrifice?” I asked brusquely, I knew that National Bounty hunters rounded up any insignificants they could find and would be rewarded with food and supplies, or so I heard.
“I guess? Look I actually don’t know. I was just doing as I was told, you have to believe me.” He licked his non-existent lips again, his beady eyes as wide as they could be behind his horn-rimmed glasses. An arrow struck him in the shoulder, “SHIT!” He screamed, my eyes widened slightly but other than that I wasn’t surprised, an arrow was bound to hit home at some point. “Help me, I’m going to bleed out!” Greg pleaded, this time openly crying, unashamedly wiping away the tears and snot dripping from his face. My lip curled in disgust as I watched him, what a sniveling piece of crap.
“Pull yourself together, man.” Dex moved forward and kneeled before the man, his eyes focused on the arrow sticking out of Greg’s shoulder. Greg was panting, body almost rocking with sobs. “Stop effing crying.” Dex ordered, “It’s just a flesh wound you sook.” He wrapped his fingers around the shaft of the arrow but Greg slapped his hands away.
“What are you doing?!” He asked in a rush, “Stop! I’ll bleed out, you’ll rip the flesh out when you pull it out!” He continued to cry in rushed sentences and my teeth gnashed together as the sound of his nasally cries grated against the inside of my brain.
“Shut the hell up!” I snapped, Greg didn’t stop crying but at least he quieted down.
Before I shoveled Greg in the face I addressed my friend, “Sole, Dex, you know what you’re doing?” I asked, not really caring whether or not Dex did, if anything I was hoping Dex wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. However Dex nodded, not once looking up from assessing Greg’s flesh wound.
There had to be a way out of here
Scene from somewhere in the novel:
“At this point I’ll be glad for a rat,” Dex took another small bite of the cabin bread cracker in his hand, the mould not even registering with us anymore. For me, I used to scrape it off. Now, it felt wasteful and so I thought of it as ’added flavouring’. It was hard not to reminisce back to Sunday lunches, or koga’i as we called them, before the Incursion. It was always a feast, especially if there were a few families gathering after church. So much food, it was excessive really; mostly Samoan food- with some European food too, and there was almost always leftovers. My mouth watered at the very thought, all that food taken for granted. If I had known that this is where we would wind up mere months later, I would have stockpiled or something, I don’t know. I nibbled on my own cracker. Dex groaned as he finished his and slouched, staring into the fire. ”Shit, what I wouldn’t give for a piece of taro.”
I choked on flakes of cracker that flew into and stuck to the back of my dry throat; coughing and wheezing before taking the smallest swig of our dwindling safe-for-drinking (question mark implied) water supply.
“Tanielu, did you just say you wanted taro? The world must be ending!” Every Sunday gathering Dex’s family joined us for he’d be all over the KFC, and whenever his mum tried to make him eat taro, or freakin’ God forbid some raw fish he’d gag until he got his way. Granted this is when they were kids, as teens they could make their own plates after the parents and elders had finished eating. “Remember that time you had some oka and as soon as a piece of raw fish touched your mouth you spit it out and it hit the pastor’s wife on the cheek? Oh you got the meanest hiding that day, holy shit- you projectile spit that thing all the way from the kid’s table!”
I was laughing so hard I was crying, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my jumper, I shook my head and stared at the fire myself. The flames dancing away, unaware of what it felt like to be empty. I grabbed another coffee table leg and fed it to the fire. Imagining that the fire was me and that the table leg was a Subway sandwich. I chuckled lightly at the thought of flying pieces of raw fish. My stomach ached from the workout, or the lack of food. I would wager it was the second one.
“Are you done?” I looked up at my old friend, not even a hint of a smile, seeing Dex down wasn’t something I was used to. He was always the happy one, smiling when handed a detention, laughing when the boyfriend of a girl he started flirting with punched him out. Dex was a happy dude, to see him so dejected was pretty unnerving.
