Page 7 of Blue Arrow Island (Blue Arrow Island #1)

One Week Later

When defending yourself, your goal is always to control the threat, not engage in a back-and-forth of blows. To neutralize the threat, target major muscle groups and large joints.

- Excerpt from a police training manual written by Ben Hollis

Something is shaking my shoulder. No. Some one . I jolt awake, my effort to scramble away cut short by a wall at my back. I groan, pain radiating throughout my body, not from hitting the wall, but from soreness.

The sun isn’t all the way up yet, but I’m able to make out the muted gray outline of a man, his palms out in front of him. I squint, recognizing his untamed hair.

“Olin?”

He moves slowly, keeping his palms facing out where I can see them. With his right hand, he pats the top of his left wrist, where a watch would go.

I’m groggy, my thoughts a murky, slowly creeping fog. My body is begging me to lie down and go back to sleep.

What is he trying to tell me about a watch? No one wears them anymore, and there aren’t?—

“Oh shit.” I sit up, scrub a hand over my face and throw off my wool blanket. “I’m going to be late.”

I was dead asleep on the walkway outside of Marcelle’s door.

Her schedule is different from mine, and she doesn’t finish training until two a.m. Since she won’t give me a key to her room, my only option is to wait outside her door, and with the intensity of the training I’ve been doing, I can’t stay awake.

The first couple of nights, I tried to. It’s dangerous to sleep out in the open.

But eventually, my body took the choice away from me.

Now, I cover myself completely with my blanket at ten every night and hope the darkness hides me well enough.

Some nights, I don’t even wake up when Marcelle gets here.

And today, I slept through the camp-wide alarm that blares over the sound system at five thirty every morning.

“Okay.” I stand, the stabbing pain in my stomach making me cringe. “No time for...anything.”

The woman I sparred with yesterday was relentless. She must have punched me in the stomach a couple hundred times. It’s only my pride that gets me to the end of my six-to-ten p.m. training block; I don’t have the energy by then.

It would have been nice to clean my teeth with charcoal dust and saltwater and take a quick shower, but I don’t have time. The bathroom lines are long at this time of day.

I shove my blanket up against the outer wall of the housing block and walk over to Olin.

“Thanks for waking me up.”

He nods. I was late on my fourth day here, and my punishment was no food for the day. The next time I’m late, I get three days without food. The training is too rigorous for that.

Olin hesitates, then walks over and picks up my blanket, folding it neatly. He passes it to me.

“You think I should take it?”

He nods.

“Because if I don’t, someone might steal it?”

Another nod.

Despite the headache that never fully goes away, and the pain I feel from my scalp to my toes from training, my lips quirk with a smile.

“Thanks, Olin.”

We walk in silence to the kitchen, stopping at the well next to it to fill our canteens. I drink two canteens full before filling it a third time and putting the strap over my shoulder so it rests on my hip.

I shouldn’t be drinking so much water, because I know I’m feeling the effects of sodium deficiency. Water makes it worse. But I’m also usually dehydrated here. It’s an ugly irony.

“Briar and Rona, you’re on meat prep, get going.” Billy wastes no time putting us to work.

Meat prep is a double-edged sword. It’s hard to peel and slice juicy, ripe papayas when your own stomach is knotted painfully with hunger and you aren’t allowed to eat any of it. Meat prep is gross, but not tempting, so at least there’s that.

The term “meat” is all-encompassing at Rising Tide. It includes fish and kills brought in by the hunting team. Hunting kills are field dressed and sometimes come to us in pieces, and I’m only able to identify some of the animals because of my knowledge of biology.

We get a lot of boars, birds and reptiles. Snakes are the easiest to identify. Some days we get a lot of fish, and other days, hardly any. I don’t think too hard about what some of the meat is, but Rona seems to enjoy pointing out the things she knows will make me cringe.

“Mmm, rat.” She holds it up and waggles her brows.

The carcass still has its tail attached, wiry hairs sprouting between the scaly rings. Eating rats is bad enough, but what’s worse is that Rona won’t discard the tail. Everything gets eaten here—even fish skin and eggs. And still, it’s not enough.

I hated training at first, but it’s become my favorite part of life at Rising Tide. When I’m running, rolling massive logs, swimming or sparring, it takes everything I’ve got just to get it done. I’m always exhausted, sore and hungry, but I can’t think about that during training.

Instead, I pretend my dad is beside me. I imagine what he would tell me to do and how he’d encourage me.

You don’t have to be the fastest or the strongest, Briar. If you want to be the best, it only takes one thing—never, ever quit.

He didn’t talk a lot about what he did in his Special Operations Marine Corps unit, but he did say he survived things he shouldn’t have many times.

Maven and I complained about him forcing us to read Jack London books in our early teen years, but when the virus came, I clung to those stories of survival and the human spirit. I still do.

“What we really need is some canned fish,” I say as I chop unidentified meat into small pieces.

Rona snort laughs. “Canned fish? If I could make any food appear before me, it would be a giant, juicy burger and fries.”

“I wouldn’t turn that down.”

She slices the tail from the rat carcass and deftly chops it. “Why canned fish? Aren’t fresh fish healthier?”

“Yes, but we need the sodium canned fish have.”

“I thought sodium was bad.”

I scoop up the pile of chopped meat in front of me and dump it into the big stainless pot. “Too much is bad, but humans need some sodium to survive.”

Billy makes it clear that if he catches the kitchen workers complaining about the food or our work, he’ll have us reassigned to laundry. I’ve seen the hands of the people who do laundry—they’re so raw from scrubbing that they bleed.

Telling Rona the diet here is nutrient deficient might be seen as complaining, so I don’t say anything else. And really, there’s no point mentioning it. I figured out a few days in that there’s not enough food to feed everyone here.

It’s a cruel paradox, being around food for eight hours a day, but preparing it for others. When Rona and I get a five-minute break to eat our first meal of the day, it’s two bite-sized chunks of smoked meat and a small sliver of hard, unripe papaya. At least it quells the dull ache in my stomach.

My limbs are heavy as we return to work, fatigue blanketing every inch of me. I don’t know how everyone else makes it look so easy to get by on maybe five hundred calories a day.

There are no walls in the food prep area we’re working in behind the kitchen, and I get a quick glimpse of a training group racing past us on the dirt path that runs through camp. It’s a group of fours, and I swear they’re running at a four-minute mile pace.

Not only are the fours surviving on very little food and not enough of a single nutrient, they’re thriving .

I finish my meal in about a minute, and instead of sitting with Rona, I take my bowl back into the kitchen and find Billy.

“What?” He glares at me, his brow furrowed with annoyance.

“I, uh...” I clear my throat and straighten my spine. “I was a botany major when the virus came. I’ve loved learning about plants and biology my whole life. I could help identify edible plants if...that would ever help.”

I’m waiting for him to bark out how stupid I am.

That’s what he does to everyone. But I had to say something.

I don’t think it’s a matter of ones getting shafted on meals.

Everyone—even the fours—is too lean, muscles out of place on bodies with visible hip and collar bones.

Pregnant women get double rations, but even that isn’t enough for them.

Billy sighs, his expression drooping with resignation. “We’ve been burned before. Had people die from some of the plants. The commanders don’t want to risk it. Get back to meat prep.”

I consider pressing it. Telling him I know how to identify plants and test them to see if they’re safe to eat. But it’s not his decision, so I drop it.

When I return to the meat prep area, Rona is already there, dumping a bucket of water into the cooking pot we filled about a third of the way full of meat. We’ll cook it in water to make a stew of sorts. The next kitchen shift will do the same with the pile of bones, organs and fish skin we left.

Beef was on the menu almost every night at Lochlan’s.

A chef prepared it with spices and cooked it to perfection.

Freshly baked bread and vegetables were heaped into serving dishes, still steaming as they were delivered to the table.

And the butter the kitchen staff churned by hand was always available to be slathered on bread or melted on vegetables.

We had steak, pasta, grilled chicken salads, vegetable soup and more.

Bacon, eggs and toast for breakfast. Then there were the desserts—the most decadent of desserts every night, with rich chocolate and the raspberry sauce Lochlan often requested.

It was a very comfortable prison, but it was still a prison. I’d rather be on this island, my greatest hope that I get a bowl of watery bone and fish skin soup for dinner.

My kitchen shift ends. I check out with Billy and jog to the training area, because I don’t want to be the last to arrive. That person has to run laps around the training camp for the entire four hours of the session. In my state of exhaustion, soreness and hunger, I’m not sure I could do it.

For a week now, I’ve watched the person who arrives last struggle to get through that four-hour run. They usually throw up, and they can hardly walk when it’s over. Some of them crawl away from the training area.

It leaves me wondering what happens if you can’t complete the run. I’m not sure I want to know.

That night, I stagger to the showers at the end of my second training session. My feet ache from running in boots and my right hand throbs from all the punches I threw. Pax and his co-commander, Virginia Marsden, watched me spar and I didn’t want to show any weakness.

I don’t understand it. I don’t care about impressing them. They can call me a one or a four; it makes no difference to me. It would be nice to be able to leave camp and scout the island, but I’m only focused on survival right now.

Something deep inside me is fueling me, though. Telling me to fight . To get up from the ground faster. Punch harder. Jump higher.

Since I can’t get into Marcelle’s room, I hide my soap inside a bush near the showers. I fish it out and unwrap the leaf I put around it to conceal it.

Showering makes me feel human again. The salt left behind from drying seawater was added to tonight’s evening meal, and I already feel better from getting some sodium. My headache is finally gone.

“Shower stall nine, move your ass! Time’s up!” a male voice calls.

Shit. That’s me. I was air-drying a little bit since I didn’t want to use my blanket to dry off. It gets surprisingly cold here at night, and sleeping outside with a wet blanket doesn’t help.

A woman who does laundry duty was sent to the infirmary during training tonight because she has an infection in one of the open wounds on her hands. I think about her as I put on my clean clothes.

On the walk back to Marcelle’s room, a woman’s moan makes me pause. My hand goes to my hip, though there’s still no dagger there. I look around from my spot in the shadowed edge of the path.

“Fuck, I’m gonna come.” The man’s voice is ragged; more like a feral snarl than a groan of desire.

I silently turn toward the row of housing I’m closest to; a man has a woman pressed to the outer wall, his hips driving into her and his pants pooled at his ankles.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she whines desperately.

Okay, so she’s good with it. I resume walking, wondering where the hell they get the energy.

I stashed my blanket behind an empty crate outside the kitchen. After grabbing it, I drag myself the rest of the way to the walkway outside Marcelle’s room.

I curl up beneath the blanket, not caring about the jagged splinter of wood my cheek rests on. Immediately, I feel myself falling asleep.

My gasp is unconscious, my eyes flying open as I’m dragged, someone pulling hard on my hair.

“Close the door!” someone whisper-hisses.

I’m surrounded in blackness, panic coursing through my veins as I frantically reach for the hands wrapped around my hair.

They let go. I jump to my feet, my fatigue forgotten.

“Who’s there?” I demand.

Someone moves. The sound of a turning doorknob grabs my attention. A crack of dim night light is visible as the door opens.

Marcelle walks into the room, a small, primitive torch made from a tree branch in hand. The flickering flames highlight the harsh lines of her thin face, vitriol swirling in her eyes. The corners of her lips turn up in a cruel grin. She presses the door closed and turns the lock.

“Time to find out what we do to baby killers here.”

A hard kick lands in my stomach, doubling me over. My feet are swept out from under me, putting me in a prone position on the ground.

Instinct kicks in. I shield my head with my hands and scoot away, hitting a wall.

We’re in Marcelle’s tiny room. She passes the torch to someone else and descends on me, her hands wildly punching me everywhere. Spit lands on my cheek.

Someone else is kicking my legs. My arms are being forced from around my head and held to the ground.

I try to resist, but they’re all so damn strong . I get a hand free and use it to claw at Marcelle’s face, hooking a thumb inside her cheek and pulling on her face with every ounce of my strength.

She mutters a curse and bites me, drawing blood. It’s warm, a droplet falling onto my cheek.

I’m beat. There are too many of them. But I won’t give them the satisfaction of hearing me cry. I hold in every moan and plea, taking my mind somewhere else.

I’m with my sister. We’re kids again, running through a clearing of wildflowers. Her smile is carefree, the sun glinting off her caramel ponytail as it swings through the air.

Mae is with me. I’m not going to die alone.