Gifted #Wattys2015

Chapter 6

Travelling

I'm not sure how they knew about us, or where we were, but they were yelling. Chants and cries of 'freaks' rang out from the crowd. Freaks, really, could they not come up with something even just I bit more original than that. "Time to go!" I said. Collectively, we gathered our belongings and packed them into our rucksacks as quickly as possible. Theo and Frost were holding the door in place; it was rocking and creaking from the immense weight the people of the town were pressing on it.

The door suddenly flung open, and Frost was thrown backwards, crashing into Blade. He then fell to the floor. Theo was even less fortunate, as he was repeatedly stood on by the mob of people rushing through the door before he managed to scramble to his feet. Like a swarm of bees whose nest had just been disturbed, the towns people advanced forwards, edging closer to us. Many of them are simply armed with fists, others hold pipes and a few even hold knives. Jason shifts into a polar bear, standing on his hind legs and growling. This stops the 20 or so people currently in the thankfully open plan ground floor in their tracks. But not for long. They soon start to advance again, not deterred by Jason's growling. They are still jeering and taunting, hurling expletives towards us. "We're ready, let's go!!" Rose yells.

We headed out the back door, turning our jog to a run as we exited the town. There was a 8 foot high electric fence surrounding the town, which made things a lot harder. That was, until we remembered Taylor could fly. He carried each of us over the fence, excluding Madi, who simply walked through it. With a fence between us and the angry mob of people, we were safe. Well, we were never really safe, just safer than if we were on the side of the fence with the angry towns people.

"They really hate us, don't they?"

I didn't even bother replying, I wasn't even sure who said it. We all stayed silent, and did what we were now experts at. We ran.

We decided that staying in a village or a town never ended well, and since it was still summer and the nights weren't too cold, we could survive in the forest or woods near a village instead. It took quite a while to reach an area we could stay at though as unfortunately there was a large hiking trail in the direction we were travelling. Hikers with there mountain boots and heavy, noisy backpacks. This made it easy to avoid them, but there were easily a 100 or so that had come past in under one day's travel. We were also forced to follow the trail as the ground began to curve sharply upwards into huge hills that were practically mountains. If we weren't on the path, we were about to fall off a steep cliff. So, we stuck to the path.

It wasn't too long either before we were all exhausted, our food and water supplies diminishing quite rapidly with the extra three. They had had no supplies of their own as they had been kicked out very unexpectedly. Using our only map, Theo and Jamie were able to locate a small village not too far over the large hills we were settled on now that would probably be okay for us to stop at briefly.

On every map though, the little red dots indicated that an authority patrol would be there, which was never good. The dots were a reminder to the running enhanced that there was practically no settlement that wasn't guarded, and that we really had no option other than to turn ourselves in. Not this time.

Another harsh days traveling passed. We continuously alternated between running, jogging and occasionally walking as some movement was always better than having to stop. Our water supply was really dwindling though, and we hadn't seen a stream, a pond or even a puddle since we set off. I looked at the sky for about the 7th time that morning. Completely clear sky, a deep sea blue and beaming sun. No chance of rain either. "How far away is the village now?" I called out to the girls who still had the map.

"The hill should start crest soon, and then it will be all downhill, which will be a lot better. The village is to the far left of this hill, built around the only water source for miles." Jamie called back. Her, Madi, Rose and Taylor were all ahead, followed by me, Frost, Theo and Blade. Jason had shifted into an eagle form once again in search of water on the hills to the sides of the hills we were on. A forgotten pond hopefully, something small enough that it hadn't been included on the map, but enough for us. "Alright, thanks." I replied.