I was running, my heart in my throat as we torn through the grass field, breaths ragged and heavy. I could barely focus on the ground in front of me with the little light we had; my eyes threatened to drop shut any minute and my legs felt heavy as lead. I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours and my entire body was screaming in agony. The only reason why I was still running was because of adrenaline, which was bound to wear off soon.
“Gail, pull yourself together!” Tom’s angry voice snapped me out of my trance. Just in time too, since I nearly stumbled on a particularly large twig on the ground. There were countless starches on my legs, courtesy of the long grasses we were running through. I couldn’t even feel them; but I was beyond caring now. All I wanted for all these to end.
“Go left!” Evanna shouted from behind. Tom and Fred immediately veered left and the rest of us followed. I swallowed hard. I didn’t know how long I could run for. How many times has it been? Tenth? Fifteenth? I had lost count now. I didn’t know how long we could do this for, but if we don’t find shelter soon, we are dead meat.
The roar of the pack of Lupas behind us gave me another reality call. They were closing in on us. I looked back and saw they were gaining on us quickly. Owen and Evanna were at the back and my heart skipped a beat.
In our dreamy state, we forgot our usual formation and ended up in a loose line stretching for several hundred meters, and we had also managed to get separated as well. I watched in horror as the Lupa continued to gain on Owen and Evanna, frozen to spot by the nightmarish scene in front of me.
“Gail run!” Owen shouted at me, waving his hand and pushing Evanna forward and taking a stand in front of the Lupas, who were only twenty short meters behind him.
“No!” I screamed, creating a mind wall in front of him, successfully blocking the first blows. Evanna continued to run towards me with a pained expression and I couldn’t help but resent her a little at that moment. My first mind wall shattered and I quickly put another one up, ignoring the dizziness in my head.
“Go!” Owen shouted at me, wielding his make-shift sword in front of me in a fighting stance. “Rather me than any of you.” He said.
My second wall shattered and my vision blackened for a minute. When I regain consciousness I was being carried piggyback and the temperature has gone up. Tom had created a fire wall to stop the Lupas.
“Put me down, I am fine.” I said, struggling to get off Tom’s back. He tightened his grip on my tight and ignored my request, continuing to run in the direction Evanna instructed us to. I could see the edge of the forest now, if we run into it, there was a chance that we can hold them off till day light.
I could see Fred was carrying Evanna too, who had already passed out. Owen was behind us, giving me a reassuring smile when he saw me looking.
“Shoot.” Tom cussed. The howls behind me told me that the Lupas had somehow managed to get through the wall of fire and were again hot on our trails. My eyes immediately darted towards Owen, praying that he wouldn’t do something stupid. I also cursed myself silently. If only I was strong enough to hold a decent mind wall right now.
The Lupas broke through my third set of mind wall like it was made of paper; Fred and Tom tried to set up another fire or ice wall respectively but I could tell that they were running out of strength as well. I began to wonder if this was the place where we died.
“You guys run.” Owen said in a grim tone. “I will hold them off.”
“No!” I screamed, Tom and Fred exchanged a look and they both shook their heads. If we won’t in such a dire situation I would have laughed. These two are actually agreeing on something!
“If you stay, we all die.” Owen said, then giving me a smile. “You guys are more important than me. If you don’t go, Evanna and Gail will die too.”
Owen had stopped running and once again turned to face the Lupas, ready to fight. I screamed and kicked as much as I can as Tom carried me away from Owen. Tears welled up in my eyes as I failed to free myself from Tom’s grip; I tried to stop the Lupas, but exhaustion was seeping through my body and all I could managed was establishing a paper thin wall in front of Owen, which would only buy him a second before the Legres reach him.
“Don’t look.” Tom whispered, hastening away from Owen and turning me away from him. Panic welled up and I tried frantically to get off Tom, but that only made him hold on to me harder. Roars and sounds of metal against flesh came a few moments later. My heart seemed to be squeezed by an invisible hand and I screamed and kicked, willing the Lupas to just back off and leave us alone. I could see the forest just ahead of us now, but the edge of my vision started fuzz as my eyelids drooped heavily down and I lost conscious.
---
My throat hurts. My head hurts. Basically my whole body hurts. My mind was still cloudy from sleep and I held my eye shut, trying to figure out where I was. Then memories of what happened came flooding back and I snapped open my eyes and bolted upright in the crisp cold early morning air.
I drew in a deep breath of fresh air and looked around me, momentarily dazed. I could hear voices and footsteps coming towards me as my visions adjust.
“Are you okay?” Nate asked kneeing in front of me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would end up screaming. I looked around to find Owen but he wasn’t there.
“Guys! She’s awake.” Nate shouted and I heard more people coming towards us. My vision started to clear now and I could see Nate, Holly and Casey in front of me with mirrored concern on their exhausted faces.
“Is she okay?” Tom asked Nate when he came to a stop behind Holly, who gave him an affirmative answer. I momentarily forgot about my heartache and gave Tom a glare.
“Don’t talk like I am not here.” I reprimanded, which Tom took no notice of. I huffed and turned away from him. Whilst he had become more amiable since our escape, it doesn’t make him less insufferable.
The lump in my throat grew as the rest of my friends gathered around me, including Evanna. None of them looked sadden or depressed, but they could be putting up a brave front to deceive me.
“So, what happened?” I asked, hoping to prompt them into telling me about Owen. I just couldn’t bring myself to actually ask the question directly. The all looked at each other, as if consenting on some kind of story before Nate spoke again.
“A pack of Lupa found us, broke into our camp…” He started, but I quickly interrupted him.
“I know.” I said through my gritted teeth. Could they not see how desperate for answer I was? “What I meant was what happened after I passed out.”
“Oh.” Nate said, giving me a sheepish look. “Right. We met up again in the forest and brought you and kept running until we were sure they weren’t following us.”
Resisting the urge to slap or read his mind. I took a deep breath and settled on giving him a look. He knew what I wanted to know, he was just playing dumb with me.
“Gail, are you okay?” a voice that I never thought I would hear again asked, accompanied by groans of everybody. My head immediately snapped back to the source of the voice and saw a very muddy Owen emerging from our make-shift tent.
“Owen!” I screamed, attempting to get up and ran towards him but held down by Holly and Casey. Realising that they were attempting to trick me into thinking Owen had died, I turned around a glared at them.
“Owen!” Nate cried. “You have ruined our joke.” The others all sighed and shook their head and Owen, who shrugged and gave them a puppy dog face. They were all in on this?
Taking another deep breath, I recomposed my face into a fake smile. My body was starting to shake from the range of emotions that I just experienced. On one hand I understood why this would be a funny prank, however, didn’t they think that it was too serious a matter to toy with?
“You guys.” I said through my gritted teeth, to which Nate responded with an Uh-oh and started to back off. “Thought it was funny to pretend that Owen was dead?”
“Well, technically, we didn’t imply anything.” Fred piped up, and Natalie hit him on the arm and sssh him.
“Come on Gail, it was funny.” Tom smirked. I suppressed the smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. I can’t just forgive them like this.
“Seriously though, what happened?” I asked again, remembering the events before I blacked out. Lupas packs are particularly aggressive during full-moon, and will stop at nothing to kill of any intruders they meet. I eyed Owen worriedly, but he seemed relatively unharmed apart from a bandaged- arm.
“Honestly? I don’t know.” Owen said, “One minute they were ready to pounce on me, the next they just stopped and looked at each other before backing off and ran back.”
“They just left?” I asked incredulously and Owen nodded.
“It was too good to be true.” He said, smiling ruefully and scratched his head. My heart clutched at the memory of his expression as he decided to stay behind so we could escape. It frightens me to think that any of us could die at any second in this forest. We didn’t really thought things through when we decided to escape into the wilderness. We had no training, zero knowledge on survival skills; if it wasn’t for Evanna we would all be dead by now. And even her power could only protect us to a certain extent.
As if reading my thoughts, everyone turned to look at Evanna. She had lost a lot of weight during the past month, in fact, all of us had. It wasn’t hard to find fruits and such in the forest, but identifying the poisonous one from the edible one was the real challenge. Cooking meat was also another issue; whilst we could catch smaller animals easily, the smell of cooking attract much larger animals and Legres, and it’s just disgusting to skin and clean an animal. Argh, I don’t want to think about that.
“Don’t look at me.” Evanna said, blinking innocently. “I can look into the future, not find out reasons behind it.”
We sat in silence for a while, caught up with the exhaustion of the past month or so; Holly gave out some berries for breakfast, thank god we didn’t lose the supply bags yesterday night. Oscar had the sense (or the compulsion) to grab it when we fled. I stole a glance at him and saw that he was concentrated on eating his berries. Glad to see something never changes.
“What are we going to do now?” Holly suddenly asked in hushed voice. Everyone dropped their gaze. To be honest I don’t think any of us had any ideas of what was going to happen. Our objective had become staying alive and on the move in a general direction, hoping to reach a Citybase soon. There were too many variables in the close future that Evanna couldn’t see it.
“Carry on?” Fred suggested, earning an eye-roll from Tom to which he replied with one of his own. “We are bond to reach a Citybase soon.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Citybases aren’t exactly common around here.” Tom said sarcastically. “We could have past one without realiseing. The forest is too big.”
“What suggestions have you got then?” Fred replied heatedly, there they go again. Those two are like fire and ice. Literally. It’s like they can’t live a day without fighting with each other.
“The forest can’t go on forever.” Casey piped up. “Once we are out we would be able to see better.”
“Yeah, but we can’t hide from the Legres either.” Oscar commented, and everyone shuddered, remembering the events of last night.
“You know what; we will just have to take this one step at a time.” Tom said, suddenly standing up, startling all of us. “We definitely can’t stay in one place for too long. Just stick to North West, we will get somewhere.”
I blinked up at Tom, who seemed to suddenly taken charge. Everyone looked towards Evanna again who shrugged.
“I can’t see anything until we decide.” She emphasized. Tom rolled his eyes and tapped his foot, obviously annoyed by us.
“Let’s do a vote.” I said, clasping my hands loudly on my knees causing everyone to snap up (or awake, in Nate’s case).
Out of the corner of my eyes I could see Nate whispering to Holly who rolled her eyes at him. I had no doubt that he was asking her what was happening.
“Okay, who agree to carry on? And if you don’t have a better idea, you better say yes.” Tom said, raising his hand up in a defeated motion. After a bit of whispering and sighing, almost everyone put their hands up, except for Fred. This was as per usual.
“Alright.” Tom smiled, shooting a victorious glance at Fred and clapping his hands together. “On we go!”
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Hey guys! Happy Birthday to me haha :) anyway sorry for a little bit of repeat, but that's the whole of Chapter 2. I will try and post every week from beginning of Feburary, but I am seriously behind schedule so it might be less than that!
Anyway there's only 5 days till end of Wattys! For those who haven't voted for Evolution yet please do so! Even if you have, get your friends to vote ;)
Anyway I will be going out to celebrate with my friends tonight :) hope you all enjoy this first chapter <3 x