Wishful Dreaming

07

Landing on the ground was softer than Seven expected, maybe it was because he had gotten used to the hard wood floors in the room. That's also when the realized that he was outside, not in the dusty house he had been trapped in for the last few days, which had felt like years to him. He was back to the world he could only stare out of from an old glass window before. He actually lived to come back to it.

Well not for long if he didn't start moving, The Hunter was still after them. Seven could hear The Hunter running as fast as he could, which was hard for the stocky build he had, to catch up and kill the escaped boys. The terrifyingly unhuman sounding yells were also to be heard from inside the house, increasing every second as The Hunter became closer to the outside. He and Mono needed to start running, this time they weren't going to be so lucky if the man grabbed his gun.

Mono must have been thinking the same thing, as he scrambled up onto his feet and dragged Seven up as well, not hesitating to grip onto his hand and begin running the opposite way of the front door which The Hunter would most likely use. Seven trusted Mono to know what he was doing, after all he believed that Mono had been here for a while, at least longer than Seven had. He probably knew his way around this forest, and the best hiding spots too, so Seven squeezed his hand and began running as fast as he could to keep up with Mono. He might still be extremely tired, but he would have to wait to rest when they found somewhere safe.

The two boys ran around the house, into a direction that would take The Hunter longer to catch up to them. Mono hoped by going around the house a bit would make The Hunter lose track of them, since he wouldn't know which direction they went. The downside of it was that Mono had never gone this way before, and knew next to nothing about what laid ahead. He only wished that he knew enough of the wilderness to get them to somewhere safe, and quickly regarding Seven's current state. He didn't know how long Seven could keep up with this pace, but he was grateful that Seven was putting in as much effort right now to try and go as fast as Mono was.

They continued to run, and since they didn't hear any normal sounds of The Hunter, they almost believed that they might have lost him. Luck was no longer on their side, as a gunshot followed by loud footsteps soon came from not too far behind them, allowing them to know that the hunt was still on. This made Mono's pace quicken, straining Seven more, but he didn't complain. Seven couldn't, not after everything Mono had done for him, he couldn't risk them like that.

Then a barn from not too far ahead came into sight, and Mono knew that The Hunter also probably owned it, since it wasn't falling apart like the rest of the abandoned buildings that he would come across every once in a while. Instead of trying to go inside of it, Mono started racing around it as well, wanting The Hunter to somehow be slowed down by it. He was indeed not, and he continued shooting as well, missing them and hitting a fence nearby.

Mono ran behind the strewn out boxes, attempting to hide behind some of them to save him and Seven from the continuous bullets. He had slowed down considerably from before, noticing how Seven's breaths came out more ragged and that he was practically dragging him by now. He felt bad for pushing him so hard to begin with, but he tried not to dwell on it so much as they continued to run. Boxes were shattered behind them, and Mono couldn't help but jump each time, but he was grateful it wasn't him. The terror he felt from the sounds of the gun made him want to almost cower and curl up, but he wasn't going to, that wasn't going to get him and Seven to safety.

Seven was tailing right behind Mono, also glad that the boxes they were hiding behind kept them from getting obliterated from the bullets The Hunter shot. His mind seemed to be running faster than his feet, both from the spinning of exhaustion and the process of trying to find a way out of this. He was lucky to have Mono here to guide him when he was in such bad shape. He wasn't normally this undependable, but right now he couldn't help it with all that had happened. The original escape mission of the Maw ended up horribly, to winding up here and getting captured, to running away from Mono and getting captured again, and then escaping once more with Mono this time. It didn't seem like he could get a break from running, but then again, it was what he was mainly nicknamed for.