Zodiac War

Research and Running

I couldn’t help but think back to the day everything changed.  My life had been so carefree back then. I only had school and some projects to worry about.  Those worries seemed so minor compared to my everyday life now. Now I was stuck running for my life with my best friends Adrian and Talise while people from the eastern zodiac team or EZT for short and the western zodiac team or WZT for short were trying to find and kill us.  The only reason they wanted to kill us so badly is because we were trying to mess with their natural order of things and we all know how well people deal with change. Currently we were racing down the highway in a beat up green gmc safari trying to get away from the WZT who had managed to track us down.  I looked behind us and saw that they had managed to catch up to us while I had been caught up in my thoughts. I saw one of their people start to aim his hand out the window and yelled, “Duck!!!” to my friends since I had no idea who they were aiming at. His rocks and dirt sailed through the back and front window of our car not a moment later, but now we knew that they must have been aiming at Adrian who was driving.  But knowing that he was an earth element didn’t help since we had figured out a while back that fire and water only served to strengthen anyone from the WZT who was an earth element. We were starting to figure out the rules in this crazy new world, so the only thing that I could do currently was act as a shield for my friends who were both weak if attacked by earth.

We had to figure out a place to hide though and also how to get them off of our tail before they were joined by others.  Luckily, we were blessed with having Talise with us. She was a water rooster, so being smart was one of her good qualities and this was a situation in which her quick wit would hopefully be able to save us once again.  I turned towards her and asked, “What should we do? We need to get them off of our tail.” She asked, “Do you trust me?” We both looked at her in surprise before Adrian turned back to the road. He said, “Anything is better than having them keep aiming at us and slowly gaining on us.  This is a losing battle right now.” The next thing she said made us both think she had lost her mind. She said, “Leave the highway on the next exit and head into the downtown of the next big city.” Adrian hesitated for a second, but then decided that he might as well do what she said.  So far her quick wit had saved us on multiple other occasions, so it would probably turn out good now as well. The next exit sent us towards downtown Los Angeles. As we got nearer to downtown and the traffic jams, we had to keep slowing down and we saw the WZT gaining on us even more. “Now what?” Adrian yelled at Talise.  She scanned the traffic and pointed him into the right lane. “Don’t use your blinkers anymore and when the turn signal for the left lane is green, cut across all three lanes and make a u turn. Before they’ll have a chance to follow us, we’ll have made plenty of turns and lost them.” We sat tensely while waiting for the light to turn green.  The next thing we knew, Adrian stomped on the gas and made a quick u-turn. At the next street he turned right followed by a lot of other random turns. We then decided to leave Los Angeles just as quickly as we had come because we didn’t want to be stopped by police and questioned about our reckless driving. We could never know which police was part of the WZT or EZT.

Our racing hearts were starting to calm and we went back to laughing and talking like we had been before we realized that the WZT was following us.  We headed into Nevada and checked into the first campsite we found that was off of the beaten path. Maybe we would be able to stay here a while and research.  We still didn’t nearly know enough about the chinese zodiac and astrology and all of the weird rules that seemed to come with this life. Maybe research would help us figure out what we were dealing with and how we could come up with a solution that wouldn’t require Talise and me to kill Adrian.  The only thing we knew at the moment is that Talise and me had been born into the EZT and that they were in a war with the WZT. The only problem is that we didn’t know what the war was about and why that would require us to kill Adrian just because he had been born into the WZT. We had managed to find the EZT after months of searching and almost getting killed only to find out that Adrian should have been our enemy.  They were about to kill him when we sprung him from prison and we’ve been on the run ever since.

Adrian turned to us from his seat in the front and started dividing up research tasks.  He told me to research about the chinese zodiac while Talise looked up the western zodiac and he would keep watch.  Since he just stayed at the wheel, this would make for a quick getaway if anyone had managed to follow us here anyway.  We had pretty much made our little boxy car into a home for us. It had a table, a cupboard, and a huge mattress that all three of us could fit on.  Not that we actually all used that at once, we had to keep in mind that someone needed to be on watch at all times, in case either team showed up and we had to make a quick exit.  After a while of trying to find out everything about the chinese zodiac, I still didn’t feel like I was any closer to figuring out the rules in this new world than I had been before, but at least now I felt like I understood myself better.  The chinese zodiac was just so accurate that I couldn’t believe that I had never believed in it before finding myself in this situation. I looked up at Talise who was still absorbed in her research and asked, “Did you find anything useful?”  “I only found out that the western zodiac is based on the month that people are born in, but I already knew that. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If someone is born with an element on everyday of each month, then there would be billions of people with these marks and everyone would be hunted by one of the two teams.  But we didn’t even know this was all real until we got into a natural disaster or something,” she said. I thought about what she said and realized that she might be onto something. “So that means that there must be rules that prevent people from being born with powers all the time. But I wonder what those rules are and why did our own powers not show themselves until we almost died?”  I started to think back to the day I had found Talise and couldn’t help but wonder what made us special.