They had been lucky so far, if you could call it that. Scratched and bruised and broken, yes, but they were all still alive, and he supposed that counted for something, didn't it? He thought it did, so even though they were now thirty minutes in to a seemingly endless chase through the woods, and his side was throbbing where he had fallen and landed on the stump protruding out of the ground and his companion to the left was sucking air as though she had been a five-pack-a-day smoker for the last forty years and the one on his right was bleeding into his own eye from the large cut on his forehead, he still considered them lucky. But nobody's luck holds forever, and theirs was no exception, so as his feet continued to pound into the ground he began to feel as though their grains of lucky sand were moving into the other side of the hourglass. And as he turned and saw that the officers who were supposed to be their reinforcements were no longer (or perhaps never had been) behind them, those granules seemed to move faster. And then there was a shot. And a scream. And suddenly he didn't feel lucky at all.
