Chapter 7 of Cross Country. Yeah, I’ve been in a writing slump for the last couple months. I just wanted to laze around and watch movies and listen to my iPod and read books…I’m sorry. I think I’m back from that vacation now.

I must sincerely thank all those who’ve stuck around till now. It’s been a bit boring up till now. But then, now’s when things pick up. When little kids are missing, things get interesting no matter what. God knows what Tsunade will do. These are her youngest babies! She’ll be devastated when the plan is launched! Speaking of which, to launch said plan, I should do reviews now. I love doing reviews.

Reviews:

Sakuraharuno-cherryblossom: Hinata’s got so many more surprises in her than being funny—you don’t even know what she’s got up her sleeve.

Lily: That sucks. It’s May now, but I wish it was snowing. Thank God school’s gonna be over soon, huh?

Seguha: : )

KougaAnd KagomeForever: If you can channel inspiration in your sleep maybe that’s why I’m typing this. I never did figure out why I just got come from school today and decided to write something for the first time in two months. If I could send a box of chocolates or money via Internet, I would, dammit. …Kiba…Kiba…is so…cool. I love making him say stuff…He’s being all, like Hakuna Matata. Since they’re not siblings, any KibaHina is just fine. I shall make it so! Also, I haven’t watched Naruto fillers in a long time, so I didn’t see the one you’re talking about. Now it’s all Shippuden, man. But if Ino was feeling bad then I’ll probably look for that episode.

Blackxheart: Nothing’s wrong with liking knives. Nothing’s wrong with wanting to use knives instead of darts when you play dartboard. (I.want.to.play.dartboard.with.knives.) WHAT? You don’t like Taco Bell? Inhuman, I say! Inhuman! Cartoon Network, gay. Luckily I found out that they DO still air Courage the Cowardly Dog. It’s on at 9 at night for Midwestern states, so 10 at night in the east and 8 in the west…I think. Wasn’t Freedom Writers great. I loved it, especially that one white kid in a class of black kids. No racism meant, but he looked like he was about to die from fright and I found it funny.

Flame Hikarashiha: KibaHina and KibaSaku. They’re both nice. So I include both here…when I can. The story continues…

Chapter the 7th.

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June 2nd, 4:19 AM (very early Monday morning, when the sun isn’t even up yet)

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“Rrrf.”

“Muhh.”

“Rrrf!”

“MMMmmmmuhhhh!”

“WOOF!”

Kiba was suddenly knocked out of his wondrous dream of red cotton candy and purple chocolate bars and had fallen off the edge of his bed. The covers had fallen off with him and were tangled up in his legs. “What the he—oh, yeah! Thanks for waking me up, Akamaru!”

“Ruff!”

The little white dog paced back and forth and anxiously sniffed Kiba’s fully-packed old, unused-for-years red Jansport backpack, tucked secretly behind his dresser so it couldn’t be seen. He and his pals had skillfully decided to pack old backpacks. and old clothes, instead of their usual school ones, obviously to hide that fact that they were running off and not being taken. The clothing items they took with them were old and forgotten, and would certaintly not be missed.

Kiba got up, wearing old boots to hide his real footprints from the floor, and stretched away his sleepiness, and ran over Hinata and Sakura’s plan in his mind. Firstly, he had to be quiet. Most of the Hokage family were heavy sleepers, but he knew they had to be careful. If they screwed up tonight, some person or other in the house would get suspicious of them and they’d have a wait a long while before trying to sneak out again. With Tsunade’s bank going further down the tubes every day, they just couldn’t do that.

Once he had dressed in many-pocketed tan shorts and Temari's old blue-colored Miami Dolphins hoodie—and for the first time in his life, put on a watch—he cast a look at their bedroom window, which they’d opened almost all the way many hours before.

When everyone else had gone to sleep, the three had waited an hour, then Kiba and Sakura had crept outside through the front door—wearing gloves to mask fingerprints and make their hands look bigger—climbed up the tree near their room and opened the window, which Hinata had earlier locked, with a kitchen knife they had bought themselves earlier that day. After he and Sakura had gotten in through the window themselves, they’d walked around, wearing old, long-forgotten boots they’d found in their closet, making it look as though some intruder had looked and walked around their room.

They’d stopped walking at random spots in the room, then jumped onto their beds like rabbits, so that the trail of boot-footprints would abruptly end at random spots in the room, as though the people making them had simply vanished. They’d stayed in beds ever since, and the skillful footprint-fingerprint trail they laid would fool any authorities for sure.

Since they’d done that—perhaps at 11:30 at night?—the window had been open all through their sleep, and though it was almost summer, the breeze had been chilly. If their fingerprints were still there, it would show that mysterious people in gloves had unlocked the window, come in through it, walked around the children’s room, investigating, then taken them out of their beds and walked out through the front door. The footprints he and his sisters made now, while they got up and get dressed, would confuse authorities all the more.

Grinning at the brilliance of his sisters, he crept over to Sakura’s bed, and gently nudged her. She opened one sleepy, green eye and gave one look over Kiba and understood right away that it was time. She pulled on her own old boots to hide footprints and turned away to dress in old clothes that no one would miss from the back of her closet where she’d found them.

Kiba turned away while she dressed herself and woke up Hinata, his back to Sakura. He pushed gently on her back, and, her being the only light sleeper in the family Kiba knew of, woke up immediately. She turned her head away with an embarrassed blush as she accidentally saw her sister dressing, but the pink-head came up to them and tapped their heads to let them know she was ready.

Sakura wore a light, black jacket unzipped over a Jurassic Park shirt that had once been Tenten's, and knee-length, grey “boy-shorts.” Once she had her backpack—the long-forgotten one she had used in the 2nd grade—she would be ready to go. Hinata—not wearing boots but big tennis shoes Jiraiya had left in their room many months ago and forgotten—found herself some suitable clothes and went into the closet to dress, too embarrassed to even stand next to her siblings in such a way. Kiba and Sakura merely shrugged, preparing for their runaway.

Rubber gloves, was the first thing that Kiba went for. They had found an old box of them at the very back of the drawers by the sink. No one would find any rubber gloves suspiciously missing from this house.

As Sakura pointed out, if their house was investigated, the first thing searched for would be fingerprints. If they found the kids’ fingerprints on a broken vase and on the window, they would know it was a runaway and not a kidnapping. Rubber gloves would hide their fingerprints; moreover, make it look like a kidnapper tried to hide his fingerprints.

Hinata came out of the closet in a light, green jacket, fully zipped up, and long jeans that were close to covering her feet. “Take those old shoes with you, Hinata,” Kiba said, pointing to the ones she wore.

The boots their plan was practically built on were two old pairs that they had found in the back of their closet, long forgotten from last Christmas or before, and so old that no one would miss them. (Hinata's pair had actually come from under Kiba's bed.) He had found the old things at least a month ago, stuffed behind Sakura’s old, too-small rollerblades and a rain jacket that Hinata had outgrown which had fallen to the closet floor.

There were two pairs of old hiking boots, about Jiraiya’s size and nearly torn apart. One pair was camouflage-printed, while the other was solid black. The black boots were closer to ripping apart than the slightly-better-conditioned camo boots. With help from Hinata, he had worked out that he and Sakura could slip on the boots, so that if footprints were investigated as well as fingerprints, they would find the big feet of big men, not little feet of little kids running through the house. This fact had helped them a lot with the “window break-in” stage.

And since their closet hadn’t been cleaned out in quite a long time, the only marks on the footprints would be old dust that had sat in the corner of a little room for months. There would be no Akamaru fur that might make a curious sibling think it had been Kiba walking around at night. There would be nothing to draw from the footprints but old dust. No one could figure out anything from old dust.

He and Sakura would wear the boots, and even though Hinata had her own old shoes to use, she would be carried on his back, to help avoid a suspicion, something like—three kidnappers, three kids? Hmm. The numbers are the same. Perhaps they ran away!

They’d make sure no one really thought that.

Sakura would carry two backpacks and Hinata’s would still be on her own back. Kiba and Sakura would go downstairs, making their footprints look frantic and far apart like big, mean kidnappers making a dash for escape, and on their way out, smash a vase. If Hinata’s fake scream didn’t wake the family, the vase crashing would, and all that would be left of them would be a broken vase, mussed-up bed-sheets—which they had quietly but violently rolled in to make it look like they struggled when they were kidnapped,— and the lack of their presence.

He sat on his bed, tossed Sakura the worn camo boots and he slipped on the black boots. Sakura took the two backpacks on her arms and Hinata slipped hers on her back. Akamaru, hidden in Kiba’s backpack with his nose barely poking out, made not a single sound. Sakura patted his nose lovingly and heard his tail wagging inside the backpack.

“Okay…start walking like n-normal.” Hinata said. “You guys made it look like they came in through the window, but carrying three kids, kidnappers can’t leave through the window, right? It'd be like carrying too much luggage. They'd fall. They would j-just go out the front door, s-so we’ll do that, too. Make your footprints big and wide like grown-up footprints. Kiba, when we’re close to the door, I’ll scream, make it l-look like I’m, you know…uh, struggling, and then you smash a vase or lamp somewhere, because you have the biggest, most adult-kind-of-big hands. Then we run, rip open the front door and don’t look back!”

By the end of her speech, Hinata was giddily smiling with pride at the greatness of her own plan. Sakura searched through every detail of it in her mind and found no flaws. It was perfect, absolutely perfect—and it was almost all Hinata’s idea! Little, scared Hinata had nearly done it all.

There was little time to be grateful to Hinata now. They could congratulate her later. Kiba and Sakura, both of whom were sitting on their beds, slowly got off. Then, with Hinata on Kiba’s back, Kiba and Sakura began taking big, adult-like steps towards the door. As they looked back at their own footprints, they saw they were almost nonexistent. The dusty footprints of the old boots they wore could barely be seen at all, and if you didn’t look for them, you probably wouldn’t see them.

Kiba, who had the biggest hands of them all, reached and pulled open the door, making sure to touch it only with his rubber-gloved-hands and not his bare arms or wrists. They moved down the hall with anxiety pulsing all in them—any second now, someone could come out of their room wanting to go down to the kitchen for a midnight snack. Sakura consistently looked up, listening for anyone whose room was on the third floor and might be coming downstairs.

Nothing made any noise anywhere. Perfect.

They crept down the hall, taking agonizingly slow and big steps and being extra careful not to touch walls and leave marks anywhere, especially not on the stairs. Despite how scary it was walking down the stairs with no support while holding heavy things, and being in danger of falling down on their faces and cracking skulls, they couldn’t touch the railings.

They came to the foyer, the front door in sight, and almost stopped to stare at the antique lamp that Kiba knew he had to smash down. Before he could stop, Sakura gave him a shove in the arm and he didn’t hesitate.

Hinata suddenly gave a loud shout. “Aaah! No! Let me go! Shizune! Shizune! Aaaaaah!”

Somewhere in between Hinata’s extremely realistic yells and the bumps and thuds of people upstairs being awoken, Kiba’s gloved hand smashed down on the lamp. Sakura dashed past him and covered the front door’s doorknob with her hand, ripped it open and dashed out into the night. Kiba and Hinata followed.

As they ran down the driveway—their hoods up to hide their hair color, in case they happened to be seen—Sakura lifted the camo-print boot she was wearing and gave a swift but very unbalanced kick to Jiraiya’s car. As though hit by a clumsy car stealer, or kidnapper, the alarm sounded off and began blaring.

By the time anyone in the Hokage household or anyone else on Highstone Drive opened a window or turned on a light, the young ones were already halfway down the dark street, and completely out of sight.

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June 1st, 3:41 AM (very very early in the morning when the sun isn’t even up yet)

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“MY BABIES! MY BABIES ARE GONE!”

Tsunade’s fists pulled dangerously on the wooden frame of the children’s bookshelf as she stared at the open window and the messy sheets of her babies’ bedroom. Behind her, Shizune, Temari and Ino all stared at the empty room with horror and confusion in their eyes.

Shizune and Shikamaru called their names downstairs and Lee could be heard looking in the bushes in the backyard. Chouji shouted their names from the basement. Everyone else ran about the house searching, hoping against hope that three of their youngest hadn’t been taken in the night. Kankurou dashed down the stairs from the third floor and made his way over to them, his black cat-eared hat and purple makeup for once absent from him. He panted, and his pajamas, black like almost every other piece of clothing he owned, were tousled up and wrinkled from squeezing himself into small spaces to search.

“They’re not…” He spat out lint from the corner of his mouth. “…In the laundry room, either!”

“Call the cops!” Jiraiya commanded. “Now!”

Ino dashed off before anyone could take in their next breath. She dashed to Jiraiya and Tsunade’s room and her legs buckled beneath her as worry and fear gripped her heart. Determined to help, she still groped around in the nightstand drawer for a cell phone. She grinned as her hand touched it’s cold hardness and she ripped out the black Nextel cell, taking no regard for the other contents of the nightstand drawer that spilled out with it.

It took her a few seconds to realize that the number she needed was 9-1-1. She pressed in the numbers and held the phone frantically to her ear. A woman's voice, not a recorded voice, a real, talking person, answered her.

“9-1-1 emergency, how can I help you?”

“My brother and sisters went missing! We need help now!”

“Are you sure they’re missing, miss? Absolutely?”

“Yes!” Ino jumped up and down and stamped the ground. “One of them screamed, and then we heard a vase break, and we all got up out of bed really fast and the window in their room was open and they weren’t in bed and the front door was open and—”

“We’re coming right now, miss. Your address?”

“Umm…Uh…Jiraiya, what’s our address?!”

“634 HIGHSTONE DRIVE, CASPER, WYOMING!”

“634 HIGHSTONE DRIVE, CASPER, WYOMING!” Ino repeated her adoptive father’s words perfectly into the cell phone. “You need to come, like, NOW!”

“We’ll have police officers there in less than five minutes.”

The woman hung up.

When Shino came rushing into the room in his pajamas, sunglasses on like always, he found Ino standing stupidly with a cell phone at her ear, listening to dial tone. “What are you doing?” He cried. “9-1-1, Ino! Now!” The pretty blonde nodded and absently muttered, “I did. Five minutes…they said five minutes.”

Shino followed Ino’s eyes and saw her staring at Tsunade’s body-length mirror.

With an affectionate smile and a shake of his head, Shino left the room and went downstairs to await the cops. His heart pulsed sadly, as he was particularly close to his brother Kiba. It was practically his job to keep the boy in line, along with the others like Shikamaru and Chouji. Shino didn't know what it would be like, nor did he want to know, what it was like to not have Kiba to keep in line. And as he quickly went to open the front door, missing his brother already, he nearly forgot to be shocked.

‘Holy freaking shit.’

Shino didn’t even bother to think that he was a cussing sixth grader.

By the time he’d opened the front door the cops were already coming down the street.

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June 2nd, 3:55 AM (very very early Monday morning when the sun isn’t even up yet)

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“A quarter per person, kid.” The bus driver muttered, staring down at the newspaper.

Kiba nodded and held out his hand. In a few seconds, Sakura had reached into the pocket of her “boy-style” shorts and dropped three quarters into Kiba’s hands. Kiba, in turn, dropped them into the slot by the bus driver’s hand.

The three of them found a comfortable seat in the very back of the bus. Now all three of the children wore their backpacks—and Akamaru was likely to faint if they didn’t give him air soon— but had put down their hoods to cool off from the long run. Since they’d run out their front door, they’d been going down street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood until neighborhoods elevated into shopping streets that were still lit but almost totally deserted.

The only person who’d even looked at them was a old man in a white hat across the street who looked too busy with his cell phone, pager and shopping bags to remember ever seeing three kids running by at 5 AM. Kiba tried to look across the street to see his face, make sure he hadn’t really noticed the three of them, but when the poor man dropped all of his things and shouted out in frustration, the brunette boy gave a cheeky grin and knew no one in the world would have seen them.

Sakura suggested they take a bus out of town before morning, when the news of three missing kids would likely be spread all over their section of town. By afternoon, Hinata had put in, more people would hear of it, and everyone at Westmill Middle School would know from gossiping teachers—and their own siblings, of course,— and those students would tell their parents, and by the sunset of June 1st, all of Casper, Wyoming would know of the three kidnapped young ones.

Kiba agreed, led them to a bus station where no one else was around, and waited hardly 15 seconds before a big, blue bus with a McDonald’s advertisement sign on it had come lumbering around the corner. They’d paid seventy-five cents to take the bus to Cheyenne, the state capital, and now they were resting in the back seat of the bus, and the only other one riding it was a sleeping mother and her toddler son who would never care or know that they had ridden the bus with her.

“How long is it to Cheyenne?” He asked, unzipping his backpack and letting Akamaru out.

“I’m guessing 2 hours.” Hinata muttered as she dug through her backpack for something to eat. “…Maybe 3…”

“What are we gonna do when we get there?” Kiba’s question silenced both the girls and his dog.

He watched as Hinata pulled out a cereal bar and nibbled on it somewhat nervously. To keep them from worrying, he spoke some more. “Did you guys make sure to pack only stuff nobody would miss?”

“Mm-hmm.” Sakura said. “I brought my old Gameboy and a couple Pokemon versions, in case some train ride gets really boring. I haven’t played it for months, and nobody would know where I kept it anyway. I packed all the money I had, but no one at home knows where I keep my money anyway so they won’t know I took it…” She put a finger to her chin. “And I brought two changes of clothes…they’re old stuff from the closet and under my bed. And I brought smoke bombs I found in the garage from last 4th of July.”

“…you brought smoke bombs?”

“We’re running away aren’t we? You never know!”

“I guess.” All three of them glanced out the window the bus passed a large sign that gave them all a nervous twitch.

Casper City Limits.

Kiba took in a deep, serious breath. “Toto…We’re not in Wyoming anymore.”

“Uh...Yes, we are..."

“Oh. Crap. I mean, Toto, we’re not in Casper anymore.”

She laughed at the oddness of the saying. “Hey, Hinata, what’d you bring?” The purple-haired girl opened her backpack all the way. Her clothes, old things that nobody would miss, were folded as neat as she could get them, and on top of the clothes she’d packed a small, build-it-yourself tent, a lighter, a flashlight, a blanket, and five cereal bars.

“You thought of everything!” Chuckled Sakura. “Is anyone gonna notice any of it missing at home?”

“None.” Hinata announced proudly with a smile. “The lighter, tent, flashlight and b-blanket are things I had under my bed for a year now.” Her eyes went distant and dark. “I thought I’d go camping one day…and need these things. I bought them at Wal-Mart with my o-o-own money on the way home from school one day…nobody knows about these things but me.”

Kiba whistled and Sakura silently clapped.

“And the cereal bars won’t be missed, either. Shizune bought a bunch of boxes last grocery day. There’s probably a hundred of them in the pantry. N-nobody will miss these five. And we’ll buy some other food in Cheyenne, r-right?”

“Yeah, but uh…” Kiba scratched the back of his head nervously. Hinata and Sakura both looked at him, even Akamaru seemed to sense he was about to say something important.

“What do we do when we get to Cheyenne?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

They all turned to a cross-armed, smiling Sakura.

“No.”

“We do whatever we want!”

Kiba stared. His mind stopped, started, stopped, started….went into full power.

“We’re seein’ a movie!” He decided. Sakura agreed with a high-five and Akamaru with a yip. Hinata just laughed at his idea. “It’ll be real early in the morning when we get there. Let’s sleep now—then when we get to Cheyenne, we’re gonna go see Shrek The Third!”

And even Hinata high-fived then.

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Firstly, I saw a lot of flaws with their plan when I first started typing this. Seven errors at least and I retyped the first three pages twice. Secondly, I’m so glad I typed this. It got inspiration for every story going. Everything has at least two new ideas…but most of them are for this story. I got an idea to include a certain male human in this story, to be a crime lord and somehow entangle himself in our three 12-year-old heroes…and that’s all I’ll say about it.

I’m so glad this part is over. The runaway was fun to type but more fun things await. I plan to introduce more characters, and very soon…that is, after our favorite characters go to Cheyenne and see Shrek The Third.

Ta…Storm