A Hidden Past

Chapter 5

The air was fresh as Shalimar walked down an unknown street, the wind made her tangled up hair fly behind her. There was no one around, not this early in the morning any way. She walked and walked until she came to a children's park, she enter and crawled into a plastic tubing, she curled herself in a ball and fell asleep, for once not worrying what torture would wake her.

It was the noise that woke her. The cars, the people, the talking and laughter were suddenly too much. Shalimar had spent her entire life in seclusion and this amount of noise to her feral hearing was overwhelming. Shalimar crawled out of the tube and put her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to make it stop.

Children were filing into the large playground, Shalimar sat off to one side still with her hands over her ears and pulled her legs into her chest, she was really starting to hurt now, her leg and her arm, god she ached all over, she just wanted it to go away and…….

"Hi"

Shalimar's thoughts were interrupted and she slowly raised her head against the glare of the sun. It was a boy not much older than herself but a lot taller, he had very dark hair and deep chocolate eyes like her own.

"Hey" Shalimar replied weakly.

"My name's Brennan, where are you from I haven't seen you around here before."

"I uh just moved here just last…." Shalimar trailed off as another wave of pain flowed through her.

"Hey are you ok, maybe I should get my mum, you don't look so good we could get you to a hospital."

"Hospital?" Shalimar questioned, fear was slowly rising in her throat, she couldn't go back there why would he make her do that, maybe he was working for them, he just wanted to hurt her, like all the others.

"Yeah, you know a hospital where they give you drugs and make you better." Brennan carried on light heartedly oblivious to the fear seeping into her eyes.

"NO!" Shalimar screamed, "leave me alone I won't go back, I won't." Shalimar stood and started backing away from the boy, who was now looking increasingly concerned.

"Hey I just want to help, you really should see a doctor." He approached her, stretching out his hand.

"NO!" Shalimar screamed again, heads turned towards her out burst, but she didn't care. As Brennan took one more step towards her, Shalimar's eyes went feral; she lunged towards him and shoved him off his feet and into the air.

Shalimar took no time in seeing how he landed or if he was all right as more concerned parents came towards her. She looked around, desperately looking for a way to escape. She saw it, the fence on the other side of the park lead into a back alley. So with the ease of a gazelle, she ran and with a hop, skip and a jump she was over.

Nightfall came quicker than she had expected, Shalimar found herself in an alleyway, she was tired and her body ached. She found a mattress sheltered by a cardboard box and crawled inside. She sat and started to eat the leftovers she had found at a café. She knew it had been an age since she had eaten but she really didn't feel hungry, she just wanted to sleep so sleep she did.

Shalimar woke to find a man shaking her; he was leaning right into her face. He was unshaven, fat and smelt of booze a lot of booze.

"Hey, hey what do you think your doing? This is my place, you can't sleep here, you have to pay to sleep here."

Shalimar started to move to leave when the man grabbed her broken wrist. The pain was instant and mind numbing, she couldn't fight back.

"Where do you think you're going? You've slept here, now you have to pay."

The man reached for his trousers with one hand but kept a firm grip on Shalimar with the other. Shalimar instantly read his intentions, she may have been in seclusion all these years but she wasn't secluded from everyone. Not the men that liked to tell her their fantasies, or the men that would rather carry them out. Shalimar had seen the full scale of what humans could do to one another and she wasn't about to let it happen again willingly.

She cried out with all her might, she struggled fiercely and kicked and punched, but the second he was on top of her the fight was over, he was too heavy, she knew the more she struggled the worse it would get but to not struggle at all that was letting it happen and she just wouldn't be that weak.

TBC

Next chapter Adam to the rescue, it's nearly finished.