"Mrs Beauchamp!"
Cal reached out to her but she brushed him blindly away. She was walking as fast as she could without breaking into a run. She could feel the pound of the heel of her stilettoes against her feet, aftershock after aftershock shooting through her bones, with a heat and pulsing pain that matched the throbbing at the back of her head.
"Your hands are bleeding!"
Somebody else called out, a voice she didn't know, or didn't recognise. She could barely see, the world was too bright and blurred and everything was too much – the buzz of rage within her body, the prickle of a cold sweat against her scalp and the rumble of the wards, the trolleys, the squeak of rubber soled shoes, and the voices calling her, the hands reaching out for her, grasping her arms just as quickly as she could shake them off.
"Connie!"
Charlie's voice was the only voice she heard clearly, and if she allowed herself to she could see him out of the corner of her eye, jogging every other step to keep up with her.
"Connie, wait...wait..."
He reached the exit before she did, blocking it with his body so that she had no choice but to stop.
"Move."
She hissed, her entire body trembling.
"Mrs Beauchamp, I-"
"Not now, Cal."
Charlie raised a hand to Cal who had stopped behind her, unbeknown to Connie. She turned her head only slightly, catching his eye.
"I just wanted to apologise..."
He continued anyway, he was out of breath and holding out his hands as if approaching a wild, animal. Her lip curled and she let out a breath of a laugh.
"Oh why don't you just...just fuck off!"
She moved toward the doors again, pushing herself against the wall to force her way passed Charlie who stumbled back, helpless.
"Connie!"
He called out to her as she bent her head against the wind and quickened her step.
"Have you got your phone?!"
He shouted, the force of the weather stealing his words and buffeting them away into the coming storm.
She stopped abruptly and turned to face him, standing in the middle of the car park, her hair whipping wildly about her face and stinging her eyes, the hem of her coat billowing out around her.
She let her bag fall from her shoulder to the bend of her elbow and pushed her hand into it, finding the smooth plastic of her phone. She pulled it out and held it up for him to see, watched him smile slightly and then threw it to the ground so that it shattered and skidded against the damp concrete to come to rest at his feet, and she turned away, walking against the steadily falling rain to the car.
Once inside she slammed the door closed and started the engine before she had time to think. She would drive until she ran out of petrol, she thought, and then she found herself laughing at herself.
"How very teenage..."
She murmured to herself as she pulled out of the car park and onto the main road. The sky was low and purple-black, angry and rolling towards her, closer and closer, and then came the rain, all at once, thousands upon thousands of rain drops beating the car, rattling and hammering down so hard that nothing else in the world could be heard. It fell as though it meant to wash her away, it meant to keep hammering until there was nothing of her left.
Thunder cracked the air, as if the very heavens might split apart. It rolled like the ash could of a volcano, becoming a rolling booming rumble. It declared to all the raw power of nature and gave fair warning of the wrath that was to come. And come it did, with lightening that shot the sky into a million fragments, shocking the ground with as many volts, turning the world into a negative of itself for only the fraction of a second.
She drove into it, with the wind howling against the car, the rain pelting the windscreen and the thunder growling low overhead. She pushed down hard on the accelerator despite her limited vision.
She could barely see the pixelated orange lights of the other cars, or the ripple of the barrier between her lane and the next. Still she sped faster, and faster...Something was wrong. She knew that. Somehow she had become who she had been trying to hide. She shook her head, her hands slipped against the steering wheel only to tighten again a fraction of a second later.
How could she put into words what was wrong when she didn't understand it herself? She couldn't articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness. Her fear wasn't just of those men who had held her down, of Grace never wanting to see her again, of committing to Rita, of having another child...her fear was of the weather, the atmosphere, the very air. She knew very well that at any moment now the car could skid out from underneath her and she could crash. Her body could be crushed and she could lay in the cold with the rain beating down on her whilst she bled to death. Or the storm could do it just as well...one bolt of lightening...just one bolt...she gritted her teeth. What good did safety tips do her now? 'Avoid water, metal objects, rooftops; stay off the telephone in a storm, don't think glass can protect you; even if a storm was 8 miles away, you're still not safe from a strike." Avoid life itself, perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip, stay away from it all...
She clenched her jaw, any moment now she expected to feel it, the tires slip, and the smash of her car into another. And then she saw it, the brief flash of a sign post out of the corner of her eye, and she knew what she had to do, she felt her body begin to cool, the rage within her turning to ice, crackling and numbing her, stealing the flush from her cheeks and the moisture from her lips, and she realised all of a sudden how silly she had been to fear the rage within her, when the torment of the ice was so much worse.
-.-
More later this evening. Thank you for the reviews, I love to hear what you think about what I've written, and what you think may be to come. xxx