Cover picture MaxPixel freegreatpicture.com

© Colin Palmer, 2017

ISBN 978-5-4485-5658-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Chapter One. “Welcome Shoppers!”

She would have changed things if she’d had any idea of what was going to happen… done it differently in an attempt to change her fate, her future. Or maybe she wouldn’t have altered anything – she didn’t know, was confused. It had started only a day ago but felt like a year or two even. So much water under the bridge, so much pain and suffering, so much change and so little time for all those things to have occurred. Yet they had. The sound of the loud hailer assaulted her ears again.

“Mrs Curtis, Vivienne, please! This is your last warning. If you do not come out in the next sixty seconds we will be forcibly entering the building. Please come out with your hands above your head and lay face down on the footpath. Vivienne? Your minute starts now Vivienne.”

Why do they tell you the exact time they’re gonna be busting through the front door, she thought to herself? She lay behind substantial open top freezers in the cold food section of Franklins (the soon to go bust Franklins chain, this particular store replaced by a Woolworths). There were six freezers in all and she had rearranged them so to have any chance of getting to her, they would have to blow them out of the way, or spend considerable time getting forklifts to move them. And while the dumb overly considerate constabulary stuffed around with that, she was simply going to slip out through the fridge section behind her. What they obviously didn’t know was that in the capacious area behind the fridges, the bulk cold stock was stored. There was also a vent opening large enough for a horse to slip into. From there it led to the ceiling space. The ceiling space gave access to the entire western side of the shopping centre, not just the supermarket – she’d be swanning out of the front door of some little boutique safely out of sight while they still thought she was behind those freezers.

They wouldn’t have time to check engineering plans and the like to discover this little escape route, nor the time to find out that she had worked part time in this very supermarket right up until last Christmas. Dumb barstards! Because they were up against a woman they were being nice. Nice! Does a person, a woman, have to kill and maim to get serious attention out there? But it wasn’t the attention she was seeking. It wasn’t anything like that at all. She just wanted her life back. Anonymity. Her husband. Her daughter. Her home.

But oh, the strength, the power she felt. It was addictive, and she loved it. If only it had started differently. Tricia. My dear sweet beautiful daughter Tricia, she thought.

Chapter Two. “Blind Faith”

Two days had passed since the supermarket confrontation and it was just as she had imagined it would be, as easy as that. They had fired their gas pellets or stun grenades or whatever it was the Police used under those circumstances, but only after giving her all the warnings in the world. About the only gentlemanly thing they hadn’t done was to provide a police escort away from the damn place!

Vivienne figured that if she had been a man, armed or unarmed, they would have come in through every entry point possible, and they would not have been as nice about it as they had been with her. Sure, a man or any armed person would have been more risky for them, or at least that’s the way they were still thinking. They knew she was smart, intelligent that is, but street smart she wasn’t. They continually failed to comprehend that she was dangerous, more so than any man with or without a weapon. Until they realise that, she understood it simply wasn’t possible to be taken seriously. They saw her as just an unarmed woman, an unarmed married woman with a little girl, a husband and a home in the suburbs. She was an unarmed woman that the entire State Police Force in South East Queensland had, so far, been unable to catch.

“I bet they are still standing around in Franklins scratching their heads, and their balls, trying to work out how I piled those freezers up together so quickly,” she whispered to herself, and giggled.

Vivienne Elizabeth Curtis, nee Barnes, twenty-eight years of age. She turned twenty-nine in about a month. She sat on the floor of a little caravan not even one kilometre from that very same Franklins supermarket. She was on the floor so that nobody in the van park could walk past and spy her, inside what should have been a vacant van. And because it was cool. Since this had all begun, she was always hot. Not sweating, goodness no, women don’t sweat! She didn’t feel sick like when she’d been running a fever or anything either, but she knew her body temperature was as high, if not higher than those very periods of illness. It was early May, almost winter, and even though the day time temps were still warm, at night it was beginning to get decidedly chilly. Not that Viv felt it, the cold that is. It was like she was impervious to any temperature change. She even thought about how pleasant the temperature of the Franklins cold rooms had been.

She stood about five foot four inches tall in the old scale, and weighed about fifty-two kilograms ringing wet in the new. Her husband Brett was in his forties and he still used imperial measurements for a persons’ height, metric for just about anything else. Go figure! She wondered how he would measure her body temperature at the moment? Taken orally, he would probably measure it in Fahrenheit, just so that she’d request a reading in the centigrade scale she could understand. Then he would make veiled suggestions that he would have to take a reading from ‘elsewhere’ if she wanted it in metric. She knew they didn’t own a rectal thermometer, that’s for sure!

His sexual innuendo was constant and that’s what he would be suggesting, the dirty old bugger! She would tease him about it for another year or so but she knew if he persisted she would give in eventually. Besides, the thought of some taboo little sex act excited her but it was the anticipation more than the actual act itself that kept her going. This was one anticipatory event that she was going to string him along for as long as she could.

“Who am I kidding?” she whispered to herself. “When they finally catch me I’ll be dead or locked away for the next twenty years anyway. Only sex I can look forward to will be as one of the girls in striped prison issues,” she laughed softly.

She stretched out her legs and thought of her daughter Tricia, the beautiful little tyke. Just over a week ago she was taking Tricia shopping, and that’s when it had started. Viv closed her eyes and pulled out her mental photo album, her mind flipping the pages as she revelled in the discovery of some new frames that had developed since the last time.

Maybe she could eventually work out just what was happening to her, and if she couldn’t fix it herself, then at least convince the very pissed off authorities that she was worth saving. She saw that bright May morning again, Tricia in the stroller near the front door as her Mom, she, Vivienne, went through the garage to back out the car.

It was much easier getting Tricia into her car seat outside of the narrow single garage, and then a simple matter of sliding the stroller along the back floor, or into the boot. Their house was slightly elevated from the road and Viv recalled her shock at seeing the stroller and its precious cargo, rolling slowly down across the lawn toward the street. She remembered leaping from the car and charging down the drive, sobbing hysterically but knowing she was going to catch it in time as long as she didn’t slip or fall. She thanked God there were no cars coming. She slapped her hands around the stroller handles and swivelled it around, grabbing out her beautiful baby and crushing her to Mommy’s heaving bosom.

The stroller began to roll again, and Vivienne heard and saw its movement from the corner of her tear filled eyes. She put her foot under the rear wheel and it propped. She didn’t know how long she stood there in the sun soaked front driveway, but when she next looked up she saw the stroller resting against the gutter on the other side of the road.

She looked down to her foot and nearly swooned – the rear bumper of her little hatch back was resting against her leg. The outside of her foot lay against the rear tyre, her leg bowed like a string of spaghetti, yet she felt no pain. But she was so hot! She concentrated but could not even feel the car against her leg.

Tricia slept soundly against her chest as Vivienne looked around wildly but as usual for a weekday, saw none of her neighbours. She let one arm drop to the back of the car, paranoid that at any second its weight would become all too much and complete the order of gravity by rolling back, crushing her and her baby.

Viv wouldn’t let that happen, she would lob Tricia onto the lawn hopefully out of harms way, or twist so that the car could continue its journey by just running over her legs, Tricia safely in her arms. No, too risky, it would have to be the lob onto the lawn she knew.

The car moved. She looked at it. Her hand was resting against the boot and she gave it another imperceptible push. Maybe the boot had not been closed properly she thought. But when she pushed, the car moved off her leg, the bow decreased and the tyre no longer rested against her foot. She pushed more and her car moved a little further. Uphill. She continued to push until the car was on the level floor of the garage.

She ducked her head through the open drivers’ window, careful not to nudge her precious sleeping bundle, pulled on the hand brake and nudged the gear stick forward into first. Viv walked out to the front of the garage and looked down the driveway. She walked as if in a trance, down the driveway and across the road, retrieving the runaway stroller and dragged it slowly back to the house. She lay her beautiful sleeping Tricia back into her cot, before again, zombie like, she returned to the top of the driveway.

Turning, she looked at her car. She shook her head, it hadn’t happened – she’d just dreamed it all. She walked along the side of the car and saw the drivers’ window down, hand brake on, the car in first gear. Yes, she had done that. Returning to the rear of the car, she rested both hands against the boot lid, her head drooped between her arms and saw the unmistakable rubber mark on the outside of her left shoe and a crease in the skin across her upper calf where the bumper must have rested. She pushed against the boot with her hands and saw the panel indenting, felt the car resisting. No, not feeling, knowing the car was resisting now that it was in gear and the brake was engaged – knowing that if she pushed harder, her hands would either dent or go through the panel. Or the car would move.

She walked around to the driver’s door and retrieved the keys from the ignition. The hand brake was on, the car in gear she noted again. She opened the rear hatch. She could feel the heat emanating from her body again but it wasn’t uncomfortable. She grasped the lower lip of the boot with her hands, aware it was infinitely stronger than the hatch door she had been pushing on. And push she did. She waited to feel the resistance again, any resistance, but when she didn’t feel any at all she pushed harder. All four tyres squealed quickly and at the sound of a crash she stopped, leaned back, eyes wide open, heart pounding, and the heat, the heat. Startled, she saw the cracks in the rear brick wall of the garage – another foot and the car would have gone through the wall and into the back yard. She stepped to the side and saw the two skid marks ending where the tyres currently rested. They were three feet long. She couldn’t recall taking even one step but would have taken at least three or four to push the car that far.

“What the hell am I thinking?” she flashed loudly around the garage. “I shouldn’t be able to push the car at all!”

At that moment she felt the heat around her, in her, dissipating, and she slumped to the floor gasping. Not from exhaustion, but from fear and desolation. She knew it wouldn’t work anymore. She struggled up and pushed against the B pillar of the car. It didn’t budge an inch, and she wasn’t surprised.