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“We’ve found her! We’ve found her!”
They moved in as a rush of black armored men.
Melanie cringed but lay prone, too weak to put up any sort of a struggle despite how her mind raced. A man approached her, dressed in a dark suite. He had a kind face, but wore a worried expression.
He held her tenderly, wrapping a blanket about her bruised body. Too tired and scared to argue, she wrapped her arms around the figure and let him carry her away from the torture. Slowly, her eyes closed and sounds faded as warm blackness enveloped her senses…
“She hasn’t spoken for days…” the doctor spoke in a hushed voice.
Behind her, Melanie could hear the handle on the door turn. She pivoted her head slightly to listen, but remained looking out through the window.
“Good morning, Melanie.”
She turned and said nothing.
“You seem to be recovering quickly. Are they taking good care of you?”
Melanie shrugged and looked at him.
He seemed oddly familiar but she knew that they had never been formal acquaintances.
“So how’re you doing?”
She shrugged lightly and turned away.
She’d had this happen for the last several days now; strangers would arrive every so often through out the day to ask her questions that she didn’t want to answer.
Her face pinched and she felt her throat tightening.
She heard him walk and the shifting of fabric as he sat down upon the bed she had been assigned. This was different from what she was used to, however.
Melanie turned and looked at him again. Most of the others had left after realizing she wasn’t going to talk to them but he just sat there. He actually had taken out a small book from his pocket and had begun flipping through its pages.
She slid down the wall leaning against it and wrapped her arms around her knees.
He took long enough to glance at her but then returned to his book.
She glared at him in frustration. Who did he think he was, a psychiatrist?
The clock ticked quietly.
She wished he would leave. He was making her uncomfortable.
His sudden sigh made her jump.
“We need to hear, from you, an account of what happened.” He explained calmly.
He had a nice voice to listen to, she thought. It wasn’t gravely or strained with high pitches. It was smooth and low.
Melanie shook her head and dropped her chin to her knees.
“I know it’s hard…and I’ll sit here for however long it takes you.”
One of her hands moved as she raised it to brush her hair from her face. She watched him through her lashes. He gazed back.
Melanie licked her lips and thought.
She had nightmares about the ordeal every night, even as the bruises and the cuts faded; she knew that it wasn’t a dream. She relived the horrors at night, what made them think she wanted to relive them during the day too?
They sat in silence for over a half hour and the man sighed again.
“Melanie, I didn’t want to have to force you to talk, but I need you to.
We found you in an abandoned apartment at the edge of a bad neighborhood in the thick of the city. No one knew where you had come from, or who you were. You were all but nude in a room with no windows, a single bathroom, and a doggy door where food was pushed to you upon a cookie sheet.
We found evidence that you had been drugged, beaten, and sexually assaulted. However, we still have no idea how long you had actually been kept there.”
Her lips moved slowly, inaudibly, finally she murmured.
“No one would come to look for me…”
The man paused and watched her. He flipped through the pages in his notebook.
“I seem to remember hearing you were waiting to be set into a foster home.”
Her singly sentence, detached as it was, kindled hope that she would actually speak.
“The government doesn’t care about us…” She whispered. “We’re the leftovers, the unwanted brats. I’m sure you know that I’m not the first of us to go missing.”
As her voice trailed off, but her lips still moved and he had to strain to hear her.
“I never once heard about an Amber Alert set up after any of us were taken…. bastards.”
He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak and was taken aback slightly.
He flipped he book open to several blank pages and took a pen out of his jacket pocket.
This wasn’t the information he was searching for, but at least he was getting somewhere.
As she spoke quietly, he scribbled down her words upon the little pad.
A lapse of two hours flowed toward the end of Melanie’s story. He had come to sit next to her with a box of tissues stretched toward her in case she needed them.
She stared at the ground; her shaking arms wrapped around her legs.
Finally, the man had the chance to actually look at her.
She wasn’t a plain girl, but she wasn’t exceedingly beautiful either. Her appearance would have to be classified as “handsome.”
For the first time since he had first seen her, she turned slowly and gazed into his face, her lips twitching in an attempt to smile softly…
The room was filled with more than a hundred people. Twelve sat inside a small wooden pen with chairs, watching the man intently as he spoke.
 kindreanselkie · Sun May 06, 2007 @ 04:54am · 2 Comments |
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