Alora Funk
The Deliverance
PUBLISHED BY:
Alora Funk
Copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Daich
Cover Design:
Amber McNemar
www.ethinkgraphics.com
Dedication:
Thanks to my kids for being my biggest fans!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
The cement room–
My name is Alora Funk. I guess my story begins on the day of my liberation. Liberation from what, I didn’t know.
When the authorities rescued me, I was found in a basement, cold cement walls encaging me in. My body strapped to a hospital style bed where a PICC line connected inside me. It was like an IV, but scarier, because it went through my veins and emptied close to my heart, pumping me full of chemicals that kept me in a coma. My only nourishment came from a G-tube, a device surgically placed in me, a portal for dumping in liquid-nutrients, keeping me alive.
At the time, I was thought to be around thirteen years old. Two Russians imprisoned me. Their names were Vyacheslav and Nadezhda. The neighbors said the Russians had lived there for three years and had kept to themselves. No one really knew them.
I didn’t gain consciousness until a few days later in the hospital. That is where my memories began. Everything before then was black, even the entirety of my life. Only later, I would learn the details about how I was found.
In my hospital room, a pounding headache greeted me upon gaining cognition, the expanding pain felt like it was trying to rip out of my skull. I couldn’t take it. It was too much as I thrashed around not able to endure the pressure. Screams burst out of my lungs which caused my throat to become raw and added to the gripping pain overwhelming me. Even though the nurses softly spoke to me, it didn’t soothe me. I had no control to my actions as I hit and tore into their flesh with my nails. They strived to settle me, eventually restraining me to the bed, which only heightened my anxiety. I became a caged- monster who was fiercely trying to break free. I had no sense of right or wrong. I had no sense of anything. I was acting out of pure animal instincts. When they fully confined me, I freaked out, my innards heated up, almost exploding. I needed them to release my arms and legs.
After the doctors chemically stabilized me, things calmed. The nurses tried to make me feel special, as if they had forgotten what a vicious animal I had just been, but I was in state of stupor. Everything moved slowly. Each experience felt foreign to me yet there was also a sense of familiarity to them.
Finally the drug induced fog cleared, and I was looking at things without reconnections as to what they were. I lacked words or memories for objects, unable to understand people. I was absent of emotions only functioning on primitive reactions.
In the thick of the uncertainty, she appeared. Her name was London, a heavyset woman in her forties. She had big curly hair-well, not so much curl as it was frizz-and it was everywhere. Her complexion was light and her eyes were a deep brown, almost black.
London snuck into the hospital room one night and actually crawled to the side of my bed.
“How are you doing?” she whispered.
I hadn’t discovered my voice yet. Things were still sorting out in my head. At first, speech was noise to me, uncomfortable and mostly unwelcomed, but little by little, sound formed into words and meaning. It had been two weeks from my liberation when London showed up.
She pulled herself up from the floor and sat on the edge of my bed. I must have looked frightened, because she put her warm hand over my mouth.
“Don’t scream,” London said. “I am not here to hurt you. I wanted to see if you are alright.”
I wasn’t going to scream. I wasn’t afraid. I hadn’t identified fear yet, but I would. I merely gazed as her pudgy hand slowly move away from my mouth. Heat lingered on my chin, making it warm. Her perfumed was overpowering. I coughed as it replaced the oxygen in my lungs.
“You aren’t going to scream, are you?” she asked.
I didn’t reply.
“Listen, I am not supposed to be in here. They wouldn’t let me come see you, but I found a way to trick them. So here I am. I hope you are alright.”
London picked up my hand in hers, rubbing it, her dry skin chafing my own. Big tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her plump cheeks. Her expression changed.
“I am so sorry. It is my fault you were stuck in that room for so long,” she said, covering her face as she silently cried. When she pulled away, she had plastered a huge smile on, her teeth predominating her smile. Her brown eyes pulled me in.
“Let’s not talk about it right now. I want you to know you are safe now, and I promise nothing like that will ever happen to you again. I am going to do everything I can to be able to adopt you. I want to protect you. I can’t begin to know what you have been through.” She almost looked like she was going to cry again.
A teal shield of light glowed around London as she talked to me. Her hands busily caressing my skin, rubbing them too much in the same spot to feel good.
I believe it was during London’s first visit I noticed auras. At the time, I didn’t know what the teal color outlining her body meant. After she left, I noticed how everything I looked at had hues emanating out of it. Colors seemed an extension of all things physical, being the energy attached to the mood of the object. Auras could change as people’s mood’s changed.
London kept talking, but I stopped listening, for she wore me out. Then, she sang to me in a very soft voice, her hand stroking my forehead. I closed my eyes and listened, the music entering my soul, calming me.
Voices could be heard outside of the room. London stopped singing and slid under my bed barely before a nurse walked in. The nurse’s feet slapped against the floor on her way to my bedside. My muscles became stiff.
“How are you doing, hon?” she asked. Her aura was emerald green. I looked at her without expression. I felt nothing.
She picked up my hand, scanning the plastic band wrapped around my wrist. It was cold and cut into me. I didn’t like it there, but I hadn’t found a way to remove it. After her scanner beeped, she tucked my arm under the light blue covers where it warmed, and she went to the computer and typed, the sounds of the keyboard mixing with the hospital monitor’s low humming. When she was done, she returned to my side with a syringe, which she connected to the IV tube in my other wrist. A solution injected into my veins.
“I am flushing out your line.” Her gum smacked as she talked and worked. She pulled a new syringe out of her pocket. It was filled with a foggy substance she pushed into my veins. She returned to her computer and inputted some more.
Bang came from below me.
London must have hit her head. At the noise, the nurse sharply turned to see if I was alright. I hadn’t moved. She studied me for a while. I could hear London breathing heavily beneath me. The nurse must not have heard her over the buzzing of the medical equipment in the room, because she turned back to her computer. When she was done, she shut it off and exited the room.
London stayed under the bed long after the nurse departed, probably way too frightened to show herself. Finally, she slid out and looked up at me. A bit of dust clung to the right side of her frizzy hair.
“Whew, that was way too close. I don’t know what they would do if they found me in here. Probably send me to jail. Can you imagine that? Me sent to jail! Just what would everyone think?”
London bent over and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were warm and sticky as she left a wet spot behind. It became cold as the overhead vent blew air straight on me. Her teal had turned into a
n ice blue.
“I will try to get here tomorrow,” she assured me.
London crawled to the door on her hands and knees as she looked down the hall. She searched both ways, stood up and walked out the door.
The next night -and thereafter- she returned, doing the same things she did her first visit. She jabbered on about subjects I didn’t understand or care about. Sometimes she had to hide under the bed, and other times no one came in during her visit. She sang to me every night always rubbing my arm or hand. By my third week in the hospital, I understood more. An awareness of emotions developed. My senses were working while thoughts were forming. I was becoming alive.
I wasn’t sure I liked London’s nightly visits, but one evening she didn’t come in, then I couldn’t fall asleep. Unconsciously, I had grown dependent upon her kind presence.
During my time there, my mind was an empty slate. I had no memories in my head. No thoughts or identifications. By the fourth week, I experimented with talking. I didn’t speak to anyone, but I would practice by myself. Although it took effort, it also seemed like a natural thing as if I had done it before. I really didn’t know. I didn’t know much, for I couldn’t remember.
During my second month there, a group of stuffy people came to my room. They were nothing like the kind nurses or the loving London. They were all business. Each one sported a different cologne or perfume, filling my room up with a mix of obnoxious odor, making it hard to breath, practically choking me. No one noticed as my lungs rebelled, coughing so hard it hurt. Meanwhile, they talked about me as if I wasn’t there. I guess in a way they were right. I wasn’t there in spirit. Maybe my soul had stayed back in the cement room.