A Loving Abduction.

I was only ten years old when I found Rachel. I’ve always liked the name of Rachel, I guess because it’s old. I found her on the floor in a Supermarket just sitting there quite happily without anyone around to wipe up the drool that was running down her chin. I was a boy, I didn’t carry sophisticated things like a handkerchief around with me, so I grabbed some tissues off a shelf and wiped her face. I stuffed some extra ones in my pocket and did something that is quite uncharacteristically alien to me; I picked up what was to become Rachel wrapped her in my coat and walked out of that store with her.

I hadn’t a clue what I would do with her, but I felt a sense of ownership as I clutched her tightly and protected her from the blizzard conditions. If I took her home, my parents would make me take her back, and I didn’t want to lose her. I crazily decided to run away with her. I would look after her. She would not want.

Here you see an immature decision being carried out by someone who obviously hadn’t thought it through. The place where I found her is only called a ‘Supermarket’ because the owner was taking the piss. It was actually a small broken-down place where the owner was frequently found fast asleep. Often, there were piles of money in front of him where shoppers that didn’t want to disturb him, left the money for the goods they’d taken. It was an honest community and as you may have guessed, extremely rural. In fact, so rural that wired telephones didn’t extend to that region.

I was of an exploring nature and I had found many caves in the hills nearby, and that’s where I and Rachel lived for many years. For a start, I stole things, but gradually I gathered up fruit and stole from the fields around until I set up a hydroponic type of unit to grow vegetables.

No doubt a fuss was made for us two missing infants for a while, but I’m picking it would soon die down as alligators sometimes picked off kids without too much of a palaver being made about it. Kids were plentiful in the South. Although inconvenient at times, I made sure that our habitat was well back and hardly frequented by anyone.

I loved Rachel. I loved her with a wholesome kind of love that protects and endeavours to do it’s best to see that she’ll want for nothing; except the company of strangers of course.

I’m not boasting when I say that I am very intelligent, despite the, in retrospect,it could be seen as a very unintelligent caper. I was good at the subjects taught in school, and I passed this on to Rachel. I purposely trained myself out of the common brogue that passed for language here and based it on the accent more commonly heard in the Northern part of our country. Rachel was talking in a way that had she met any peers, they would have considered her snooty.

As she grew, I taught her how to fight and hunt and how to look after herself in wild country areas. She, like I, became an expert with the bow and arrow. I had by ranging far and wide judiciously stole many things, but not enough to incite a serious search for the perpetrator. I didn’t steal any guns, but I was able to eventually equip a workshop for our extensive cave system with its interlocking areas that were deep within the hills.

I also stole books. Mainly educational books, but some fairy and adventure tales which had Rachel holding her breath. I even stole soft material for her sanitary pads which she could wash in our ever-flowing stream in one of our caves. We were happy, but now I faced a reality; Rachel was growing up and needs more people than me in her life. She is nearly fifteen and a woman. She needs more life than I can give her here. We had to leave.

We put our accumulated gear in the back of an obscured cave in case we needed to come back to it and then hit the road. We decided to head North and the possibility that there is a more amenable style of living than is often seen in the Southern States and where our developed accents would not excite resistance.

Rachel had grown into a very tall girl for her age and would be taken for someone bordering on twenty, so there would be no problem with work wherever we went. 

We worked for a while on a farm harvesting various products and gradually accumulated money. I introduced her to other people always for a start chaperoning the engagement even with other women. Rachel doesn’t know her own strength as she always had to fight me, and I’m very strong. I’d hate to see her tossing other people around like she tries to do with me. It’d be hard to explain and we definitely don’t want to talk to anyone that has anything to do with the law.

There was no nervousness with meeting people on her part, and she found she had a natural ability at most sports. She could have been an Olympic Games contender in archery if she had wanted that, but she didn’t. She was superb at football (soccer). So much so that she was soon on the playing fields controlling the games and taking her team to the top of the league. Her picture was starting to be splashed on the front pages of local newspapers. Soon it would be television commentators talking of her uncanny skill and how she could anticipate the opponent's strategies. She would one day captain the National team.

I made my decision to depart. I was a burden to her. She still deferred to me too much; she was her own woman and needed to make her own way. I would always be here for her, but I had no wish for her background to be subject to too much scrutiny where two and two may be put together. My life is fulfilled, I will maintain a watching brief, but Rachel can very well take care of herself. There is a man that she’s quite partial to and if he turns out to be any sort of scumbag, I’m sure Rachel will literally toss him into a garbage truck. If some sort of love blinds her, then there’s always me to do the tossing.