Saving Delilah

Chapter 11

Chapter 11 - Runaway, Don't Look Back

*Delilah's POV*

My feet pounded against the midnight ground as the street lights flickered and spluttered. My breath came out in a cloud of mist as I raced through the streets of the town that I used to call home. My side was burning with a pain I was yet to get used to.

My money ran out about two weeks ago on my last night in some dingey, run down hotel which wasn't functional. I had managed to stay in a new hotel every few days with out any one finding me or figuring out who I am. But I'm sure no one was looking for me, not that I wanted them to anyways.

It's been four long, tiresome weeks since I ran away from Arthur and Ellie Thomas.

Four weeks since I ran away from Leon, Lennox and Elizabeth.

Four long weeks since I ran away from Eddie, Diana, Madison and Demetria.

Four long, heart breaking weeks since I ran away from Dallas. The one person who never raised her voice at me. Or blamed me. Or judged me. Or ever impacted my life in a negative way. But that, in its self, is negative. Because she wasn't around long enough to do so.

I shook my head from the painful thoughts and instead focused on out running the police man chasing me. I hadn't meant to get caught, but I was just so hungry that when I saw a young woman - about 22 years old or so - come out the side door to a greggs, I took the opportunity to borrow some food. I would have paid, but I had no money. And so I grabbed some pasties and sausage rolls and made a run for it.

But with my awful luck, a police man happened to be walking the streets and saw me.

My legs were burning with the exhaustion of running so fast and for so long. I would have stopped a mile back but I knew that I needed to run in complex circles before heading back to the hide out.

The hide out was an abandoned factory on the side of the Tyne where myself and a few other runaway kids stayed sometimes. You could never guarantee who would be staying the night and for how long, but most kids would stay for a couple of nights, take off to a new town for a week or so, and end up coming back.

Because in reality, the Old Boat was the only safe place for us street rats to be. And recently, a strange type of hieracy has begun to take place with the older street kids in charge of a forming gang of theifs and vagabonds. And while being part of a gang may sound dangerous to most people, for us, it's safer to stay in groups rather than being by yourself. The streets are dangerous at nights.

And I had found that fact out the hard way.

I had found myself near some deserted part of town, where the old ship yards had once been. Many of the buildings had been long forgotten and left to crumble to nothing but piles of festering ruins.

There was an old building that loomed ominously in the distance. A small, flickering red-orange light could be seen glowing as dim as an ember through cracks in the walls.

Dispite the harsh cold freezing my fingers to icicles, I refused to approach it - not knowing who resided there.

So instead, I looked for a sheltered room or door way. Any where that had at least two walls to try and keep out the harsh winds that blew the freezing, murky waters of the tyne on to the dry land.

It took me a while, clambering over old rocks but eventually I managed to climb through a window to the second floor of a building that had been stripped of any and all metals. The ground floor was bare and the walls crumbling and mouldy. So I took a chance and hoisted myself through the window, only to be greeted with a pitch black room and a ragged, beat-up old mattress covered in foisty green and brown stains that looked older than me.