CHAPTER 12 -- AUSTRALIA
Can Dianne put her marriage back together?
Author's notes: This is the final chapter of my first Literotica submission and it's been an interesting ride. Thank you for your many suggestions (and a few anonymous trolls). To the readers who have followed and liked this piece, thank you.
I enjoyed putting the story together. No doubt many would want a different outcome but hey -- it's my work and it's fiction -- something which some people seem to find difficult to comprehend.
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Following a brutal bashing by her billionaire temporary owner, Dianne finally recognised that her naïve acceptance of her slavery arrangement could only end in tears. With help, she escaped from his mansion and made her way back to her home in Australia. With her husband overseas on a long term engineering contract, she would have to fend for herself. Would she still have a marriage?
Emerging from the Brisbane terminal a day later, Dianne was thankful for the summer clothes she had worn. After the icy conditions in Hamburg, the Brisbane heat assaulted her like a furnace. She headed for the taxi rank, avoiding the stares of fellow passengers, shocked by her battered appearance. It was her arm however, that caused her trouble. It was badly swollen and very painful as she made her way home -- home to an empty house.
It was close to noon when she was able to shower. It was the first opportunity to view herself in the mirror and she could barely believe what she saw. Her body was a mass of bruises. Her left eye was half closed and blackened and her arm was red and swollen. She noticed the light on the phone blinking to indicate a message waiting but before she checked it, she dashed to their home safe, extracted a little box and with a deep sigh, returned the valuable contents to their rightful place on the third finger of her left hand.
It turned out that there were two messages. The first, predictably, was from a furious Helmut.
"I will follow you and bring you back. You belong to me. Please forgive me for the way I treated you before you left. I promise it will never happen again. I will be in Australia soon."
The second was from Steve.
"I got an email from someone named Maria, so I hope you have arrived safely back home. I will try to reach you by email. Still stuck in Venezuela until my year is up in eight weeks. Don't do anything silly. I'm very confused by your move to Germany for so long, but I love you and want to work it out when I get home. Love you. Email me. Bye!"
While the last message gave Dianne some comfort, the first made her blood run cold. How much time did she have before the German's arrival in Brisbane, she wondered. Should she wait for him to arrive and send him away again?
With a flash of inspiration, she dashed out of the house and down the road to her best friend Helen's home. The two had gone to school together, married within a few months of one another and often dined together. Helen was a stay at home mum, caring for a daughter conceived within weeks of their wedding.
"My God, Dianne, what happened to you? When did you get home?"
"I don't have a lot of time to explain Helen. I made a very stupid decision to go to Germany while Steve was working in South America because at the time I couldn't see anything wrong with it. It got very ugly at the end and I was beaten up by the person who was supposed to be looking after me. I had some help to get out of Germany but I fear the guy who beat me is coming after me. He's very, very wealthy and can make life really difficult for us. Helen, I need to ask a really big favour."
"If it's possible, I'll help in any way I can."
"Helmut -- that's the German guy who's coming after me -- will be looking for me and if he cannot find me he'll follow the money trail. I don't know how he gets his information, but he seems to have informants all over the place. I can find somewhere to hide. It's a big country after all, but if I use my own name or use my credit card they'll locate me in no time.
Would you let me transfer one hundred thousand into your bank account and give me your credit card until we get sorted, please?"
"Let me talk to Pete first."
She picked up the phone, spoke briefly and said:
"Pete's all on board with it. We will just add another card to the account so you can leave immediately with mine. What do you intend to do?"
"First I'll buy a car and register it in your name. Then I'll disappear and it will be better for you if you don't know where I am. Would you please email Steve and tell him I've gone to ground and that I'm OK? I dare not email him myself for fear they'll track down the URL of the site I'm using and locate me that way."
Dianne was led to Helen and Pete's computer and quickly keyed into her bank account to transfer the money she promised. She looked in on Helen's sleeping toddler, bade her goodbyes and dashed home to pack a few belongings.
She drove her car to Helen's and locked it away in her garage, hoping that any person trying to track her would assume she was using it. A short cab ride to a nearby used car lot provided just the break she was looking for. A recent model, low mileage SUV sat at the head of the lot. Being white, it would blend in nicely anywhere. The registration process took several agonising hours but finally, just when the salesman started making apologies for the need to carry over proceedings to the next day, the paperwork came through.
With her few belongings stowed safely in the back, she drove south west, avoiding the highways and pulled into a small ma and pa petrol station where security cameras were unlikely, to fill up the car's tank. It was dark by now and she drove on, fighting the need for sleep until the car's wheels dropped off the edge of the tarmac. Bringing the car back under control, she guided it safely to a truck lay-by, parked well away from the roadway and succumbed to the need to sleep.
The sun was high in the sky when she woke, cursing because she lacked the foresight to stow drinking water in the car. A little town nearby boasted a roadhouse serving fuel and food. After filling the car again, she ordered a big breakfast from the motherly woman behind the counter.
"You OK?" she asked, concerned at the bruises on Dianne's face.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Ran into a door." She tried to smile but it turned into a grimace. She bought a couple of bottles of water, returned to the car and headed south. Several hours later she turned into a dirt driveway with a battered sign proclaiming "Mountain Health Retreat". Dianne hoped that it was still run by her school friend from years ago. They had lost touch, but periodically she would read about the work she did with drug rehabilitation programs.
Parking the car under a leafy gum tree, she was barely out of the car before she was intercepted by her long lost friend.
"What happened to the other guy?" she quipped when she spotted Dianne's battered face. "You had better come inside and tell me about it."
Dianne gave a short version of the events that brought her to the retreat and agreed to let her friend Lisa give her a thorough assessment. Her arm did not appear to be broken but was very badly bruised. She surmised after a close examination that the bruises all over her body would heal in a week or so, but she correctly diagnosed Dianne's fragile state of mind and signed her in for a four-week care program using Helen's name, accepting payment on Helen's card.
One week in, with good food and plenty of exercise in the outdoors, Dianne's improvement was obvious. The arm, though still sore, was no longer swollen and the bruises were turning lovely shades of yellow and green.
"Do you have a anyone here who can teach me to fight?" Dianne asked over dinner.
"There's a self defence guy about twenty kilometres from here, but he's not going to teach you much in two or three weeks."
"Ask him to come over. I'll pay him for his time and travel."
The instructor was an ex army guy with a shaved head aged in his early fifties, Dianne guessed.
He looked at the remnants of her bruises and asked whether she was trying to deal with an abusive husband.
"Actually, my husband is overseas. I need to protect myself from a European predator until my husband returns in eight weeks or so."
"Look there is no way you can learn to fight in such a short time. The best I can do is to show you some self defence moves and work through ways in which you can use the element of surprise to your advantage."
True to his word, the instructor taught her some basic intercept moves to halt an attacker and use his momentum to gain advantage. He also taught her how to play dirty. Kick to the groin, then hard knee to the nose as he doubles over. Very effective and will buy you time to get the hell out of there. He taught her to look for implements to use. A spade left outside for example, or a tree branch, which can be used to block an attacker and also as a weapon.
In her final week when Dianne had regained most of her physical fitness and a healthy tan, the instructor taught her about diversionary tactics and worked with her to demonstrate how to fall without coming to grief. Equally important, he said, was the ability to get up after a fall. It is difficult to defend when you're lying on the ground. Dianne realised that her training would never win her a combat match but hoped that the lessons would allow her to at least get herself out of a difficult situation.
After four weeks in the centre, it was time to leave. She thanked Lisa profusely for her guidance and promised to get in touch when her problems were resolved. Now she had to consider her next move, which she had been worrying over for the past week.
Staying in this area could be dangerous. If Helmut had carried out on his threat to come to Australia, he would have a team of people looking for clues as to her whereabouts so the longer she stayed in one place, the greater the chance of discovery. She made up her mind to get away from the east coast and drove long and hard, heading west. Her biggest risk, she reasoned, was being recognised on CCTV at fuel stations, so she took great pains to use bowsers placed away from cameras and always wore one of a variety of hats she carried to avoid discovery.
Three days later an exhausted Dianne broke cover and booked into a motel in Kunnunurra in Western Australia under Helen's name. She knew it was a risky move, for if Helmut discovered the transfer of money into Helen's account, his contact might be looking for her in Helen's name. Still, she had travelled across the top of Australia using Helen's card without any trouble or query, so she reasoned that she was fairly safe.
