It felt so very good to be really clean, squeaky clean as her Mom used to say when she was a little girl. Louise could have stayed in the hot biting shower for hours and let the wonderful water stream over her body. It had been more than a week since she had last showered and had the opportunity to wash her short brown hair. It was a wonderful public service that the church shelter offered to the homeless. She wished that she came in to take advantage of it every day as it made her feel so much better about herself. She decided she was going to try and come much more often. As good as the water felt she knew that she needed to get out and make room for another person before she ran all of the limited hot water out of the tank.
As she toweled off another woman, who had the down cast look of the lost, took her place. She hoped that she did not look so forlorn and aimless to others who saw her. Louise helped herself to a clean pair of jeans and a sweatshirt styled top along with an almost new pair of jockey style underpants and tube socks from the stack of donated clothes that was piled there for them. She carried her old heavy blue hooded coat out into the dining area and saw her friend Albert talking with two older men that she did not know and had never seen before. Everyone was in an upbeat mood having availed themselves of the showers and getting clean clothes. She really wished that she and Albert were able to spend the night in the shelter but they were regular users of marijuana and could never pass the mandatory drug screening. If you could not satisfy the compulsory security rules and tests you could bathe and dine but not sleep on the premises. The rules were very strict on that matter.
Louise had graduated from high school the previous May in a small rural town in upstate Michigan. She had struggled for grades in high school so she had no prospects for college. It was a combination of not being the brightest person around combined with a very poor self-image and a total lack of direction and commitment to her studies. Instead of college she had gotten a dead end rotten job at the local Dairy Queen that she had absolutely hated from the very first day. A week after New Years she had finally had enough of her life and gathered up her few possessions and headed south. Her mother had died a dozen years before from breast cancer and her father was a perpetual drunk and really cared less about her than where he was going to get his next drink. She had spent her teenage years waiting on him hand and foot like some domestic slave, cleaning the house and doing all of the chores. He never laid a hand on her in anger or in lust and she was grateful for that but she felt she owed him less than nothing. When she told him that she was leaving he had wished her well and asked her to stay in touch. She wasn't really surprised by his reaction and it just convinced her all the more that she was doing the right thing. She had a few hundred dollars that she had saved up which was enough to get her a bus ticket and food money for a while until she could find something better.
Growing up, from the age of eight, without a mother's guidance she had developed into a tomboy at best. The girls at school made fun of her for her lack of femininity and the boys for the most part just plain ignored her. She stood five foot two and had more than a few extra pounds for her age. She wore a size twelve in everything. Her legs were stocky and she wore her hair chopped off around her neckline with no type of styling. Outside of a little lipstick and an occasional dab of perfume she did not ever use any type of cosmetics. In reality anyone who looked closely at her would have discovered that she was very definitely a female with her body maturing into being very well rounded in all of the right places. She had nice wide round hips a full but tight rear end and it took a solid DD cup bra, when she wore one, to capture and restrain her breasts. If she had known how to dress to her best advantage she would have turned many a man's eye as she was definitely blessed by nature with a body that was built for a real man's enjoyment and comfort.
Louise had met Albert in a park near the downtown area when she arrived in Atlanta on the Greyhound after an arduous tiring two-day trip. He befriended her and she felt some semblance of safety being with another person even though Albert was very slight of build and not at all imposing. Albert was in his late twenties and had been living in Georgia on the streets for more than a year and a half. He wasn't real specific about his past but he let on that he had had some mental or as he called them emotional problems, been in and out of rehab and had gotten far away from his meddlesome family. He was from somewhere out west but he never actually told her exactly where because he was paranoid about having his family learn where he was living. In the two weeks they had been together they had become friends and he had shown her around town. Unfortunately he stayed constantly on a drug high and his very existence was centered on getting the next joint or fix. Because it had seemed the thing for them to do they had clumsily made love on one occasion in a deserted building. It was an exercise that was mutually unfulfilling and succeeded only in breaking her hymen and at last taking her virginity. If that was all that sex was about she wondered about the big deal that everyone made about it.
When she joined them Albert introduced her to the two men he had been talking with whose names were Phil and Randy. Both of the men were in their mid forties and had the wet haired look of the rest of the recently showered. The men looked her over, smiled and seemed a little on edge.
"Good news Lou," Albert said. "These guys have a place not far from here where we can crash that's warm." He looked towards the two guys and they nodded acknowledgement. It was mid January and as moderate as the daytime temperatures might be in the south, at night the thermometer plunged to near freezing. There were posted warnings on the shelter doors alerting everyone that that night's weather forecast called for it to dip below freezing with the possibility of sleet, ice and some snow. She was not keen on being outdoors in that kind of frigid mess.
"Ok," she responded. "Works for me." It was already getting close to dark and getting colder by the moment.
The four of them went into the dining area and got trays of food and sat down together to eat at the tables that were sat up with folding chairs on either side. Albert sat next to her and the two older guys were across the table. The food was simple but wholesome consisting of some kind of meat and macaroni casserole, bread, a bowl of fruit cocktail and tea. The rule was that you could eat as much as you wanted but it was not permissible to leave anything on your plate, as that was wasteful.
They were all famished but found time while they ate to learn a little about each other. Phil and Randy were both ex-cons who had the well-developed arms and shoulders of men who had spent a lot of time in the prison yard working with the free weights. Both of the men were under six feet and around two hundred solid stocky pounds. They had short hair and tattoos on their forearms and necks. All in all they weren't bad looking guys though they were about the same age as her dad. They certainly did not look like the kind of guys you wanted to mess with or piss off in any way. They said that they preferred to live on the street rather than buy into some societal game where they had to always answer for their past in some sort of bullshit type of job. On the street people did not tend to judge you. She wondered about how long they had been out and about parole officers and such but was afraid to ask.
She notice that the two men spent a lot of time looking at her and few times whispered to each other and chuckled under their breaths. Once or twice she felt the solid leg of one or the other of them brush up against hers under the table and stay snug up against her until she moved away.
It was getting closer to being totally dark so they decided to go ahead and leave the shelter. Louise and Albert followed Phil and Randy to an opening near Underground Atlanta that took them into the viaduct area next to the subway. They had to push aside some cut chain link fence and crawl under a barricaded opening to get to the dark musky passageway. Phil pulled out a flashlight and led them through a maze until they reached an area that was remote and seemed to be near the subway track lines. Occasionally you would hear the loud rumble of a passing train making the ground shake and tremble. Louise tried to keep her eyes straight ahead on Phil's back as she didn't want to see the mice and rats that she could hear scurrying around on the wet concrete. They walked for a very long time going at least a quarter of a mile underground.
