Wickerman Cove

Part 11: Roadtrip, Semicolon

Penny took being ordered out of the driving seat pretty well. It was her car, which probably made it a little rich, but she'd driven from New York to just outside Bangor. Steph had gotten seven hours' sleep and not helped with a damned thing, so it was probably her turn to drive anyway.

It calmed her nerves to be driving. The hearse handled well – heavy, but smooth. It had serious power and a surprising turn of speed. That was probably part of the original design – nobody wants the lead car in their funeral procession to stall at the first hill.

Unsurprisingly, Penny was asleep within a few minutes of the car starting. Steph entertained herself by making a mental list of the questions she was going to ask when they arrived at Wickerman Cove. Renard made a minor commotion by trying to climb between the seats so that he could sit in Penny's lap, somehow managing to get his butt in Steph's face and almost kick the hearse out of gear.

The road continued not to exist beyond the reach of their headlights. A part of her kept drifting back to the old days in Helmand, when Leatherneck wasn't much more than huts and sand. Training in California hadn't prepared her for the reality of the Afghan desert, it just made sure she didn't freak out the first time she set foot off base.

Steph thought about Hitch, driving, convinced he had a sixth sense for IEDs. Mac, who got shot in the spine and taught English these days.

Jesus Christ, what was she going to do with her life?

Steph tried to bring her mind back to the road and the dark, but it refused to give her more than twigs and wet asphalt. Nothing, compared to the fact that she'd lost her purpose in life: she was the sick kid made good. The highschool athletics champion with good grades. The one who wanted to do more than spend her life in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The whole incident with the weirdos at the gas station still bothered her, but the fact was she probably wasn't going to see them again, or if she did, they wouldn't be stoned enough to start any trouble.

Although, seriously, how had it come to this? Forget the supernatural, if it really was that. A week ago, she'd been a Marine Staff Sergeant with one eye on her E-7. Then she'd somehow fucked up to the point where a fundamentalist militia had kidnapped 40 teenage girls and she'd dragged a whole infantry platoon through Northern Mali chasing a literal ghost.

The road ahead suddenly felt like a good metaphor for her life – absolute darkness, containing psychos, bullshit and ghosts. The glare of her high beams on the asphalt and the hanging branches were this job. Afterwards, who knew? She was creating the world one day at a time.

Maybe she'd head to LA and see if she could get a job in the movies? There had to be something for a photogenic blonde – if she was flattering herself – who was certified to work with firearms. Of course, that depended on not getting a psych discharge.

She stared into the dark and drove. A rational part of her tried to interject that there was literally no point in trying to imagine what was going to happen, since no-one had even mentioned her not going back on active duty yet. Once her three months were up, for all she knew, they might judge her fit and ship her out to wherever. Even if they didn't, she still wasn't out of the Corps. What if they put her behind a desk? Money was money, she'd still be a Staff Sergeant, and her mom would worry less.

Unless she spent the rest of her life being labelled as crazy. Or actually was crazy. Or never got a job that paid the bills again and died in a snow-filled ditch while walking to her minimum wage job because winter had arrived, her meds had run out, and she couldn't afford to run a car.

Not that she had any illnesses that needed meds. Or a car.

Or a job, in some ways.

"God damnit, Marine," she said, stealing a sidelong look at herself in the side window. "Get a grip."

That was when she almost rammed a battered white car sitting across both lanes of the highway.