Sarah
~It's BFE out here...~ Sarah thought, surveying the road from behind thick sunglasses. Her beaten up Chevy was perched at the top of a hill and she felt like she could see for miles. Trees and fields and not a sigle building as far as she could see. ~Damn.~ Could she really live out here, in the middle of nowhere? The last cluster of houses you could call a town was thirty miles back down the asphalt-gravel road. Out here, the road melted down to sand and reddish clay. She had slowed to a 5mph crawl after fishtailing twice. ~Almost there, almost there.~ No matter what this place was like, at least she would be off the road.
And if they had a real non-gas station bathroom, she would love them forever.
Sarah McCoy had loaded what was left of her things into her truck about 20 hours ago. She had been driving ever since. She had lost the Nashville stations an hour into the trip and now she sang vaguely in key with Patsy.
"Worries... Why do I let myself worry?"
Sarah McCoy was sixteen, barely legal to drive the truck she and Bobby had repatched, wired, coaxed and cursed into working. She was long and lean ("surly and mean") with freckle-pale skin and red-gold hair cut short and spikey. With one of Bobby's hats shoved down over her forehead, she looked like a boy. It was safer that way. Mom always ranted about how she was going to get a flat in the middle of nowhere and end up getting raped by wandering cowboys. ~Just cuz it almost happened to her doesn't mean it must happen to me.~ But that was how it always was with Mom. ~Doomed to repeat her mistakes.~ But she wasn't going to get pregnant at 17 or end up in two bad marriages. As far as Sarah was concerned, she wasn't going to do kids or weddings, ever. There didn't seem to be a point. That never phased Mom and her rants though. ~But you won't hear those anymore, will you?~
"Wonderin'... What in the world will I do?"
Mom's last rant had climaxed with most of her things being thrown out the window. ~If she hadn't knocked off the fucking glasses...~ But she had, and grabbed her chin - "Look at me when I'm talkin' to you!" - and stop! Frozen in place. But she was okay, kept control on her powers. Mom hadn't been forced to do anything, she was just frozen until Sarah broke eye contact, snatched up her sunglasses. Safe behind mirrored lenses as the shit hit the fan.
Anything still in one piece or easily fixable went into the truck. Bobby risked Mom's wrath - not that he really gave a shit - to slip her a sleeping bag and some cash, enough to get her all the way down to Texas.
"Crazy, crazy for feelin' so lonely..."
Texas. C.O. 372, gate 2. Her directions said about 10 miles dow from 1151 but how long had she been going? 7 miles or 8? ~Don't miss it, keep watching.~ Gate 1 had been almost nonexistant, who knew how gate two would be marked. But she was almost there...
Spiral Grove. It sounded like some kind of new age cult commune thing, but Jackie had insisted it wasn't. They were some kind of haven, like Australia was supposed to be a few years back, but a lot smaller. No one was supposed to know about it either, but Jackie did. ~Wonder who else knows about it?~ But it made sense that J would. She was a connection. Back when the Australia thing had happened - Sarah was barely 13 then - Jackie had worked in one of those mutant centers. When those dissolved, some of the center-staff stuck around, formed mini-communities. When her powers first surfaced
