Mad As Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore

[decoy73]

It looked like the other guy had really done a number on Darlene's face. There were a lot of cuts and blood and bleeding - did it do something to her ear, too? But Darlene just went, got her glasses, and went back to Max. Stephanie just looked at the bodies. It wasn't as bad as three days ago, but still, Max hadn't been that bad recently. He'd actually tried to be good.

"Darlene. Do you ... I'm here if you need me."

[MurderWeasel]

"No."

A droplet fell from Darlene's face to her forearm, something she felt but couldn't see. She expected it to be a tear, but realized she wasn't crying right now, so it had to be blood.

She should have probably said something different. There were lots of better options, but she didn't have the mental or emotional energy to find them. Stephanie was being kind, offering support and care and attention, but Darlene didn't care. She didn't care about Stephanie. She didn't really like Stephanie, had never trusted her. She'd been so busy keeping an eye on the girl, getting ready to shoot her maybe if that was what the situation called for, that she'd gotten stupid in other ways. She'd been so caught up in the potential for danger from within that she'd been blind to its ability to manifest from without, right up until it smacked her in the side of the head.

From that perspective, this whole thing was kind of Stephanie's fault, wasn't it? Darlene thought she was still ready to shoot the girl maybe, so it was a good thing the gun was tucked away nice and safe and out of sight. It wasn't that it was for Stephanie's sake, really—Darlene had known from the start that more or less everyone here was going to die, and Stephanie was definitely part of that everyone—but it just didn't seem right to do that to someone who was trying to help, and Max wouldn't have wanted that, and Jonah either.

Both of them would've probably wanted Darlene to stay with Stephanie and watch out for her and vice versa, but they were both gone now so they weren't going to get everything. This was compromise.

Darlene took big deep breaths, felt her lungs fill up with air like they rarely did except when she was singing extra loud, and her head cleared a little, the haze and pain not going away but turning transparent, letting her think for a little. She slowly stood part of the way back up, then bent and patted around. She thought she should maybe feel better or worse about touching Max, but she didn't really feel much of anything as she grabbed him under the arms.

She should have said thanks to Stephanie, or apologized, or given her some words of wisdom or something real poignant, but Darlene didn't have any of that. She could've maybe threatened the girl, or yelled at her, or something, but she wasn't there either. It was what it was and she wanted this chapter to be over, wanted them to go off and follow their own paths and when it was Stephanie's turn to catch a bat from the darkness to the face, Darlene would be too busy with something else to even notice when it was read out, or maybe it would go the other way.

"I want to go on my own," Darlene said. "I have things I need to do. Alone."

She grunted as she pulled on Max. He was a lot taller than Darlene, and some heavier too, and it felt weird, like she was playing a game with friends in elementary school again, tugging each other around on the carpet in the classroom, laughing and screaming and thrashing and then crying when someone got rug burn. She'd never been very strong. She was breathing hard already and they'd only gone maybe five feet, and she kept expecting Max to protest or cry out in pain but he didn't, and that was worse. The mouth of the cave felt a million miles away, but it was too dark in here and people would come looking for shelter and if they saw him in the dark they might think he was someone lying in ambush and shoot him and Darlene didn't want that.

"I don't hate you," she said to Stephanie, which was probably shoving her foot in her mouth because there wasn't any big reason for Stephanie to think that unless she was insecure except now Darlene had denied it out of nowhere, but she meant it she thought.

"I just..."

She didn't know how to finish that one, so she gave up and started over.

"Good luck."

She managed to keep the "I guess" from bleeding through from her tone to her words.

((Darlene Silva continued in That's When I Reach For My Revolver))

[decoy73]

Darlene just left.

"I want to go on my own. I have things I need to do. Alone."

She dragged Max - Max's body, and left, leaving Stephanie there with a corpse. The corpse of Jeff Greene. The corpse of ... nobody. Just some arsehole that decided to attack them for no reason. Stephanie just stared at the hunk of dead meat that lay there, starting its process of rotting. He was nothing. It was nothing. Just a former obstacle.

She just picked up Max and the corpse's duffel bag, and the bat and clear shield, and left the area to consolidate.

((Stephanie McDonald continued in Terminal Gardener))