"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man." -Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
You're young, and you've walked a long time, and you think you were a cop once.
You think maybe you were pulled from the same raid as the guitarist with the mask of dried skin. There are jokes about it at first, as you're nudged this way and that by the pudgy white fingers of what you later will find out are war pups and now look like larvae or ghosts. Can you sing? Can you dance? It turns out you can't keep a beat, so that mostly dies down.
Then you get out of the ropes and mere feet away from the guards and there are war boys all over.
The little ones were trampled, maybe. The warrens are filled with dust and tools, every kind of rope and ratchet and remain. Face down on all of it you have a chance to want it. Had a badge once that wouldn't have been out of place in this junk. Anything that isn't useful has been broken down. There are probably screws and shards of glass in the dust. Dirty fingers with ragged nails creep along the floor looking for - something. You grasp on instinct when you find a metal piece that might, from the scratchy flat edges and the groove, be a wrench.
Someone is beating time on their knees. War boys grasp at you, eight, ten white arms. Red wrench. When you wave it to clear some space a few of them fall back, their wrists swatted aside. Where's your blasted car?
Your knees shake, but you stand up enough to get rammed by a war boy full on and climb over his knobby back while he's trying to figure out what happened. Another fall and your tangled hair in your mouth but you've got a clearer shot to a more loosely-packed crowd now. Where are the pups?
Wrench. Pushing sideways on your shoulder, you slash the wrench toward someone's face and feel it hit nose at least. Kicking backwards, you hit more of them before they pile forward.
Why so many? Part of you thinks. What is it like in this hive when they aren't swarming? The other part thinks that you see a lot more spikes ahead of you. More weapons, sticking out of the ground. Scramble, hunch, throw somebody's weight over your right shoulder and then you're on them.
The war boy's blackened hands are a blur, but you push through it and bite him on the bridge of the nose. One of his hands grabs your right ear and somebody else pulls a wad of your collar into their hands. Blood sheets.
You're on your back again for a second, kicking, and get the wrench into somebody's knee. Pushing backward, there's the horrible feeling of almost crawling into the lap of the one whose nose you tore. He pulls you back like a lead weight and gets his arms around your neck, but you slam your head backwards, brutalizing the nose further, and the arms go just limp enough that you can push away and stumble a few steps into a blue room.
What you thought was an armory is just a pile. You squint against the blue light. It's a rack of steering wheels, tens of them, useless as blades unless you tear them apart. You lunge forward and the war boys hesitate. Their air of reverence hits you with a wall of shame and confusion: is there something dangerous here? Maybe you've just walked into a poison vent, and this is the cage they've built to keep it from opening up wider. The room is narrow, thin enough to pack bodies in standing or a few laying down.
Forget the reverence. You grab one wheel, turn, throw. The crowd is too still to react to the one war boy you catch in the sternum, folding him over around the wheel. The others boo and heckle. They don't come closer, though, and then from their twitching shoulders and scuffing feet you know -
It's a shrine, obviously, with the light coming through it like that. They'll spiral in worship here forever, tearing up the roads, and you have to get back to your car. There's something worshipful about the bone and dust and oil and guts and all the pretty things and their machines. You look for the familiar wrapped wheel from the Interceptor, but one or two bodies have overcome religious fervor or territoriality and leapt at you.
You pull a shaft from the pile with a skull-head wheel impaled on it, and it's heavy enough to drag both of your arms down. One war boy hits your shoulder and goes for your eyes while you duck your head down. The other tries to get in front of you, maybe to the wheels, and you stab him through the shoulder with the last drop of strength you have.
It helps that he's leaning into it, coming down with a scream and yellow teeth. It helps that the one behind you doesn't have his arms around your neck yet, just pulls hard enough to help you lean into the upward stab that gets the spike through sinew. It helps that when you stand up, knee shaking, you throw one war boy off and lift the other one on the spike coming out of his back. His blue-black shadow casts stripes against the red walls.
That's when the imperator arrives.
You don't know she has a title, then. You don't know that she has a brand on the back of her neck or that she is one of many, but you know that there's authority in her because of the way the war boys part. The dead one wriggles on the stick next to the wheels, grinning. She's either about to kill you or about to congratulate you, because that is how these things go.
She says, "Where'd you find him?" to the war boys while you pull in breaths that smell like blood and try to get up on one knee.
"Out in the waste. Near the new boy."
"Half-life?"
"Looks whole."
The floor swings back and forth on a pendulum while you press your palm against a steering wheel and get to your feet. The knee will survive. Doesn't collapse, doesn't hurt worse than anything else.
"You're from the road?" She moves real fast and frisks you before you have the chance to move away. Then you back off, back toward the circle of war boys on the other side. You shake your head, but she knows it isn't an answer to her question.
"You don't look so good," she says. "You need water." There's calm hatred in her eyes.
You raise the wheel, slowly.
Remember: Put your hands behind your back …
Hand it to her.
They keep you because you've seen the light, because standing in the blue room with a boy in front of you on a pike made from their own pile of gods' necks you looked like some sort of monster.
They keep you because you've earned it, and because you can always be put back. The blood bags still have the whites of their eyes, and they roll to look at you. You see them, but don't partake in that particular communion. You don't need to, although you run and push and shout with the war boys sometimes. No one chalks your skin.
The door guards need you, or the men who drum on the skin-and-tarp bass drums need you. You see your once-companion there, picking out rough chords on a silver guitar. You slam out a slightly stuttered beat when the water comes.
If it isn't the fights that will get you turned into a blood bag, it's the health - you can see the imperators eyeing you, wondering what this man with his two eyes and his shape is doing among the tumored unwashed. You cough in the night just to seem like you fit in, just for the audible camouflage afforded by being diseased. You've probably caught something from someone in the dens, because sometimes it isn't fake. You don't remember why it was supposed to be.
After all of that, the imperators keep you.
Immortan Joe keeps you, although you never see him. Ever when the water comes down you're low and in the back of the crowd, closer to the war pups than the supplicants. Seeing him is something of a revelation, you gather. He doesn't want to be seen. You don't trust any of it. Just your luck that you got branded before you could be tattooed.
The guitarist trusts, but he isn't entirely part of it either.
He's young, almost baby-faced around a vacant, cleft mouth and pale eyes. He finds his own corner in the night-nests of war boys and sits with the guitar across his knees, puffy fingers pulling chords out of metal strings. The pipes running along the walls are uncomfortable against your backs. The desert cold doesn't exist in here, between the pipes and the people.
The music becomes jaunty and teasing when you come by, a circus-freak march that makes half-asleep war boys raise their heads over one another's arms and grumble. You sit down, groan, close your eyes. Sleep the sleep of the mad, twitching when the music doesn't stop.
In the middle of the night there is a small division: after a scuffle the group of war boys splits, a few in the middle looking back and forth as if unsure where to throw their allegiance. War boys on the far side stand up and sit down again one after another as if they've won something. The guitarist sways his head back and forth, listening blindly.
You don't join the war parties. The first time you try there are raiders coming from the north, a ragtag group on trucks. Immortan Joe's rigs will swarm them, and it will be over fast. The war boys are a tide running down the halls to the winches. An imperator stops you at the mill wheels where the gate handlers climb, and you're pushed in there with the old men and the young, the ones chosen for reasons clear only to the imperators. They don't trust you yet, you think.
You never see any of the women who must be somewhere in the compound: only Furiosa, only pups.
When you earn their trust it's after another scuffle. War boys come back from hunts agitated and frustrated, shamed by not having died in glory or taken enough people to the grave, and the imperators prod them apart only occasionally.
Somebody throws a handful of chalk that explodes next to your left eye. The war boys are gearing up, and you are an outsider because you haven't been shaved-headed and white-skinned from birth.
You paw the chalk off and reach out with a white hand.
The war boy is a stocky one, wide and old and scarred. Your hand grasps at his chest for a moment before you take a better shot and dig your fingers into his neck. He flings himself forward, white-blur and gray-blur, and cracks his skull against yours until everything shakes and goes red. You pinch his neck and howl until you can get your hands around, digging your thumbs in against the ridges of his throat.
He kicks you in the right knee - this kid's been watching - and you throw him against a wall where three others had been standing a moment before. Hoots and catcalls, someone drumming on something that rings out high and metallic.
He postures, his arms held far out like he's going to fly away, like his muscle-wrapped elbows are broken, and you put your head down and kick him in the gut.
His hands slap at your ears, setting them ringing. You prod a knee into his legs and hit soft spots. Someone's actually trying to pull him away; someone thinks one or the both of you aren't worth a useless death, or wants to get involved. You slam one fist against the interloper's fingers, and the big guy between you goes for your legs again.
All of you on the ground. It's easier now; you can kick his flailing feet bloody because you have heavier boots, but the guy keeps going for your neck and your hair.
He flips you over and you punch him in the eye, gouging down until there's blood on his cheek. The war boy who interrupted is suddenly looking toward the door like a hawk, his broken fingers swinging free. You twist to look up, and the war boy on top of you shifts just enough that you can wedge your arms around his throat and lock one bloody, slippery hand around your other wrist. There's eye-blood on your cheek.
Then a silence, and an imperator appears upside down in the door.
He's reedy and tall, with boils where his right ear should be, and he's glaring with small, black eyes under stapled eyebrows. Engine-black hands with ten fingers.
You push your arm against the throat and jerk your head toward the imperator, and the war boy bares all six teeth and spits.
He slinks away, though, because you have invoked a higher power. On purpose this time, not out of fury and ignorance. The imperator just looks at you, and even if your hackles rise he doesn't give you a reaction to push against.
Times goes by, and some of it you remember and some of it you don't. You hiss and scratch and posture a half-grown killer into taking you on as a lancer, but when you look at the spiked lances fanned out behind the car you have to shake your head and stagger, because there are big bloodshot eyes and broken teeth and red hazes like desert sunsets between you and the tailgate.
It's a sleek car, too, turbocharged and hunkered down. Even covered with dust it looks old and mean and like it's ready to scream out into the desert. That's your car -
"What's wrong with you?" Your driver says, and someone else pushes past with a rusting knife in his hand and says "He's dizzy!"
"Tune up!" Your driver yells, and pushes you back with both hands slapping against your chest. Some others yell it in passing, catching on, and roll their eyes at you while the fervor lights up and the engines go, one after another like all flavors and makes of gunshots. "Tune up!"
The guitarist is leaving the mechanic when you get there, scratching all over. Depravity, dust and bone, teeth and oil and fights - you are used to these. It's not even the freedom you want. It's something that was pulled up at the sight of the cars, simple and deep.
A pull, not a push. You have to leave the Citadel. It has been too long since you just left a place.
Days later. Weeks later. One or the other, forever and ever, rock'n'roll, amen.
And then -
You hear it in snatches.
- going rogue -
- catch her -
- going after Furiosa -
and there's a chance if there ever was one. (A chance for what? Not for food or water or milk or glory, not for that shiny car you didn't take back. But a chance.) You're going on this one if you have to kill somebody for it.
You think you stood for some kind of law once, and think of the spike sticking up out of a man's back in the blue light in front of the chromed steering wheels.
Full disclosure: I wrote this, in part, because I hadn't at the time seen any Mad Max movies except Fury Road. I have now, but I also like the idea of a Max with no back story, one who is a blank slate at the beginning of MMFR. This is who "my" Max was to me. Of course, a Max with even ambivalent, shell-shocked loyalty to Immortan Joe would be bringing different baggage to the War Rig when he eventually teams up with Furiosa, as he must, but I haven't thought much about that story yet.
I feel a bit guilty about the fact that a very similar story could be written about Furiosa, and that I haven't done that yet either.