Recidivist Max

by Kjata

Literally "fall back" into crime, or in this case, the life once lived. In other words, Max tripped. (A post-Fury Road continuation, ft. Furiosa and The Wives and The Citadel in all its reconstruction glory.)

The first time Furiosa purchases Max off of some travelling slavers, she tells him, "Don't mention it."

The tenth time she finds him at a Slave Market- Lot A405, presumed feral, good for soups- she says, "We've gotta stop meeting like this."

The forty-third time, he's hanging upside down in a wicker basket carried by three slavers looking to trade for water and she suggests a payment plan, because this has gotten really expensive.

. . .

Blazing sun, normal. Blistering sand that abrades the skin, yes, normal.

Max keeping track of a dozen children carrying sticks, not normal.

The youngest War Boys, too young to do much but suck on mother's milk and lizard bones when the Immortan breathed his last, are on Lizard Hunting duty in order to hone their skills, acquaint them with the desert in a safe way, and keep them out from underfoot while everyone else attends to keeping the Citadel running.

Furiosa must want Max out from underfoot as well, because there's no other reason for him to be out here, holding a half-loaded pistol and shading his eyes from the sun.

A War Boy with intricate scarring that shows as stippling around his eyes and across his eyelids keeps bringing live lizards to Max to show them to him.

"This one is good in soup," the little one confides.

Max pokes it. It wiggles in the boy's grasp but seems to be otherwise resigned to its fate.

"What, as flavouring?"

The War Boy nods. "Tender meat, too."

Max is doubtful it has much meat to be tender, but he shrugs and accepts it the boy's knowledge as superior to his own. The War Boy beams at him and holds the lizard out.

"You want it? For your soup?"

Max shakes his head. "You need the soup more, mate."

The War Boy nods solemnly.

Ten feet ahead, in the wall of a Dune that Max has no intention of letting the boys crawl into no matter how much they insist that lizards a-plenty are to be found in the basin, a massive lizard erupts from the sand with its teeth gnashing and its claws scoring gouges in the dirt.

War Boys scatter, except for the show-and-tell, who hides behind Max and calmly watches, still holding his soup lizard folded neatly in his hands.

Max draws the pistol and takes aim. The lizard thrashes its head around, he can't get a shot between the eyes so the neck will have to do.

He pulls the trigger and a spurt of blood explodes into the air and across the sand. All it seems to do is make the lizard angry, because it lunges free of the the dune's wall and charges him.

He shoves the show-and-tell War Boy away from him just before the lizard slams him to the ground. His breath is gone, but his pistol is still in his hand.

The lizard raises its head, mouth open. Max shoves the pistol into its mouth and pulls the trigger again. It jerks away, swings its head from side to side, then slams its full bodyweight back down onto him.

Max slams the pistol right between its eyes, using it as a bludgeon instead of a projectile machine. He grabs its head with his free hand to steady it and hits it again and again and again.

A War Boy leaps on its back and saws at the neck with a knife. Max keeps hitting it, and between him and the War Boys with their numerous sharp pointy things, the lizard finally goes still.

Max falls back and heaves into the dirt. He's shaking, it hurts to breathe, and he's soaked through with blood from neck to pelvis.

"We gotta drag this back quick like," he hears one of the War Boys say. A chorus of "Aye" follows, then the lizard corpse is pulled off of Max and slowly leaves the area.

Four War Boys peer down at Max's face, cutting the blue of the sky off at the pass. Max wheezes at them.

The show-and-tell's lower lip trembles. He's still holding his soup lizard, but now he's crusted with dirt too.

One of the four boys silently takes Max's left foot. Another takes his right.

Together, they start to drag him along the tracks left by the lizard corpse in the sand.

He coughs and jerks, but they don't let him go. Show-and-tell walks at Max's shoulder, keeping a worried eye on him.

Max tries to keep his head up but gives up not long after they start. The sand is rough against his neck and scalp. He lolls his head to the side and looks out across the moving horizon of the desert.

He can see a huge cloud of dirt out there. Interesting.

. . .

Max is doing manual labour for The Dag and her plants up on the greens of the top of the Citadel. This means he has a harness looped across his chest, wound around his arms, and he is dragging a rudimentary plow through the dirt.

It's night irrigation, too hot for anything other. "The plants would burn in the light if I made them open up now for water," The Dag explained to Max while he put on the harness.

He doesn't argue with logic, even if he doesn't agree with it.

Capable has an oil lamp set up with her two little boys at her feet playing with the shell husks of this vegetable she's extracting the meat from. She keeps her head down and doesn't look at him once, though the boys stare at him just fine.

The sky is clear tonight. The moon lights up the desert as well as the sun, but a bit cooler, a bite of frost compared to the burning fire of the day.

A ringing alarm sounds down below at the base of the Citadel. Someone shouts a lot. The Dag and Capable both rise and step to the edge of the Greenery and look out over the desert.

"What's that?" The Dag asks, points.

Max shrugs out of his harness and comes to look.

A car is rolling slowly towards the Citadel, about a mile out. There are dark shapes hunkered and slithering alongside it. No noise, except from the lookouts who are preparing the Citadel for possible attack.

"Looks like a scout," Max says.

A flare of light comes from one of the dark shapes. It tosses the flare into the car and all of the shapes scatter, run back the way they came, dodging and weaving through the dunes.

Back at the car, a fire grows.

And underneath all the alarms from the Citadel, faint but clear across the desert, Max can hear the wretched sound of human screams.

. . .

Furiosa's mechanical arm is flat on the desk in her rooms. She's oiling it with one hand, using the corner of a rag to dab at the gears.

Max pokes through her collection of books on the shelving next to the desk while he waits.

"Today I want you to help Toast with her machines," she says. The room smells acidic, more so as she dips the cloth into a pot of something viscous and smears it across one of the support rods.

Max inspects the frayed binding of a large tome that looks to be about home repair from a century past. "I could hunt."

"You're horrible at hunting." She cracks a smile but doesn't look away from her task. "Help Toast."

. . .

Toast has a hulking bulk of a machine set in the middle of her main workshop. This isn't where she fixes guns and figures out what jammed the cannons, this is where she creates.

And apparently what she is creating today is a flying machine.

"My mam was a pilot in the old world," she explains to Max, head down and fiddling with a joint. "I don't remember her, but my dad said she woulda flew us out of Joe's cage if she was there."

Max is quiet. He perches on the edge of the table and does as she instructs, holds the metal structure still while she replaces parts that don't work anymore.

"And I lost my baby-" she stops for a moment, breathes in through her nose, continues, "-I lost it and chose to come up here to get over it. Haven't really left since.

"Kinda stupid, huh?" She smiles at the joint, pops it out and leaves Max to brace the weight. "I didn't want it, but was upset when it was gone."

She quickly replaces the joint with a fresh one from the side table near her seat. The weight Max has to hold lessens immensely.

"I had a kid once," he offers when he's got feeling back in his arms.

Toast raises her head slightly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

. . .

The young ones caught another giant lizard while Max was helping Toast. They drag it through the village at the base of the Citadel shouting and whooping. The thing bled out long ago, the gash in its throat is fully scoured from being dragged through the desert sands.

Max stops on his way to get Toast a piece of scrap - "About this big and this wide, think you can find something?" she had said, and his answer was, "Well, I can try." - when a woman villager shrieks and turns away from the lizard to spit furiously into the dirt.

He steps onto a rock so he can peer over the writhing mass of disgusted villagers and gleeful War Boys.

The lizard is comparable to the one he fought out in the desert the other day. Its eyes are slitted closed, forked tongue lolling out the side of its mouth, and the stomach has been cut open to reveal the partially digested and curled up corpse of a human child.

"Did it swallow 'er?" one of the old women in the group asks the War Boys. Max recognises her as one of the Vuvalini. One of the survivors, anyway.

The War Boys shrug as one. They don't know.

She points at the exposed neck, the turned down face with ragged hair eaten away by stomach bile. There's a jagged brand there, either a product of the bile too or something done pre-mortem.

"Property of a slaver," the Vuvalina hisses at the boys. They shudder and hunch their shoulders, she nods with satisfaction.

Furiosa touches Max on the elbow. He startles and jerks away, he hadn't known she was there.

"Come down for a moment," she tells him. Jerks her head towards the way he came, leads him a bit away from the commotion.

"Slavers getting rid of unwanted product now?" Max points at the lizard corpse, now visible from the villagers backing away, no longer interested in harvesting meat from a creature that had a human inside it. "Quite odd, innit?"

Furiosa's face is blank. She rubs at her left bicep with her right hand, leaves the mechanical add-on hanging limp.

"How were you caught so many times?" she asks. She stares at the lizard and what the Vuvalina is doing to it. "Did they ambush you?"

Max's shoulders go tense. He rubs at his jaw and eyeballs her from the side.

"Sometimes, yeah. And get me when my supplies were gone so I couldn't fight. One group shot me with something that made me legs stop working." He ducks his head so he can stare up at her face from a new angle. "There are others. Why you want to know?"

She answers with silence, still watching the Vuvalina extricate the corpse and mutter a Mother Prayer over it. It was a girl. A small one, legs growing coltish with malnutrition.

"Is this why you won't let me hunt?" Max asks.

Furiosa starts out of her reverie and gives him a flat look.

"No, I don't let you hunt because you're horrible at it."

. . .

Dark of night brings another burning car. Dark shapes writhing around in the sand around it, certainly humans. More multi-tonal pained howls from the flames, also certainly human.

Furiosa is up in The Dag's field to watch.

Max is up there too, but he has a reason beyond voyeurism. He has a plow blade to replace, squinting in the subpar light of the lamps.

"Trap or terror, you think?" he asks, jerking his head towards the spectacle. He knows what he thinks. He wants to know what she thinks.

Nothing, apparently.

"I don't know yet," she says, quietly, "but it's starting to piss me off."

. . .

Using a bit of cotton cloth and his own blood on a needle, he's made an approximation of where he's been ambushed in the last five cycles. He's devised a key of symbols for preferred tortures, three spikes means rolling beds of nails and two circles means dry drowning. He figured out how to indicate the size of each encampment, big squiggly line for comparable to the Citadel, two dots for travelling population, two big squiggly lines for something that's a barbarian city full of fighters and cages and an overlord with a hearty, throaty laugh when she tosses her head.

He lets it dry overnight, presents it to Furiosa in the morning over a breakfast of ground oat things mixed with three spoonfuls of aqua-cola to make it go down the gullet easier.

"The torture parts blur together," he tells her as she inspects the cloth and he chokes down a mouthful of this wretched excuse of a meal. "It's not complete."

She places the cloth down flat on the table between them and points at a spot just to the North of the Citadel, surrounded by three little clouds. "What's that?"

Max swallows wrong, coughs into his hand. Flecks of the oats coat his palm when he's done.

"Poison gas. They had groups organised and used to test it. Called them the Lost. I was too healthy so they sold me after two tests." He wipes his hands clean of food before pointing at three lines indicating a ravine where Slavers gather to showcase wares twice a cycle. "You got me there, after."

Furiosa rubs a hand over her mouth.

"What was it like? The gas?"

He really shouldn't have finished eating that bowl of food, if this is the topic of conversation for the day. He can taste the sulphur at the back of his throat, sense memory, blisters forming up his spine.

"It burned," he says. "Everywhere."

She stops examining the map and starts examining Max's face instead.

"You know, if you were so tired you could have just stayed here."

First time she's breached that topic this go around. Max's face feels stiff, but he grins at her anyway.

"Easy to say, not to do."

. . .

Toast is trying to figure out the torture gas in her shop down into the rock. She points at a book that looks well cared for, but dusty and crumbling anyway.

"The Dag can make it, I just want practical application."

Max hums and looks it over. The swaddled package of gears and screws she wanted him to fetch from the latest Caravan shipment is set on the table between them. The small bag he had to pick up from The Dag is on top of it, and though he is curious, he's not that curious.

"Practical application, right," he nods.

Toast picks up something that was a wrench in a past life, but has settled down into a nice conversion state of something with imitation teeth set into the handle. Then she pokes him in the side with it.

"I could try it on you. I need test subjects, all the good scientists had those. Read it in a book."

Max leans to the side to get away from the sharp poking and holds up both hands.

"Respectfully decline, sorry."

"There's nothing respectful about you," Toast snipes.

Her War Boy assistant, emphasis on Boy and Assistant, comes into the shop dragging a metal strut from the underside of a quad-roller. He drops it in the centre of the room, catches sight of Max, then squeaks.

"Hiiiiii," he wheezes at Max.

Max raises his eyebrows and lowers his hands. He's certain Toast won't poke him anymore with that thing. She's too busy unwrapping her deliveries.

"Hallo," he says to the boy.

The War Boy grabs a bag of hammers and drags them to Max. He hoists them onto the table without a word, opens the bag wide, and pulls out a miniature sledge.

"This one Toast used to kill a man for looking at her wrong!" the War Boy explains.

Max looks around the room to see if there's a notice hanging around somewhere that says he's to be threatened at every turn. All he sees are chalk diagrams of machines on the rock, and the Flying Machine shoved to a corner on the floor.

The War Boy pats Max's arm to get his attention. He shows him a ball peen hammer.

"This is the one she gave me when I made full assistant! See how shiny?"

Max looks at him. The kid has burn scars along the sides of his neck, nicks and scratches all over his hands and arms. He wears a vest and hunches his shoulders to keep it closed where skin would show through the gaps of clothing because buttons are missing.

"What's your name?"

The War Boy blinks at him. "Ferrous."

Max nods at the hammer in his hands. "Good job, Ferrous."

Ferrous looks at him with wide eyes and begins to grin, a flush darkening his cheeks even more than the sun-cracked wear and tear.

"You sure I can't spray you with this?" Toast asks again from the other side of the table. "It would only hurt a little. Probably."

. . .

Caravan rolls in from the settled down remains of Bullet Farm at half past the noonday sun. Brings with it news from the North Plains, mentions of burned cars left in strategic places along the road packed with charred corpses of children.

Max stands on the outskirts of the villagers milling close to the caravan to make their trades. Furiosa stops next to him, already the prompter and witness of most of the tales from outside.

"So terror, then," he says.

She looks back at the caravan. The villagers look scared, but are bartering for goods anyway. Life goes on, even when the threat is looming over the crib in the form of fire and death.

"I'm so tired of this shit," she says and goes back inside.

. . .

There's a stairwell down into the rock that leads from the passage branching off to Furiosa's offices, The Dag's storerooms, Toast's Mechanic Wonderland. But this one goes down further than the other routes, into a room that has boulders as baffling between work areas, and a long rail set into the floor for cartloads of weapons to roll out when they're finished.

It's a nice old production line for the blow-up spears and repairwork on the mass-produced engine blocks. Capable does some work down here, checking to make certain no one dies while manufacturing their defences.

Furiosa leads him into this mecca of fire and banging. Max squints through the bright light, she seems fully at home and is placid, calm.

She takes up a spear, one of the explosive heads already latched on, ready to fire.

"Can you throw one of these without taking off your own arm?" she asks Max.

Max raises his eyebrows. "You'll let me fight now?"

She makes a face. "If I have to, but I don't want you blowing yourself up either."

A War Boy hauls a bucket of something on fire past, dumps it in a trough for a villager to poke at with a metal stick. The War Boy leaves the way he came in, salutes Furiosa with one hand as he passes.

"You're like a War General with all this mass production," Max notes.

Furiosa's calm demeanour goes by the wayside. Her jaw clenches.

Max holds a hand out for the spear, head bowed and shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry, right? Let me protect the War Boys again, I'm sorry."

She lobs the spear from one hand to another, considers him with calculation.

"You've taken a shine to them, huh?"

"They're worse at hunting than I am, let's say that."

She catches the spear in her metal hand and holds it out to him handle first.

"At least they bring back usable meat."

. . .

The Dag has figured out the thing called mustard gas. She holds up a piece of linen she inked with berry juice and points at the line of numbers and letters at the bottom.

"Copied that from a book from Joe's library," she proudly states.

Toast peers at it, wrinkles her nose. Furiosa scratches at her scalp with her hand and Max sits in the corner peeling something called an "imitation potato".

"Should I weaponise it?" Toast asks.

The Dag gives her a sour look.

Furiosa shakes her head. "Should look for a cure instead."

"There is a cure, in the same book," The Dag explains.

"Then figure out how to make it," Max says from his corner.

All three women turn to look at him.

"Could I at least weaponise it on him?" Toast asks.

Furiosa shakes her head.

"No."

. . .

Max has added all he can remember to his map, it's as done as it's gonna be. He takes it to Furiosa during the night meal, drops it onto her table rolled up and tied with a bit of woven weeds that a War Boy gave him two days ago.

"Bullet Farm's people found more burned-out cars," Furiosa says around a mouthful of hash. "Unaccounted for caravans, carcasses and stores looted together."

He has nothing he can add to it, so he just hums and shifts his weight. His brace creaks with the motion.

She looks at the brace at the noise, chews slowly.

"Get Toast to check that out before sundown," she tells him after a moment of contemplation.

He thinks about how the sky looked on his way in.

"Sun's already down," he says.

Furiosa snorts and shovels in the last spoonful of hash. She gets up with her bowl and takes it to a small sink full of fine sand used to clean things. Dishes. Guns. Hands.

"There's a bag of ammo and a gun by the door," she says as she starts to scrub the bowl out.

Max looks over. It's a handgun with .22 WMR imprinted on the side of the barrel, shining as if new.

"Take it and go see Cheedo," she continues, still scrubbing.

He's amused, but doesn't object. He creaks over to the bag and gun, picks both up, and leaves. On his way out the door he says, "Get some rest," and Furiosa grunts in response.

. . .

Lots of activity in and out of Toast's shop. Personal heirlooms of handguns need cleaning and scrounged ammunition before being useful. Some old War Boy wants a cannon, swears there used to be one around, did Toast melt it down?

Ferrous helps his boss the best he can. Max watches him hand out sacks of ammunition, noting on a slab which precious weapon belongs to who and setting them on a table by order of priority, amount of damage to be fixed.

Max sits next to the flying machine, as out of the way as he can get. He has his leg stretched against the table and gently oils a moving part on the machine that he thinks is attached to one of the wings.

Toast launches into a loud argument with the old cannonmonger War Boy. Ferrous takes a moment to come check on Max.

"I'm gonna fly that," he says, points at the machine.

Max considers the wings, the harness inside, the metal sheeting presumably to protect the operator.

"Shouldn't you wait to see if it works first?"

Ferrous shrugs. "Nah, life's too short."

The old War Boy stomps out of the shop, Toast drops the rag she was using to wave at him and comes over to Ferrous and Max.

She leans over to poke at Max's leg brace, jerks her head at Ferrous. "Get to the repairs, boyo."

Ferrous scurries off to the land of bent metal brushes and discards from V8 engines. Toast produces a bottle of something clear and thick from the table. She twists off the cap and puts a drop on one joint of the brace, a drop somewhere else.

"You've got rust. I'll clean it a bit so it won't break when I take it off, then I'll strip it and replace stuff."

"Stuff?" Max's thigh aches from holding up his leg so she can look at it, but he'll be damned if he lets her hold it up herself. "Sounds technical."

She gives him a look, then dribbles more liquid over the moving parts of his brace.

Max watches Ferrous duck under a table to pull at a stack of cleaning cloths.

"He's my best assistant, don't let him die," Toast says. She doesn't look up.

Max nods at the flying machine. "Keep him out of this, then."

. . .

Night falls heavy but with little noise. The winds are howling across the dunes, as they do.

Max walks easier thanks to Toast, and he stands up in The View at the top of the Citadel with Capable and her babies to keep watch. The tower is ramshackle but strong enough to not tip over, and that's how the War Boys made it to be; for the woman to swap out shifts, stay up there all through the night and keep track of the world around them.

Capable stops one of the boys from eating a bug. Her hand encompasses his little fist delicately and all-encompassing.

"Larry, no," she shushes.

Max leans against the opposite wall with a spyglass rest in his lap.

"Odd names."

Capable stills. "Oh? What do you know about it?"

Her glare is like a running headlong into a rockface on an old V16 Hemmy engine. Max holds up his hands in surrender and resumes looking out at the desert.

The other baby fusses. She shushes that one too by coaxing him to eat a piece of potato.

"They remind me of him," she says softly.

Max stops staring out at the desert and looks at the kids, really looks at them.

"All right," he concedes.

A glow on the horizon sparks, flickers. Max sighs and stands up while Capable looks through her glass at it.

She makes a distressed noise down in her throat. It makes her babies fuss and burble unhappily.

As Max gets on his knees to swing his legs down onto the sprung ladder that leads to The Dag's top fields, Capable says, "It's a tanker. They're throwing in people who're still moving."

. . .

Two rigs have been selected to flank the rush. A horde of thirty cycles with two riders apiece, excepting Max and Furiosa's rides. Three quad-rollers with bars for a frame and no windshield, but excellent to carry a flamethrower and the necessary guzzoline to fuel it into the fray.

Max has his own cycle loaded down with a kamikaze package so he can blow something big up by running right into it. Preferably after he's already rolled off and run the other direction so he doesn't die in the blast too.

Furiosa has the same setup, but she carries a windup torch, one of those disposable things Toast hates to produce because they're a "waste of her time".

She stands higher than everyone, on the exposed block of one of the quad-rollers. A spotlight from high up on the Citadel wall is trained on her, so everyone about to roll out can see the Imperator in her glory and know who they're fighting for.

The motive stays the same, even if the figureheads never do.

"We do a half circle after the forward guard greets them, you hear?" she shouts. The War Boys set to the rear guard whoop at her, throw their fists up and pump their arms. "We stop them from getting to our home, we defend what's ours!"

Max leans against his cycle and sighs. Ferrous stands next to him, fidgeting. He was the one who brought Max the armaments, and he doesn't look happy about it now that he sees they're going on the actual cycle Max is riding.

"And Max?" Furiosa calls, "Get off the motorcycle before you hit anything."

More whooping from the War Boys, and Furiosa grins at Max's expression.

Ferrous looks alarmed, takes in the explosive jelly in canvas molds strapped to the sides of Max's cycle.

"Can I ride with you?"

Max shakes his head. "You're staying with Toast."

Ferrous clenches his fists and sets his jaw. He must be twelve, maybe thirteen, but Max looks at him and sees a toddler.

"I can fight," Ferrous insists.

"I don't doubt it. But you're staying with Toast." Max jerks his head to the entry into the Citadel where Toast stands, arms crossed and watching everyone closely. "Best goes where best is needed."

Ferrous opens his mouth, probably to argue. Max stops him by grabbing his shoulder and shaking him twice.

"You keep us alive by doing your best, boy," he growls.

Ferrous hunches in on himself.

"Yeah?" His voice comes out small and unsure.

Max switches from annoyed to amused, like a lever being thrown. He lets go of Ferrous and slings his arm over the boy's bony shoulders. Definitely not thirteen yet, still a child.

"Yeah. I come back to find you working, get it?"

Ferrous nods and stares at his feet.

"We ready to roll out?" Furiosa asks one of the War Rig drivers.

He smacks the side of his door and gives her a thumbs up.

"Well, let's get going!" she roars. Everyone roars back, and the engines all turn over as one.

. . .

They roll out when the clouds cover the moon so thoroughly that the slightest glow from a match would give away their location.

Max is on the rear guard. They go as silent as they can, which isn't very on cycles and four-wheel V16s, but at least there's no whooping from the War Boys. Furiosa gathered the ones to go on this venture and told them, straight out, no whooping.

The screams are louder, up ahead. And they just keep increasing in volume. Max hunches his shoulders so the collar of his coat covers his ears a bit more, protects him from the desert cold and the grit flying through the air and the screams.

Some of the Forward Guard disappear over the rise. More screams, but this of War Boys heading into battle. A sound of something exploding, makes the dirt shift under the cycle's wheels and Max fights to correct it and stay upright.

He climbs the rise of the dune into the glow of the fires, crests it and rides down the other side, right into hell.

Fire. Bodies on the ground in tattered rags and ripped open throats. Twirling masses of men with sharp teeth in their mouths as they grin at the masses of warriors come to meet them, wearing sackcloth and dark swathes of fabric around their heads, necks, bodies.

The smell of sulphur hits Max right in the face. He recognises that smell. And just when he looks up, searches for Furiosa to tell her, protect her, something to his left explodes and bits of War Boys fly over his head.

Max keeps his cycle up, just barely. A sharpteeth tries to get in his way, he swerves around it. An empty transport truck is on the other side of the dune in this sheltered pit that even the seeing glass from the Citadel can't peer into, and he aims his cycle for it.

He hopes there are backup weapons inside. He doesn't want to waste effort on an empty truck.

He drives past a huge balloon bobbing in the air, tethered to a truck with no headlights mounted on the front. He doesn't twist to look at it, he'll come back later. Twenty yards from the truck, fifteen, swerve around another sharpteeth trying to stop him, ten yards, and he locks the handlebars by breaking off the break pumps and rolls off the cycle as it keeps on going.

The cycle hits the transport truck and it goes up with much more explosive power than a little bit of jelly strapped to a cycle would cause. So effort not wasted, how nice.

Max lies on his back and blinks back his vision. He can't hear anything except some ringing. He swallows, tries to hum, cannot hear his own voice. He blinks.

A sharpteeth looms over him, grinning. Max brings up the shotgun on a shoulder strap he put on before they left and shoots it in the face.

The sharpteeth stops looming. Max rolls onto his front and crawls on all fours past the twitching corpse. A low thrum is penetrating the silence of his new world, and he thinks it might be a War Rig's engine.

He gets to his feet just in time for a War Rig to crest the Dune at the far Eastern border. It spits flames as it passes, and he can see the pale bare limbs of War Boys as they pump the fuel into the throwers and lob spears into masses of the enemy.

Max staggers past a group of War Boys tearing a sharpteeth limb from limb. He can hear shouting, but it sounds distant, like at the end of a tunnel. He shakes his head and keeps forcing himself to swallow.

The balloon is gone. The car is still there, no headlights, but the balloon is gone.

He peers into the sky, can't see anything floating up there. The clouds are over the moon enough to only give a hazy glow, but it would be enough to see something artificial, he thinks.

Something explodes behind him, he hears the dull thud and falls over from the concussive force. Then Furiosa is dragging him up and over to the car that had the balloon tethered to it, her looking at his face and mouthing words he cannot hear.

"HOW MANY LEFT AT THE CITADEL NOW?" he shouts.

Furiosa rears back, looks around, shoots something, then refocuses on him.

"AFF O- ORCE-, -YY?"

Another explosion, to their left. Furiosa drags him down and shoots towards it.

"I HAVE TO GO BACK," he shouts at her. She doesn't look at him, he hopes she heard him.

"GAS," he shouts, then starts to cough. The smoke is thickening the air now with all the fires, it's like taking in a big lungful of Hell.

Furiosa finally looks at him. Then she rolls her eyes and swaps out her gun for his shotgun, still hanging on a strap over his shoulder.

She gestures towards the area where War Boys are still streaming over the edge of the Dune.

"GO," she roars, and he hears her.

. . .

He's got another cycle. The thing is trailing something from the engine, it's not as fast as it needs to be, but he comes across two parties of sharpteeth on his way so he knows he's right. He has to keep going.

At the one mile mark he's close enough to see the burst of light that makes up the spears raining down from the sides of the Citadel. Inhuman cries that sound as soft as a child in pain rise up from the ground, Max's level. He grits his teeth and pushes the dying cycle faster.

Out of the dark rises a sharpteeth, facing away. Max drives his front wheel right over it and takes it down to the ground. The sharpteeth screeches inhuman as it goes down; Max knows they're coming and leaves the cycle there.

He's got a welded pipe from the siding of one of the sharpteeth's tankers he came across on his way out. He uses that to hit and smash anything moving. Blade-like somethings drag across his bared forearm, he hits that one twice.

The moon gives just enough light to show the outline of the spears as they arc through the sky. It glimmers against the rockface of the Citadel when the clouds move a certain way.

Max ducks a throw from one of the sharpteeth, returns with a smash to the mouth with his bludgeon. He gets knocked to his knees from something behind and he scrambles through soft sand to escape further hits. He's still making progress towards the towering rockface of the Citadel, it's just taking a bloody long time, and he still can't see the balloon anywhere.

Out in the blackness a War Rig's horn sounds, faint but still recognisable. War Boys whoop back, further out still. The sharpteeth howl and more swarm around Max like a writhing mass of overly loud serpents.

To Max's left is headlights from a War Rig. He looks up in time to see three sharpteeth get mowed over and more manage to throw themselves out of the way. A War Boy riding on the tail of the Rig starts a flamethrower pump and lets a trickle of flame catch the corpses as they pass.

The sharpteeth are focused on the War Rig, so he gets to his feet and runs.

A spear explodes to his left, he sees the outline of the stick before it incinerates into a beacon. Another one hits a sharpteeth right in front of him, and he dodges around the lit up creature as it dances and howls.

He reaches the Citadel. The rock is sheer and he'll never get a handhold, but he runs along the base anyway, trying to stay out of reach of enterprising sharpteeth and their jagged everything.

Moonlight glints against something metal a bit higher than his head. He stops and peers at it, recognises a chain with a massive hook on the end that he's seen attached to engine blocks being lifted up to Toast's workshop.

A sharpteeth comes out of the dark at him mouth first. He steps to the side, smashes its face into the rock, and climbs on its back to get a boost and reach for the chain.

He grabs it in both hands. The sharpteeth crumples, leaving his feet kicking in the air. He gets his boots under him, pressed flat against the rock, and starts to pull himself up, hand over hand and the cold links of the chain rubbing his hands raw.

Something grabs at his ankle and tries to pull him down. He looks back to see a sharpteeth dangle from his leg. Max kicks the sharpteeth in the face, his legs swing about and his knees hit the rock.

The chain loosens in his grip, drops him down a bit. He grabs at the chain with one hand and tries to wind his other in the slack.

He hears a series of clicks up above. It gets the attention of the sharpteeth on the ground too. They shriek at him and pelt him with rocks, all while something clicks overhead.

The chain starts to retract and pull him up. Slowly at first. He notices the movement only when his boots pressed back against the Citadel wall slide out from under him.

Clicking gets faster, the chain follows the beat. Max's stomach slides and scrapes against the side of the rock and it's all he can do to hold on and keep his face from smashing into the rock.

The sharpteeth shriek down below, but he isn't being hit with any more rocks, so that's something.

The clicking starts a rapid tak tak tak taktaktak and he outright slaloms up the rock. The chain disappears into a hole, and he goes with it. Long scrape of darkness, his jeans wearing holes in the knees and his body banging against the ceiling of the tunnel with every turn.

Then bright light, a bit of fire somewhere that smells like it's smoking out, and he can't hold on anymore so he releases the chain and rolls on some stone floor until he hits a wall.

Blood roars in his ears. Smashes of white spots collide in his eyes. He heaves a breath into his lungs, then lets it shakily out again.

Ferrous stands over him, shakes him by the shoulder. Max groans and tries to move away, but his back seems to not be working anymore.

"You hit your head," Ferrous is shouting. "Can you see?"

Toast joins Ferrous in peering at him. She leans down to poke his neck.

"Look, I don't have time for this. Get it together," she says. Her voice is distant, but at least he can hear her.

He tries to sit up. The pain is immense in his back and neck, but his vision clears of spots after a moment and his heartbeat slows in his ears.

"How did you know I was on the chain?" he croaks.

Toast gives him a look. It's how she always looks at him, like he's stupid as shit. Then she points at the chain spool and the counter-measures she has attached to the length. The hook he held onto for the entire trip is loose to the side, with a bit of unspooled chain lying next to it.

"It senses a pull of weight and starts the winding," she answers. "Congrats, you're as heavy as one of my engines."

She goes to one of her work tables across the room. It's loaded with weapons and baskets of ammo. "Go help fortify the entry to the village, huh? You're no use up here."

Max uses the wall to help him stand. He clings to it like a reptile, but it does the job.

"Have a cure for the gas yet?"

Toast turns away, gestures at Ferrous to hand her something. He gives her a screwdriver from his pocket.

"Ask Dag, I'm busy."

Ferrous holds out a hand as Max staggers to the door. Max waves him off.

"Best work, do it," he tells the kid on his way out.

. . .

There is a mass of organised warfare down at the base of the Citadel, Cheedo reigning above using flares and spotlights and the occasional one-handed shot from a handgun.

There are mounds of dead sharpteeth on both sides of the barrier. Only a few villagers are down.

Max reloads Cheedo's handgun for her without asking. She doesn't thank him, takes it and shoots a sharpteeth right off the barricade and keeps on with the shouting of the orders.

He slides down the incline of rock to hit the dirt. Two War Boys are grabbing armloads of spears and handing them out. Max takes six, as much as he can carry, and positions himself atop a boulder, protecting a huddled group of the older villagers who can't fight but can reload weapons just as well instead.

A sharpteeth pokes his head over. Max takes aim and throws, catches him in the shoulder and sets him aflame.

An old woman villager is stringing packets of exploding jelly onto rope, a younger woman is tying the ends of said rope onto a stick and listening to the crone talk.

"You hit 'em in de head," the old woman says. She sucks on her teeth for punctuation and Max draws his own reloaded handgun and shoots a sharpteeth off the barricade.

"You hit 'em in de head, and they can't be getting back up again, no how." The crone nods at the three sharpteeth climbing in tandem over the barricade. Cheedo gets one from her perch, a young girl villager shoots another in the stomach so it stops moving, and Max throws his fourth spear at the remaining one, hitting it in the forehead and causing the entire newly-made corpse to light on fire.

"See, that's what I be talking of," the crone says, radiating approval.

Max snorts and holds his hand down to her. She puts the stick of jelly packets into his hand, both ends tied to the stick and a noose of explosives dangling from it.

A fire spreads from one corpse to the other three. The one the girl shot in the stomach is still writhing a bit.

"Get sticks!" Cheedo yells at a group of young War Boys. They grab long heavy poles used to shove metal around on a platform and proceed to use them on the corpses, just to shove them back onto the other side.

Max coughs and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. The smell is horrible, it burns.

Cheedo calls out from her makeshift crow's nest. "What's the balloon thing?"

Max stands tall and peers over the barricade. Something stitched together is rolling to the barricade. It's light yellow in this moonlight, and it scares the hell out of Max.

"It's gas," he says. Cheedo shouts, "What?" and he says louder, "It's gas! Figure out how to get it away!"
He looks up in time to see Cheedo's head disappear back into her nest. He grabs another spear and takes aim at a sharpteeth that keeps on crawling despite the bullets being pumped into his body.

Someone shouts high above, a young voice, sounds like Ferrous. There's a mechanical cranking that has villagers and sharpteeth alike looking up at the sky for the source of it.

A burst of fire where the cranking was. Max's attention goes to the flame just like everyone else, and the flying machine dangling long chains swoops out, improvised balloons of something gaseous tethered to the wings that stiffly pump to keep it in the air.

He doesn't think about it. He jumps as the machine flies past and grabs the closest chain, holds on for dear life.

It carries him over the barricade, his boots just skimming over the thick layer of corpses. Sharpteeth pelt his legs with bits of the barrier they've ripped off, he kicks some of it away and endures the rest.

The machine flies over the balloon. He slides down the chain and tries to hook the end onto the metal strut that serves as a frame for the balloon. The machine is pulling on it, the chain is jangling, there are so many issues with this idea of his.

He gets one chain snagged around it, grabs at another. But the machine pulls the balloon right out from under him and he falls back, rolls down the side of the thing as its dragged out into the desert about a foot off the ground.

He lands on a swarm of sharpteeth who are snapping at his arms and trying to bash his face in with rocks. He hears Cheedo's voice shout, "IT'S LEAVING, GO GO GO," and he punches down at a sharpteeth under him, then rolls off the writhing mass to get to the ground. A villager - male, older, with a very long pointed stick - stabs at the sharpteeth he punched to keep it from getting up and following him.

He looks out over the desert. The glow of the balloon shows it's been dragged right past the fighting and beyond.

Max runs away from the clash of villagers and sharpteeth to the abandoned vehicles. He finds a cycle laying sideways in the dirt and picks it up, tries to start engine doesn't even sputter. He drops it back down and begins to run instead.

He skirts the clash of sharpteeth and War Boys, eyes on the dimming fire from the machine and the flickering leftovers of the balloon. He might hear Furiosa's voice hollering in the night, he might not. Everything's gone blurry, his skin is too tight across his bones.

All he can hear is his ragged breathing and his heartbeat when he catches up to the crash. The sun is starting to rise to the East with its embryonic greenish cast against the sand. It outlines the jagged form of the machine sticking out from the dirt, clouds of orange gas roiling across the sand at about knee-height.

Max wades through the gas as quickly as he can without kicking it up to his face. The smell of sulphur is acidic at the back of his throat. He's gonna need treatment if he doesn't get out of here soon.

But what of the pilot of the machine.

He grabs at the top part, some hollow bowl of metal designed to help keep the pilot conscious in flight. It took Toast ages to get it right.

He rips it off clean. Then he grabs the opened rim that leads down into the machine, braces one foot on the side and leaves the other foot on the dirt, and leans back with as much force as he can muster.

The cracks along the side of the machine widen, he can see a flash of skin streaked with burns inside.

He heaves backward once more and the upper third gives way, bent back as if on a hinge. Max stumbles a little, regains his balance, then leans into the machine to pull Toast out.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," he chants.

Toast gives a watery cough and shudders, from the pain he's well acquainted with, he knows.

"Your face is stupid," she croaks.

. . .

Toast has a cosy room that opens out over the cavern that houses her shop. Ferrous is down there trying to make braces out of scrap metal and record ammunition stores all at once while she reclines on her bed and coughs irritably at Capable.

The latest batch of herbs to try on Toast's burns apparently itch. Better than inhaling the smoke, which has plenty of villagers down with a case of itchy lungs.

Max sits square on one of Toast's massive metal boxes of loose machine schematics. He's under orders to shove her back into bed if she gets up to order Ferrous around.

Furiosa comes in to watch Toast while Capable leaves to check on her boys. She dabs at Toast's wounds with a sodden cloth, shoulders hunched and her mechanical arm left somewhere else.

Max looks her over. She's bruised, scabbed in places, but he can't see bandages except for a short length around her left bicep. Sometimes he forgets she can be fragile. Fortunately she uses the shards of fragility to cut out the throats of her enemies, so he's not terribly worried.

"Where's the machine?" he asks.

Furiosa looks at him blankly for a moment as she parses the question. Finally, "In the square. Villagers are purifying it by throwing dirt on it."

Toast sits up from her pillows in outrage.

"THAT IS DELICATE MACHINERY AND THEY'RE DOING WHAT?"
Furiosa shushes Toast and gently shoves her back. Max shifts his weight, kicks his heels against the floor to tap out his boots.

"Any alive?" he asks.

Furiosa presses a full water cup into Toast's hands, who sips it in a quiet rage.

"You can come along if you want," she says without looking at him. "Later. Tonight."

. . .

The deep part of the Citadel is underground for miles, but the main entry is set from the base, a winding stair with ramps for goods on rollers along the outer side; circling, circling.
Last time Max was down here, he was a blood bag.

Old equipment is hanging around. Toast is obviously pilfering from it for parts now and again, but the structural husks remain like monsters huddled against the walls.

They captured two sharpteeth alive. Furiosa ordered them held still with bits in their mouths and limbs spread-eagle against the curved tops of two rocks.

A War Boy, older than most, one Max hasn't seen before, waves both hands at Furiosa in greeting. He has a raging fire to the side with metal rods sticking out to keep the kindling going, doubles to keep the cold at bay.

Furiosa nods at him and leans against the wall.

Max follows suit and the War Boy turns to the sharptooth to his left, brandishes his bare hand, and begins to pinch the sharptooth's soft underbelly.

Max watches the torture passively. The War Boy has ragged fingernails, it probably hurts.
He leans to the side, closer to Furiosa.

"Interesting technique."

Furiosa's lips quirk. "There was a book that The Dag found in Joe's rooms..."

"What was it about? Irritating someone to death?" Max snorts.

"Psychological warfare."

Max stops making fun, because this is beyond interesting, this is mean. He looks at the side of Furiosa's face, but she's not giving a damn thing away.

The Assigned Torturer goes to the fire and pulls out a metal rod, three inches in diameter and pointed at the end. Without so much as a by-you-leave he slips it just under the skin over the ribs of the sharpteeth to the right and twists.

No questions have been asked yet, Max notes.

The sharpteeth who had been pinched starts to thrash in his confines. The one being jabbed with the hot poker screeches, but stays still.

"We suckle from our mother's breast," the pinched one wails. The one with the poker in its ribs shakes its head, but the other doesn't see and keeps screaming. "Then we tear it from her with our second set to nourish our souls to take the lives of others, for women are the torture and the death, they are the magma of the earth, they bring us here to suffer and-"

Furiosa closes her eyes, clenches her fists. She turns and leaves, steps sounding heavy on the stairs.

Max crosses his arms and leans against the wall to watch.

. . .

Cheedo is the most civilised of them all, apparently. The War Boys find her magical, Capable as an irritating little sister, Toast hasn't got much to do with her for some reason, and The Dag works closely with her on the Villager's needs and how to make a healthy population.

Max watches Cheedo move around the base of the Citadel, navigating piles of refuse without much thought and ordering the healthy ones left on how to make a barricade just in case they're attacked again in the night.

He removes himself from his perch behind a tall rock and approaches. She sees him but does not face him.

"I'm here to help move things," he tells her.

She jerks her head towards the burnt out car that some of the village boys are trying to shove to the opening of the Citadel's grounds, to use as a base for the Eastern barricade.

He goes over to help shove and pull and arrange without a word.

Not soon after, he's gasping for breath. He rests by bending in half and resting his hands on his knees, sucking in lungful after lungful of air. The dirt is sandy and light coloured in this portion of the Citadel, and Cheedo's feet appear to the side wearing ripped up boots with the toes worn away to show the steel caps underneath.

"Do I need to get Furiosa?" she asks. He looks up at her face to see arms crossed and a twist to her mouth.

Max holds up his hands and backs off. He's wheezing with every breath, the area across his ribs feel like fire has licked up under them and is still smoldering down beneath the skin.

He picks a spot next to the little War Boys who have also run out of breath and need rest. He picks a boulder on the edge so he doesn't bother their stick games, but they start to creep close as soon as he's looking the other way.

A War Boy settles next to him, taps him on the arm. This one is no more than ten years old, the ragged scarring around his eyes look familiar.

"I got another lizard, you wan' see?" he asks Max.

Max grins. Nods. "Sure."

The War Boy pulls a large sack up from the ground onto the boulder they're sitting on. He tugs at the drawstring, opens it, and withdraws a dried head of another huge lizard, sans eyes.

He says, "There were lots of heads, but this one was easy to get off than the ones still moving."

Max stares at the head, goes still.

"...where was this?"

"Down in the rock." And he points out the grate set into the rock that is propped open.

. . .

Furiosa stands on the opposite side of the grate, shaking her head.

Max points at it with much greater emphasis and growls.

"We send scouts for the filtration maintenance, nothing more. We can't spare exploration right now."

"There's bloody lizards down there the size of a child, and you want to leave them?" Max seethes. He's as close as he's ever got to shouting at Furiosa post-Joe era, and he's vibrating at the effort it takes not to give in.

Furiosa looks at the grate, then back up at him.

"What, you going to blow them up?"

"If I have to. What will you do if they find a way out and eat through the stores? What if they kill people you can't spare?"

Cheedo's been standing to the side watching with her arms crossed. She makes a noise and hugs herself. "How do we defend against something in the ground, then?"

All three of them look at the open grate, at the dirt.

"Give me weapons, a couple veterans," Max all but pleads. "I'll take care of it."

Furiosa's jaw works. She continues to stare at the grate.

"You hurt yourself, I'm not making you a new limb."

. . .

It's a cavern into the rock. Three feet of dirt layered on top, then nothing but carved and wet and something dripping off somewhere Max cannot see.

Three War Boys go with him on order of Furiosa. They carry torches, backup torches, rope, and one has a blanket folded and strapped to his shoulder.

He leads the way and pretends they're not there strictly to make sure he doesn't fall and hit his head. They follow, murmuring little jokes back and forth and letting him do what he wants.

A lizard skitters into the torchlight on their way. Then it skitters back out. The thing is the size of a loose tyre, nothing unusual this far down into the earth. Max doesn't mention it to the War Boys.

After ten minutes of travel they hit the Filtration Device. There's a pump attached to one end, steadily cranking and winding along, and a display of yellow lines across a panel near the front. The War Boy with the blanket over his shoulder walks up to said panel and taps it.

"These're good PH levels, man. Sufficient like."

Max rubs a hand across his forehead.

"Do you know what a sufficient PH level is?" he asks.

The War Boy gestures to the panel.

"Yeah, it's that."

Max nods. "Right-o."

The other two War Boys poke at the long tube filter encased in glass and has water burbling halfway around it. Max peers into the corners of the cave, counts no less than six different narrow entrances that lead off into the dark unknown.

A susurrus of a sound is in the third entrance, something like slithering. Max checks his shotgun, racks the barrel, and steps closer to it.

PH War Boy shrieks. Max spins around, shotgun leading.

A lizard with three heads and multiple ragged headless necks has slid out from the top of the filtration machine and is chewing on the leg of the shrieking War Boy. He's moaning and kicking at it, the other two are trying to beat off the two free heads with their metal sticks.

Max shoots one head to smithereens. Takes aim, pulls the trigger, wings the head that's chewing on a War Boy just across the top.

It releases the War Boy's leg and rears back to snarl at him.

The other remaining head snaps at the entire room and hisses.

. . .

He directs the War Boys to take the dead lizard to the smaller ones who normally hunt them outside the Citadel. The little ones are thrilled and start shouting as they attack the corpse with their rockflint knives.

Furiosa hears the commotion and wanders over from a Rig being outfitted near the barricade. Her face takes a twist to it that means she's less than pleased.

"There's a place further down past the filtration," Max tells her. "Been locked up for a while. Give me some exploding jelly."

Furiosa gives him a long hard look, then rolls her eyes.

"Fine. If you get it open then Toast and Cheedo get first pick."

He grins at her, blood streaked and dirty everywhere. "Naturally."

. . .

The explosive jelly is best used smeared across the weak spots of the massive vault door Max found post-lizard attack. The hinges are deep set into the rock, probably so no one can shoot them off. Max's fingers are burning from the acid in the jelly as he packs more of the tinged-blue substance down into the cracks, keeping the chain unbroken.

The War Boy with his leg wrapped is hobbling from point a to point b for Max, his very own Ferrous but without the smarts. Max holds his hand out for a cloth to wipe his fingers, and the War Boy hands it to him, the jagged remains of his sewn shut lips gaping wide as he smiles at him.

"Get behind the rock," Max tells him, jerks his head.

The War Boy nods, hobbles away. Max crouches to the floor to peer at the crack of the hinge where he made the jelly thinnest.

He has a match in his pocket. The flames will spread quickly, he'll have to run.

The match-head is a dark flint phosphorus of Toast's design, but Capable is the one who found the substance used for the stick. A twining vegetable matter that the Dag was throwing in for kindling, since it did nothing after it was separated from the meat she grew.

He flicks the head with his thumb nail. Instant flare of light. He lowers it to the bottom of the vault door until the flame is just touching the jelly, then drops the match to turn and run.

A big woosh of heat hits him in the back. He throws himself behind the rock, the War Boy grabs him by his jacket and pulls him further behind the cover.

The door buckles inward, groans loud and long. The second smear of jelly spread in a circle in the centre of the door lights and the whirling lock on the front blows off, sails down the hall right past Max and the War Boy.

Three-foot long slabs of steel crash to the ground to reveal a dimly lit room beyond. Smoke fills the corridor. Max leans against the rock and removes a strip of cloth from his jacket pocket, then ties it around his mouth.

The War Boy hands him goggles, his already in place. Max shoves the strap over his head and fumbles with the glasses because his eyes are already watering.

Max leads the way past the licks of flame that will burn themselves out in time and into the dusty room beyond. And by dusty, Max sees even through the smoke it's thick and settled across everything. Bookshelves. Machinery. Jugs of something clear.

Cabinets line the wall to his left and his right. Ahead is another sliver of dark that carves into the wall and is surrounded by stacked crates and bookshelves.

"This is great!" The War Boy shouts. His voice echoes and makes Max wince. "It's a catch!"

The smoke has cleared out, mostly. Max pulls off his goggles tentatively, judges it sufficiently clear, and pulls off his mouth cloth too.

"Cache," Max corrects absently as he peers around.

The War Boy is following his lead when Toast and Cheedo stomp in. They wave their hands in front of their faces and cough a lot, but Toast is eyeing the machines with a bit of lust in her eye, and Cheedo is glaring at Max, so it's nothing new or unusual.

"Please, do come in and make yourself at home," Max drawls.

The two women ignore him.

Toast runs her fingers along spines of books on shelving, skips her fingertips along the ornamental bookends that waste space but look shiny.

"This is a stockpile," she says.

Max stands in the centre of the room and looks around, full-circuit. "Joe?"

Cheedo throws a pile of dusty rags of a nubby cloth onto the ground. She's pulling them from a cabinet, the double doors open to reveal it to be crammed with items at least an arms-length back.

"Oh yeah, definitely Joe."

Furiosa waits an hour before she comes down to look around herself. By then Toast is slicked up to her elbows in fresh motor oil as she investigates a hulk of metal something with long moving parts and forks stuck on top, and Cheedo is halfway through counting up the stocked ammo in one of the tall closets along the far wall.

Max has been exploring. He greets Furiosa by handing her a winding torch. The plastic is cracked and will never protect the delicate innards from the sand, but it's nice to look at.

"All of it Priceless Junk, but could turn this place on its head if we started to use it."

"This is a cultivator!" Toast shouts. She has a wrench in her hand and is waving it around. "I saw it in a book once!"

He points to a dark space behind him. Wide enough for a man to pass through without his shoulders touching the sides, but only barely.

"There's a passage that leads out the other end and runs for three miles. Sand over the lid, we haven't opened it."

Furiosa closes her eyes and tips her head back.

"What direction does it lead?"

"North."

She opens her eyes and levels a look at the passage opening. "Around where the sharpteeth drop their cars?"

Max nods. "Yeah, around there."

"And here I was thinking they were coming after us because they thought we were weak." Her mouth twists.

Cheedo bangs the lid down on one of the ammo boxes. "Hey now, let's not get ahead of ourselves," she says.

Max shrugs. "It probably helped them make their choices."

. . .

The captured sharpteeth choke on their own blood. The War Boy who was watching them reports that they were, full quote, "Total dedicated, man. Top stuff. Swallowed their teeth. Impressive!"

Furiosa glares at her small bowl of green beans. The War Boy doesn't notice and continues with his rhapsodic delight.

Max, long finished with his own food and now skimming Furiosa's inherited collection of ancient "Nuclear Fallout Shelter Necessities" literature, slides further down his seat and tries to stay out of the way.

. . .

Down in the Vault, as they're still calling it, Toast is disassembling machinery with Ferrous doing delicate work to assist. Max is helping this venture by moving things as directed.

His back is still bruised and his neck still stiff, but The Dag said he got out relatively lucky overall so he should get out of her sight and go do something useful.

Furiosa was unsympathetic, so he went to the underground to work with Toast. She tolerates him better.

"Move this cannon thing into the light." Toast indicates a boxy machine with a long nozzle sticking at an eighty degree angle out of the top. The barrel, if that is indeed what it is, is bigger than Max's head.

There is no elegant way to move the thing from point a to point b, so Max just shoves it until it's in the centre of the room, as per Toast's request.

Ferrous is thumbing through some crumbling books on the back wall. He coughs at the dirt that Max stirred up, sneezes into the dry paper.

Toast yells at him, "Hey!" and Ferrous hunches his shoulders.

Max leans against the boxy thing to catch his breath. His bruises haven't had the chance to heal yet, and all of them are throbbing like hell beat him up out in the wastes and then left him to die in a lizard pit.

A massive bang happens out in the hall, distant enough it only makes the cabinet doors shake off their coating of dirt, not swing about.

Max forgets his bruises and runs out the door to see what's happening. He comes face to face with a sharpteeth running headlong down the hall. In the light of day it looks like a grotesque lizard with human limbs, and Max immediately sets about killing it with a wrench and some dedication.

"What's going on?" Toast shouts. She's still wrestling with the gun locker.

Max grabs at the makeshift door Capable got installed the night before and slams it closed after him. It's not as thick as the original, but it has hinges and will stop anything short of a concentrated explosion from getting beyond it.

"HEY!" Toast shouts from inside the room.

"Arm yourselves, then come out," Max explains loudly.

He hauls up the stairs, runs into a duo of sharpteeth who clearly weren't expecting him. He shoves one against the rock hard enough its neck snaps, kicks the other one in the gut on the same pass and uses the knife he put in his boot this morning to slash its throat open.

He crouches down, wipes the blade on his jeans and puts it back into his boot, then continues on.

In the room with the Filtration Machine there are four War Boys. Three are finishing off a group of five sharpteeth, another is sitting next to the machine looking dazed. Max checks on the dazed one and sees an indentation on his skull that shouldn't be there.

"They dropped in!" one of the other War Boys shouts. Max looks up to see them pointing at the passage that leads to the grate up topside.

"Get him to Capable or Dag," he indicates the Boy with the bashed head, "Then join the fight."

They converge on their Brother and Max runs down the hall to the grate. It's open, he jumps up the steps carved in the rock and exits into the bedlam of open air.

The sun went down hours ago, so there's quite a bit of screaming in the dark. The moon isn't out, or its covered by clouds, so all he can see are flashes of teeth and the bits of torches that the Villagers are using.

Standing like an unsung hero is Furiosa in some of that very torchlight. She's on top of a stack of sharpteeth corpses, rifle in hand, and shooting at things out in the dark. Cheedo assists on the ground, reloading clips and shouting orders at anyone who hesitates.

Max goes to them. He has to beat back four sharpteeth at once, but they don't see him coming so it only takes a little bit of effort.

Cheedo looks up in time to see him finish with the fourth. She shouts, "We need light!" at him. In their torchlight Max sees a sharpteeth rise behind Cheedo with its mouth open, and he pulls a rusty six chamber from the belt of a dead sharpteeth and shoots it before it can hit her.

Cheedo whirls around to look at it, and Furiosa takes notice of him. But first she shoots another sharpteeth, then begins to reload.

"You're supposed to protect Toast!" she shouts over slamming a fresh clip home.

"She can protect the Vault with the new guns!" he yells over her next two shots. She pauses to aim at a sharpteeth trying to climb the side of the Citadel. "I'm helping you!"

She shoots the sharpteeth. It falls to the base of the Citadel like a rotting bag of human skulls Max saw once at a Slaver's Market.

"Suit yourself," she tells him, then jumps off the stack of sharpteeth corpses to look around.

A sharpteeth near the entry to the base of the Citadel lets out a wailing cry. Others answer with the same wail out in the darkness. Then, one by one, they light themselves on fire.

Furiosa growls like a wild dog and shoots the closest flaming sharpteeth in the head. The corpse falls to the ground and continues to burn. The swaths of fabric is soaked in something that lets out a yellow fume as it burns, makes Max cough familiarly.

Max sees some of the villager men, older but not feeble, hesitate. Their women grab the guns from their still hands and take aim themselves, pick off the easy targets for them.

Max looks at Furiosa. "This is a distraction."

"Yeah, no shit," she snarls at him. Then up to the bodies hurrying along the walkways of the Citadel on both sides, "We gonna get some lights out here?!"

Capable shouts back from somewhere above, "We're working on it!"

Max shakes his head and runs back to the grate. The three standing War Boys are there, keeping more sharpteeth from entering. They have cuts that bleed freely down their arms, faces, torsos, and the blood glints in the corpselight.

"He's at the medic station," one of them offers without Max asking.

"Then back to the Vault, boys," Max orders. They part to let him down, then scramble down the rock after him.

He runs headlong down the winding hallway, past the Filtration Machine that was left alone by the combatant, skips over a couple corpses, and comes to a stop at the Vault door. It stayed closed exactly the way he left it. He hears the War Boys run up behind him, so he grabs the handle and swings it open.

Toast stands there aiming a shotgun at his head. He drops to the ground just as she pulls the trigger. The buckshot flies over his head and hits a War Boy in the shoulder.

The War Boy faints back into his two Brothers' arms, and Toast curses.

Max uses the warped doorframe to shakily pull himself back up.

"The passage?"

Toast jerks her head back towards the far wall. "Ferrous is taking care of it."

Max grabs a rifle from the stack of guns next to her, as many clips as he can hold in one hand (which is a total of four), and an electric torch. He points at the War Boys dragging the fainted one into the room, they stop dead and stare at him.

"Protect her," he tells them and indicates Toast.

She smiles wide at them, shows all her teeth.

One of the War Boys swallows loud enough it sounds like a gunshot.

Max runs down the back passage. He keeps the rifle pointed ahead of him but his finger is off the trigger; he doesn't want to shoot Ferrous by mistake.

There's a fire blast up ahead. Max runs faster. Familiar shrieks belonging to sharpteeth echo against the rock and into his ears.

Ferrous is up there with a cloth over his mouth and nose, goggles on, and is using a handpump on some propelled fireblower that is running full stream at the sharpteeth trying to get at him.

Max hoists the rifle to his shoulder, stops running at fifteen yards away, and shoots two sharpteeth in the head with two quick squeezes of the trigger.

Ferrous ducks down so he's not in the way and keeps the fire going, low, cutting the invading forces off at the knees.

Max takes cautious steps between each shot, but does his best. He wings a few. Headshots for the rest. Eventually they stop coming, and Max comes to a stop next to Ferrous who has stopped pumping the machine and is letting the fire spit out until nothing.

There's a mass of corpses strewn down the hallway. Most are on fire and smoking. It's impossible to know if any chose to run away, or if this is all of them.

The immediate pile of bodies goes up to Max's knees. He kicks one off the top to send it tumbling down the other side. It rolls only so far before it catches on other corpses and goes still.

"This is gonna smell horrible when the sun comes up," he says.

"Not really. The cool of the underground will keep 'em fresh." Ferrous inspects the canister attached to his directional firebomb wotsit. "Furiosa won't let us use them for lizard bait. She says it taints the meat."

Max hums. "She's generally right about these things."

He leans down to search through the pockets of one of the less burnt corpses near him. There's a hole right through its neck, so one of Max's kills. He finds bits of string, a bobbin, and three coins hot to the touch.

He skips the coins from one hand to the other and blows on them. Then he brings them up to the dim light and inspects the stamps on either side.

The stamped image on one side is familiar, and not in a good way.

Max curses, "Fuck," and pockets them.

Ferrous pokes at a corpse at the bottom of the pile.

"This one is still breathing, do I shoot it?"

. . .

He checks the breaks for sand. Fingers around the rim of the gasket on the guzzoline tank to feel for grit or a build up of oil. Tests the straps on the bags of goods he's supposed to be hauling for bartering purposes for leniency, how yielding they are.

Yesterday he was a Road Warrior.

Today he is a Pack Mule.

Ferrous stands opposite of Max. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, has reverted back to stooping as a way of spinal expression.

"What's that in your hands?" Max asks. He jerks his head towards the scrap of white fabric.

"It's a handkerchief," Ferrous answers.

Max hums. Then he kicks the tires.

Furiosa is doing the same as him to her own cycle. Hers has two wheels to his three, because she is leading and needs manoeuvrability.

"Ten day ride," she says as she checks the mount for her rifle on across the handlebars. Cheedo stands behind her with arms crossed, face stone.

"Ten days back," Cheedo says.

Furiosa grins over at Max.

He does not grin back.

"I'm doing this under duress."

She rolls her eyes and swings one leg over the cycle, settles in the seat. "Tough luck, you're going."

Max doesn't get on his cycle.

"She'll make me fight again."

"Oh, now you don't want to fight?"

There is a sour taste in Max's mouth. He twists his tongue inside his mouth, spits to the side. Attached to either side of his cycle are two hand-cannons wired to a trigger on the handle grips, via Toast. He adjusts the cover over the muzzle on one and sees that Ferrous is still wringing that handkerchief thing.

"What are you doing with that?"

Ferrous shrugs, hands it to him. "Heard knights get tokens? And bits of cloth for noses?"
Max takes it, for want of anything better to do.

"Oh, well, we can always use bits of cloth for noses."

Furiosa finishes talking to Cheedo and turns on her cycle. Max doesn't startle from the abrupt noise.

"You ready?" She asks him.

Max gets on his bike, flicks the ignition switch. "I don't want to go."

Furiosa grins and guns her engine.

"Stop whining."

Max kicks off the stand at the same time she does. Cheedo stands with the villagers, brushing good luck from their hearts and for Max and Furiosa to take with them on their journey in a repetitive smooth motion.

Toast and The Dag and Capable stand up high where the water spouts used to run, watching. Ferrous steps back, hands hanging limp at his sides.

Max gives a short wave of farewell that is meant to apply tall of them. Furiosa doesn't do a damn thing except lead the way out.

So they roar out of the Citadel. Main Road to Bullet Farm, short trip, less than an hour.

Then on via the South to Bartertown.