-Slit-
If you haven't heard your own name in a while, I recommend hearing it half naked. I had heard it through her fingers, she'd tried to muffle it and failed but I'd heard it, my name. And nowhere else had it sounded so chrome. The nut now slept sound and deep. She slept like that last time too, on her side with her curled arm under her head and a thick line of spittle running out from the corner of her lip. She probably wouldn't have a disturbance, if this was indeed like the last time in the car, so it seemed safe enough to let her dream. We had to pull up our trousers and cinch up our belts, unfortunately. Couldn't lay around buck-ass nude this close to an installment of Scrotus Pukes. I might have given in to the desire to drift off, but every so once in a while I could hear them over there and it, thankfully, kept me awake and alert.
This probably wasn't supposed to happen, it just did. I really used to hate her freaking guts. She was and is overbearing, temperamental, obsessive, irritating, stubborn, and hopelessly chipper about the darkest shit... But she was also tolerant, durable, determined, observant, praising and finally, she was forgiving. She's a fool. A long time ago I could have easily rewarded her forgiveness by taking my chances, bludgeoning her in the head, and stealing her bike to go out and die like a proper War Boy. I didn't, I was too afraid to fail again, later became resigned to everything, and then failed to drag myself out of the meaningless fog of that despair until after she almost got her head blown off by the lightning. Things hadn't been at their worst directly before that, but it hadn't been good either. I existed, did the absolute minimum of what she required me to do, and in turn demanded her hands to stop myself from dwelling on the ruin of my life and the gates which were surely closed to me for good. I used to think about little else aside from eat, shit, work on the car, shine hand, sleep. That's all there had been for me and I was too much of a coward to eat a bullet. Now, I thought about tomorrows and next weeks and things that felt so far away and too close at once. I thought about my half life, her full life, and how long the two would overlap. There were other things to think about too, the new, fun things. My head felt stuffed full enough to crack open like a ripe bird egg. At least, for the moment, I could think about nothing else but how much I liked my hand spread over the curve of her hip. She looked shine, even when her mouth was hanging wide open and drooling.
I hate visual perfection for the sake of aesthetic. A rusted mallet gets the job done if the goal is to smash lizards. You can take the rust off in a chemical bath, polish it up, make it pretty, but if you doll it up just to have a perfect hammer, what the fuck are you doing? If something is too pretty to be useful, then what use is it? Something good doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to work. That logic probably has something to do with the thing that looks back at me in the rear-view glass. Nothing about me is good to look at, but I look at Dune and she looks at me. We're not a couple polished show hammers, that's for damn sure, but I think we both liked what we saw. I liked it when her eyebrows rose up and the maul of razors turned into that big opened mouthed smile formed around a laugh.
When dusk came, I had to wake her. She whimpered and bitched, I held a hand over her mouth and suffered the guilt for it but when she was aware enough not to be noisy about it, she scratched my hand away and got to her feet. There was a badly suppressed moan, sounded like pain.
"What's your problem?" I know it came off my tongue sounding ugly. Didn't necessarily mean it that way and found myself biting the unruly appendage that had produced those rusted words.
She muttered under her breath, cursed her redheaded harpy friend for some reason, and began to undo her belt. I felt my teeth clench and threaten to pinch scar tissue. We didn't have time for this. We had a tiny-ass window of time when the last phantom glows of the sun just below the horizon gave us enough light to see what we were doing but probably not enough light to be noticed at a distance. With her belt undone, she pulled out the waistband of her pants and hunched a bit to look down into her grundies with yet another curse and a twisting of her upper lip.
What the hell? What was going on in her pants to get a reaction like that? The fun we'd had was messy, pretty sure it's supposed to be, and she should expect that since it was that way last time, too. I tried having a look, thinking something was going on that shouldn't be, but the second I leaned forward she pulled back her waistband in one hand while the shine hand slapped over my face and shoved me away.
"Gah! Get your eyeballs outta my business, nosy bastard!" she snarled as I stumbled back to catch myself with hands thrown back against stone.
I didn't expect that kind of reaction. So, I still didn't understand what went on in her head. We could fondle each other all over with our bare asses in the wind, but taking a look down her britches was a step too far? I didn't get it.
"What's the matter with your junk?" I questioned, a moment afterward wondering if whatever was going on with her was my fault.
She was digging around in her pockets and the pouches stitched to her trousers. Out into her hand came a tightly wound roll of cloth, the same as the kind she used to wrap me up with when my skin was raw with blisters and burns.
"Turn around." she said, then demanded almost in a plea which stank of embarrassment. "Turn around. Don't look."
My brows quirked, but I did as I was told, if for no other reason then the novelty of seeing something smacking of humiliation on the shameless woman's face for the first time.
"You... Uh. You okay?"
"Yes." she fairly swore the word.
"You sure?" I tried again to be certain.
"Yes. I'm fine." she muttered that one in the first person, which usually meant she was not fine. I heard her clothes rustling. Was she bandaging herself somewhere?
"Are you bleeding?" It was hand thrown thrown out into the dark as far as questions go. It just popped into my head. What else would you use a bandage for?
"Wha'did ya just say?" she croaked.
I heard her zipper pulled back up and took that as being allowed to turn to look at her. She was glaring into my eyes when I turned, waiting for me to repeat myself as she pulled her belt tight and buckled back up.
I cringed at the question I had asked, becoming aware that if she was bandaging a part of herself that had to do with grundies, then it meant there were only a few places she could be bleeding from. I felt my own blood running out of my head and pooling around my guts. I simultaneously felt ill, like I had to piss, and like there wasn't enough red stuff in my skull. And why would that be bleeding? Unless I did something to it when-
"Hey, Ducky? Oh, oh! Sit down."
I couldn't tell how loud her voice was. It sounded far away. So, I uttered a "Shhh" to be sure as she pushed at me till I found a wall of stone and slid down it only to try pulling myself back up and clutching at her pant leg while my vision started getting dark around the edges like a tunnel.
"I'm sorry... I- shit! I'm sorry!" that makes exactly four times I've ever said that to her and meant it. Fuck, it was well earned if it was for wrecking her there.
I was being shushed then as she pushed down on my shoulders with her palms, maybe to keep me seated.
"What are- for what, Ducky?" she asked, grabbing at my head to force me to look at her.
I have absolutely no idea what I babbled at her in some kind of dizzied panic, but she'd nodded and thankfully didn't let me go on too long, before panic could become self loathing at what I thought I'd done to her.
"My good green goddess. You really are just a poor boy in a man suit. Aren't you?" she spoke as if somebody had just sucked all of the inappropriate happiness right out of her. Made me feel guilty, but it also reminded me of something Phil said once. 'I was a thirty six year old boy' he'd told me while I was off my face, drunk.
"It's normal." she added to her ruthlessly stinging words about me. I didn't have it in me to feel too lousy about her accusing me of being a pup, I was still stuck on how badly I thought I had screwed her up.
"Bleeding out your breeder bits?!"
"Don't say the B-word, Slit." she growled through her gnashing teeth and continued. "And, yes. Normal. Every month, normal"
"Every... Month, normal?" I repeated after her dumbly. Hell week. It had to do with hell week.
She only sighed at me and sat down herself as I recovered from that revelation. I didn't somehow wreck her innards, good, but bleeding from a place like that doesn't sound great either. Pieces started clicking together in my head as if it had all needed another part to fit together the whole ordeal of hell week. Made sense that blood accompanies the pain Dune obviously dealt with around this time. I'd also figured out that all women did this. Ardith was definitely even less pleasant on a schedule, just like Dune, and when I asked Crank about it he laughed in my face and practically chirped a curt 'yep' without bothering to elaborate on why. Why was the only part that was missing from this picture, so that was the next word out of my pathetic face. I had narrowly avoided literally fainting at the idea of blood in Dune's drawers that I might have caused. Humiliating. She sighed at me again.
"You know what, Slit? I think the less you know, the happier you'll be right now." she said, and for the moment, I agreed.
I recovered from this. I could accept that this happens. I tried not to examine it too much. Probably for the best. Dune didn't seem to be willing to answer any more questions about it at the moment. We lost the faint light of dusk over this, which made the climb down treacherous and nearly impossible. It was a mess, dozens of near slips and if we hadn't been heard sending down small cascades of crumbling rock, then those Scrotus Boys must be as deaf as we were. To V8, I prayed we hadn't been seen.
I forgot about Dune's personal hell. I was thinking about the nearby danger which was armed to their snaggled teeth. Scrotus Boys tend to take a very dim view on the world. In their minds, anything they set eyes on belonged to their warlord, who was years dead even before the road war which changed everything. Scrotus has seemingly risen from death's grip before, though, so it was no wonder they still regarded him in high esteem. I too had admired the war stories of Scabrous as told by Scrotus Boys, even if I'd often wanted to bloody the lips those words were chundered from. I'd also gotten the impression that Scrotus Boys feared their leader as much as loved him. Maybe they feared the possibility of his return from death, so remained loyal. Thinking about that kind of peril kept my skull meat off of the very immediate danger of falling down a mountain and breaking my V8 damned neck. I'd say that I couldn't reach the bottom soon enough but, any sooner and it would have been because I rolled down the rest of the way. It wasn't overly comfortable to walk on the shale and rocky rubble, but at least it meant we were pretty close to the foot of the mountain. One last drop off before somewhat level ground. I couldn't find it in myself to make commentary on the fact that Dune reached out and found two handfuls of my ass while trying to, I guess, find me and make sure I didn't just fall on top of her on my way down.
Now, the walking. It wasn't a big deal next to climbing down the mountain, but I was kind of glad it was probably too dark for Dune to watch me limp around on the screaming stump. It felt like the thing had grown teeth and started chewing on itself. We were keeping close and bumping shoulders to make sure we don't get separated in the dark. There was some moonlight, enough to see some of that silver light reflecting around the top edges of stones but not enough to avoid tripping over your own feet on uneven ground. The last five minutes of the hike was the worst. Wherever I go, the last hundred yards of any given walk makes me want to chew glass. I couldn't wait to not be walking, for that matter I couldn't wait to pull off the damn leg and maybe dunk the whole stub in cold aqua-cola. Dune grumbled every step of the way and a few times stopped, and bent forward to grind her palms into her lower back. I should have expected Hell Week to start at any minute and with a bang. She was doing that the whole way up the mountain that morning too, the headache and the real nasty attitude couldn't be too far behind. We were both so eager to get to the bike and out of here that we didn't bother to be too quiet as we closed in on where we'd stashed it, we also didn't notice the faint but warm light of a camping lamp which belonged to neither of us as we rounded the rocky rubble behind which the bike was parked. We both froze, and the silhouette of a man in front of our ride froze too. Dune was quick as can be, she'd fallen into stance and lifted her lead-spitter faster than I could undo the strap holding my own piece secure in its holster. Dune didn't fire, wisely, the stranger was standing in front of the bike and holding up a spark torch to blind us. If she fired and missed, she could put a hole in the gas tank.
"HOLD IT!" We heard the man bark out through his clenched teeth. He was holding a firearm, maybe a Glock, I couldn't be sure. The bright light of a spark torch with working batteries made the cataracts in my right eye glow and flare with blurred orbs of burning white.
Dune seemed to realize first that we had the technical upper hand. She's thinking more like a War Boy every day, or I was thinking more like a Scav than I ever realized.
"Can't kill us both before you taste lead! Drop it!" Dune tried bleak reasoning. This was a standoff, two guns against one, if he blew one of us away, he'd still be shot before he could take aim at the second. No, I didn't want that to happen, one of us getting blown to the next realm, but truth was truth, this fucker would die if he discharged that weapon.
The sound of a bolt pulling back and sliding forward to move a bullet into a chamber stopped Dune from making any further demands, it wasn't her rifle, that sound came from behind us. The man ahead lowered his spark torch, revealing his smirking face to us. After a few Blinks, I saw white skin and smokey colored war paint around his eye sockets. He grinned at us savagely.
"Don't ya fuckin' move, Wretches!" called a second voice as I felt the barrel of a sniper's ruthless killing utensil pressed to my spine. I had no choice but to lift my arms and drop the Colt.
"OFF him." The War Boy behind me commanded Dune.
She was gentler about how she lowered her cherished weapon to the ground. They didn't care how she felt about the object, the man with a scoped rifle of his own circled around us and kicked it harshly toward the bike and out of her reach before picking up my revolver from the dirt and tucking it into his belt. A flicker of anger rose in my chest, that was mine.
The Boy by the bike approached now that we were held at the barrel of a long-shot. He put away his firearm for the moment to search us, starting, of course, with the woman. Why wouldn't he? War Boys seldom encounter women to begin with, so all that I could do was look on while some stranger put his hands all over the scav for the sake of the novelty. He found her emergency arm, a Beretta, and tucked that into his pocket, then further up her leg he found her knife, which he tossed that toward his mate's boots. The gunman nudged it a little further from us.
Dune sucked in a choked breath, which pulled my attention back to her. I found her standing stiffly with her arms over her head as the scum kneaded his way up her inner thighs, slowly, seemingly savoring the action and feel of it. Her teeth were bared as she sucked in ragged breaths and I could see her eyes darting all about under the dim light of the camping lamp. I twitched, leaning closer and leering a glare that could burn flesh unto the top of the naked head of this Scrotus grunt, but I heard the gunman shift his weight and only just restrained myself from moving. If I moved, he'd shoot. Images ran wild through my head, foul ones. A terror roared inside me. What if they did something to her right in front of me? I could only stand by and watch what happened. Shit. Shit .
This wasn't just some pat-down, this depraved fuck was groping around her hips for feel of ass and finally, as his hands slid over her belly and his thumb hooked under her tit, her fist flew down and boxed hard against his ear. Reaction is half instinct, any brawler will tell you that. I jerked toward them, wanting to drop kick this prick right in the mouth with the foot of the metal leg and get him off her but I felt the cool barrel tip of the Gunman's long-shot prod harshly against the back of my skull. Self preservation is instinct too. I froze a second time. I didn't want to die, holy shit, I didn't want to die. The Scrotus Boy had instantly grabbed Dune's wrist, twisted her arm around her back and damn near thrown her at the ground with his filthy fingers gripped tightly in her hair. A noise crawled out of me, something hissed through teeth and akin to the sound of an animal that did not like being cornered. Dune picked herself up after being ordered to stand. At least now, the little shit left her be. It was my turn to be searched, but I was watching Dune the whole time, trying to peer through the darkness at her face to see if she was okay. She just stood there, trembling with her arms at her sides. Not right, all shook up.
My blender wrenches were taken, stored away in the cargos of the man digging around in my pockets. Another blade, the one which often hung from the left side of my belt, was chucked at the feet of the gunner the same as Dune's knife. The little pervert almost gasped as my gauntlet came away from my arm and into his hands. The two argued around us over it while my hate burned hotter. In that moment, nothing could have pleased or satisfied me more than killing the both of them, carefully, in the ways only War Boys fear to die. My jaw was flexing so hard my molars twinged and ached.
"Aw, shine!"
"Ey! Who the hell says YOU get that?!"
"HEY! You already got the magnum! You can do with the sharps and the hand-cannon , I get THIS beaut!"
"If I didn't grab that when I could you'da taken that too, dong breath."
"Fast hands get the good shit."
He backed off once he was done with me. I couldn't reach him and if it weren't for the gun trained on my skull, I might have risked a swipe at him. Out came the Glock again, pointed toward HER instead of me. I was in his head, I've been him before, in his position, weaseling out the weaknesses of others. Without a rifle in her hands, Dune wasn't the big threat here; I was. It had been easy to overpower her, a much bigger bloke like me might not be easy at all and reacting like I had when he had his hands on her told him all that he needed to know. Threatening her would serve better to keep me compliant, and it burned to know that assumption was correct.
Dune's Beretta appeared in his left hand, pulled from his belt. He pressed the barrel flush to the gas tank of the bike. If he put a hole in that, there's no leaving here. Leaking guzz all over a hot motor and splashing back on the exhaust? That's a fire waiting to happen if there's any guzz left to speak of. He nodded his head at the gunman, who gathered the blades he got out of this before turning to start the dash for The Canyon to get others.
"Gonna ride your strappin' arse in for questioning. Been hoppin' mad around these parts all week. Boss wants to know whats up. After that... Hmph. Yir maggot food, Mate." The man left behind sneered at us. Dune seemed to shrink at that.
"Why the fuck would we say shit if you're just gonna kill us anyway, fuck you." I snapped back at him. Really, how dumb did he think I was? Even if it could benefit me, I'd refuse to talk out of spite.
"Boss cn' sway ya, very persuasive, he is..." He said with utter conviction, but paused and tilted his head with a half disbelieving smile. "Hey, do I know your ugly face from somewhere?"
"Fuck if I know." I declared, because why would I remember some painfully average face painted white and black out of more than two or three hundred I'd seen in my half-life? I didn't give a shit who he was or if we'd ever met, I was busy trying to figure out how to get out of this without getting us shot at. Dune was shuffling awkwardly next to me, I could hear that more than see it at my right, and reflexively leaned closer.
"Heh, Wait, YEAH! You're that Citadel tosser that almost knocked Fast Lenny's head off! Can't forget a face like that!"
Well, I was recognizable for obvious reasons. Dune moved to take a step ahead of me as she started talking, my hand gripped the back of her vest, just in case this shit-stick decided to get trigger happy. Didn't want the nutter getting too close.
"Yeah, yir both War Boys. Brothers, right? Maybe we ca-"
"Shut yir holes, Breeder! Nobody asked what you thought! An' I ain't a brother to blasphemers!" He cut her off and his crowing hit my ears like screeching tires.
Damn her optimism. Can't blame her for trying to appeal to what could have been some kinship had this been a boy from the Citadel. We both shut up and I ground my teeth so strongly that I tasted copper, fucker. Sure, I'd let that word slip earlier, but I didn't call her a breeder. I'd begun to sweat despite the cold and my bloodpump was hammering so hard that my entire corpus felt like it was pulsating. There's no way out of this, is there? Gotta think. Do something. Anything. I was considering the idea of maneuvering Dune behind me, maybe I could take a bullet and distract this bastard long enough for Dune to get on the bike and bolt. No, she'd probably refuse. She was stubborn like that and I wasn't willing to die for absolutely nothing. The shit was laughing at us, so V8-damned loud that I was beginning to worry that someone else out here might hear it; Storm Chasers, for example.
"Wonder how much them Citadel softies will pay to get back a scum-bucket like you? Probably not much, damaged goods ya know, but the girl... Nah, Boss'll fancy that booty for 'imself. Likes um fighty." he predicted, and if snakes could talk, they'd sound just like him.
My blood ran cold for a moment as I looked at Dune. She looked dazed, a blankness washed over her face which made her look disturbingly sane. She had that 'I'm not really here' look. Damn. Fuck. FUCK! When were we gonna catch a fucking break?! Everything just kept spiraling further out of fucking control and I couldn't do anything about it. The storm, rust luck! The trip to Green Place, fucked! Scav Country, boned! Now this!
So this is what I survived the road war for? To get offed by something resembling one of my own kind and watch the Scav get hauled off and turned into some thong wearing wanker's plaything. Fuck V8. Fuck everything!
My fists clenched, nails biting into my palms to leave half moon cuts. I could see my breath billowing in great misty clouds on the frigid night air as I stood there, fuming. Now, I could even feel my pulse in my eyeballs while I observed the smug face stretching the weak jaw on the slimy little creature in front of us. My blood didn't cool as minutes passed. I could do nothing but steam like a hot engine running with a cracked radiator.
The moron was beginning to relax, casually leaning back against the bike and getting lazy about his grip on his gun. It was taking a while for his mate to get back, which wasn't a big shocker. It's a half hour walk to The Canyon. He'd return quicker, no doubt with a vehicle at his disposal and men to properly shackle and restrain their new captives. He hadn't let his arm and the weapon in it sag much but his eyes were wandering over the motorcycle so, his aim had drifted just slightly to the right of Dune instead of squarely on her chest. She must have come out of her stupor and noticed that, too. She squatted down for a moment without him noticing and it was so quick, soundless, and fluid that I barely noticed the movement myself. I wondered just what that was for, what she was doing. Meanwhile, he was scraping the barrel of the Beretta at some rust on the handle bars and muttering to himself, surely listening to us still, but good and oblivious for a what might only be a few precious seconds. Dune and I exchanged a look and she mouthed two words at me, then again when I didn't so much catch what she meant. On three. It made sense after I saw a good sized stone in her hand, about the size of her fist. This was insane, incredibly stupid. We were going to get fucking shot, but I knew what she was going to do and nodded. We didn't have many options left outside the schemes of the terminally stupid.
I counted to three in my head and on cue heard the air whipping around her swinging arm as she flung the stone with everything she had. The rock struck hard just behind the Scrotus Boy's right ear and he nearly knocked over the bike by falling into it, but a bang still rattled my good ear. Dune yelped, but the bullet missed me, I was sure of that as I lurched forward. I hadn't been so kamicrazy since the road war, this didn't even compare to the time Dune and I almost murdered each other. I didn't just want him dead, I wanted to cave his skull in and beat the corpse till my knuckles looked like ground up meat. The bike got knocked over this time under the combined weight of two. I'd find out later that we'd snapped the rusted foot peg off.
We hit the dirt, crashing down atop the bike and grappling. He still had a gun in each hand and that needed to change quick if we wanted to live. He tried to stretch himself out and twisted his wrists around in my grip in an attempt to break free. The struggle had his fingers curling involuntarily around the triggers and twice more lead flew. Our arms were spread high over our heads as we rolled away from the toppled motorcycle, looking like birds dueling in the dirt. I couldn't let him turn his wrists and fire again. Couldn't pull away too far either. I had to keep my head ducked low against his shoulder and try not to let go while he drove his knee into my gut again and again on the left side. I couldn't do anything about it, not with the metal leg locked straight behind me.
Dune joined the fight, half falling into me and both her hands falling over my own to hold down our captor's right arm. I heard the screaming and another shot go off. My ear rang. When I turned my head to look, Dune had the Glock and there was a chunk of skin missing from his forearm. Dark flows streamed from the bite she dealt him. Yes! She held the gun and had pressed it to his temple as he thrashed under me. She squeezed the trigger. Click. Nothing. He spat in my eyes, but now I had both hands around his left wrist to pry Dune's Beretta from his hand.
-Dune-
Empty on two shots! What kind of moron feeds his weapon so poorly!? It didn't occur to me that these men might not have been well supplied with ammo. I chucked the useless thing and scuttled on my hands and knees for Mama's rifle. I should have gone for that first, but Duck had been so close to getting blown away that I couldn't just stand by and let it happen. I lifted her, fed a round into the chamber and ran back to try angling myself over Duck's shoulder so that I wouldn't shoot him by mistake. I saw the eyes on the War Boy bulge as he looked up to find my nasty barrel pointed at his face. Mistfire . Shit! They rolled again, this time away from me because Slit had gotten him separated from my backup armament and he wanted it back. He was straddling Ducky now, a bloody hand clawed around Slit's throat while they fought with their remaining hands for the gun which lay on the dirt by his head.
I knew what had happened, the magazine had come loose when it had been kicked like a piece of trash. I turned to point the weapon away from them, afraid I could be wrong as I turned up the weapon to be sure. It was gone, the magazine, but there should STILL have been one in the chamber now that I think about it. Did I pull back the bolt or not when we discovered we were not alone? I was too frantic to remember as I dropped my dutiful killing tool and scrambled through the dirt. No time to find the missing magazine. Slit would be turning blue by now. I didn't quite get a hold of my backup, my clumsy scarred digits just bounced it further from the pair and into darkness. OH! Someone had a fist full of my hair!
This man was not so thick as Slit, but he was taller so had a longer reach. He could grind my face into the dirt and keep on exchanging blows with Slit, no problem. He shouldn't be this strong, no one should. He must have been high on adrenaline, or maybe something else. I heard a fleshy thwack, then I was free. I turned to look, and both Slit and the War Boy were gagging and gasping for air, but Slit didn't take so long to recover, he jammed his hand onto the knob of his peg-leg, then dove over the body of the man retching on his knees and elbows. I'd never seen anything like it, I imagined, this was what it was like to watch dogs fight, something I've only heard stories about from elders. Slit had his right arm around the other's straining neck, a knee in his lower back. The man shrieked, and Slit jerked upright so fast, so harshly, twisting the others body in the motion so that something just under the skull was severed forever in a wet crunch.
I've seen Slit kill, but not like this. We've been in situations and we've both taken our lumps, we've even exchanged bullets with other scavs, but he'd always hidden any worry under a mask of casual amusement at the excitement of danger. This time, as he knelt over the body, he looked down at it with a dark arousal in his eyes. He was admiring his work, or maybe pleased in a deeper way that the Scrotus Boy was dead under him. He panted as he looked at me, still all fight, surely. He wasn't looking at my face and he came at me too quickly for the fright of his wicked expression to have left my mind. I flinched away, but he had grabbed my right arm around the bicep so that there was no escape. My eyes followed his, finding a thick line of raw flesh over the mound of my right shoulder and red dribbling from it. Oh my. I only felt it when my eyes took in the sight. I was loaded with the fight-juice and too keyed up to feel anything until it was pointed out to me.
"Just a graze." He gruffed, then started pawing at my left leg to unwind the strips of cloth I used to hold my pant legs neat over the calf.
The other one could be back soon, I tried to listen for engines but frustratingly I couldn't seem to tell if I was hearing anything or not. "We need to go , Ducky."
"I know," was all he said as he tightened the makeshift bandage around my arm.
The colt, my trusty knife, and one of Slit's blades were gone, no getting those back, but we got gathered what was left, hastily put our remaining belongings back in their proper places. Slit didn't bother going through the dead man's pockets, he simply undid his boots and belts, slid his pants off him and rolled them up to stuff into the saddle bags on the bike, which I now had to hold upright while he looted. We lost some shit, but gained a firearm and whatever goodies might have been hidden in those pants. Slit rightfully claimed the Glock. It didn't replace what was lost, but it was a substitute for now. I found myself shaking when we finally seated ourselves on the bike and hoped that it would start up even though it had been knocked around too. It fired right up like a faithful servant to us, and I told Ducky to take a longer route back, one which usually had so much traffic that our tracks would be hard to discern from the rest.
He still huffed and growled the whole way and I think he was sweating. His back was cold and damp against my cheek. How'd he manage to leak body coolant through two layers of shirts and leather? Worryingly, he was shifting about in front of me, maybe turning his head for some reason, and urged that old motor harder. He ran her as fast as she could possibly sprint down these dusty roads in the darkness. I spent much of the ride wondering if we were being tailed, but unwilling to look back and find out.
Getting home was surreal. Wilson was already down in the garage chamber and raising up hell, scolding Slit, making quite a racket over the red stained bandage over my shoulder. I didn't respond, couldn't seem to fire back at the ancient medicine man, and the moment we were both dismounted from the bike, Slit had his arms around me and had crushed me to his chest. He didn't say anything, didn't explain this oddness, but that was okay. I didn't need or want that explanation, I wanted to be held. What just happened, and what could have happened, it had hit with all its might right then. The sticky wetness at Slit's back hadn't been him sweating through his shirts and leather vest, I'd been weeping and whimpering the whole way home. He'd heard the sobs over the roar of the engine. That's why he'd stepped on the gas, pushing the old bike to its absolute limit to get me home.
"Christ, what happened?!" that was Wilson, being rightfully upset and furious about what he was seeing, the result of our foolishness. We should never have gone to see who ruled The Canyon.
I had tightly clenched fists full of the former War Boy's shirt and I must have sobbed some more, possibly retreated so far into my mad mind that I wasn't aware of what was happening for a long while. Events of that early morning seem to leap about in my memory in a haphazard pattern. I vaguely remember Wilson cleaning out the wound from the tickle of a speeding chunk of lead. It hurt, but no more than anything else is this dying world. Slit was there, I had been sitting between his bent knees and leaned into him while the old man messed with the wound. It probably didn't need the three stitches I found in it later, on watch.
It wasn't me watching out, it was Slit, but I happened to be there with him. It was another moment where reality seemed to roll forward unexpectedly. He wasn't using the fold out chair and I was leaning against his shoulder as we both sat on bare rock, lazily watching the sun rising.
I was thinking about the slaver caravan Mum and I were with, where I had been told I was going, that I was to be a wife to a warlord, and knowing what that inherently meant was going to happen to me. It almost happened again. Almost. I should probably have lied, told him ol' Dune was just fine, but I didn't want to talk about it. What's there to talk about outside the obvious? We both knew what had been implied by what the now dead Scrotus Boy had said. I'd have probably watched Slit be murdered, then been kept alive for the personal entertainment of a stranger. History had tried to repeat itself. I wonder how Mum would feel and what she'd have to say. Her efforts to do away with my lovely smile apparently meant nothing to some men, they'd still try their luck and take what they want by force if I refused. I wondered if Ducky would have been like that too, were it not for the trauma in his terrible childhood. I wanted Mumsy, to see her, speak to her lovely face. She was always lovely even after she dried out. She wasn't there. I took her home to Pa. I hadn't been back to that corner of my old home because there was nothing left to visit.
Couldn't talk to Slit about this, he'd just started relaxing himself, but I didn't want to be alone either. Our rocky ledge was murder on my hip as I pushed my head under his arm, used his thigh for my pillow and lay on my side. He didn't complain about getting a taste of his own medicine, but he did have something to say.
"I don't like it when you go blank like that." He grumbled quietly.
I felt my lips twist at that. He must be referring to what I was like after I'd peeled myself off the seat of the bike after we got home.
"You think Dune likes doing that?"
We said nothing more about it for a short time, and I very nearly fell asleep. A thick hand squeezing my forearm roused me.
"...you can't do that when we leave here. If you go head-empty out there, you'll wind up dead."
"I know," that was all I could say. I wasn't stupid, I knew what could happen if I had one of those moments at the wrong time.
I rested there for a while, until the sun had risen high enough to glare at us. My head was aching furiously. Couldn't stand the damn light and to make matters worse, I had to both deal with the curse of womanhood and be on watch soon. I rose up to leave, frankly hoping that I hadn't bled though my damn slacks at any point in the last five or six hours.
"Need to tend the maggot farm, get a few things sorted. Then I'll take over here, Slit." I told him, expecting a nod and a grunt to confirm that he'd heard me. He shook his head instead.
"No, you're wrecked. Sleep it off." he grouched as per custom. I detected pity, or maybe concern mixed into the texture of his voice.
"I'm fine now," I asserted.
"Yeah well, I'm not necessarily talking about that. In case you haven't noticed, Nutter, you have the personality of an adder around this time, so sleep."
Well, that was coarsely considerate in a Slit kinda way.
"Oh, right," I agreed.
"Yeah," Slit grunted while scrubbing at the creases in his forehead with his fingertips. That must be fatigue creeping up, or anxiety. He'd been jumpy lately.
"Thanks, mate."
"Sure."
And that was the end of that. First thing, I washed my hands and face, then attended to the most urgent matter, changing out grundies and bandages, then scrubbing through what I'd had to stuff down my pants up on a mountain. I remembered the way Slit seemed to panic at finding out all about this cursed time. Poor thing. I never truly wanted to explain the nitty gritty details this to him. Before all the business of getting chummy with each other's business happened, which I never really suspected could happen to us to start with, I had been keen to keep him focused on figuring out basic human manners. Too bad now, cat's outta the bag. Well, he knows it's not his fault, there's that.
Maggot farm. Next on the agenda was good grub for the journey ahead. It was easy and a fine distraction. A little fire and some salt, they were cooked up well done and ready to be stored away. I brought Slit a bowl, he tucked right in with a thankful groan, hungry as he was.
I later thought about the potatoes I had tried growing. All I ever got out of them were thin yellow shoots and putrid smells. Wilson had better luck and sometimes we got a few potatoes outta him in trade. They were descendants of the ones I found in sacks when I won the Impala in a trip to shoot-n-loot many moons back. Sometimes I tried to grow a bumpity lump or two traded from the Doc in some old worthless tires, but I could never manage to get them beyond the sprouting stage and the leaves would never seem to brighten up and form completely. Maybe the dirt I was trying to use was too deficient, maybe it was toxic. I hoped the former, or else I was probably cooking up a whopping case of cancers from living out here. Now those spuds were surely dead. No one to water them in months. I dug around to see for sure but found nothing but shriveled husks and rotten juices where growing things should be. I sat by my failed cultivations and thought about why Ducky and Wilson would now be on the lookout. We haven't heard the sounds of war in more than a day, the massacre at the refinery seemed to have been the final battle. Scav country was gripped by an otherworldly silence. No passing hum of motors going by the territory, no distant gunshots, only a whole lot of uncharacteristic nothing. War Boys was what we should be watching for after what happened, they'd have certainly found their dead and naked comrade by now.
I gave up on being productive after that. I took my Ducky's advice and curled up on sleep mats I had dragged into the car. I wanted to be alone, but not too far from the others. My dreams were nothing but nonsense broken up by the sneering face of the War Boy who'd had his hands where he shouldn't have. I kept half waking, if only to open my peepers and confirm that I was enveloped in the safety of Shirley. The final time I woke that afternoon, it was to Slit settling in behind me. I phased back into my dreams, but this time my sour skull meat was happily occupied by imagery of Slit stuffing a roasted spider into his gob. What a lovely image.
-Slit-
This road is long, but not so long as going all the way around the range, and three times I've been on it. I always seemed to end up making the drive at night, seemed safer in shadow, but darkness only means you can't see a threat until it's on top of you. The headlamps sent steaks of yellow skittering over the crackles and deep potholes of the worn asphalt. I think this might be the last surviving old road of the region. I could hear sobs, the sniveling whimpers and wails of a pup. Aw fuck, Usually I was alone on this road, but for reasons you could probably guess, Dune was with me this time. She heard the cries too. "What's that?" she questioned as she leaned forward in her seat with a hand braced on the dash. "That sounds like a lil' sprout, Ducky." "Veeight, stay in the car, Dune. Don't get out. Ain't jus' some pup." "How d'ya mean?" Just as I tried to reason my way to a late explanation of this road through hell, the headlights shined on what I hoped I wouldn't see. He couldn't be much more than one thousand days old, and there he was, waddling around, alone, in the middle of the road. He had his back turned to the car, still screaming and hiccuping and clawing out at the darkness ahead of him with unnaturally thin hands for such a young pup. A layer of filth and a halo of dirt brown tangles to match the protruding bones of his naked body did not make me sympathetic. This was bait, nothing more. "Holy seeds." That was all I heard before Dune threw the passenger door open. Diving across the seat to throw my arms around her waist didn't stop her, she seemed to flow out of my grip like loose sand. "DUNE! STOP! DON'T!" Shrieking at her didn't do anything either. Too petrified to leave the car, too cowardly, I rose from a sprawl across the seat to see what was happening. Of course, Dune was on her knees, reaching out to the little monster. She didn't know, she couldn't know, because I never told her, and I never told her because I never wanted to admit what happened out here before I knew the dangers myself. I didn't want to admit how soft and stupid I really was. The pup turned, and he had no face. No eyes, no nose, no brow, only a mouth full of blunt teeth splitting his skull so wide that Dune lost her whole hand to him. Her screaming got me out of the car, but it was too late. More sets of teeth sprung out of the pitch black, sinking in, devouring everything...
A cold sweat was what I woke to. Cold because it was now night and the residual heat of the day was leeched off into the winter evening. First thing I did was check Dune, even though I was well aware I'd just woken from a simple nightmare. She was intact, snoring, blissfully unaware. Next, I just lazed there with my face at the back of her head to keep reminding myself it was just a dream. A dream that could soon become reality. So, the little demons wouldn't truly look as they had in the dream, they would have faces like any other pups, but they would be feral, opportunistic feeders who don't much care how their meals are acquired. It was the fact that the looming danger came in the form of a hoard of cannibalistic children which made my guts churn. I'm chrome as fuck, I'll snap your head right off if you so much as look at me wrong. Man or woman, I don't give a shit, but pups? Even I have a line I won't cross. I hate that fucking road, but it was better than getting sniped or blown to bloody chunks in the tight Canyon. No way we could cross there now that the Scrotus Boy with the rifle would recognize us.
I got up, knowing Wilson would soon be down to pester me awake to take my turn anyway. I relieved him, but he returned after only a few minutes with open can of that revolting old world grub to pass my way, and then he sat. I was suspicious of why he'd choose to forego sleep to linger here. I rightfully had no doubt that he'd start chewing my ear off with his chattering.
"So, you feelin' alright about this road trip?" he was just making small talk, so I merely shrugged as I passed a glob of whatever this lumpy brown shit was between my teeth.
"Hmm, outta curiosity, you an Dune tryin' for a baby?" he said, and I inhaled a bite of that brown sludge.
After this came hacking and retching near to the point of chundering while holding that can away. Even if it tasted like crap, I didn't want to vomit into my dinner.
"NO!" I said, hoarsely. "What the shitting-hell makes you THINK that?!"
"Well, to start with, yir both covered in hickies an' love bites and I've never seen THAT on either of you before so I'm ASSUMING that ya been knockin' boots." he reasoned accurately.
I hadn't even thought about the bruises on my neck or the ones on Dune. I fought off the urge to just kick the decrepit bastard off the ledge.
"It's none of your damn business, Old Man! Get outta my face before I kick yours in!" I snarled, shoving the can back at him. I don't know why, but him cornering me to talk about this pissed me off. A much younger me might even brag about getting a breeder on my thunderstick, if he could get around the consequences of doing such a thing in the first place. Wilson rolled his eyes at my threat. He knew it was a bluff, knew he was too valuable to damage.
"Matter of fact, since you say you're NOT tryin' for a kid, it is my business. Does the rhythm method mean anything to you?"
Partly too hot in the head to respond, and partly too confused by the term to say anything, I only shook my head through a glare. The coot sighed and dug into his pockets. I was made to look at a clean shit ticket with drawings and organic mechanic jargon scrawled all over it. I told him I couldn't read it, he replied that his handwriting wasn't that bad, so I reiterated. I can't read. I hoped that would force him to give up and leave. It was a partial lie. I could piece together sounds of letters and figure out a few words at a time. He didn't go away, he started reading to me like I was a pup looking at a diagram of an engine for the first time. I hated this, but I did learn shit even if it was unwillingly. I thought there was no way to avoid the risk of pups, and maybe that the frequency had to be pretty high to wind up with one. No, there was a distinct block of time on that twenty-eight-ish day cycle of normal and not-normal where trading paint, even just once, can be a serious problem. I did not know that. I didn't retain much else. Some of it sounded ridiculous. People don't lay eggs like birds, and I've never seen shit swimming around in my stuff.
"...so, if you MUST be nasty. Pull out. For the love of God. No offense, but I don't wanna find out what kinda kid you two would raise up." he finished at long last.
I was left in the silence, looking at the thin scrape of old paper with a circle drawn on it and ringed with numbers and scribbles. It showed what days mean what, and the red days marked days a person like Dune would be miserable and apparently bleeding. The bold numbers marked when you could accidentally get stuck with a pup.
"...can I keep this?" I wasn't sure if I would remember this if I didn't have it or copy it down somewhere.
Wilson held up both hands and ducked his head as he left, visibly done with this conversation too. "Take it."
Thank V8 he was gone. I did count the days though, just to make sure the two times I had rolled around with the Nutter didn't fall on any risky day. Should be safe, but he also said 'it varies woman to woman,'. I spent the nearly my entire shift with a knot in my gut and at the end of it, I checked on Dune. She was all balled up around her aching middle and having a fitful nap.
My damn skull loved to torture me, I imagined her knocked up for exactly one second and the pull of my face into a deep cringe was instantaneous. That's just not something you think about, not out here and hell, not anywhere else either. If I screwed the pooch on this one, she could end up with a tiny corpse covered in tumors or a monstrous lump of deformed flesh. I knew damn well that my blueprints couldn't possibly be stellar, I presumably came from the wretched folk after all. Even if, by some V8 blessed miracle, my baby-gravy managed to spawn a healthy pup, it would still be one hell of an inconvenience. You can't make pups when your situation is uncertain, that's why wretcheds give theirs up to the lift guardians. But... Damn it, I was getting too soft. For just a minute or two, I let himself watch Dune sleep through the back window of the car and imagined her with a pup in her arms, not necessarily mine because it just doesn't have to be and probably shouldn't be. Yeah, she was nuts, but she'd probably make an okay mum, and a pup of her own would probably make her happy. She was pretty attached to Ard's pups by the time we left the bog, especially Trellis.
One simple thought can lead to other, stranger thoughts. I felt a wave of inexplicable misery, and my head churned out something from memory buried so deep that it had become dream like. Black hair, lots of it, and it would pool like water in the sand behind her. I used to hide in it until it all fell out. It came away from her scalp in clumps if I clung to it, and the last I saw of that haggard face It was getting smaller, further away as I rose higher on the lift, higher, higher still to the entry platform of the war tower. I lied when I once told Dune that I forgot my mother. I'd lied to her and myself. All I could clearly remember was the hair, her face was vague and I couldn't quite grasp any detail besides the protrusions of bone under skin in her thin, dying face. I still hated her, I couldn't pry that feeling apart from the memory, the pain of being given away. I couldn't be sure which parts happened and which parts were simply assumptions to make sense of why she handed me off. If she was dying, then I guess she had no other option, but it still hurt and I still couldn't be certain if that was the case.
We all quit watch after that day, if War Boys were going to come looking for us, they'd have already found us. That was simple fact, and Storm Chasers were clearly finished with their rampage. A dangerous quiet had fallen on Scav Country, we'd be leading the caravan though it, obvious as ever. Dune's mood eased up and things went back to business as usual, with a few added perks which don't need to be discussed. Dune, she was looking and acting off on the day we left. She didn't say much, but that was expected. We probably wouldn't be coming back here, to this place. She'd lived here for eight years, six of those years alone. I didn't bother to ask how she felt as we poured all the guzz we had into the two chariots, even siphoning the bike to be certain the Bus and the Impala had enough to make the trip out to where we would meet the others. They would be a full day into their journey by now, taking the safe routes we'd marked on a drawn map for them. All the ammunition Dune had was in the car, arranged within easy reach. I had fashioned a bladed polearm out of sharpened steel and one of the broken sticks which had once been a piece of my old crutch.
"It's quiet, Duck. Not right."
"I know. Nutter. We'll be fine."
Those were the only words we exchanged on the way to the meeting place, and there we waited. A small fire warmed the three of us between the Bus and the Car. Dune leaned against my side and slept for a time, wrapped up in one of the blankets. The damn old fuck smiled at me and I scowled at him. Didn't like his eyes on me like that.
It wasn't quite a full day later that we caught first sight of them. Dune set off a whoop to wake me and the stale fart, she was waving and hopping about at the top of the stone formation with the long lookers in her other hand. To be sure she wasn't mistaken, I had scrambled up the rock to yank the looking glass from her hands and have a good look myself. I saw the truck Crank and I had fixed up, behind it the seven other cars we had fortified. It was them. They made it that far.
Dune was attacked, just like the day we arrived at her dead Green Place. Ardith almost crushed her to death, and her children did too. Crank's grinning face was what I saw next and I was not even remotely prepared for what he did to me, dragging me in at the collar and trying to crush me too.
"Ready to do this, Fucker?"
"No,"
"Hah! Me neither." He said, the quivering in his voice exposing how afraid he was.
