-Dune-
I understand what Slit meant when he once told me there are things from his history that he just can't remember.
I remember Wilson, how he told me 'stay alive, I'm going to come find you. Just stay alive' but I think he was just trying to convince himself of this, next came his raging roars, his shouting and cursing when they split us up, then nothing.
Months later my senses would remind me of the things I'd seen. A familiar smell, and the memory of bodies shuffling along on the chain gang across a platform and the sound of men making bids would appear and fade. This is off point, getting ahead of myself about a footnote from another far-off time when my fate would be uncertain again. This was the day I met a woman named Demon, and a demon named Madame.
I met Madame first, sort of. Her face was a persisting presence ever since I was pulled apart from Wilson. I don't remember arriving at or leaving from Shatterbone, only that the malicious aura around me had doubled with this woman and Scrud together, talking in the seats ahead of me while I sat cuffed, tied and chained to a car door.
I met Demon next. Her hair was the same color as a copper jacket. Bizarrely pretty, clean, skin that looked so flawless that it seemed fragile and thin like the grey silks she wore. I recognized the stuff, perfectly uniform woven thread and crafty use of hems wrinkled with the pull of elastic. Someone had made her fine clothes from a pristine bed sheet set. I haven't seen bed sheets since Mum and Pa had their own mattress.
If it weren't for the fact that the Madame woman kept scorning every sigh or groan the girl uttered and calling her by that name, Demon, I'd have called her Sheets.
She ignored me, did not speak, and only leveled glares that bit like ice crystals. Apparently she was in a world of trouble for some reason, hair all badly cut as if somebody had gone at it with a dull knife. The older woman in the seat ahead of me was all red in the face and kept reminding the young woman how hideous her head looked.
She'd say: Ugly as my arse now, or I'd be lucky to sell you off lookin so trashed up, and much more telling of the circumstances: Couldn't even shoot out an heir before your man carked it. What am I gonna do with a girl whose baby makin' guts gon sour? It was an awful, awful thing and the Lady of Seeds was surely pissed about this, but it wasn't my drama. I tried to tune it out.
Beyond looking at one another once or twice to see what we were each seated next to, we ignored one another. Memory blurs out again like tracks in the sand swept up by wind. All I could think about was Slit in between horrid moments of complete emptiness in my head. My thoughts were liquid, they'd slip away and I'd be unable to grasp them. It was like fog in my skull and being startled every time my brain decided to remind me where Slit was. I can remember thinking so intensely that it was midday, he'd be turning red all over by then. More head fog rolled in.
When I returned to myself it was because the car had stopped and I was being dragged out of the car by the rope coiled around my ankles. It hurt, everything outside the womb hurts. I didn't fight Scrud, I had no bite left in me to do anything but let myself be dragged. I hardly cared, why care about anything? He won, he'd done what he set out to do. What would more fighting do? Nothing.
I looked around a little while I was hauled along. Metal, metal, metal everywhere, and not a bit of it left untouched by rust. There was a kind of short tunnel, a tube chewed through in rust circled holes by salt and wind. After that I watched tires, studded hubcaps, and both bare and booted feet pass me on by. Rather, I passed them on by.
After all the dragging and getting scuffed up on the floors, he dropped my feet and pad locked my chain to a group of the poor and desperate all huddled together in the open courtyard of- oh, this is a camp. Everything was boxed in by rust rotten shipping containers and... I'm not sure what the other old-word structures were. Tubular like the entrance but with rows of Windows on the sides? One such big tube thing halved the courtyard in two. Everything else was framed in high rising rock. What a camp.
I could hear squeals, growls, and Madame's horrid cursing. I sat up to watch her yanking on Demon's hair to lead her deeper into the compound. Guess you can't house a girl dressed so prettily with us filthy beasts.
No one among the other captives paid me any mind, which was just fine. They lay about conserving energy and hiding as much as they could from the harsh sun under a curving dome of rusty rotten wreckage from yet another tubey thing. That was the only shelter provided and only the roughest of the bunch enjoyed its shade and a moldy couple mattresses nestled in the shadow it cast. Others had little choice but to coat themselves in the dust and hope it protected their exposed skin enough.
The mass of unwashed I was seated with weren't the only captives here. I saw true slaves through an open doorway to the other half of the yard and the bodies attached to the feet I had seen.
At first I merely watched the movement of men at work for a long while without actually absorbing any information. I wasn't really in my head. I was elsewhere, senses not telling me anything useful at that time. I was like a pupating grub, closed up in a shell, can't really see, hear, or feel much and only generally aware that something was going on outside its protective casing.
It was late in the afternoon before I really began paying attention to what was going on in that other half of the yard. There was a distinct difference in the two men who wore boots and the dozen others who walked on their bare soles. The booted men were dressed in protective leathers and carried old sports crap. One carried a bat with holes drilled in it, the other a lacrosse stick.
The others, they were barely wearing anything. Practically disintegrating pants or shorts with all of the pockets cut out or torn off, most shirtless, but a few had small burlap ponchos or squares of ratty cloth to tie around their heads. It was hardly enough to protect their naked skin, though it might not matter. They were completely coated in dust and presumably their own filth. Anywhere they sweat created steaks and any drop that fell was muddy brown with dirt.
Each of these men were chained to a crumpled wreck of a car and between each two vehicular cadavers was a box of shared tools. They were dismantling the wrecks, desperately picking them apart looking for anything useful. I spied a fenced off and locked storage area, through the chainlink I saw bins overflowing with hardware and parts I could not possibly identify. That must be Madame's business, selling parts and people.
One car looked fit enough to repair, I watched the men up to that, leaning under the hood and tinkering. It was somewhat comforting to watch them busy with something Slit would so often do under dearly departed Shirley's hood. For a moment I thought I was beginning to see things, or that my sick brain was trying to morph the homely and horridly unkept men into Slit. They had scars of you cared to look past the wildly over grown hair all over their heads and faces. Pretty little doodles of mechanical things across chests or down skinny arms and calves. When one was ruffling up his hair and scratching at his peeling sunburns about the back of his neck and shoulders, I saw Joe's logo. These were War Boy slaves, and the booted men pacing about the crowded and cluttered half yard? Supervisors. Twice I witnessed what the bat and lacrosse stick were for.
That baseball bat had the curiously big holes drilled through it so that it hurts more and whips through the air faster when its owner catches the slave mechanics slacking off. What was considered slacking was simply preposterous. They were tiredbecause they were emaciated.
As the sun set, the ratty and rail thin boys were freed from their projects but thoroughly searched for contraband pilfered from cars. Next they were mustered together by the awful booted men tapping at their knobbly knees and elbows with their beatin' sticks to move them into line for their shackles. The sight turned my stomach.
They shuffled along in a neat line on a long chain to a space across from us non-culters. Some rolled up cot mattresses were tossed into the cluster of men, all too young to be so broken. A few were knocked down pitifully by the scant bedding chucked at them. I wanted to retch. They all moaned and whimpered with sore and visibly hungry bodies.
How could anyone be so terrible to do this? Vampires! Sucking the life from already sick men because it was easy! What evil. I didn't care what these War Boys may have done in their lives as Joe's soldiers, no one deserves this. Any judgment which awaited them should be dealt in the afterlife, not here in the plain of mortal suffering.
The horrible Madame came with a great steel basin of grey gruel and table scraps. Each boy got a pat on the head from her as they weakly held up their little dishes to be filled. These tin bowls which always hung from their belt loops were probably the only personal belongings they were permitted to have. Some whimpered softly, others looked outright afraid of her. It all read nasty to my eyes, something insidious and wrong.
The other new slaves and I were then fed similarly, but everyone around me simply held up their cupped hands to clamor for it. No pats for us though, thankfully we're just chattel. I refused the food, got snapped at by the man behind me to 'put em up! I'll take yers if ya wanna be starvin'!" I piled the mess into his greedy hands and wiped my fingers on my pants. Couldn't stomach tucker although I knew I'd regret this refusal later. I watched the devastated former soldiers instead.
One man, who'd been beaten nasty that day, was too weak to feed himself. A mate of his fed him with clumps of food on his finger tips. A great sorrow swept over me. I could remember feeding Slit like that when he was weak and busted up. Everything reminded me of him.
After every morsel of food was gone, the War Boys seemed to snuggle together in a sad pile by the wall they were chained to. It was gut wrenching to look at them and know how easily this could have happened to Slit if he hadn't crashed. It made me wonder if they'd been thrown from the Citadel and if Phil and Ard could have a shred of hope for their clan there, then all that thinking circled right back to my poor Slit yet again.
I couldn't sleep, would refuse sleep just the same as the gruel if I were capable of getting any winks. As night closed in and blanketed the world in her black cloak, I was unable to think of anything but Slit cold, alone, dying out on the salt. I could so clearly see him in my mind, curled up and shivering, fighting to stay warm enough to survive the night.
I began to weep miserably, shackles rattling with every sob as I clutched at my face in anger. I was bereft, they took him and ended him in the cruelest way for no reason at all.
"Aw, please don't cry," I heard a voice say to me.
Strange, so soft and so sweet that the genuine nature of it sounds out of place in the voice of a grown man. Sweetness like that is only found in the youngest of children in this age.
When I wiped the drops from my eyes to look at where the voice came from, I found one of the scrawny men from the War Boy chain gang, sitting up only a few feet from me and trembling from cold without the shared body heat of the pile. He was so thin, so sickly. A pitiful ol' thing with a face which looked so much older in the harsh glitter of moonlight than his voice sounded. Sunken and sallowed cheeks make you look old or ready to become a corpse. His wasting body was filthy, black from grease from fingertips to arm pits, the rest of him stained a shit brown from the dust and dirt, only his sides where the old sack he wore was cut and tied off revealed him. The sweating and the rubbing of his bony elbows had scrubbed the filth from his true skin. He was pale as a toddlers milk teeth, the whitest thing you will ever see.
He continued: "Madame will get real upset if you wake her up. Likes her sleep, she does. Gets mean if she doesn't get it."
Moonlight is faint even when the celestial face is full, so I couldn't really make out his eyes, but his terribly scarred lips quirked toward the weakest smile I had ever seen. It was as if this mere facial gesture was exhausting to feign. There could be no happiness within this man. He was in hell. We were all in hell. No need to make it worse by waking that witch of a woman, she'd probably take it out on that poor copper haired girl first.
So, I choked back my cries, bit my knuckle just short of opening up my skin and spilling red with the great effort. Now it just hurt deep in my chest with every hitched breath and sniffle. I couldn't stop picturing it, my Ducky freezing out there.
"There, that's better. Things ain't so bad. You headed to gas town to work? I heard they feed ya good." he said after a moment and an attempt to pat my shoulder, he was swatted away. I'd had enough of stranger's unwelcome hands already.
I shook my head, knowing my fate well since the cunt bastard palling about with the sadistic bitch wouldn't stop reminding me.
"Bullet farm." I replied.
"O- oh. I'm sorry. Well, still better than here, probably." the bony boy said, very nearly in a whimper.
Didn't make sense, his voice. I had to snort back the snot building in my face before pointing that out. "You ain't no War Boy. Too sweet, sound like a sprout when ya talk."
He laughed feebly, either trying to keep quiet or too tired to give it any true amusement.
"Whadda you know about War Boys? Ain't likely to meet one out here, 'cept us." he asserted.
"Lived in Scav Country. Best mate was a War Boy. Mean fucker, my Ducky. Found 'im half dead a couple years back. He's probably fully dead soon. Slaver fucks left him on the salt." I told him.
"Rust suckers," he spat in a whisper.
"What's your name?" I tried, somehow I didn't want to leave here without it. I wanted to remember his kindness.
"It's Nux," he breathed, and my lungs refused to let their air go.
I must have sat there looking confused long enough for him to notice. The scarred lips, a soft soft disposition, and eyes that glittered pale and blue when he tilted his head at me and waved a hand before my eyes to break my stare. You'll have to excuse the phrase, I might as well have been shitting a solid gold brick. This man, though thin and terribly ragged, was just as Slit described. Once able to pick up my brains off the ground, I assembled my question. I had to be sure I hadn't misheard him.
"What did you just say? Say it again, please."
"My name? Nux?" he replied, sounding a bit worried now.
"L- lift your shirt." I said, realizing too late that it came off as a demand.
He recoiled, justifiably, at such a request. "Why? I don't even know your name yet!" he hissed with every effort to keep quiet. A stern shushing from one of the guards sounded from nearby.
"Yeah yeah, whatever, name's Dune. Come closer, can't tell if my head's full of sillies or not." I tried whispering lower, but I couldn't suppress the startled quivering in my voice.
"What does that have to do wi- Head sillies? You a psychotic?" Now he exclaimed, maybe a bit too loud.
"Do you have an engine on your chest?"
He jerked slightly, then froze. Stunned at my guess I suppose. Now I knew it was him. I needed no more confirmation than the way he looked at me.
"...How did you know that?" he questioned softly.
I strained against the taut chains to reach out and touch his hairy face, shoulder, whatever I could reach. This was the cursed and mourned brother, a man I felt I knew through stories and the look in Slit's eyes when he'd told them.
"My sweet green lady, you're his Nux."
And how in the world had he gotten here?