Long ago, I'd known what I was, who I was. Now I'm not so sure. I lived, I died, I lived again. Valhalla was not what awaited me on the other side. There had only been pain and disgrace and a lunatic who forced me to go on breathing. I used to hate her but love myself and the God who called us half-life warriors his children.
When I heard the wretched cry a rogue Imperator's name, call her the boltcutter, I knew there was no reason to approach the lift guardians. No reason to care. So I returned to the dark, safe place where a hideous grin and a bowl full of maggots waited for me. I came back because there had been nowhere else to go and no others like me left in exile. Everyone I knew was either with the traitors or dead. There was only that loony scav and her ability to touch with a shine hand which helped me to forget.
Now, I'm just the prideful coward who wouldn't go back to a world that had changed too much for me to go on in the way I remember it. Maybe I'm just hoping for the Immortal to rise from the ashes and smite us all for failing him.
She passed the binoculars my way after a long look though them. Well, fuck me. Looks like the boys back home have expanded their range. It used to be that supply convoys didn't travel through the canyon. But with the Rock Riders scattered to the winds after the same road war that brought me here, it seemed that they were now willing to make trips out here to scav country on a regular basis.
I hate cleaning out the maggot farm, and I hate being wrong, and I hate that I had to watch crews painted in white bounding between war machines as they made their way back from where they came. It's hard to help myself from trying to spot boys I knew, or Nux if he's still kicking. Luckily they were too far out to see clearly even with the long-lookers. Just white blurs riding escort vehicles. It's easier if I don't see their faces and feel the pangs of jealousy.
"We could set a few traps like the Buzzards do. Wait for their next run. Watch them fall into spiny pits, yeah? What'cha think Ducky?"
"I think that's a lot of diggin' I don't wanna do." It's true that I didn't have any desire to sweat nuts and bolts out in the middle of nowhere with a shovel as my only sane company, but an equal part was that it wouldn't feel right setting traps for them. Even if that one armed bitch was leading them now, I wasn't about to set a pit fall for boys who might once have been brethren. I didn't want to because I'm not traitor filth like some people.
"Lazy. Well, they either killed the moonshiners, or absorbed them. I think that's where they're going to and leaving from. Never was terribly sure where they actually made camp, but that general direction anyway. Must be some reason for the Citadel to send crews out there. I wanna know what they're hauling back."
"Don't think you should get too curious about that. You wanna get your head ventilated with a bit of flying lead?"
"You'd dance on my corpse if I did. Can't have that can we Duck? Guess we'll just watch. Who knows. Maybe we'll get lucky and one of them will crash. Mmm, could use some shiny metal from wrecks like that..."
I tuned out her chatter. Kind of had to learn to do that a long time ago with my smeg of an ex-driver, a trick like that sure as hell comes in handy living with a mouth like the one this hermit has got. She talked to her mother's bones seldom now, thank V8, but that was only because she had what's left of my ears to gnaw off with her yammering.
I focused instead on the path traveled by the convoy, a line of dark shapes that the cargo tanker and escorts made just below the horizon. There really was something green strapped up to their rig, bushy bales barely leaving enough room for the gunners and crew. Whats this? Faint sounds of explosions and the orange flash of thunder sticks. They had raiders on their back.
"Let me see! Are they under attack? Dune hears the pop, pop of black powder on sticks!"
She tried to wrench the binoculars out of my face. Swatting at her arms did little to fend her off. She pulled at the strap and that earned her a clack of my teeth as a threat. She bit me not five minutes ago, I owed her a good chewing for that and wouldn't hesitate if she tried my patience.
"You should have brought your own long-lookers Slit." She crowed my name like a curse. Electing not to have another round of clawing and biting I shoved them back into her hands.
"I don't have a pair, those are the only ones we have."
"Then you should learn to share." She took another look and sucked on her dry lower lip. "We should start heading out there now if we want to be the first to pick through the leavings."
Dune had a talent for making certain that she would arrive first at a wreck site, but long enough after the action that none of those involved in the bloodshed would still be lingering. So I could trust her judgment there. We had the fan sled and the cycle, the car would drink up more than twice the guzz we had in our possession to bring it all the way out here so it had been left back at the homestead.
Climbing off the misshapen stone formation jutting up from the earth was no fun. The damn leg still needed a few mods so that it could do more than just basic motions and it wasn't making the descent easy. I still didn't have the range of flex and automatic movement that I wanted. Dune insisted that it was a quote, work of art, but I felt that there was a lot of room for improvement. Maybe I could put a motor in it with a button in my glove to control the fucker instead of letting gravity make all the decisions for me. Electronics and tiny fabrication jobs like that were never my strong point. I'd need a certain skull faced smeg head to help me figure that one out, and he was long gone traitor or dead so I was shit out of luck on that front.
Riding the cycle wasn't a challenge, I had installed pegs to rest the folded metal leg on when in motion, riding that was as simple as falling off the back of a pursuit vehicle. Easy. The fan sled on the other hand? It handled like a Model-T in a mud bog, how Dune could manage to control that thing but remain unable to grasp how a clutch and gear shift works is beyond me. Tried to teach her to drive the Impala once, either I'm a shit instructor or the loon is a shit learner.
By the time I was at the bottom and straddling the bike seat, the scav was already in position to pull the start cord and get the fan blades spinning. We were off. I rode point, she occasionally checked ahead of us with the long-lookers as she drove her air propelled monstrosity. Upon arrival something caught the seasoned scavenger's eye straight away. She set off a whoop and hopped out of the sled before the fan had even throttled down entirely. Dune kicked gingerly at the corner of a fuel jug, then lifted it for me to see as I leaned the cycle against the sled and pulled the knob up on my metal leg, flicking it forward to unfold it.
"HAH! Glory to thee who scours the wreckage! Full jerry can. We could give Shurely a decent meal with this." As always, a bottom feeder like her is excited by any useful find in the sand.
"Don't call the car Shurely."
"Oh, you like Debbie better?"
"No, I don't."
"How about Misty?"
"Where do you keep getting these mediocre names from?" We'd been arguing over what to name the car for as long as I'd been given the right to work on it.
She dug into the inner breast pocket of her mother's vest and produced a small, half burnt word burger, as if I could even make out what it says.
"You know I can't fangin' read unless it's a user manual or blueprints."
She snorted. "You could if you tried long enough. The cover says Popular Baby Names of 1969."
"Baby names. Pups used to get their names from word burgers? No wonder Before names are such shit. Where did you even get that from?"
"Found it in one of the wrecks from that Buzzard on RoadKill mashup a few months back. Remember?"
I recalled the wrecks and wondering why I was seeing Roadkill men so far north but not the inconsequential stuff.
"I remember the metal from that savage. Not the useless crap you always pick up."
"Ouff. Says you... Hey Slit." I looked up, squinting through the painful flare of white that the sunlight created in my ruined eye to see her hold up a twisted steel bar from a roll cage between her legs as if it were a cock. "Suck it."
Perverse little- I showed her my favorite finger and continued on, hobbling over to the nearest wreck with the hose and an empty jug under my arm to see if there was any guzz left to siphon out of the tank, which appeared to be intact for the most part if a only a little dented. The more Guzzoline the better.
Dune leaned into the driver side and started hauling out a corpse that wore a leather mask and goggles. Red and white shown brightly against the naked steel of the pulverized pursuit vehicle.
"We'll replenish the maggot farm with him. Poor boy. Couldn't be more than six thousand days old. Not a scar on him that wasn't on purpose either. Could'a been his very first time in road fight. Poor babe."
The first thing my good eye searched for was an engine carved into him. When I found no such scar, the relief came and went, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn't recognize him, he'd probably been one of the faceless pups that I didn't care enough to memorize the name of. He had a bullet right through the melon, a finger sized dot just behind the ear where a chunk of lead entered and a gaping hole of gore dribbling out the other side where it exited. Bits of gray skull meat fell out of its shell as Dune pulled him along by the ankles toward the sled.
"Mediocre, dyin' like that."
"You could have some respect for the dead Ducky." She scolded through a chorus of grunts and groans, palms rested on her knees and out of breath once she had the body pulled up into her sand boat. "Heavy forkers they are."
"If you die rust on your first call to war then you're not worth any respect. I'd have thought you'd known me long enough to understand that factoido."
Dune humphed. "You're the one who snaps at Dune anytime she calls you War Boy. Yet here you are, talking reverently about it all as if you were still a follower of the Veeight cult-faith-thingy."
I didn't have to justify anything to the psycho. Especially not this. "Just shaddup and dig around for something useful woman. Before I break off the only foot I've got in your arse."
After that we moved in silence from one totaled war chariot to another. The raiders didn't look like any group I'd ever fought on the Fury Road. They were probably just a random rag-tag gang of bandit thugs, which was not uncommon out here. There were three wrecks total, only one had been a Citadel pursuit car. The other two just rust buckets cobbled together from various junk parts and built around an engine block.
Some of the metal was salvageable, could be strapped onto the bike or tethered down in the sled. We filled three small jugs with guzz and found an intact can of nitro. Not a bad haul at all. Not the best, but not bad. Dune found a few bits of green stuff in the sand as she followed the deep troughs left by the wheels of the rig. She declared that the green stuff was choof after we each had a few sniffs. She tucked that into a bag at her belt and muttered something or other about fashioning a pipe for it. It had been a while since I had a toke, since before Nux got sick as hell and decided that he wanted to die historic. Years was what Dune called vast collections of days like that.
I heard something growling out loudly in echos across the wastes, pistons pumping and exhaust stacks rattling. When I looked up Dune was standing erect and had her eyes buried in the binoculars. She shook her head and tossed them my way as I approached the crest of the shallow hill where she stood.
What I saw in the distance wasn't a convoy, or bandits. It was two low-slung, heavy armored monsters rolling on tires that were extended far out of their wells with modded out axles. Something that you'd never be able to flip over.
"What the hell are they?"
"Storm Riders." She supplied. "Harmless chaps really. They believe riding out into the fury of dangerous weather conditions brings them closer to their heathen god."
They cruised on by at last two miles south of us, oblivious to our keen eyes watching them. "Jesus Chrysler. Their rides must weigh like tanks with that much leather and metal welded on."
Dune looked to me and nodded, then turned her eyes toward the direction they were headed with a weary sigh.
When Nux had been serious, his big, dumb, blue eyes made him look bat-fuck crazy. With Dune, the only time she didn't look insane were the moments when her beady green eyes narrowed and she thought carefully about her next action. She was scanning the horizon with what appeared to be serious consideration of what lies beyond it.
"We should find shelter. If the Storm Riders are out and about in broad daylight, then trouble is coming on swift wings for the unwary. A storm cometh."
Shit's gonna get real.