In the desert, distances are never what they seem. What looks close moves away – far away – when approached, and lengths can only be counted in time. They've reached the runway at last, after it had slipped away many times, and Volta sensed Nux's disappointment when he realized that it was not the Citadel's. He's no fool, and he was a Black Thumb before being a driver. He's understood that the Ural needed to cool down. He's also understood that she wanted to lighten up again and dump the rest of her copper under cover.
He didn't say anything about that. Because as for the rest, he seems constitutionally unable of keeping his mouth shut, exhausted or not. Sometimes Volta is sent to the Citadel because – without their strips and barely ragged – the immature Iskra make good spies. She has already witnessed the departure of the convoys, grotesquely ceremonial. She has seen the water of the Aquifer, meagrely delivered from the heights of the First Rock Tower of Immortan Joe, onto the bloated crowd of The Wretched. And she watched the War Boys come down. With their vehicles, on the platforms. The Fuk'ushima Kami-crazy War Boys, their half-lives gnawed to the bone, taking the Fury Road like one would go to a devout festival. This one has this enthusiastic fatalism, this absurdly mischievous adrenaline. A battle-thing, pertinently selected for his euphoria in the face of death. Now he's looking north. Is he really so greedy for what he'll find there?
— You're going back to the Storm, he suddenly notices as she complete a wide arc, but she doesn't reply because the answer is yes.
The entrances of the auxiliary Bunkers of the Burried City are always hidden this way: turned towards the tumult of the eternal Storms because nobody ever comes from that direction. Invisible in the meanders of the lands. They ride, ride, until lightnings strike behind their backs. The Storm. Filling the whole sky. And finally, they reach a metal porch between the rocks, facing the chaos. From beyond the gate worn out by the sandy winds, Volta brings back a kind of wheelbarrow where the copper, her battery and Nux are thrown. The Ural is slid into a shelter between the rocks, a narrow space carved to the exact shape of the sidecar. Now the vehicule is a stone among the stones.
— We'll only be here for a short time. Just what's necessary.
There may be eyes on this place, allies and enemies alike. Volta pushes the pitching wheelbarrow and Nux clings to the side as daylight dies in the tunnel.
— What an amazing ride, he says as they move along, and Volta wonders if he's capable of sarcasm.
She moves forward, for several minutes. Under her feet, the ground has been terraced by the weight of many narrow tanks. In the dark, only the strings of Moths larvae can be seen. Weakly bioluminescent garlands of fat worms. With one move, she snatches one off and sends it down into the wheelbarrow. This tastes better than mature Moths, he'll experience it as he eats them. The pupae burst, bitter, juicy. She sees him gloating. Finally, they go through another door, and the walls around are plated with Metall. Above them, the rocky ground shakes with a rumbling, louder than forty V8 engines. A sound like that of the Cataclysm, Volta always thought, even though she was born long afterwards.
— We're... underneath the storm, stammers the War Boy.
— Look.
In a shrill squeal of scrap metal, Voltra pulls a large telescopic tube down from the ceiling. The binocular of a gyroscope, in which she checks something. An automatism, accomplished before letting Nux reach for the eyelets as far as his cracked ribs will allow. What he sees and that cuts off his speech for a moment, Volta herself ended up finding it beautiful. Up there, the horizon no longer exists. There is only the raging storm, the revolt of the winds, the blurry orange light arched by blue electric arcs. Lethal. There, the Bunker roof seems to be the only stable thing. And – planted on top of it – swings the fragidly indestructible pole of one of the Iskra lightning rods.
— Brilliant, he says as she pushes the galvanized steel wheelbarrow again, forcing him to let go of the observatory.
In front of them, in the rather large container that constitutes the main room of this underground facility, stands a colossal electrical cabinet with humming coils, just below a complex transformer capable of taming the raw energy of lightning. In the chiaroscuro, numerous orange lights blink and multiple crackles combine to compete with the muffled thunder. Volta presses a switch. On the ceiling, a constellation of bulbs lights up. Their filaments, she has braided them all with her own fingers.
— Chrome, opines Nux as she pours him to a black bench half embedded in the wall, before discharging the copper and going away to plug her empty battery on a stud.
Right next, a dozen other batteries are in charge and she picks up one that flashes green. She pulls it into the wheelbarrow. And then, with a wide gesture, she opens a cupboard made of the same metal as the Ural's hood. There, she digs around for a while and finally takes out several objects made of plates and articulated rods. On the bench, they fall with a sound of scrap metal, but the storm – above – soon takes over.
— What's that?, Nux asks with a kind of uneasiness, not common with him.
She guesses he's never seen one: War Boys are either alive or dead. They're never broken.
— I won't be able to carry you when we get to the Citadel. You must stand.
Prosthetic splints. Which would have put him on his feet even if he only had one stump left. The one that fits him, she'll get it back once she delivers him. While she finds the right one, she guesses that he's thinking about something and she doesn't know what it is.
— It' s just a quick fix, she says. Just for the time needed. Anyway, there's no point in doing more, is there?
Under her hands that buckle the straps, that tighten the transverse pieces of metal, she feels no resistance. Almost no body tone. He gave it all up when the kimbersnake was on their tail, now he's got almost nothing left in the tank. She pulls, hard, to tighten the splint as it were part of the intact bones above the broken pieces. She gives him time to drain the pain. She rips out the fragments of black tissue, lacerated in the crash. And then she asks, forcing on her screwdriver:
— How long did you have to live before that?
He's hesitating. If he doesn't want to answer, it won't make a difference. Still, he rises to sit a little more dignified, while a lightning bolt is caught by the lightning rod above them in a crack of the sky.
— A blood-bag, he says. I've been plugged... three days ago. It'd be over by now otherwise. Maybe. Definitely.
He hesitated about time, as if all this had happened in another existence. Volta believes it. All of it. The truth is that without another such transfusion, what was imminent – what has just been delayed – will come to pass. And rumor has it that all the blood bags have been released from the Citadel, just like the other prisoners. She takes the wrench and he retrieves the screwdriver. Then he begins to coat the tip of it with the black grease that lubricates the mechanics of the splint.
— Larry and Barry, he says as she frowns. They're jerks.
She watches him use his screwdriver as an improvised brush, retracing without even being able to see them two faces on the pair of lymphomas growing at his neck. Four eyes, two mouths. Like he's done this a hundred times. And he keeps saying they're jerks.
— They don't get that when I'm done, they'll be done too.
Volta lets him finish, then turns around and sends the oversized splints back to the metal cabinet. She's seen his fever the night before, similar to the one that took her mother away. At least he's factual: one more will be one too many.
— You still want to go back to the Citadel, she says because she can't understand, even though she shouldn't care. Immortan Joe's dead, and you won't even get a pat on the back. You don't give a shit, you said. For real, you don't care if you go back and die soft there ?
What War Boys usually fear the most, they who only seek the final act of heroic bravery, the fireworks of mechanics and bones that will mark the memory of their witnesses.
— I can die soft, he says, and she can see that he never thought he'd say that before either.
She's listening to him, but as she tightened the side bolts on the splint, she raised her nose towards the door. As if she heard something through the acoustic plague of the hurricane outside. Something other than the crackling of the batteries. He hasn't noticed.
— I can, he says again. I would. I know where and I know how.
— There's someome waiting for you there.
It's not even a question. Volta grabs the wheelbarrow again and puts it back against the edge of the seat. The transformers sizzle, but her attention shifts elsewhere. The noise in the tunnel. It just happened again and it's not a stone falling from the ceiling.
— No, she's certainly not waiting, she hears, on the lookout.
Volta doesn't need to know who she is, and he's probably right: she doesn't expect anything. The Pass, the War-rig, the dust, the bingle as the Wasteland slang sums it up quite well. Nux shakes his head, as if it were off-center.
— I live, I die, I live again...
This enumeration is not finished, and it is Volta who completes it.
— You die gain, one last time.
She thinks that maybe their interests may not conflict, but the noise is coming back. She pulls him hard down into the wheelbarrow and moves towards the door in a defensive posture. This time, she has pulled her dagger and now she's waving it forward in the direction of the tunnel they came from. She swears very low in Russian, but then she whispers:
— We'll make it happen wherever you want.