It was cold and the wrappings did nothing to stave off the chill as it reached deep into me and clenched its frigid fingers around every bone.
Awareness would come and go, so would pain. I might have broken my wrist, I couldn't be sure because it was dark and I couldn't move. The sand itched and burrowed into every centimeter of ruined flesh but it and the ruthlessly cool night air blowing passed me was the only reason I knew that I was close to escape. So stupidly close. I could even smell the grease and guzzoline of the place where the mad scavenger kept her rides.
I was close, but I might as well still be laying there useless next to the corpse of Dune's parent. I had gotten lost, the torch had gone out and I hadn't seen the sheer drop. The fall shattered the crutch into splinters, sent a blaze of wretched sensation throughout every nerve and then sucked the breath out of me. That had been hours if not days ago, I still couldn't bring myself to get up.
If you can't stand up you can't do war.
My words, echoing in my brain and feeling like a kick in the ribs. I'd told Nux that. I hadn't wanted him to go, because I hadn't wanted him to die. It would have been better if he had just stayed and fueled up on the feral's blood. Then he wouldn't have traitored us all. I wouldn't have to hate him.
If that bitch Imperator wouldn't have stolen the Immortal's treasures, If Nux had stayed, If I hadn't caved in and let him go then we might be laying in our bunk right now, shoulder to shoulder. If anything had happened different, then everything would be the way it should be now.
He's probably dead. Joe probably shredded all of them. Why wouldn't he? What reason is there to hope that what I saw isn't true?
It's all Nux's fault. If that mediocre shit could have just stayed at home and not always be convinced that he was dying then I wouldn't be here right now wondering where the hell he ended up. Because he sure as hell wasn't going to Valhalla now that he's pissed away any chance he had to be awaited.
You filth! You traitored him!
When I shouted that at him I had almost said it wrong, tasting the word me even though it came out him. Why? Why was he helping them? It made no sense and I couldn't force the answers to come together in my head no matter how hard I tried. I'd spent days trying to figure it out.
I remembered the taste of guzz and watching Nux coax the rig's engines a little faster. I watched him hack and retch on the fuel because the idiot had inhaled it. I had laughed at him and he deserved it.
The wind blew in through the cave mouth and down into the place I had fallen to dust me with sand carried in on the breeze. I had long lost feeling from my fingers all the way up to my elbows. I tried curling up and stuffing my frozen hands under my arm pits to keep them warm but that helped little. Night is cruel when you're alone.
All of the small details leading to Nux betraying everything we knew kept on appearing and vanishing in my head like a tease, as if I could reach into the past and change it all around so that things would turn out right. Thoughts became restless dreams, I forgot where I was.
I had my hands around his neck. His big dumb eyes rolled back and then I let him have a breath. "Why!? Tell me why, smeg!"
He gulped down air, mouth hanging open and scarred lips blue. "Slit!" He rasped, then choked on the tumors he'd given stupid names.
When he started getting some color back in his traitor face I closed my fingers around his throat again. He wasn't going to die, we used to play this game when we were pups to see how long the other could keep their eyes open. I knew just how long Nux could take it before my grip beckoned his death.
I let go again. The sound Nux made when he sucked in air only fueled the fire in my gut, a combustible mixture of both my rage and his desperation. Now he's desperate to live huh? After wrecking his chance at Valhalla. "WHY?! Why shit for brains? Just couldn't stand the idea of letting me drive could you? Why do you keep fucking everything up? Why didn't you turn the Coupe around to grab me when your bloodbag kicked me off? Were you that fangin' eager for Valhalla that you couldn't waste five seconds to pick me up? We're supposed to cark it historic together you worn out, skull faced, brake pad!"
Nux managed to wheeze out a response, an excuse, something that I couldn't understand. Everything sounded like it was far away, it was as if I had a rag stuffed into my good ear.
"Look at this!" I showed him what was left of my leg. A scorched stump. I pointed to my left side where weeping red bubbles had replaced my skin. "This is your fault! You did this! If you hadn't traitored him this wouldn't have happened!"
He lifted his arm and pointed behind me, fingers shaking and eyes growing wide like two blue hubcaps. I turned my head and the Immortal was there, breath heavy as his dead breeder hung limp in his arms. She was dropped to the ground, useless and cold now.
He raised his hand and pointed an accusing finger at my driver. It was right and it was just, yet I begged it to stop, for everything to just hit the breaks. I tried to get up to pull Nux away, but when I looked down my other leg was gone too.
Nux howled as if he were being gutted, writhing and kicking and spine twisting in ways that just weren't normal. His skin changed, going gritty and losing all of those familiar scars. Pieces of him began to blow apart and fly away on the wind like ash. I tried to catch them, but all of the bits of him just slipped through my fingers like sand.
When I woke my face was wet and my blood pump was trying to piston its way through the ribs I had bruised when I fell. This must be what it's like to die soft, this must have been what Nux was so afraid of.
"Look at yourself. A burnt out wreck. No leg, no driver. Never gonna be a driver yourself. Nothing... Just. Nothing." I said it to myself. Maybe I said it for Nux too, wherever he was.
There was dim light, the cave mouth must have been even closer than I thought. The night before had almost killed me with cold but now it was almost too hot to breathe. Sweat had broken out anywhere there was still unmarred skin. It must be high noon now if I was sweltering in the shade. Heat I could take, it was the cold that made a whimpering pup out of me. It had always been like that, but I'd always had Nux and his fevered skin to sleep next to before. I hadn't realized how comfortable that'd been until now because we'd always fought over space with jabbing elbows and kicking feet.
The mound of sand that had formed against my back as wind brought it in almost felt like a body leaning heavy against me. When thirst and sleep came to drag my eyes closed again I dreamt of the shallow stone alcove where my driver and I slept.
-0-
"What are you doin' here?! Aw Ducky. Dear thing. Come on. Lets get you up."
The scav's voice stirred me, then her canteen pressed into my face and fully roused me so I could drink every last drop. I should have been angry, should've hated myself for failing to reach Valhalla again. Instead a guilty sense of relief crept up on me, stabbing quick and bolting away again into the deep holes in my mind. She dusted off the sand and started hoisting me up by the wrist. Nope, it wasn't broken, but it didn't feel any good.
"Ahh! Filthy, loony, mindless, bitch." It was supposed to come like the roar of a nitro boost. Instead it fell out of my mouth like sobs as she pulled my arm over her shoulders and began lifting with a long groan.
"Shhh. Shh. You're alright. Come on, stand with me now. Three legs are bettah than two. Yeah? No?... Come on. Dune's got you."
I said nothing and barely cared enough to obey.
"Ouff!" Dune stumbled under my weight and I had no choice but to collapse into the sand with her. She pushed herself up and started grasping at me to try again. "Come on War Boy! You're gonna hafta put in some effort here!"
I found just a little fight left in me, it resisted like a flame that just wouldn't go out no matter how hard you tried to stomp out the embers. I shouted, jerked away from her hands and took a swing at her with my less charred hand. I had no right to be called a War Boy, and there was nowhere else to focus my shame and anger but at the creature that had robbed me of the chance to mcfeast with fabled heroes and ride eternal.
She took my knuckles solid to the left side of her jaw and she went flopping back into the sand.
"I'm not a War Boy! I'm nothing but mediocre Nothing! And that's your doing!"
She sat back up and scooted out of my reach, palming her chin and rotating her jaw. I could see red coating her teeth. She glared at me and took several ragged breaths before saying anything. I could tell that she was deciding whether or not to strike back. Finally she filled up her lungs deep and huffed the air back out as she made her choice in how to retaliate.
"Slit. We ARE what we ARE. You're a thing that fight, fight, fights. If ya weren't a tough S.O.B. then you'da died before I ever made my way to the trail of death the war parties left behind. You're Kamikrazy, and I'm- Well, I'm just plain forkin' crazy and I'll admit that... Now, shit happens. But it don't change who and what we are. We're not nothing."
What she said didn't hit me first, it was the fact that she hadn't spoken in the third person. Only after I grasped how awkward it sounds when she talks sane like did the rest filter through. I cut my gaze away from her. I didn't want to hear this. If anybody could be right and full of shit at the same time, it was Dune.
I pretended the sand pile between us was the most interesting thing in the world as she spat bloody spittle and got back to her feet. "Are you going to help Dune lift you up off your arse? Or are you going to force her to carry you?"
I glared, becoming aware of my scowl when the staples in my face pinched. I looked away again, refusing to meet her gaze as I lifted an arm for her to take.
Being helped stung somewhere deep, but it wasn't as if I had much choice. With an arm over her shoulders and her other hand gripping the waistband of my pants tight to keep me upright I was turned toward a gentle slope of rock that wound around the three meter drop that I had stumbled over in the night. Just a few steps to the left and I would have succeeded in my quest.
No more words were exchanged. Dune didn't need light to navigate, she'd taken this path into the interior too many times. It took half the time to get back to that rustpit than it did for me to get as far as I did on my own, and soon she was propping me against my boulder and lighting the torches.
"If you got those pants on, you can get them off yourself. Dune needs to put away the haul and replenish the maggot farm." She sighed and shot me a glance before stalking away, wiping the trickle of red away from her chin. "At least we shall not starve."
I just pulled the button out of the loop and let them fall into a pile around my ankle. Didn't bother with the boot. As sore as my ribs were and as taut as the burns were under their two day old wraps I wasn't going to be bending myself in half to untie that again. I slid down the rock and sat in the nest of mediocrity Dune had built around me, resigned to it.
When she returned she yanked off the boot and gave the trousers a sniff before turning her nose up at them and tossing the lot as far away as she could, muttering that they needed a wash. Dune then got to work performing the torture she always suffered me with.
Sometime in between being scrubbed clean -with uncomfortable thoroughness- and smothered in the healing slime, I lost the battle with sleep once again.
Silence never quite falls on the warrens where War Boys sleep. Teeth chatter and bodies quiver with a false chill brought on by the fevers. Every night at least one man will die in his bed and his sleep mates will wake to his body cold and stiff among them. An angel of death lurks in the dark, stalking its next victim.
Can't move. Can't breathe. Can't wake.
"Nux, this isn't fuckin' funny. Get up." He wouldn't move, wouldn't blink, wouldn't speak. His mouth just hung open and his eyes stared blankly into the distance.
Don't do this.
"Get up you filth! You have to fix this. Make it up to Joe! Get up! Or you'll never get to Valhalla!" I got up and pulled him out of the bunk, but he just rag-dolled onto the floor in a pile. He wasn't even cold yet.
"Witness." The faceless boys in the surrounding bunks whispered.
"NO! SHUT UP!.. Nux, get up... Nux? Wake up!" I shook his shoulders and his head just rolled around.
Witness.
"No! Stupid pup. You stupid, stupid pup!" It' wasn't a joke. I turned to shout for someone to get the Organic, when I turned back there was nothing left to revive. Just a pile of bones.
Witness...
It's a dream I've had before. Usually after a couple days listening to the weakling whine about his body failing him. It started out hard to take him seriously because ever since we were pups Nux would make a big deal out of any symptom and attribute it to his "immanent demise". As the days and days went by it started to become clear that plenty was actually wrong with him, and I grew cold, refusing to believe it was true until he needed bloodbags regularly.
How could you trust a driver that might konk out in the middle of a pursuit? I didn't want him to die, but didn't want him to drive. I didn't know what I wanted. I was just sick of the confusion. When he declared that he was going to die historic, that was sort of the answer. Fine. I decided that we'd both chuck it in. There wasn't a driver better than Nux, hate to admit it but it's true and I wasn't keen on getting paired up with some green pup after Nux went. We could've kept on like always, just in Valhalla instead of this dumptruck load of shit called life. He just had to go and muck the whole thing up. Cancer must have eaten up his brain.
How come every time that traitor pops into my sleeping head he's dying? I scratched at my face, the rags tied around my fingers absorbed the aqua-cola my eyes had wasted while I dreamt.
"Who's Nux?"
I stiffened at Dune's question, not expecting it at all. "No one. A piece of trash. What's it matter to you who he is?"
"You ask for him in your sleep. You beg him to wake up." She spoke soft like. It was weird compared to the way she'd normally bark out excited nonsense.
Her statement earned her a glare. What happened to all of that mess on her head? All she had left was a mohawk of blunt ended pleats. Didn't matter. I turned my head and resumed looking at the stone wall. Nux was none of her damn business. "You whine shit in your sleep too. Not that any of it actually makes sense."
I heard her shift and some metal clinking. The brush of a finger running over the whorls and designs carved into my right forearm caused me to flinch and snap my head around to gawk. She flinched too, retracting her arm quick as lightning. The stare we exchanged was long, neither of us fully trusting the gesture. Cautiously that shine hand reached out again to trace the shape of a wrench in the scars, I tensed to it.
"So many doodles... All so pretty. You do that yourself?"
I didn't know how to take this. Gentle hands and sentiment are reserved only for the youngest of pups, not grown boys with faces like the one I've got. She should be afraid, she should heed the way scars like mine warn not to touch. If I weren't so fucking mediocre right now I could end her just like that. Didn't she know better than to invite snakes into her kip? Still, as the thoughts buzzed in my head like flies, other very not War Boy like feelings squeezed at my innards. All my pathetic self could seem to do was watch the little circles that the fingers traced and nod moronically. Yes, I did these cut-ups a long, long time ago.
It was like the witch had hexed me and I couldn't control what my meat and bones did anymore. Long minutes passed, maybe hours. I felt boneless. She traced every scar that wasn't hidden or scorched away, even those that had given me my name. It was a lazy, soft, rusty, shiny thing of the loon to do. For a while I forgot to hate her again.
"I'm hungry. You must be starvin' too Duck. Dune's going to make us something to munch now. Yeah?"
She pulled away, wiggling herself out from under how I'd leaned into her and I resented the empty, neglected feeling that spread across my skin when her shine hand was gone. If she kept doing shit like that, I might not be able to keep on hating her like I should.
