"Mary mother of god..."
"Can you help him?"
"No. He's as good as dead."
"Dune knows you can save him. You have to help. At least try... Wilson?! Say something!"
"You want me to say something? You dragged me all the way here for a man that's as good as dead!... This- This is wrong, and insane EVEN for you! Look at him! Do you think anyone would want to live like this? Even if he heals, even if he beats the infection? Would you want to live like THIS!?"
"Yes. Life is worth saving. Even if it hurts at first to live."
…
"Support his head woman, and hold down his arms. I have to cut out all this dead tissue."
"Nux?"
"Ducky?"
"Nux, don't leave."
"I'm right here Slit. Don't be afraid."
Nux, help me.
I swore that I saw him leaning over Dune's shoulder, reaching out to me. I swore that I heard him too. It was like the day I almost bled out on the Organic Mechanic's table and my driver stayed right up until they forced him to go. I felt comforted, something our kind seldom feel.
Infection had finally caught up with me, starting at the gnarled end of what's left of my leg and moving through me until I fell into a fever so cruel that dreams came to taunt me even when my eyes were open. I remember little of it, just like I remember little of the week after Dune found me. She had to fill me in on what had happened.
A man called Wilson was there when I woke, a gun across his lap and his hand wrapped around the handle as he napped sitting up with his head tilted back against the stone.
I was told that he had been staying here for a time helping Dune to fix me. He was an organic mechanic apparently.
"You almost died again Ducky. Gods be praised, you live again! Like a cat with lives to spare, that's three by my count. You got six left now."
No, four. I've already almost died twice before winding up in this Joe forsaken cave.
"What the hell happened?" My tongue rolled around between my cheeks slowly, bogged down and sticking to my teeth from the sour dryness. I couldn't move again, there was just no strength left in my bones to so much as lift my fingers. The words came slow and scratched through my throat too, I'd have asked again when she paused with guilt running through her face, but I only managed to cough up something thick and salty from my lungs.
"Infection. Your body went rotten. Should have known better- Dune should have thought about it before... Shouldn't have left you alone so long. Should have told Wilson about the leg sooner. Shut your fucking whore mouth Dune and get Ducky some water!"
She shook her head and gnashed her teeth at the air, snapping them and turning sharply to gimp her way to the buckets which caught the Aqua-cola. She felt bad. She regretted. Good. It's about fucking time she hated herself for this. Her muttering and low ranting at herself seemed to wake the decrepit old man lounging against the furthest wall. He lifted a brow at the nutter, clutched his rifle closer and grimaced at where her mother's bones sat propped up before turning his buzz cut head away and closing his eyes again.
When Dune scuttled back she wore a sympathetic closed mouth smile, hiding her savage teeth. She slid her scar hand under my head and used the shine hand to tip a grimy mason jar full of Aqua-cola against my lips. It washed away the taste of death from my mouth, but introduced a chemical aftertaste.
"Wilson says he's going to leave in two days, but he'll come back for check ups once a week... Ohh, rust and dust. Dune owes him MASSIVE. Might never be able to repay it. He gave old world medicine to help." She said excitedly, and then morosely at the end. All the words were hurried, as if there was more jabbering to be done and it all needed to make it out of her mouth quick. Making up for the days that I couldn't hear her beating those ugly teeth together.
"Why is-" She didn't let me finish speaking, she tipped the jar into my lips again and I couldn't refuse.
"Drink. Drink. Don't want you dryin' out, could hardly get any water into you while you were out cold... Hungry Slit!? Yeah? No?" She set down the jar and reached for the metal dishes we ate out of.
"No solids for him yet woman!" The old man, Wilson grunted with an authoritative voice. "I don't want him horkin' perfectly good food back up when there's so little of it in this dump already."
She growled low. "Well, this is my dump Wilson and Ducky can hork up whatever he wants to."
"He could fall asleep and then aspirate. Turn him on his side if you're gonna fill him up with water like that." The old man argued.
"WHAT the FORKIN' hell does that even mean?"
My stomach churned acid and my throat spasmed around my gag reflex. "Stop talking about vomit. Veeight, please stop."
Dune gasped and dropped the tin bowl in her hands. "Goddess on her throne of seeds... Di- did you just say please? Ahh, shit. Wilson! Dune told you the pain would make him wrong in the head like her. You should'a given him the needle. Don't think Dune could live with herself if he started acting all nice like and forgetting to smite her with profani-"
"I was beseeching the mighty V8. Not you, bag of nuts."
Dune snorted, but grinned wide too. "Bag of dicks. Wasn't really even worried 'bout you anyhow."
"I miss my bunker." The old organic sighed as he shook his head slowly, wild gray brows lifting high on his head as he attempted to tune out Dune's muttering, then crooning at me annoyingly, and her further muttering.
The two days didn't pass quickly. Dune and Wilson bickered often enough to give me headaches which throbbed all the way down into the sockets of my shoulders. I found out that Wilson was using maggots to -and I quote- prepare the wound for closure.
"They'll eat up all the dead meat that I missed." He'd said.
The knowledge that they were there, squirming around under loose bandages on my half-leg and chewing at me, almost made me sick. Watching Dune change the bandages to pick out the fat, well fed wrigglers and pop them between her lips was the limit of what I could take. I'd rolled over and retched up everything she had force fed me that morning, just thankful I hadn't tossed up the acid and bile into my naked lap. She just patted my head and wiped my face with her own sleeve. I wanted to sink into the rock and disappear.
When the time came for Wilson to go I was something close to giddy. I wouldn't have to listen to them bitch at each other anymore.
Before Wilson left he gave the scav all sorts of instructions that I didn't listen to. Then he turned to me, looking my useless corpse over a final time and ignoring any protest I made. "You're a lucky boy. Mostly lucky to run into somebody crazy enough to give a shit about you. I'll be back in a week to suture up that leg."
Hate his arsehole already.
-0-
Sixteen days later, Dune woke me from a dead sleep by shoving my pants up my leg-and-a-half then pulling me up and helping me to stand. It was easier now, at least it is when I'm awake. Half asleep it's like slogging it through mud to hop around with her arms around my middle to keep me from toppling over.
"Ugh, what the fuck is this? Put me down. Now."
"Come'on. Quit being a mean little piss-ant. Dune wants to show you something. It's real green- Err. Or maybe chrome is the way you'd put it? Hm? Yeah?"
"Doubt anything you have to show me would shine like chrome." I growled out as she harried and tugged me along a little too quickly, making my sore skin and aching head throb.
In the darkness Dune knew the place like she knew her own body. Still, this journey through the pitching and winding tunnels made me a little anxious that every sharp decline would end in tumbling down into the endless blackness and going splat at the bottom.
By the time we got close enough to the surface to see columns of light pour in from cracks and wind worn holes in the sand stone my eye had adjusted to the dark. This made the dim glow feel like staring straight into the blazing sun.
I could smell the desert. Clean, parched earth and hot, dry air. We stepped around the gaping hole I had fallen into when I tried to escape and I spat into it as we passed. I was still huffing and growling at the memory of that night when she tugged me harder and commanded me to hang on tighter around her shoulders so she could take more of the weight.
"Almost there Ducky! You'll get a kick outta this."
"Chrysler, what the shit could be so fucking important that you'd drag my hairy ass up to-"
The words vanished in my throat before I could taste them on my tongue. We were standing at the entrance of a chamber bathed in light from a gaping hole in the roof. I had never seen this place before. There was the motorcycle I'd heard her leave and come back on, there was something I didn't recognize at all with a fan on the back, and there was a car.
The body was dented and scratched to shit, the tires were a joke, and it had the sloppiest coat of matte black paint that I had ever seen. It was a 1960 Chevy Impala. Most of the letters on the front were missing or cockeyed. I'd only ever seen one in a torn up old word burger in the garage. I'd liked that picture almost as much as I liked the Mustang page in the old world calender Nux kept in our bunk with the pictures of Ford models. Never touched that calender though, the pages always stuck together suspiciously.
Dune extended her hand at it and grinned up at me with the most horrifying yet idiotic smile I had ever seen. If her eyes had been blue, not green, I could have mistaken the scav as my driver for a split second.
"Ta-forkin-da. That thing's all yours. It don't like Dune. Just lurches around and fights her."
She must not know how to drive a manual. Mediocre of her that, but the fact that she was pulling me along and practically carrying me to this beastly vehicle helped me to overlook her fault.
I leaned heavy against it and started looking it over, smoothing my hands over her metal body to feel all of the dents and deep scuffs that were within my reach. Most of the windows were miraculously intact too. She let me go and scurried off, coming back a moment later and pushing something at the back of my knee. It was a wooden crate that she had managed to bolt skinny little wheels onto. It rattled obnoxiously when it rolled over the uneven stone under my foot.
"Sit on this."
I still couldn't speak. I don't know what to say, or feel. It was a car. She gave me a fucking car. Why? She could have hocked it if she had no intention of driving it herself. It was certainly worthy of good trade even in this condition. Out here any car that still runs is worthy of at least three months worth of food minimum. If you could find somebody to barter with that is. I could drive this, I still had a right foot. I could still drive if I wanted to. My bare toes curled into the rock at the thought.
My blood pump was thudding like a war drum, I could practically hear the Doof warrior shredding out the Immortan's commands in my head. Wait. No.
"I don't deserve this..."
"Hm?" The scav grunted as she pulled her head back out of the passenger side window and tilted it at me.
"I Can't. I failed Immortan Joe. Fate shouldn't have me behind a wheel again. I'm not worthy 'cause I couldn't even fangin' die right." I spat and curled my hands into fists against the trunk. Vision blurred with wasted aqua-cola as I realized where I really stood in the world now. Excommunicated War Boy. Worthless, useless, one legged-
Without warning she had turned me around at the shoulders, pushed at me til I sat on the trunk, and then slid her shine hand around the back of my head and pulled our skulls together. I might have thought this was some sort of attack had the actions not been so soft and rusty on her part. Her forehead was sticky with sweat and her breath bad, but I didn't have the will to pull away when that damn shine hand touched me.
"Come on Duck. Do lighten up? The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you. You're not nothing, so stop pissing and moaning that you're unworthy, 'cause you're startin' to piss me off with this tripe." In spite of the harshness in the words the voice was soft and dripping with sentiment that made the contents of my gut curdle. She let me go and began fetching bins full of tools, most broken or useless.
It was like she had no idea what the significance of giving away a car to a War Boy was. Then again, I wasn't really a War Boy anymore, was I? A scav's pet maybe, a spoilt one now. The threads that held me together inside were getting clipped in half one by one. In a sudden and completely unexpected string of thoughts that gave me chills I realized that... Well, at least when I drop dead I'll be going wherever Nux went. It was a fearful relief to know that.
END OF ACT 1
