-Day 724-
I remember asking how those Storm Riders would know if a storm was coming when it still dwells beyond the limits of sight. Dune merely gave her best guess, something along the lines of they got a sixth sense 'bout it- which doesn't really answer the question.
I was half convinced that there was no real danger at all until a dark blot formed on the horizon, growing wide and tall with electricity crackling through it as we made the mad dash for cover. Her aqua cola dripping cavern was too far to reach before the rage of the black storm caught up with us and there was no outrunning it.
Dune knew the territory, however, and she had bolt holes to scurry into when she had no other options but to spend a night out here, or take cover from something she can't put a bullet into.
The place we stopped was somewhere between the decrepit old bastard's hole in the sand and the flat lands beyond which she insisted we never ventured into. There was a tall, round-topped boulder and the remains of a tanker wrapped around it as if a previous storm had picked it up and blown it into the rock. It didn't look like it had ever been a war machine. Made from rust more than anything else, it was ancient enough to have been a part of the old world.
Dune pulled the sled in close and hopped out. The rifle was in her hands as she approached the cab of the broken down rig, which was miraculously right side up and sitting on bare rims. She gave the door a few taps with the barrel. The pistol on my right thigh felt heavy while watching her ensure that no one else had taken refuge inside. I undid the clasp and curled my fingers around the handle and bone grips.
Dune clambered up and pulled at the door, putting her full weight into her attempts twice before it came open with a plume of red dust. Something scaly with too many legs skittered between her boots and dropped into the sand. It got shot on reflex.
"Gah!" She shouted then glared back at me as the gun smoke floated away on the rising wind. "Clear. Nothin' but a mutated forkin' monitor lizard."
"You mean dinner." Couldn't help the smirk that tugged on my split face.
"If we have time. Get your goggles on Ducky. The fury of the dead world is blowing in fast and we need to tie everything down before taking respite."
The interior was completely gutted, no seats, no steering wheel, nothing. Just floorboards and wads of trash. Dune grabbed her canteen and the oil lamp she kept in the sled and put that up into the cab of the wreck, then she started pulling out coils of rope and the tarps. One tarp she tossed into the cab, the other she threw over both the sled and the bike. The scavenger started throwing stones onto cargo and around the edges of the covers to keep the wind from tearing it right back off.
"Duck, take the rope and start feeding it around the rock and under the tanker!"
It was a simple enough chore, but the damn metal leg was being difficult, it liked to get caught on everything.
"Could you hurry the fuck up Slit? We've got minutes! Maybe less!" She bit out over the wind at me with her hands cupped around her mouth.
I was busy tying knots and trying to get the second rope around the gigantic, stupid fan so that I could tie that onto the back of the rig. Anger pooled in my mouth. "Oh, you think I can't see the WALL of shit coming at me? You've got both your legs, come do it your-damn-self if you think you can tie a fuckin' knot faster!"
She hurled one more heavy stone into the sled to hold down the blue tarp and started around the wrapped up pile of our crap, throwing curses as the flying sand started to bite and the sky began to go dark.
I expected to have something chucked at me, be it a slur or a rock, not to almost get blown up. Burning white light, a boom that tore air and dirt and rattled my rib cage.
My right ear rang in sickening shrills, like metal scraping metal. I saw streaks of light dance and play around me like a pack of freshly painted warpups. My blood pump did some unsettling hopping and shuddering types of things inside me. Every hair stood up and prickled. I'd been knocked on my ass, but by friggin' what?
I rolled over and rose onto my hands and knees, both flesh and steel. What the hell had that mind-screwed bag of fodder done to me? Did she throw a grenade? Set off an explosion with a jug of guzz? I shook my head, found that I was drooling and wiped the slick line away from my lip.
When I looked up -growling and ready to start a brawl despite the storm rolling in- I didn't see Dune on her feet with fists up. What I saw instead sent the cold of night crawling through my veins.
There are some things you just can't un-see. Like your driver on the hood of a rig full of traitor scum and spitting guzz into the engines. This was one of those things.
Dune was laying face down in the sand. Smoke raced away on the wind from the top of her head and from the heels of her boots. I looked around, trying to spot who was responsible. There was nothing, no one. Thunder roared and nearby flashes of light brought me to my senses.
Lightning. Joedamned lightning.
I forgot that I was missing a leg, got up, forgot to pull the shitting knob into walk position and fell on my mediocre face. Just as well, I ended up scrambling the rest of the way there on my hands and knee because the wind was threatening to grab me and throw with everything it had.
The moment my fingers touched the back of her head where her hair was still smoldering, it hit with all of its prowess and might. We were in the throat of the storm and being swallowed whole. There was no light, could hardly breathe, and even if my ear wasn't ringing I still wouldn't have been able to hear a damn thing.
I don't know how I got myself and a limp body to the cab of the wreck. There was no thinking, just do and don't mind the way the blood pump almost hurts as it hammers away till your ribs crack.
The door swung wildly, clanging and smashing itself around. I couldn't get up there with her held under an arm like a sack of dirt. I had to literally throw her inside, like the heaviest and floppiest lance I'd ever flung.
Inside, with the door pulled shut, the sound started to make it through the whirring in my head. I could hear sand and debris pelting the outside, finding its way in through cracks in the windshield.
I didn't care that something could smash through the weakened windows, that every time something crashed into the side of the tanker the whole thing rocked. She wouldn't move, I shook her, cursed, looked for her pulse but I couldn't tell if it was hers or mine jumping in my fingers.
Goin' soft Slit. Shut it Nux.
"Hey. Hey! Say something!" Nothing, I shook her harder, still nothing. She smelled like burnt hair.
"Don't you die on me!"
I tore down the zipper and threw open her vest, pressed my good ear against her cage to listen for breath. Didn't find anything, not even the thudding of her blood pump.
"Feckin' shit. Shit!"
Not breathing. Dead. Dead just like my smeg driver. Everybody is going to go traitor or die soft on me.
Lightning struck nearby, lighting up the bare interior of the cab as I grabbed her head, sat on her legs and forced her mouth open with my face to blow air into her still lungs. I'd seen it done before in the blood hall. A War Boy brought in for being found not breathing after getting high as a polecat on paint fumes. One of the Organic's assistants had done this. I had not a clue what the treatment is called but it got the air moving in that moron's chest again.
Her teeth cut my lip. I barely felt it. A crash of lightning revealed that her chin was smeared in my red stuff when I leaned back and started trying to press the air back out. Couldn't tell what I was doing, I squished her guts before I had the center of her rib cage under my palms.
I tried again, and again. Nothing. Nothing. Hideous, soft, rusted fucking nothing.
"Breathe damnit!"
Why? I was the one standing on higher ground, I was the one with a leg made out of fangin' metal. Why did she get struck?
I gave her another breath, crushed it back out of her, and then understood that I'd be going back to her kip alone. No. She did this. Dune made me live when I honestly still can't tell if I really want to or not. She doesn't get to just check out like this and leave me here like that selfish bastard revhead did. I still haven't made her regret keeping me. Anger came back, beating down the panic I was just beginning to realize was there. I gripped her open vest in my fists and slammed the corpse down into the floorboards.
"Don't do this! Nux- Dune, FUCK!"
The body under my hands spasmed, arms flailing wildly as she coughed her bloody lungs up into my face.
Not burnt out yet. Alive.
Nux said it, maybe from inside my head, maybe as a ghost that isn't allowed through the gates and fated to linger.
I still had a hold of her vest and used that to yank her off the floorboards and prop her up. Dune wroth and retched and gulped down air as she slumped into me.
"St—ing. Going. Up to... Duck- shiny scrap to... pick..."
The loon pretty much just died and still she mutters nonsense. Despite all of my efforts to wish shit like this on Dune, the sound of her rambling came as a deep and guilty relief. War Boys are supposed to embrace death, feed on it, venerate the departed as they are now beyond our realm of suffering. Then again, I'm not a War Boy anymore. I'm just a mediocre, one-legged, sack of manure who lives with a hermit.
Couldn't find room in my head to care that it was soft as hell, what I did.
I grabbed the tarp she'd stowed in here and pulled it over us to fend off the sand that managed to find its way in. I kept her close, her lips next to my good ear so I could make sure she was still breathing, just like I had to do with my idiot driver night after night.
-Day 725-
The storm lasted until just before dawn the next day. The wind was still strong when I felt it was safe enough to venture out, but not so violent that it could pick you up or knock you over.
I still kept my scarf tied tight around my face and the cracked goggles on to keep dust out.
Dune was still breathing. I'd made sure of that, counted every pull of air she drew in and gave her a shake whenever it didn't sound like she was getting enough.
I didn't sleep, I wasn't tired. I was too busy shaking like some scared warpup to let thirst and hunger and lack of sleep catch up with me.
The sled was flipped over, the tarp was torn in half, the body and all of the metal strewn about in a mess. The bike was half buried. I laced my fingers together over my head in prayer before trying to pull it from the sand and beat the dust out of it.
"Start. Just start. Don't need more rust luck." It had to be push started, no battery. Key in, kill switch flipped, clutch down and walking it as fast as I could manage to go with one good leg. A quick release of the clutch and the scream of the engine revealed just how lucky I could get.
The Immortal in Valhalla must have granted a boon to my prayer. V8 be praised.
I circled the wreck and shut her off, flipping the kick stand out where I was pretty sure the ground was solid enough to support it while I hauled my loony scavenger out of the wrecked rig.
Dune was still unconscious, no longer muttering or making any noise as I pulled her neckerchief up over her mouth and put her goggles on for her. I had to cut several thick lengths from the torn tarp and feed them under her so that I could tie her to my back, sitting between her legs and pulling her up against my spine as I triple tied every knot.
Once she was secure I slid my fingers under her knees and picked us both up. A hell of a feat when you only have one leg.
Starting the bike a second time was a bitch with the extra weight, but as soon as I could manage it I fanged it to the old man's territory. The scrap and maggot food I left behind be damned as the sun rose.
-0-
Upon arrival I could see him, he often sat in plain sight after a disaster that might bring the locals in for patchups. He was sitting in a foldout chair under a thing that looks like an upside down flower on the top of his hill of dirt. There was a box with a big horn on it spewing out a tune that I didn't recognize. The sight was like something out of a fever dream. He turned his eyes our way as the sound of the cycle got his attention.
"WILSON!" I didn't give a shit about the formal greeting. Couldn't whistle ever since my face got shredded anyway.
I let the bike fall over after killing the engine and stumbling off to untie the nutter from my back.
He was halfway down the hill with his sawed off in his right hand and a canteen in the other. "The hell happened?"
"Lightning."
"What!?" He forgot his precious rules and made the rest of the way down with just as much speed as his old carcass could summon. He saw the charred hair and examined her head first, found a burn there. Next, he checked her pulse to confirm that she wasn't a corpse and then pulled off her boots, revealing deep, yellow and black scorches in the soles of her feet that I didn't even realize were there. "Jesus you're lucky. You idgits were out in the storm?"
"No, we were in Bartertown having drinks at the Atomic Café. The shit does it look like!?" I've never actually been to Bartertown, but I was aware of its existence from overhearing discussions held by the crews that had attempted trade there.
"I don't need snark from you. Let's get her inside."
-0-
"Pick up 'er legs, lemme slide this box under'um. Yeah. Like that. Here. Blankets. Need to keep her warm. She's in shock."
"Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?"
"What? No, it's a legitimate medical term. Just do as I say, boy."
"Is... Is she going to live?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. Lightning can pretty much do whatever the hell it wants to a person. Way back when I did triage at a bonified ER, we had a guy come in struck by lightning, slept for three days and woke up speaking french. A couple years later, a woman came in after a getting struck on a hiking trail, neuropathy got her an' she never walked again. It can cook your organs, scramble your brain, tie your nerves into knots, stop your heart or leave you unharmed. Whatever it decides it wants to do to you... Hey, don't ever do CPR again unless I show you how. You're lucky her ribs aren't broken."
"Well, whatever the hell I did I must've done it right. Blood pump wasn't even working when... Veeight. Fuck."
Why? Why did I even care? It was physically painful to look at the scav like this. She looked wrong, weak, frail. She might have been a rusty bucket of stripped screws but she was never frail. How come I always ended up with people who turn into fragile smegs? Just like Nux, a war machine building badass one minute, a skinny wreck hooked up to a bloodbag the next.
She was so pale that she was even starting to look like my ex-driver, with that round head and purple bags under her closed eyes looking almost like dark rings of war paint.
Wilson's fingers waved across my vision. "Hey, war boy. I'm talkin' to ya... You're shaking, sit down. Drink. Before you fall out and I wind up with two patients instead of one." He pushed a canteen into my hands and turned an overturned chair the right way.
There wasn't much left in me to protest, I was still going but on fumes. The chair wobbled and I didn't think it really had the strength to hold any weight, but neither did I any more so it had no choice but to seat me. The numbness that the chaos wrought was slipping away, my stump throbbed and howled with a sharp ache. I'd left the metal leg on all night.
I undid the straps and pulled the girdle I had to wear over my pant leg off. It tingled and I could almost feel the ghost of a foot curling as I peeled off the shrink sock Wilson had fashioned for it after sewing up the stub six or so hundred days ago.
"Hey, you can rest if you want. She isn't going anywhere like this. I suggest you just bed down and catch a few winks. I'll give you a swift kick if anything changes." The organic said as he started prodding at her inner elbow with a needle.
"She need blood?"
"Nah, just fluids. Lay down over there on that mat before I drug you."
I never made it to the mat. My eyes slid closed as I watched him clean out the burns on her feet.
There were two figures standing at the top of a dune. The sky was streaked in black. Like an oil slick that shimmered muted colors with the rays of silver light cast over the wastes by a burning blue sun.
I walk started the cycle and headed for the people standing on the hill, but if I blinked, or took my eyes off them for even a moment the distance between me and them doubled. I wondered if I'd run out of guzz before I could reach them, the needle rested heavy against the top corner of the E already.
I had to keep my eyes on them, to will them closer to me. At the bottom of the dune, I let the bike drop and the tire spin wildly, I didn't care. The engine shuddered out a final wail and petered out as I started climbing, stumbling when my dumb metal leg sank too deep in the sand.
At the top they each turned to face me.
Nux. Dune. One tall, bald and blue in the lips from cold, the other barely reaching the top of the driver's shoulder as wisps of smoke rose from the smoldering embers in her dreaded up hair. Nux was leaking red from his nose, ears and from under his fingernails, the blood rushing out of his body faster than any bloodbag could replace it. Dune's lips quivered, and flames licked their way up her back as they each reached out to one another.
They stood hand in hand. Opening their eyes to reveal empty sockets, maggots squirming through the hollows and falling down their cheek bones in a grotesque cascade.
I couldn't move. Couldn't blink. Couldn't wake
Dunes lips parted, revealing more than just her fearsome teeth. The long, arrow-shaped head of a goanna emerged from between her jaws. Looking at me with one blue eye and the other stained with blood and cataracts. It had three staples in its face, holding its scaly lips from falling open as it flicked its thick pink tongue at me.
It opened its mouth in a yawn, almost like it was going to speak. "Witness."
-Day 726-
I almost slugged the old bastard across the mouth when I woke up to him shoving at my shoulder.
"Hey HEY! Damnit. Durn war fodder reflexes... Look you were having a nightmare or somethin'. Kept whimpering witness, witness over an' over. Here. Eat that."
He dropped a charred thing on a stick into my lap. Roasted lizard. He dropped down into a fold out chair by the cot Dune was laid out on. It was probably the same cot where Wilson usually slept. He tore bits of lizard apart with his fingers and ate slowly. He barely had any teeth.
"From what I can tell, it went right through her into the dirt. The lightning bolt. Honestly, you might have gotten a good zing from it too if you were standing as close as you say, but she got the brunt of it. By all accounts, she should be dead. Not the first time I've said that about her, though. Too stubborn to die. Gets that from her mum I suspect."
"You knew that pile of bones?"
"Yep."
There was a long silence. I had time to finish the lizard, chew the stick into splinters and get a good look at the place. There were boxes everywhere, filled with things I didn't have names for. A shelf loaded with years and years worth of MREs. A few word burgers. A table full of surgical cutlery like the Organic Mechanic back home kept on a bandoleer around his thick chest. Further tunnels leading to Immortan knows what. Everything was lit up with real electricity, light bulbs and lamps. He had a generator somewhere. The locals had furnished him damn well for his services.
I looked at the body laying there, helpless as a warpup dying a quarter-life. Immortan I felt like a two-month-old turd. I scratched at my face, nails catching on scars as I scrubbed the wetness and sleep from my eye sockets.
"You know. She wasn't always like this."
I lifted my face out of my hands and grunted a noise that was supposed to come out a whole question. "Wuh?"
Wilson dipped his head at where Dune still lay, unmoving. "You know what I meant boy. She wasn't always- Ya know..." He pointed at his own head, crossed his eyes and whistled dramatically. Oh, she wasn't always crazy. Yeah, I figured that.
"Met her and Kay, her mother, 'bout ten years ago. We and a dozen other full-life unfortunates were just cargo on a slaver caravan headed for Gas Town. This was back when Scabrous Scrotus just started makin' all that noise Southwest of here. I was gonna be slaved out as a doctor on a chain. In some boss's pocket as his personal surgeon. What have you. Doesn't matter. Kay was looking forward to hard labor for the rest of her life. And Dune... Well. She was gonna get wifed off to Scrotus himself."
I wouldn't have thought it. I mean she wasn't particularly ugly in the face but... That nasty grin of hers. It was an honor to be given a position so close to the Immortan or one of his sons, yet the look on Wilson's face said otherwise. I knew better than to open my mouth about that. That old man always had a gun on him, and I didn't trust him with it. I raised a question instead, one that had an obvious answer and was meant simply to goad him along to finish the story. Dune never said a word about history, just the future. It's not like I'd ever asked but still, can't help being curious.
"I guess that caravan never made it to Gas Town? Or else you wouldn't be here."
He closed his eyes and nodded strongly, entire body rocking with the movement. "Right. We never made it there. Praise god. That's thanks to Kay and her instinct to protect her kid. We used to have a saying back where I came from. Never stand between a mother bear and her cub, it's a dangerous place to be. Back then, oh, Dune was an easy girl to look at. But much too young for the business of men and their ilk. Big green eyes, skin like creamed coffee, and chocolate hair to top it off. A real pretty girl. Too pretty for her own good..."
I wasn't sure what coffee was nor chocolate for that matter, but I guessed that it was some sort of way to describe something colored dark and dun like Dune.
"...So, her mum got this idea into her head, that if she could ugly her daughter up a bit, then maybe she could be spared from the fate of a child wife. See, Scrotus wasn't like his daddio, he didn't collect women for the sake of siring healthy babies. He took them for pleasure. And he was hard on those girls. Not an altruistic bone in the warlord son's body. Somebody had a file in their boot, Kay commandeered that, held Dune's head tight between her knees and started chiseling her teeth down to sabers."
Well, that explained some things. I tongued at my teeth, they itched at the gum line when I thought about how that must have felt. By now I was pretty keen to hear the rest, wondering how the hell a band of slaves managed to defy Immortan Joe and the finest of his sons. I didn't really give a damn how he'd mishandled his breeders. I had respect for Scrotus, hard not to. The man was a fucking war legend.
"Did it work?"
Wilson nodded, a grimace further aging his wrinkled face as he sat back in his seat and pawed at his ribs with a wince. "Yep. After all the hushed cryin' and crocodile tears shed in the night it did the trick. They saw her fucked up smile the very next morning, took her shackles off and pulled her out of the chain gang. Just left her standing there lookin' lost and scared as ever as the caravan started moving out again. What Kay wasn't betting on though was how they circled back and set the kid on fire in retaliation for their profit loss. Just ran her down and lit her up like a match. They left her like that, face down in the sand."
I looked back to Dune's cot, watching her pull in and shudder out shallow breaths. I tried to remember what it had been like in the wreck where I must have been stuck for hours burning up and dying. I'd seen her bare many times. While her front half looked alright, the back half was ruined from her heels all the way to the back of her neck in tight, white and pink scars. She must have been trying to make a run for it when they torched her. The long healed aftermath was pretty shine but had a somber grace to it. The story fit the scars, but having never seen Dune without them, it was completely disturbing trying to picture her in white wife garb.
Wilson started once more, finishing the grave tale with reverence in his voice as I watched her lay in what could be her death bed. "I can still hear the screams when I'm alone, Kay's screams. They keep me awake. She broke both her thumbs the following night to get out of her shackles, stole back her rifle and put lead in every face that got in her way. That's why you don't fuck with a woman Slit. When a woman picks up a gun to do war, she does it to protect her family. And there is no fire in hell that burns hotter than the blood of a bereft mother."
I know nothing of mothers. I was raised in a pile of pups and only knew the cold faces of caretakers who gave us food to squabble over and stagnant aqua cola to lick up out of a trough. Supposedly the caretakers I got were a couple of negligent bastards, but I thank them. Wouldn't have turned out so chrome if I'd been brought up soft.
Dune didn't get it soft either apparently. I'd only ever heard really weak, pussy ass tales of coddling and soft kisses when the word mother came up among warpups who could still remember the ones who bore them. I wondered what it might have been like to be raised by a parent who'd hold me down and shave my teeth to fangs if she thought it might do me some good. Maybe I'd be crazy like Dune. Maybe I'd have known what it's like to be protected instead of doing all the work protecting myself.
-0-
"How long have you had that bump under your ear?"
None of your damn business. "One thousand four hundred days. Give or take."
"S'it hurt any?" He asked, getting up and rummaging through his boxes, then picking up things from that table of knives and pokers to place on a tray.
"When I chew. Sometimes."
"Hmm. Haven't seen much of you since I patched up that leg of yours. I saw the bump then but was more worried about infection taking you at that point. I'd like to get a look at that now."
He was washing his hands and instruments in a bowl of dingy water. I knew what was coming next, I'd seen the Organic back home work. He was fixing to hack it off.
"Don't fucking touch me old man."
He snorted, looking back at me. "This is my house. My rules. You're gonna be a good boy and sit still. I guarantee this won't even pinch."
I seethed at his tone. If I didn't need him to get Dune back on her feet I might have walked right out and told him to get bent.
He shucked a plastic wrapping off a needle and dropped it onto the tray. Twenty minutes later most of my face was numb and he had me holding a handful of clean-ish rags to my neck.
"That has got to be the record for the biggest Trichilemmal cyst on this continent. I feel like I just delivered a gad-durn baby. Any bigger than that and I'd have asked what you wanted to name it."
Actually, it already had a name. Nux used to call it Jerry. I had hated that back then, now it felt weird that I wouldn't have that last trace of Nux on me anymore. It felt good, but it also felt really trashy.
"That smaller little lump under it, I'm pretty sure that's your lymph node. That one doesn't look any bigger than it had been the first time I saw it. Probably swelled up when you. Uhh. Got your face put together the way it is, then never went back down. Sometimes they do that at a nasty infection and never get quite normal again. Or, ya know. Could be cancer. There's nothing I can do about it. But at least your ear can drain now. Won't ever hear out of it again, though..." He went on and on about it as he washed his hands.
It made my skin crawl to keep being reminded of my half life. It was sort of wild that I wasn't needing blood yet, but that could start anytime. Or fevers. Or cancer. Or I could just drop dead for no reason like some do. I was never afraid to die before. I never gave a shit about my stunted lifespan. I'd always known in my guts that I was going to die young, chromed out, and historic. Now that Nux had wrecked it for the both of us I wasn't so sure about how I felt looking down the barrel of my own mortality. Hell, I didn't even like considering Dune's mortality despite how our- whatever we are, is founded on death threats and bloody knuckles.
Wilson groaned, leaned back and let his spine crackle, then turned to me and pointed at Dune. "After I'm done slapping a bandage on that ear, you're on duty. I've been up all night keeping an eye on her. It's your turn. Keep 'er warm, if she moves, or tries to sit up, stop her, wake me up."
I didn't bother to nod. I just let him finish what he was doing, I let him tape up my ear and started pulling on my leg. I stood for a while as Wilson bedded down on the mat he'd offered me the night before. I should have taken him up on that offer, my ass and lower back were sore as hell sitting up all damn night. No wonder I dreamt I was on the motorcycle.
I got sick of just standing there after a while, then took to sitting on the edge of the cot she laid in. It was quiet, nothing to do but think poisonous things that made my guts grind.
"I wouldn't dance on your corpse."
She looked cold, being all pale still. Nux used to get like this, sleep like the dead and look like a corpse. Keep him warm an' comfortable was what the slobbering Organic would say. I did with Dune what I was told to do with Nux at the end, but I bitched about it considerably less. Maybe if I hadn't made him feel like shit for dying then he wouldn't have left my ass behind with nothing but a smelly feral's boot in my hands.
I pulled my leg off, propped it up on the wall, yanked off my worn out boot and replaced the cardboard box under her knees with my leg. The rest of her fit easy under an arm. She was unlike Nux who was too big, bony, twitchy and awkward to ever fit against right but I had made it work, 'cause I never do anything half-assed.
This was better than sitting across the room. Could hear the loon breathing. Good. Would be easier to keep watch on her that way, then I could just close my eyes and listen.
I dozed off again, but it was brief. Every time I closed my eyes I saw their empty eye sockets again. This time, it was a union of the old dream where Nux was lying dead in our bunk and the new one where they were together and dead on their feet.
I pulled the maniac closer. Damn it all. It was easy to blame Nux for this too, but it was easier to wish he was here, leaning against my back like a snoring blanket made of idiot. Traitor smeg. I missed him, his dumb face and his kamikrazee shouting behind the wheel. That hurt to admit to myself. I'd probably miss this crazy bitch too.
Soon I was hearing Nux chant the sacred words in my head. Hard not to join in the mantra.
"He is the man who grabbed the sun. Live, die, live again... You know, you'd probably get along with the raging psycho better than I do Nuts, but if you find her over there where the mediocre go when they're dead, send her back. I ain't through with the wench yet."
Her breath had picked up, blowing hot against my Adam's apple. Then her arm twitched between us and wrenched me out of my thoughts. Her eyes were open. She was awake.
That was bizarre. Holy hubcaps, I wondered if his ghost really had heard that. Oh hell, her eyes were just rolling around in her skull and she was writhing as if in some fever spell.
"Hey. Hey, old man. Wake up. She's movin' around."
Praise V8.
-Day 727-
Wilson kept us there another day for something called observation. Dune was not okay. Wilson had said she was bodily alright considering that she'd been blown up by lightning. She could walk to the piss pot on her own despite the burns on her feet. I was thankful for that, I didn't want to relive the horror of being helped to the can from the opposite perspective. She shoved Wilson away at the face when he tried to help her once. I said nothing but kind of approved.
She didn't speak, though, and that's how I knew she was not okay. Her not beating her teeth together constantly was like a treadmill rat not begging for aqua cola, that's when you know something ain't right.
Wilson told me she might just need time to put herself back together. Whatever the hell that means. He insisted that there really wasn't much else he could do and that I should take her home, that it might do her good to be somewhere familiar.
It got weird after that. She pulled her boots on and gimped away before Wilson had even finished dumping parting instructions on me. I had to chase her down and grab her wrist before she reached the ladder which leads back up to the surface. She glared but didn't retaliate.
She got down the hill on her own as we left. Looked around and clenched her fists a few times. She was probably searching for the fan sled and annoyed that it wasn't there. Wouldn't trust her driving that right now anyway.
The old man emerged after us and jogged down the hill with a lumpy sack in his hand. "Wait! Here. Take this."
He held open the bag under my face to show me the dozen or so MRE rations inside, then started tying it onto the bike as I looked to Dune for some sort of explanation. She just stared blankly off into the distance, facing east.
"Why? We owe you now, not the other way around."
"For what now?" He asked, three toothed grin flashing as he spoke.
I pointed at Dune, then jerked my thumb at the deflated thing under my ear. "You've done all that without asking for payment yet. From the way Dune talks, you don't just give shit away."
The old meat mechanic sighed and shook his head.
"Kid, I'm seventy-four years old. I have heart palpitations, I get up to piss at least thirty times a night. How much longer do you think I got left? Just. Take it. Just take it and go home. And take care of yourself and that girl. Alright?"
He waited for some sort of affirmation that I understood. I could only nod, I didn't know what he'd been expecting me to say to that. He turned away and started back up the hill then as I sat on the bike. I could see it in his eyes, he sensed his fate looming.
Dune looked forlornly at the motorcycle, then at me as if she had been stripped of her dignity. Couldn't say I didn't understand that. I've barely got any dignity left myself, I covet and defend what's left of it from her violently if I have to.
She didn't argue, didn't say a thing. She just got on the back and held on around my middle, her hands clenched in tight fists against my ribs and breath ghosting against the holy brand on the back of my neck.
Notes: I wasn't 100% happy with this chapter and the way I organized it, but if I kept procrastinating and reading through it to doctor things that I didn't quite like then it would never have gotten published and I'd have started going loony like Dune. The ordeal already has me growling and snorting out lizard noises like Slit, so it was really time to just throw down and post it up. If you're curious or want me to do math, Dune's in her late twenties. 27-ish. She just behaves as if she's the same age as Wilson. The lump on Slits ear. If you look closely, it's more like two, with the smaller one down by his jaw in the general vicinity of a lymph node. The reason I wanted Wilson to get rid of the bigger one is the fact that it's actually squishing his friggin ear closed. Ears make earwax and stuff. It freaks me out that he probably has a MASSIVE build up of sand and gunk in there that can't get out. Plus, I wanted to find a way to bring up how in my head-cannon, Nux named Slit's lump too.
