Shit! Fuck! Fuck rust fuck! That hurt, wasn't the worst she'd ever mauled me but the wrist is always a bleeder. Had to yank off my scarf and tie it around the flow to staunch it while I watched her jet out the door.
"How old are you? Thirty going on Twelve?"
No time to dignify the red headed wretch with a response. Couldn't let Dune get too far. If she wandered off she'd inevitably start freaking out and get lost, then eventually fall asleep somewhere, get up to sleepwalk, get more fucking lost. Little rust head was liable to get swallowed up by the fog and shat out dead. Fuck all, I had at least two good reasons not to let that happen. Maybe three. No, still just two reasons. She still didn't regret barring me from the afterlife and I still needed her around for... reasons.
Three steps would see me out the door after the imp first. It was that easy, at least it would have been if I hadn't heard the click of a loaded revolver's hammer being slid down into the cocked position just behind my head.
"Don't move, Pup." The old deserter shit stain rasped as his wench ducked out the door and called after the scav.
Yes, I'd recognized him the moment I saw him without the goggles, respirator, and bandages around his head. For Dune's benefit, I hadn't made a scene when I saw his face. We were outnumbered and like Ardith or not, I doubt Dune would ever so much as look at me again if I wound up knocking off one of the bitch's men. Back when I was a few hands shorter, this asshole had been a rule breaker. Slept around with wretcheds, got caught twice sneaking food down to them, it was even suspected that he helped a potential clean breeder get loose and run off before the catch could be brought in and presented to the Immortal. Finally he tossed his driver from a moving vehicle and tried to leave in one of Immortan's war chariots. His crew leader went out to hunt him down and destroy him for it, apparently Tank had been too damn soft to see it through to the end. And this coward had the balls to call me pup . Fuck Phil, fuck Tank, and fuck Tank's driver by association. All of them filth. Fuck um all! With this trip fast going tits up, I'd had a mind to shred him myself and finish the piss poor job Tank did. I'd have done it in a second if I wasn't in a position to get my head blown off.
Traitors die ugly, deserters die forgotten and nameless. Much as it went against code, I called the filth by his true name when I turned, stepping forward into the barrel of the colt to feel the cold muzzle flush between my eyes. This softened up flat tire wasn't going to shoot me, I didn't think so anyway. It's all a matter of balls, had to see whose were bigger.
"Not a pup anymore, Crank."
He pulled in a breath through his teeth, the ones up front stained yellow and brown from smoking that pipe. "Yeah. Cn' see you're a much bigger pain in the arse than you used to be. I can't let you out there alone with our wife, mate. Nasty as you've been, one of ya is gonna wind up dead. No doubt, after that little spectacle, she wants to snap you."
The other two fell in at Crank's flanks to back him up, pulling up their masks and revealing their faces. One had freckles littering his face so thick they seemed to take over every feature, the other had skin darker than Dune's and darker still than the man holding the gun. Behind the three was the teenager said to be the deserter's oldest brat, unrelated to the mouthy redhead. What I saw stoked up new flames in my guts. Should have fucking known. He pulled his goggles and a leather mouth guard down around his neck as well and it became very clear that this wasn't Crank's kid, it was a pup that had gone missing around the same time Crank went AWOL. It was easy to tell, the kid had one of those faces which was easy to recognize. Big birthmark around his right eye that made him always look like he'd taken a nice wallop from one of the other pups. Sure, the mark had faded a little and the kid was at least twice as tall now, but I remember this brat. Not only had "Phil" stolen food, ran off, sabotaged, but he'd kidnapped a pup. Pups are precious, future war boys, and he'd fucking stolen one.
Couldn't make punishing him a priority though, not with the maniac out there doing V8 knows what, possibly tumbling down the hills and getting sucked down by the sludge. I didn't care if that woman friend of hers wanted me to cark it chokin' on her blade. I brought Dune out here, I was going to be the one to bring her back to her kip in one piece, period. You start something you fuckin' finish it.
"Let 'er try."
"Nah, I'd rather not have to bury your corpse tonight. Doesn't matter who kills who first. You walk out that door, you're getting put in the ground so why don't you just have a seat, No-name."
Gears stopped dead and all the cogs ground to a raging halt. No-name, an unremarkable kid with an unremarkable face that got passed over three times when names were dealt out because he hadn't made himself noticeable. No-name died, something else rising to life when a knife tore through his face and I became. No-name has been dead since long before this puke left the Citadel, he knew that, but he was trying to poke open a wound that was nothing but hard, grainy scar tissue.
"It's Slit,"
"Alright, then I think we can all agree to call one another by the names we choose, not the names we had, unless you're craving lead for dessert. Chrome?" As he spoke, There was a smugness in his smirk that made my skin itch like sand embedded in every pore.
Had to submit, nodding slowly. No choice. How can I make this rust fucker understand that it wasn't his fucking place and it wasn't the redhead's either to deal with the nutter? I'm the one that was there, I'm the one that lived with the madness, I'm the one covered in bites that overlap and scar up together, I'm the one she forced to fangin' live and it was my turn to return the shitty favor. I'm the one Dune needed, not them, not Ardith. That's how I saw things.
"Yeah, chrome."
"Good, good... Hmm, you took a hard dive off a high lifted rig and landed right on your head, din't ya? I said sit the fuck down about a full minute ago, Slit. I suggest you do as your elders say before you wind up pissin' lead."
It was deliciously easy to picture chaining this dick-head to the rear bumper of the Impala and dragging his sorry ass all the way back to the badlands behind us, just listening to his old hide get shredded and the sound of screams. Oh, I sat . I shut my pup mouth. I also imagined breaking his lumpy neck and enjoyed every second of that fantasy while he held me at gun point by the dying fire. Dune calls thinking like that 'a happy place' and makes claims that it pacifies your bloody urges just enough so you don't go and catch a case of terminal stupid. Actually I'm pretty sure it just made it harder to resist taking a bullet in exchange for pulling off my leg and wanging him over the head with it.
"So, what happened to dear old dad?"
"He died. That's what."
"You know what I meant. How did he go."
I was wrecked several miles before that cunt allegedly ripped Immortan Joe's face off. I didn't see it happen. It was when I had gone to see if I even had a home to return to long ago that I had heard this and that in several variations from the filthy mongrels camping in the shadows of the buttes. The end of the story, no matter who told it, was always punctuated with a visceral telling of half his face reduced to a mess of raw meat. I wondered if Crank's interest in the death of the Immortal connotes a sense of loss. His face didn't read like somebody who'd just been told that the guiding force of his world had died. I fucking died somehow, in spite of the deep rooted belief that such a force was not something any mere mortal could extinguish. He looked impatient, maybe a bit hopeful. What an odd, odd way to look. Well, fuck me, I was getting curious about where this talk was going to go. I'd made him wait long enough for an answer, figured I'd bait him a little and see how he responded.
"One of his Imperators traitored him." I said it plain and simple. It wasn't a lie although I omitted a key piece of information from the statement. Knowledge of which Imperator was responsible would quickly change the tone of the confession.
"Really? Who took over after him? The Prime? Rictus was always too damn dull."
Yeah, Rictus might have been built like a brick shit house but he was a bloody moron. Still, the fact that Crank -or Phil or whatever- had the balls to say aloud what he thought of Immortan's youngest made my teeth clench painfully. Prime Imperator was dead too, according to the wretcheds, not that I cared to tell him that. "Does it matter?"
"Matters to me, matters to know if I can go back."
"What the hell does that fucking mean?"
"I guess it means if he got traitored for the right reason then maybe I could get my people out of this stink hole. I think I'm plenty justified in wanting to know if I'd be welcomed home."
"Nah. Know what? I think I've just about said all I know." I lied, knowing that he would be able to detect the flagrant deception in my tone.
"Ah, ya know that kind of answers my question."
I didn't respond, didn't care to, so he just droned on.
"I can see you're still devoted to him. Slit, do you ever just wonder if it was all bull? Don't you ever feel like there was heaps of exaggeration about him, our place in it all too? What does his death really mean then?"
Jesus-fucking-Chrysler, I didn't waste that good guzz to drive all the way the hell out here and listen to some old fart try to enlighten me. Fuck that, I knew my place in the world and I didn't need him to tell me where it was. Devout, but excommunicated and cursed. I just wanted to make my pathetic existence a little more tolerable and get the nutter back to one hundred percent.
"I got a whacko seeing green crap that ain't there an' I brought her up here to see if we can't get that shit to stop. I'm not in the mood for semantics, or any talk about naming names or who did what to Daddy. I'm not sayin' shit else to you about it..."
Crank's face hardened and so did his voice. "Hmm, had quite a big mouth on you when you were a little oil squirt. Did the change have something to do with how symmetrical your face got after I left?"
"Eat my whole ass. Evened it up myself an' nobody ever managed to shut me up." I shrugged, giving him a big false smile. "Just don't talk to rust suckers who screw themselves out of Valhalla. No point, just like talkin' to a walkin' corpse. Nothing there to talk to."
Feathers and Bones were squirming where they were seated. Both were younger men by at least three thousand days. They looked to Crank, rather the man they knew by the shit name of "Phil" for guidance on how to react. He just sat in his seat, expression an unreadable stone facade.
"Uh huh," Crank seemed to be thinking of what to say next, nodding slowly with beady eyes narrowed like two crescent moons. Not exactly the reaction I'd been hoping for, picking at the usual soft parts of anyone who is or had ever been a warrior of the Immortal. "...how long you been running around with Dune?"
"What's it matter to you, shit-head?"
"Just curious."
"Fair enough, seven-hundred days plus. Leaning a hair closer to eight hundred, now." I justified sharing that to make it clear that I knew the maniac well enough, probably better than the red headed harpy. I shouldn't be in here listening to an old war boy prattle on, I should be dragging her screwy arse back to the car and making her lay down and sleep.
"Apparently not long enough to get all the garbage that Joe shit into our heads outta your system."
Welp, he missed my point in telling him and his attitude was just about as much as I could take. I was fast forgetting all about the pistol gripped in his meaty blackthumb fist and just dying to leap over the fire and sink my teeth right in, a page torn out of Dune's word burger. Thankfully I had enough sense and restraint not to.
"Hah, wretched-shit! A saw your face when Dune blew it out her cola hole that Joe's dead! You looked like her words cut you up! Don't you sit there and tell me you don't believe, not even half believe in him still!" I shouted the words, loud enough to wake the damn birds roosting in the dead trees through the hills.
I could hear the feathered rats squawking and retreating from the sound of my fury. Pity only the dumb birds seem to heed it. Crank appeared to be wary at least, he gripped that pistol just a little tighter as he leaned back in his seat and burned me with his eyes. The others tried to look every bit as deadly, but they just didn't hold a candle. They could not touch me. I was not afraid of those two and only half wary of the lead spitter held in the hand of their elder. Finally he replied.
"...No. No you're right. I still thought he might be immortal. Maybe not a god, but so damn rotten that hell would just belch him back out if anybody ever tried sendin' him there."
"Blasphemy." How dare he, if he was struck by holy fire from the skies right where he sat for this slander I wouldn't be at all shocked.
"Don't you sit there and blasphemy me. You weren't there when all of this got started, you weren't even a little seed in your momma's belly-"
"Look, I drove all last night to get here and my head's a little hazy, you wanna go ahead and make your damn point?"
"Maybe if you shut up. Tch, now you're starting to sound like the mouthy skid mark I remember. Yeah, I'll get to my point. Ace was there when Joe took the Citadel. Notch was there when we started paintin' up white. Tank was there when the rules that no one was to fuck wretched was passed down. I was there for a little of the early days, too. Some of us were real easy to lead but others... We rode and hurled thunder because were afraid of that son of a bitch. We saw him do shit to our own that no God or Pappy that loved you would do and we sure as hell didn't call him Daddy."
"Tch! Oh veeight, like fucking what? What did he do that was so out of fucking character that it justifies running away, fuckin' coward. O' course you're afraid, he's a fucking war god."
"What good did war do for the world?!" The pup blurted and everyone's attention snapped to him like bands of stretched rubber. He shrank a little, head ducked and trying to hide himself behind Crank's mass. He didn't like being the center of attention, he never did, I could remember how he never spoke when he was just an ankle biter back at the Citadel. Crank looked back at the boy, then turned his head from left to right to make eye contact with the others.
"Guys, take the boy outta here, and go find the girlies and make sure they're alright, will you?"
There was a little arguing but after some reassurances and the true yet no less annoying reminder to the others that I wasn't doing anything unless I wanted to eat a bullet, they each picked themselves up off the floor and left. For a while, Crank only glared at me from his seat, but the blessed silence from him just wouldn't last forever.
"Slit, I'm going to talk to you and you better have your ears open boy, because it's damn important that you actually listen to what somebody has to say to you for once."
I only narrowed my eyes but that was what he wanted, for me to sit there and shut up. What could be so important coming from this thing that had turned his eyes away from the mighty V8, this nothing who abandoned his own. I waited, not expecting much. I was wrong to underestimate him. To my surprise, and advantage, he pulled open his jacket and slipped the pistol back into the holster strapped on around his chest.
"Do you remember your first kill, Slit?"
This question caught me off guard, made the blood cool in a real bad, rusty way. The first kill, I never counted it and honestly I try not to think about it because I just can't. Can't stomach it. No one had ever spoken to me about what happened and if it weren't for the scar, I might doubt that it had been anything more than a rust dream. What the hell did that have to do with anything?
"Why?" I asked dumbly, my good ear was ringing for some reason and the edges of the hovel were getting fuzzy. It got hard to focus, I didn't want to look back on that shitty, shitty moment.
"I just think it might be illuminating to talk about it."
I said nothing, but felt the staples in my face pinch and my teeth cool in the open air as I cringed. I couldn't move, the deserter's eyes had changed from stern certainty to a cold deadness that I swore I'd seen once before. He kept talking, V8 why wouldn't he just shut up and let me go do my job? I'd have given anything to trade his voice for Dunes jabbering.
"Imperator Wrecker. What he did to the real little ones back then. How he did it to them over and over and over. I never realized until that night. None of us knew, that is, until he plucked your blue eyed little friend out of the den where you all slept. You followed them, you got in his way..."
I think he kept on beating his teeth together, but to this day I can't be sure. I was sliding back into that place, that night. It felt like I had cold fingers curling around my neck. I could still remember parts of that night Crank spoke of so damn clear, but other pieces were just black pits of nothing. I didn't guess what Imperator Wrecker had been doing, either. They called him Wrecker because he'd wreck anybody who so much as looked at him wrong. I always thought that was why the younger pups were afraid. I don't know how old I was, just old enough to be proud of a couple armpit hairs. Nux was maybe half my height at the time? Young, weak, easy to hurt.
Nux used to sleep next to me. The other pups shunned him because of his irritating optimism, I think. He was always a little soft in the head. I wasn't well liked either because I was three times passed over for a name and a crew to be trained under. I just didn't stand out, probably too scrawny.
I didn't want to remember, I didn't. It was just a mess of fragments anyway, a bunch of broken thoughts that are hard to tell apart from the deceitful nightmares that I had almost forgotten.
I could recall waking up to the Imperator leaving with Nux. I remember following them quietly, he didn't even notice, and I remember the way he jammed his filthy finger into the pup's mouth to pry his jaw open.
I couldn't hear anything Phil said anymore. Couldn't see anything, either. There was just that garbled memory sucking away my senses, making me want to lean over and chunder. I could almost feel was the horrendous kiss of steel warmed from Wrecker's body heat. It slid passed my lips. And the agony of it! I'll never forget that.
I think I'd tried to stop him. I'd picked up the nearest thing that wasn't bolted down and swung it at his head when I saw what he was doing to the pup. Then I was the one on the ground, pinned under a knee with a hand wrapped around my neck and feeling the shaft of a blade tear through me as I thrashed. Fighting only made it worse, made it hurt more. Nux was screaming, maybe I was too. I don't know... Then there was blood. Hot, thick, smothering, choking. It ran down my throat, I inhaled it and then hacked it back out into his ugly face.
That was where it all went dark, just a whirling vortex of nothing in my head. It was like a sink hole sucking in everything around it, all the skull pictures and the memory evaporated into nothingness. The next thing I could recall my hands were soaked in blood. It was both mine and his. It always looks black in low light, like well used motor oil.
Two older boys were pulling me out from under Wrecker's limp corpse and trying to pry the shiv out of my fist. When I was a pup, I used to think grown War Boys looked chrome, menacing, like walking skeletons. Faces painted like skulls had never been so comforting before or since. Crank was there, standing somewhere in the background and holding Nux by the hand while the others started scrubbing at me with oily rags to get the red stuff off. Ace was there, stitching my face closed and commanding me not to make a peep. It was even worse than the kiss of the blade, to feel the needle tear through and pull back out with catgut streaming behind it.
Others appeared. Wrecker was gone, where I hadn't known but I could hear something somewhere beyond sight. It was like a shovel being slammed through sloppy mud again and again.
I understand now that they were cutting the body up. The eldest of the War Boys were getting rid of the evidence. I was always told never to breathe a word about what happened. I know now that if the other Imperators had found out what I had done, it would have been over. They'd have shredded me. They never would have believed. They wouldn't have taken my word over the glory of what they believed Wrecker was. He was rust, but who would have believed me?
"...Imperators have a lot of power, they're like us but full-life. They think that makes them better than us but they're wrong. They were just property, too. Specifically Joe's property. How do you figure the owner of all that property doesn't sometimes take advantage of his wealth? A wealth of breeders, a wealth of engines, a wealth of fanatical young boys who would do anything, I mean anything to get into Valhalla?"
"W-what are you saying?"
He leaned forward in his fold out chair, eyes probing, fingers lacing together almost as if he was about to fly the V8 salute. Instead his fingers curled over his knuckles like a double fist between his knees.
"I'm saying, your driver wasn't the only one who's been hurt by someone he should have been able to trust. And Imperator Wrecker wasn't the only one doing the hurting. Think about that."
The concept of what he was saying just wasn't something I could accept. Skull wouldn't digest it. Well, there's still the chance he could be lying. My skin was starting to cool with sweat, felt sticky but not the way you get when the sun is trying to fry you. Felt sticky and cold like that night all three war parties got stuck just a quarter mile south of here in the worst of the mud.
The Immortan doing what Wrecker did, but to who? I wanted to ask, but the words were stuck somewhere in my chest and wouldn't come up.
"Hey, I know. A pretty inconvenient truth, huh? How about a change of direction. Aye? Remember how to play dice?" Phil asked, and I was all a bit too eager to abandon the topic.
After I got my face rearranged, Cra- Phil's crew leader let Nux and I stay in the spot where their hunting crew slept. They had me there just to keep me out of the way for a while so that no one suspected that Wrecker's disappearance and my face had something to do with each other. Within a few days I was so out of it from infection and fever that I couldn't do anything but lay there and pretend I didn't exist, anyway. Some of their greenhorns taught me the game while I laid around, trying not to die.
"Uh. Yeah."
"High or low?"
A few games were played. Nothing special was pulled out of pockets for gambling fodder. Nuts, bolts, Phil had some blue glass with edges all worn smooth. It was all physical distraction. My head felt weighted like a bag full of sand.
Time passed, how much I couldn't possibly guess, but no one interrupted the game until long after my arse went completely numb from the stony floor. The one to step into the shelter and start running their mouth a little too loudly was the red headed wench. She took a moment to glare at me again, but I failed to care enough to so much as hiss.
"So, Dune's off her face. Talked all this nonsense and nodded right off inside her old place. Managed to pull an old mattress out and get her to fall into that and stay there..."
"She's asleep?" Ardith ignored me. Phil raised his brows and half pouted up at her, which seemed to convince her to answer.
"Seems to be."
No good.
"She sleepwalks." Was all I said as I dropped the dice from my hand and got up off the floor with a groan.
Ardith didn't seem keen on letting me leave to go to the scav. She let her hand drift around her hip toward her back, no doubt reaching for an unseen weapon. Phil stopped her with a simple gesture, taking her hand in his and shrugging when she looked down to where he sat with questioning eyes. She quickly yanked her hand out of his and took a step forward to have her last word.
"Dune didn't sleepwalk when I knew her."
I my guts felt hot, twisting, furious. I wanted to shriek something back at the know-it-all. I was too tired to roar. Maybe she was trying to ferret out some unseen truth, trying to find a way to make it my fault. Ah, I had a revelation, she thought I had something to do with how rusted up her old compatriot's head got. Too bad, that wasn't me.
"Yeah, bet she didn't."
-0-
The shipping container had a door which leaned against the frame, hinges broken. Inside was a mess of shit all pushed toward the back wall. All rubbish and bags of who knows what puled up to the ceiling. It reeked of mildew, too. The camping lamp I'd grabbed on my way out the door to get away from Ardith's big mouth cast a flickering light on all the trash. It could be a trick of the eye, but I swore that I saw little vermin with scaly tails scurrying for cover as I moved toward the conspicuous scavenger shaped lump by the wall on a thin square of I'd at least consider luxury bedding.
As promised, Dune was curled up on a bare mattress -if you could call a flattened slab of steel springs and batting a mattress- with a bucket next to her head, just in case. A look inside told me that the pail was empty, at least I wouldn't have to sleep next to the stench of vomit. I blew out the flame in the lamp and stumbled my way over. Off came the leg and the bracer on my left arm. They were dropped by Dune's feet.
The cot was just wide enough that I could cram myself between her and the wall. Usually preferred it the other way around, but I'd rather not have had her climbing over me to hork up her guts later. I wanted to ball myself up into that spot and die. That fucking image carved into my skull meat, Crank had to be lying. Had to be. Please let him be a liar.
Well, the nutter hadn't gotten up and wandered off so there was that. I didn't think I could handle any more trouble tonight, the last two days were catching up with a vengeance yet I couldn't quite get myself to sleep even after I tied our wrists together and there was nothing left to do.
I kind of wished she was still awake, being hysterical and bitey. At least her rambling could chase off the damn imaginings of the Immortan cornering some kid or a particularly scrawny war boy... Scrawny just like the ones that would in rumor attend him every morning before he made his daily public address. Ugh!
Couldn't be possible. Just couldn't.
When the loon gurgled an involuntary noise, I realized that I was holding on a little too tightly. Her chest cage expanded the second I uncurled my arm, air whistling around her teeth.
She started trying to turn over the same way she always did before she tried to rise out of sleep to walk, but she couldn't quite get up. She rolled, pulling our tied hands between us and grinding her head into my throat. Her breath reeked of the home brew she and Ardith had been chugging down. She really was off her face.
The cord which kept us bound didn't seem all that necessary at the moment. I wasn't getting sleep any time soon, anyway. I slipped myself out of my half of the cord and pushed at her to give my head enough room that I wouldn't have a sore neck later from laying with it bent weird. Her arm lifted, hand curling in the air a few times before dropping and finding warm skin to press frigid fingers into. Felt like a handful of cold salamanders climbing up my shirt. I shivered and my teeth clenched.
She was just looking for body heat as she slept. Nux used to do the same thing. I fought the urge to shove her away. If I did manage to fall asleep like this, on a mattress crammed in a corner with an idiot leeching warmth off me, I'd probably wake up thinking I was back at the Citadel. I didn't need that kind of disappointment.
Would be nice if it was all just some rusty fever dream, then again, it would mean that Dune never actually existed. Would I be worse or better off? Well, I'd feel pretty cheated by my own imagination for dreaming up a person like that and for waking up before I could get some kind of resolution. I still owed Dune revenge for saving me, I still had to make her regret it. I guess I'd miss somebody actually giving a shit about me, too. Sometimes I couldn't figure if Nux ever did. I saved his hide from that monster, a dozen more times when he got himself in trouble, he sat there and waited in the bloodshed for me to get patched up that time I almost got myself gutted, but then he fucking left me there the moment he got a chance to ride with Immortan.
Maybe one day Dune would do it too, maybe she'd just leave. Or maybe I'm tired, maybe this whole stupid day had my skull filled up with toxic sludge.
The sand was white. Felt cold, too. It pulled every iota of strength from my meat, and it had teeth. Fucking teeth. The world had opened up its maw and taken a hold of me around my throwing arm. I should have felt fear, I needed that arm. A lancer could probably lose a foot and be okay without it, but his throwing arm? No, I couldn't do without that bit.
Still, I wasn't afraid. I was mad, mad as a feral in a bloody rage. I tried pulling my arm from the sand, the teeth just held on, clenching tighter. Blood stained the white grains a crimson. It was impossible, my arm just wouldn't budge and the teeth swallowed down more of that arm, more of who I was.
The dead world under me began to shift. It was alive! No, something in the earth was moving. The face which those teeth were rooted into emerged, the sands around it churning.
It was the skull of a dog, something everyone has seen in the wastes. A symbol of death.
It was saturated in black oil, it pulsed from the empty sockets in dark flows. More rose. A body half rotten, tawny fur sloughing off in matted clumps. Now I felt the fear, it pumped the adrenaline through my veins.
The monstrosity released me, that was the moment I saw the chain, felt the steel muzzle tight around my face.
Woven through the chain links was a tube and my red stuff flowing away into the oily creature.
"That's right! High octane crazy blood, fillin' me up!"
I swore that I saw the disembodied eyes of Nux peering out from the back of the thing's throat as it barked those familiar words at me.
"Ducky! Good goddesses! Damn, you almost knocked my block off!"
Thank V8, Angels of Combustion, Lords of Torque. Just a dream. It was probably the most senseless nightmare I'd had in years, but something about it just rubbed me wrong. Really wrong. I woke up to Dune trying to hold down my throwing arm; must have been slinging punches in my sleep. Shit, I fell asleep. Didn't mean to do that. No harm done, Dune was right there and fussing away.
"Ducky? Duck?! Hey! Slit!"
"I'm fine!"
I couldn't keep laying there, felt like my bones were trying to jump out of my skin. V8, fucking dreams. I definitely didn't want to fall asleep again. Whenever there was one weird dream, more were usually more queued up right behind the first. I snatched up the metal leg and started pulling it back on while Dune clutched at her head and groaned. Served her right if all that rotgut was making her head throb.
"Aw... Duck. Where you goin'? Sun hasn't even woke yet. Hey, you a'right?"
I felt her hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades. Shouldn't like that, shouldn't want it. Talking to Crank was like being slapped across the head with everything from home, the good, the bad, the worse than bad. I was supposed to be a war boy, the last devout boy! I was supposed to hate her, I was supposed to take Crank as a test of faith, I was supposed to be better than him! Then why do I feel like such shit?
"You're stiff as stone," She said. Dune was right, because I was fighting the desire to lean back, turn, and bury my face in her hands.
Oh V8, I just wanted her to help me forget. I wanted to lose it all, let her pull all the bad out of my head one piece at a time with her shine hand, but not now. I needed to be able to think my way through what Phil said, decide if he's full of shit or not. Couldn't give in and let her touch me right now. Frustrating, you can't want two things. I needed to get up, or else my want for Dune to fix me her way would win out. It always won out against any personal code or moral qualm. I let it sour into anger as I tried to stand.
"I said I'm fine, Dune! Sodder off!"
Her hand slid down my spine as I rose but instead of falling away she took a grip around the waistband of my trousers to keep me from leaving. She couldn't let anything be easy, she just had to make impossible to say no to her.
"Slit. Dune's known ya for two years, she knows when something ain't right with you."
"What does you knowing me have anything to do with anything?!" I shouted, snatching her hand away and turning to pin the other sinful limb down. Something wet was running hot down my face. Eyes stung too, but I was furious, or at least I was supposed to be. She knew better, she always did. Fuck.
"Bless it, is it raining or are ya leakin' wet stuff?"
Something in me quit working like it should, stalled up. I could have just gotten up and left but the strength to move failed. She had her damned claws hooked into me and I couldn't leave the comfort of their sting. Senseless killing, pig king, just a man, all her words. Was she right? Was Phil telling the truth? Had I honored an unworthy man with evil deeds? Was I headed to a fiery pit when I carked it? Was I just a blunt instrument and nothing more? Did I trade my fucking leg for eternal damnation? I wanted to die, there just wasn't any reason to live anymore. My head fell into my hands before I even realized that I had let go of Dune's wrists, I broke. I'm broken. All for nothing.
"Aw Duck," She groped blindly in the darkness at me, the touch barely registered now. Her fingers found the cloth tied around my right wrist. "Did I bite you?... Did I-"
Shit, I knew where this was going, if she'd been pissed on that swill then there was a good chance she couldn't remember much of the night before. I growled, better to sound angry rather than pitiful. "No, just one of the usual fender benders. Can't hurt me."
I was still sitting on her legs although I'd forgotten to care enough to fight off her concern. She fixed that with some innate sensibility to understand that I was about to slump over anyway. If was gonna fold up then why not right here on top of her? I knew damn well that escape was impossible now, I wasn't getting away from the nut to think about rusty things. Who wants to do that anyway? Why does it even matter? It's over. It was just a long time coming to finally get it through my head that my entire existence has been a whole lot of pointless. She took two fistfuls of the shirt I wore and steered me to the narrow space of empty mattress next to her so that I wouldn't use her as a weight bearing surface. When you stop giving a shit, you stop giving a shit wherever you're at.
"Seeds Duck, what happened to you last night? You're a right mess."
She turned and fought with a twisted strip of trash and her flint to light an oil lamp. Please let it be too soggy to light up. I didn't want to be looked at like this, a less than mediocre little maggot.
The flame of the lamp was small but blinding in the pitch black of the abandoned dwelling. She turned and looked at me with her bloodshot eyes and I rolled mine.
"Dune-"
"No, you look at Dune and tell her what's wrong with you."
"Why do you have to fucking care so damn much? Huh?!"
"Because, for better or worse I pulled you out of that wreck. That makes me responsible for you and like it or not, I got awful fond of you too. Bloody hurts seein' you like this and wonderin' who I gotta put a hole in about it! Yeah? Makes sense?"
I didn't know what to say. Did she just offer to shoot some poor sod over my misery? That was kind of half an insult, didn't need Dune doing my defending but, it also made the blood pump squeeze in a strangely pleasing way. Didn't matter, it wasn't a topic up for discussion.
"Ya wouldn't get it anyway, jus' drop it and go back to sleep."
She grabbed my lower lip between her thumb and forefinger to turn my face and force me to look at her. That didn't feel shine, and I prepared myself to shackle her wrist with my hand and threaten to break it for her.
That face of hers in the lamp light stopped me. She didn't look ready for an ass kicking match, she looked damn near afraid. Spooked by whatever was going on with me? Why? One other thing got my attention, that wasted aqua cola I'd leaked all over her. It had streaked her with clean spots across her always dust coated face.
Now there was proof that the other thing she said was true, she had this look like something with too many legs had stung her. Can anybody actually hurt for somebody else? Maybe. Lately her miserable face made all kinds of parts on me inexplicably ache. Guess the feeling is mutual.
"Dune wants to hear what's going on in that melon meat, c'mon. Can't be that hard to figure, Slit."
Almost. I could almost hear myself say it- No, I wanted to scream it. Wrecker tried to fuck a pup and put a bloody knife in my mouth when I tried to make it stop! So I cut him! I cut him deep across his fucking throat and he died on top of me! Phil was the one who pulled me out from under him! Phil's crew leader was the one who got rid of the body! Them and Ace just swept the whole thing under a rock because if anybody blabbed to the other Imperators I'd be dead! Fucking dead! The only reason I even got scooped up and trained up by that crew to begin with was because they couldn't just let me run around with this ruined face while everybody tried to figure out where that missing imperator was! They'd have gotten shredded too for the cover-up, but they were barely merciful enough to keep me and Nux for a while. We stayed with them until we outgrew their bunch and wound up a floating pair that went wherever we were needed. Too fast and too chrome to belong to any single crew. And by then we both knew better than to ever breathe a word about the imperator who just vanished one night.
And Joe. How was I supposed to admit she could be right about him? That Phil would support her position on the subject? How the shitting hell do I say 'yeah, maybe he was taking too much and asking way more of us than he should've been'?
And maybe, just maybe, those wives in white weren't so much in the wrong for leaving as I thought. Fucking no! I can't believe that. I just can't! It won't work, it doesn't fit with the place I was raised up. But maybe that was what made the horror of it half believable, the fact that I can't make myself believe in the picture Phil was trying to paint for me. Dune had, once or twice, called me a child soldier. She made it sound like a terminal illness, like a disease I picked up somewhere and couldn't shake off.
What was I supposed to tell her? As I gathered my grit to look her in the eye, only one word came to mind.
"Home."
"Huh?"
"Me an' Phil... Talked about home."
"Oh, Ducky. I see then..." She said it so quietly that I barely heard it, had to make it out mostly by how her lips moved.
There was that dumb, inescapable concern of hers and yet I welcomed it. V8 Dune, hurry up. I could feel her shifting to bring her hands up and in a moment of defeat, I pushed my face into those fingers with fervent desperation. I felt her scarred up hand curl clumsily against my eyebrow but even that felt something like liquid chrome.
The thumb of the shine hand was busy scrubbing away what was still damp under my eyes and mingling with a dried layer of sweat. I probably had clean spots, too.
Finally, fingers traced the scars, the one I put on the left side myself to even up the mess Wrecker put on my right side. What usually felt so shiny started to feel like the scratches of a blade's point, a silent threat. Tickling fingernails turned into teasing razor blades. Phil had gone and ruined everything by bringing up that first kill. Even the glorious touch of Dune's shine hand felt like dragging a hangnail over a bad sunburn.
With eyes mashed shut and teeth grinding, I had no choice but to capture her hands in mine and pull them away. They were warm, my fingers squeezed around them and spread out to feel the texture of skin, both soft and rippled with rough places that had healed tight and ugly. Both were fine, and I still wanted them on me, helping it all go away. I wasn't sure what to do, I'd never felt anything but that numbing balm inside somewhere when she touched my face but now? Would that goodness come back later?
"Please, V8... Just... Not there."
I kept my eyes closed, but I knew she was looking at me. She was so still, motionless. What else could she be doing but gawking in awe of my weakness?
My throwing hand let go of her left, before I knew what I was doing I had covered my worthless face. Ha! Trying to hide from a sand dweller who's seen me at the very most rusty. What could be worse than that level of infirmity? Being able bodied and still rust as fuck, that's a world of worse.
Perhaps she finally regretted dragging my carcass home.
"Oh, seeds." She offered no more warning than those words and this cooing noise as she felt her way around my arm and then under it to pull us together.
I wanted to fight it, question it, tell her to go sit on a prickly pear, but that arm around me made it hard to move and easy to let the ugly rust in my soul spread like a cancer. I held it in, the stinging drops of cola in my eyes, the mewls and sobs that should follow them. I had to imagine myself strangling the feeling down and pushing it into a sand drift to suffocate, just like any wretch who was stupid enough to make an enemy of me.
Like any good long shot, Dune didn't miss a thing. I was only drawn in closer, head tucked under her chin and listening to her shudder as if her cola-works were gonna start up too. I could hear it in her voice, it was confusingly comforting to hear her whimpering too.
"If you were born here, you'd have been raised up by your mum and you'd've been so loved. We'dve played together. You'da been older than Dune but a little younger than her brothers. Heh, they'd have liked you. You're actually a lot like them when you're not trying to be biggah and bettah and more deadly than everyone else. Got the same stupid arse sense of humor we all had. Dune's mum mighah been your initiate mother... You'd probably also be dead right now just like almost everybody else."
How dare you. How dare you lie to me about how I could have been loved by some breeder I don't remember.
But the picture she scratched into my mind was clear, like looking into rearview glass to see an alternate version of yourself and longing for it. How tore up was my head? Longing for anything besides white clay and a thunderstick gripped in my fist, that's crazy. I've gone crazy.
She was right, though. That fantasy could never have been possible. I'd have been brought up soft and carked it a long time ago. Being raised a war pup was probably the only reason that the scrawny No-name puke I had been ever amounted to anything.
"I'm just lucky to be born wretched, I guess."
She just hummed at that and I couldn't decipher the meaning of the sound, but she still had my left hand between us, held in her scar hand and I felt it squeeze around my fingers. I knew what that meant, though I can't name it.
I felt her other hand follow my spine North until it crashed into the hair which grows ceaselessly. Her fingers tangled in it at the back of my skull and drew circles in my scalp. Skin pricked up at that like I was cold, but I wasn't. At long last, something that could pull me out of my busted up head. It's a guilty pleasure to go somewhere else and let that weird, going undone feeling happen. You forget which thoughts are trash and which ones shimmer like naked steel. The thought passed me by, if Dune was aqua-cola I'd probably drown in her like an idiot and enjoy it. No one has drowned in forever. I don't know if there's enough wet stuff left outside of the Citadel to do more than sip very carefully so you don't spill.
I started drifting toward sleep again, thoughts getting more obscure and difficult to focus on. There was only the drumming of her blood pump under my face, the softest war song I've ever heard.
"Ya know, kinda missed this."
"Mm. Huh?" Her voice vibrating so close to my head woke me. Probably for the best, shouldn't fall asleep without the all important cord to bind our hands. Skull processed what she said a second later. "Missed wh- huh?"
"Dune lookin' after you instead of how it's been the other way around ever since that damn storm. Missed it."
"...dunno how I'm supposed to feel about that, Nutter."
"Humph, yir s'posed to shut up and let me hold you."
"Ah, eat it."
"Mmm. Maybe Dune'll just eat you, finally."
"Cannibal creeper."
"Jerkoff."
"Big-mouth."
"Greasy-pig."
"Sand whore."
"Hoppy."
"Limpy."
"Slit,"
I'd almost forgotten to feel like a pile of scrap as the familiar routines and sneering began. Felt like the careless fun ended too soon.
"What?"
"Okay, so. Dune is really, really hungover and maybe even still a little drunk,"
"That's for damn sure,"
"Pffpht! Lemme finish! Anyway, she wants to say... That your breath forkin' stinks and you're a huge pain in the arse,"
"Ugh, thanks a lot, little cockbite."
"but she wouldn't trade you for anybody else. And you can talk to Dune about anything, she'll listen even if she doesn't understand."
I pushed myself back to look at her, taking in what she just said as well as this terrifying honesty in her eyes. I don't think she could possibly grasp all of the meanings and ironies of the crap in my head, but... I already let her touch my skin and if that helped, what would happen if she touched deeper things? Could she reach far enough into me to grab the tangle of sludge and waste from the black pit in my soul and then yank it out? No, I don't think so, but for somebody who says they wouldn't trade you for anything, and if you believe them when they say that...
"I- Okay... Alright."
