Oh V8, it's in her hair. It's not even long enough to get near her mouth. How'd it get in there? Splashback?
It was the sad, violent, loud, ugly kind of retching that you do with an angry, but mostly empty gut. And like anything done by Dune, she was trying to talk throughout the entire ordeal.
"Ugh! It tastes like-" Then came more belching and gagging.
"Yeah, tastes like stomach juices, 'cause it is." I said.
"I- hhrk! Hate this!"
"You've been eating the same damn shit every day for ten years, you think eating greasy sky rat and pouring rotgut over it isn't gonna tear up your insides?"
"Ugh... Nng.."
She was just spitting up trickles of acid and the water we had earlier in between mutters and moans. It's been too long for a belly full of food to come back up. Last night's meal was probably well on its way through the tubes, leaving the stomach sour. Personally, I didn't eat much of it. The bird was actually fine. It went down the okay-ish, same as any other wild meat we managed to catch, but the rest... If I couldn't identify it, it got shoved onto a passing pup's plate and they certainly didn't complain.
I couldn't not gag at the sound and smell. It had been a while since I had to listen to somebody spew next to me. Nux seemed to always toss up at night, if I had to hork it was usually on a pursuit. Just pound on the roof, thumb at the gut to let the driver know, then let loose as soon as they veer off so there's no one behind the car to catch it on their windshield.
I caught the futile gags, can't sit there listening to it without joining in. Didn't need the bucket though. I wasn't really sick, so I could swallow it back. Felt bad, couldn't tell'er that she'd feel fine once it was up when they're was nothing really in there to come out. Her guts were just fighting uselessly out of spite at this point.
Once she appeared to be more tired than sickened, I pulled the bucket away and pushed it toward the wall with my foot. The smell would just make us both gag some more.
Dune did little more than slump forward and complain more in mutters, head in the space where the bucket had just been.
Much earlier she'd fetched the canteens, I took mine to wet down the soiled pleats on her head while she lay there. She slapped at my hands as I tried to scrub them clean with wads of the trash around us.
"What'er ya doing? Stop pulling!"
"You got chunks in your hair, Nut-job."
Yeah, I wasn't about to hang around the scav if she stunk like this. I tossed the rags toward the bucket and sat back, watching her to make sure she didn't belch up more nasty shit onto the cot. She did nothing but groan and curl up with her forehead digging into my right hip.
"Twas the headache that started it. S'gone now for some reason..."
"Yir too tired to feel anythin'. Been there, doin' it right now." She appeared to be trying to crawl across my lap toward the canteen now. "Swish and spit it or else if you swallow it's just gonna come right back up."
She gave a wave and groaned dismissively, but still followed the advice, pushing away the bucket once again when she was finished to flop back over my leg and a half, staying there. Fuck, I just let it happen, not like I had it left in me to push her off. Liked it too much, and there was too little war boy left in me to fight that liking.
I felt hollowed out, like a war chariot with no engine and no go left under the hood. It's not that I had any hope left of doing something worthy of Valhalla with the rest of my half-life, just felt as though all before that wreck was some fevered up dream. It's like waking up and finding out none of the grandness of it was real. Is Valhalla a lie too? What about the mighty V8? I worship engines, which you can see and touch, but is the spirit of it real?
Talking to Dune about it was, different. Don't feel worse, don't feel better either. She said things I don't really get, but she would probably say the same thing about what I said if asked. Dunno how somebody was s'posed to teach me how to not be pissed off at everything because I got the best driver, who happened to be perpetually trapped in puphood and fecking dying only two thirds through this half-life. And the rest of the shit. I guess somebody should've known what to do, a lot of pursuit teams start fighting when one of um has his foot in the grave. Somebody should've had the experience damn it, so why didn't they fucking say something? Why didn't anyone tell me what I was supposed to do?
War boys don't talk about this shit. Dying is a fact of the half-life. Everybody dies. Just remember it's better on the other side, but what if it isn't? Maybe I always knew deep down that we're all completely fucked.
I trained harder, prayed harder, fought harder. I was the fucking best. Chromiest of the chrome, war paint so thick that it became white armor, aim so true that the shine of our war chariot made Immorta's enemies tremble in their rust buckets. And Nux, the best driver, worthy of me.
Delusions.
I did it all, became all to conquer fear, the most wicked of all maladies. It's possible that it was all to convince myself that if I just believed enough, deserved enough, the Eternal Highway would await me beyond the gate. No more pain, no more broken thoughts.
"Thanks Ducky. Such a nice boy..."
Fuck, why do you want me?
Why would anybody in their right fucking mind like having me around? I've got the face of a dump truck and the rest of me is pretty much as useful as the stereo system you always gotta rip out of any reclaimed car.
That's the thing though, she's not right in the head, but she's swift enough not to waste too much time on useless things. I used to think a lot of the garbage she collects was totally worthless. Turns out you can build better junk from the piles of her "treasures" scattered around the caverns, like my leg.
She said she was glad that she didn't turn me into maggot food. All the touching was different now too, it was worse, a thousand times as sinful.
War Boy law dictates that you keep clean and pure. No messing around with anybody outside the faith and if you had to trade paint, better to do that with another willing War Boy. Those are things carried out without care in the dark of night in unoccupied tunnels within the deep warrens. You don't bring those sinful grabby hands into the light and in the day, the only touch you might be likely to enjoy was a fist in the mouth.
Boys back home sleeping huddled together to keep warm was just practical, but half the soft headed shits probably enjoyed it.
Couldn't tell now if Dune ruined me or blessed me. Pissed me off that I couldn't tell. I still don't fucking know what's what. Liked that Dune listened though, didn't call me soft or... Whatever. Getting to really like that shine hand's fingers caught up between mine. I think that started with the sleeping deal we have to do to stop her wandering off. I liked it even better awake. I dunno why, just made it kinda as if we're connected.
I've made up a dozen excuses for why it was no big deal when she had her fingers all over my cut-ups. Just letting her admire the good work and the grit it takes to cut flames and wheels and idols into chrome flesh, that's all it was, and she should admire the chromeness of it with a hand that shined. That's right!
It was complete bull and I knew it. I went after her for it because it felt good, helped me forget everything, made me go limp and feel... Things.
This touching lately, can't make up a reasonable excuse for that. It's worse than the aqua cola addiction. I fucking needed it. Sometimes I resented her for it, getting me hooked on this stupid, soft, rusty crap. Other times, like now, it was real easy to let her stay where she was, even rest a hand over the back of her head and toy with the damp fuzz on the sides. Didn't even care that I was still wearing the metal leg. Too fucking tired to give a damn how much that ached, and I think she was singing something we heard last night at the pole walker hovel. It was doing a hell of a job lulling me to sleep while I sat leaning back against the wall.
"...Blackbird singin' in the dead of night. Mmm mmm..."
I think I closed my eyes for just two seconds.
"Well, you two look like fresh hell. Nice sweater."
Nnnrrg! The redheaded she-dingo.
While Dune rolled off me and managed a ridiculous grin at the wench, I was grabbing my shirt to pull back on. So I wasn't bothering to shave that off anymore, it's not like I ever leave Dune's dirt hole without something to hide my skin from the sun anyway so there's just no point to running a blade over my chest to sheer it off. Dune bitched any time she found piles of hair anyway. Ardith didn't have to poke fun for it.
Dune chuckled low, devilish as she tried to scratch her nails up my ribs to drive the embarrassment home. Her shine hand got slapped for that, a rare consequence of pushing that line a little too far. Didn't like them teaming up on me.
"Ouch!"
"Serves you right."
The harpy took a step through the open doorway, clapping a hand over her nose and mouth only to back right out of the shelter again. Now she was fighting the retching. Yeah, probably stunk like a sick ward in here to a fresh nose, served her right too.
"Oh, you definitely need Bones' hangover cure, sister. And you... Phil says he wants to see you about something or other."
Fucking great, why would he want to see me? Hasn't he seen enough? I was pretty sure that the nutter and I would be rolling out of here sometime today, not lingering around like this was some dumb social thing. This place sucked. It was still cold, at like noon-ish? Certainly didn't want to hang around long. Yeah, this trip was my idea, but by how last night went it was doing a fuck-ton more harm than good.
It was a damn good thing this witch was Dune's friend, or else I'd probably grab her and chuck her out the door by the scruff. How come she ain't hungover?
I growled and gave her a glare as I stood, but I couldn't be granted the time to chew her up for walking in uninvited. Dune kept stumbling all over the place and had to be caught and hauled back up to her feet. Fine, fuck it, let the redhead deal with it and hand her back when she could walk right. If Ardith and her big mouth had any merit, it was that I didn't think she'd do the scav any harm.
With that realization, it wasn't too hard to steer her to Ardith and let mouthy creature take over leading her along.
"Dune can walk damn it!" The scav griped, and I let her go.
The redhead pointed her across the bridge, telling her a moment later that she'd meet her at the house.
"Where's Phil." I asked bluntly. I didn't have any intention to stand here to talk to her for any length of time.
"...look, I don't have to like you-"
"Feeling's mutual."
Ardith ground her teeth at that, I grinned. It was too much fun pissing her off.
"But, if you let me finish, I don't want you dead. You're Dune's man, if she sees something in you..."
"I ain't nobodies man."
Her eyes spoke questions without answers, because they were asking the wrong ones. I wasn't a husband and Dune wasn't a wife. The line was blurring, but I still knew what we were. I'm sure of it.
Her face twisted up, once again, like she'd gotten a whiff of shit. "Fucking whatever, man. Point is, I talked to Phil. He says, you wouldn't be here if you didn't give a shit about her. So... There. You don't bother me, I won't bother you."
She talked to Phil, so that meant he must have opened his big mouth too. Great, how much did she know? I couldn't tell, she was just as hard to read as the scav.
"Whatever." I said, shouldering passed her to watch Dune across that bridge. Didn't want her to fall. "...Don't leave her alone anywhere too long. Don't need her wandering off and hallucinating."
Ard grabbed my arm. I hoped that she had the sense to tell that I was tense because I didn't want her touching me.
"How long has she been like this? Since you knew her?"
"Been a nut since she dragged my worthless hide home. Got worse after the lightning." Might as well speak the truth, then maybe the bitch would stop trying to blame me for Dune's crap. "Don't. Leave. Her. Alone."
There was a moment, it was brief, but we exchanged a glance and in that fraction of a bloodpump squeeze we could understand each other.
"Got it... Phil is around back at my place, under the pavilion with the truck."
She was off running after the Scav to pull the hair up out of her face while she leaned over the rope railing of the bridge to lose her guts again. My shoulders hunched, I felt like I should be the one running after Dune and keeping her from falling over the rail or getting chunks in her hair again, but I had to let this happen.
My leg felt sticky and disgusting. I should probably take the fucking thing off and clean that whole deal before I get heat rash or some shit. The old fart could wait, I was going to do that self care Dune was bragging about first. What is a clock?
Either way, much earlier she had reminded me that I hadn't cleaned the stupid leg in a while. I popped that off, peeled off the sock and wiped the thing down. Yeah, I had friction blisters up around where the rim of the socket rubbed on me. As always, I felt a foot that wasn't there aching like it had been in an ill fitting boot all day.
I didn't have to lose a foot. If it weren't for Joe, the cult, everything, I'd still have a foot, but I also might not have lived long enough to miss it. Who the Fuck is to blame? Can't figure out who to hate, Nux, Joe, Dune, Crank, me? Who's to blame?
All that could be done for the half-leg now was bandage it up where the blisters were chafed open, put on the cleaner sock stuffed into my pocket, and just ride it out. The drive back was going to bite the big one. Well, Dune was getting better about listening to the car and shifting the gears. Maybe she could be convinced to give driving another crack and let me keep this thing off. Once we get back to her kip, I'll have to try and keep off it for a few days and hobble around on the crutches Dune made for me so this could heal up.
Why does she try to help me?
Didn't understand it. Never had. But, she did try to explain. It wasn't an excuse for all the BS I've had to deal with, but according to her, she brought me home because allegedly I'd smiled at her when I thought she was going to drain me out and send me off. I don't remember this, but it sounds like something I'd do. And she said she touches me, not the cut-ups. I didn't know what to say to that, I was kinda chuffed to hear it, but that never translates into words all that great.
She wanted to see the new ones, and I wasn't so sure about them myself. It happens when it feels like I'm made of knots, I get that freakish sense of relief and sometimes pride when it looks good, then it's done. Don't like thinking about it. Damn long-shot never misses anything, she sees right through me like windshield glass. How much of me does she really wanna touch? I pulled at the waistband of my slacks, looking down into the mess of it crawling toward my right hip. I was running out of room, and lately the kit I kept in my pocket felt heavy. She'd see sooner or later as the new and old crashed together. Would she shout and rant like Nux did?
He was easy enough to placate. I used to be able to tell him it's practice for when I traded this skill to others for better grub and cleaner Aqua Cola, which wasn't always a lie. Dune wasn't so easy to reassure. I wasn't sure what she'd do if she saw. Also there was the matter of where the new shit was.
Mm, didn't feel like thinking about it, eyes on me like that.
I sat, waiting on the stump and the leather socket of the metal leg to dry off, and nobody bothered me. It gave me time to think, time I'd needed last night but couldn't get. Now that I had it, I felt wrong without Dune close by, and then there was this vague feeling that Nux should be there, too.
I hate being alone to think.
Once I was all together enough to pull that leg back on, tighten the corset threads and fasten the belts, I made my way across the bridge, trusting that wherever Dune was, that woman was with her. That half a leg was angry, it felt like I was being jabbed with a hot screw driver. Everywhere else I felt stiff like the organic cogs and sprockets needed a good oiling.
When I found Phil, he was sitting on a wooden crate in what could only be a makeshift garage among a few heaps of scraps framed in by two automotive corpses. He was using a broken chunk of rearview glass to see as he shaved his head and face with a razor. He used cooking grease to lubricate his skin against the cruelty of the blade.
"Same as always. Would you turn to ash if the sun touched you before noon?"
"Eat me, old man."
Crank put the glass and the blade down with a grunt to look at me, and I felt small under that gaze although he was still seated while I stood. It was because he was still alive, ancient for a war boy.
"You and my wife made up?"
I cringed at that. Still didn't really care for her, or anybody around here, but I didn't want to chuck her off a cliff.
"Well, standing here ain't I? She didn't try to kill me."
"Good. Figure she's just being clucky about her friend showing up acting off." He said, and I had to wonder what Dune was like before.
"Yeah... What did you want me here for?"
"Ah, yes." He stood, pulling a rag from his back pocket and swiping the grease from his face with it as he moved toward the pickup with the hood propped open.
"I've got an engine about to cark it and no replacement to drop into this polished turd. Feather Knife and Bones are all but useless with things of the mechanical type. Figured you could give me a hand and we could overhaul this in a day if we work hard like back home... Help me with this, I'll tune up your ride and let you dig in my goodie piles. Deal?"
It'd be stupid of me not to take a deal like that, I could already spot things sticking up from the heaps that I wouldn't mind getting my hands on. I could find better parts for my leg. "Yeah, I'll give it a fair go. She chattering when you start her up?"
"Yeah. I wanna replace bearings and get her squeaky shine inside. Got the tools, parts, and equipment for it, just never the time what with pups and crow fishin' an all of that. Four hands would get me ahead of the game."
"Can't relate."
"Mm. Yeah, It's different when the wee ones are your responsibility, not everyone's. Kinda miss that sometimes, belonging to something big."
Now, there's something we could agree on. A lot of times I felt like I was just floating around loose. Back home I had a spot where I fit like the right size screw, and I looked damn shine on a lancer's perch and back basket. I used to fit there just right but that spot, and its sense of purpose, is gone.
Dune was the most annoying, obnoxious, vulgar creature to ever crawl through the sand, but she spent considerable effort hacking a hole in her world for me to fit into.
Is it a place of mediocrity? I still look at my hands from time to time, knowing that a thunderstick belonged in the right.
"Hey, yo," Phil was snapping his fingers in front of my eyes to get my attention. V8, I was out of it. "You gonna just stand there or are you gonna help me take this shit apart?"
Shit. Right. Maybe I'd been alone with the scavenger too long, starting to act like her too.
I might not be much of a black thumb next to Nux or Crank, but there's something comforting in lifting an engine out and knowing that once you stripped it down to the sum of its parts, all engines look pretty much the same. If you could put your skull meat into the right place and commit the assembly to memory, duel overhead camshaft or pushrod. Inside every good vehicle worth touching with greasy hands has the same stuff inside, if you're willing to learn how they work.
Nux was better at this, he had some kind of bizarre gift, but I wasn't useless. Ah, soon enough though, I felt like some fresh pup what with how he was talking to me, though he wasn't quite as vulgar as I remember, which says something about how he used to talk back home. He was handing over bearings after scratching his blunt fingernails over them to see how worn they had become.
"You know what that means. Feel that, we're gonna have to resurface this crankshaft... I ought skin that dodgy junk peddling skid mark who sold me this rusty old bitch. Look at this! Only had it two months, oil hasn't touched her in the right places for an age, dry as a nun's nasty."
It sent me back a thousand miles, back to laying in their crew kip with infection eating the inside of my face. Nux had more or less lived under my arm, too terrified to move. After a week of that, Crank was the one who pulled him up and told him it was time to learn engines. I was too fevered up to remember much but that moment stuck. I took a swing on him for trying to take the pup and he told me in the war boy way, that Nux would be fine, lay down, don't move. Stating that as a war boy sounded like this: Don't throw a wobbly! I need skinny little hands to dig around under a hood and this pup can't be let to latch onto you like a Joey on a tit! He'll come back in one piece an' after that you're gonna sleep on separate mats! Got it? Get to restin' before you turn to worm food. I was too rusted up to do much more than crawl after them, howling, for a few yards and then give up. Wasn't too long after that, I was well enough to get up and do something. Started on engines, but was too old to keep with trainee blackthumb work, got stuck on the back of a boarding wagon and taught to throw a lance. That, throwing fire and fury, was my own godly given gift. Only ever saw Nux at night for a long time, when he'd crawl out of his separate sleep spot and wedge himself between me and the wall.
"Aw hell, this might be more than a one day job, mate."
"Ain't your mate, geezer."
"Kiss my wrinkly ass."
Besides a drivers tan and the accompanying aging on the right side of his face, Phil didn't really look that old. It was the aging inside that was the problem. He hacked and retched every half hour or so in a fit. That was years working war chariots from wreck to beauty in the warrens and inhaling dust on the roads when he went out as a repair boy to-go. As we worked, I wondered if that's what started killing Nux, if that's where Larry and Barry came from.
How am I still alive? Lately I ask myself this question more and more. I'm at least three quarters through my life. Crank is an anomaly, so were Notch and Ace. Everything was so different now, I'm not sure what a half-life is. Do we live fast and die young because of the place we came up, or is it all luck of who your parents happened to have been and how much of their sickness they passed on?
Phil had lumps, or rather, a single large mass somewhere in his throat pushing the left side out noticeably. A lot of us get like that eventually, and blindness for a number of reasons. Always the neck and eyes. It didn't look so nasty with paint. If I thought about Phil, when he'd been Crank, he was always painted up proper. I knew he had darker skin where sweat had made the white clay run, but it still took looking at the holy scars on his face to remind myself who he was. Now it was easy to see where the sun bit him too hard on too many occasions and the lack of paint made his neck look more like the cancer or busted thyroid he must have had. More than anything it was just disconcerting to look at a war boy without the paint job, sporting nothing but the primer.
"You look fecking weird without war paint."
"Hah! So do you. Liked you better bald." He replied without missing a beat.
"Dune would have my guts for garters. Says I need the hair or else my brain'll get cooked."
"Ah, women are like that, carin' about things like us for some reason."
Only grunted in agreement. The topic had been weighing like lead on my head lately. I didn't get it, doubt Phil got it either.
"Tell me, were Tank and Notch still alive, before you wound up wrecked?"
Welcome distraction.
"Tank caught a bullet with his head about a thousand days before I, er... met Dune."
"The job hazard." Phil hissed through his teeth as he dropped what was in his hands down into the tool chest. It was an old saying among our kind. A mediocre death through no real fault of the deceased. Stray bullets happen, and sometimes we caught them with our faces or the important components inside. "Notch? Was he still doin' alright?"
"Last I saw him, Yeah. Him an' his hunting crew were doing something up north when the immort- Joe, had us chasing his breeders. They were probably on a Bartertown run."
"Ah, makes sense. He'd know when to get his crew out of the way when a shit storm is coming."
I shrugged, Notch would have only known if the one armed traitor let him in on her plot. I always thought Notch was a know-it-all. Only had any respect for him because I knew, given a good enough reason, he could probably beat my arse into pulp. At least up until the lumps on his back got nasty. He might be dead now, too.
"He had rust growing on his spine." I said, and Phil nodded.
"He was never long for this world, being an asthmatic. Didn't suspect he'd get bumpy though."
"Why's that?"
"He was full life when I first set eyes on him, but I guess we all absorbed a lot of that radiation, scouting ruins for Joe. Shit, I think I've lost more mates than you've ever met. We had a hard go of it back then, Slit. A hard go. Citadel wasn't always a smooth running organic machine."
Damn. That's not a picture I could conjure into my head easily. War boys don't talk too much about history, Valhalla, sure, feats of valor, definitely, devotion to V8 and he who grabbed the sun, always. We never imagined things had ever been different than what they were. Things have to start somewhere. Nothing starts off nice like and pretty, not in this age. You have to make it nice, same as polishing chrome till it sparkles. V8 is everything about war boys just dumbass adage fuel?
It had been several hours since we lifted the truck's soul out with the hoist Phil had built from the skeleton of other wrecks scattered about here. One look around, it was clear he'd made himself at home here, creating a proper garage around himself, much like I was beginning to do back at Dune's kip. My stupid fucking mediocre leg was killing me, but I couldn't believe what he had here. If you went just inside into the addition that was clearly newer than the rest of this beat to hell house, he had nearly all of the tools and machining equipment of a fully functioning garage. There was even a pit to work under and hydraulics to lift the car, all you had to do was pull into this back room.
I asked how he got his hands on all of this. Turns out, crow fisherman hold meetings and elections. If you're the best out of the bunch at something, they vote you the master of it and bring anything useful for that trade to you. Phil was a mechanic, so it was natural that anything that was deemed useful to the craft be brought to him. The impala would no doubt benefit from this deal, in the meantime, I was scrubbing and oiling parts while Phil tinkered and nitpicked at the poor care that the truck had endured for time longer than can be counted.
I heard pups, gibbering and squealing. They came around a corner shouting and carrying on like pups do. Weird, you could tell which one was sired by who. A toddling one with freckles, another one with a pug nose, and the third, looking an awful lot like Phil. There was the pup he stole too, almost my height now, but skinny as a lance what with being that age when you grow up rather than out. He wandered around the corner more slowly only to back up to and peer around it at us. He was afraid of me.
Phil's brat, he clambered up unto the bull bar on the truck to peer inside at the empty space where the engine had been.
"Issit gonna go fast when yir done?"
"Eh, not as fast as some I've seen, but swift enough." Phil answered as he picked up the smallest one, settling him on a hip while the other, a girl I think, grabbed at my pinky finger to pull down my hand and look at my arm.
Phil was grinning like some idiot, and the kid smeared her drool coated mouth all over my forearm with a "Mwah" to punctuate the action. Gross.
"She'll be a stitcher when she grows up. Likes fixing bleeders, though, doesn't seem to see the difference between the old and the new yet." He said, a little muffled because the one in his arms was trying to stick its fingers in his mouth.
"And Sump is Fixin' to be a mechanic too. And, then the trouble maker, like Bones." Ardith turned the corner next, taking the one Phil held from him. Behind her was the scav. Good, she looked less like shit.
"Look'it this! A Slit and a Phil doing car stuff! Makes odd sense, yeah? No?... Ey, I know a good joke. How do ya figure if a mechanic's been naughty? Cause' hell have two clean fingers! Hah!"
Ardith's eyes just about fell out of her head, I'd have laughed, but I didn't really get the joke. Clean fingers, what? I don't know, there was some latent instinct to look at Phil like he had the answer, he was open mouthed grinning, hands pressed over his brat, Sump's ears. Slowly he began to chuckle.
"Heheh, nice one. Heard it before but, Nice." With that he let go of the pup's head, just as he started whining about wanting to know what was said. Fuck, I wanted to know too.
"What... What?!" I looked at Phil again, he was stifling fully blown cackles and descending into yet another fit of coughs.
The redhead began pushing Dune into that back room I had just been marveling over. "HOW ABOUT WE SEE THOSE PEACHES. HMM?"
And then they disappeared into the shadows of that room full of shiny tools, pups trailing along after them..
"Your girlfriend's got jokes, give her that."
The gears stopped dead when he said that. Dune was a lot of things. But a girlfriend? She was a girl and I GUESS she was a friend but a girlfriend? No. Something nasty rose up in my head. Uh uh, he had it wrong. Dead wrong. I could hear something clatter loudly on the other side of the doors separating us from the harpy and the scav, almost as if Dune heard what he said too and dropped whatever she'd been holding. There were mutters and murmuring from in there too.
"She's not my girlfriend!"
"Hmm. Does she yell at you stop tinkerin' and come eat?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"Does she yell at you when your clothes stink?"
"I guess..."
"Does she elbow you real hard in the gut when you're almost asleep and say 'Ow! Get off my hair!'?"
"Sure but-"
"Girlfriend,'
"Shut it!"
Asshole. Anybody you have to live with would do all of that shit. Hell, if Nux had hair he'd probably have kicked the shit out of my shins for laying on it.
Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Rust. Fuck! Dunno why I thought of it, maybe I needed to get away from the topic. "What the shit is a peach anyway!?"
Phil glanced at me, brows pulled up on his head. "Dunno. Probably has something to do with those crates stacked up in there. Take a peek."
I dropped what I was doing, parts being scrubbed in dirty water at the bottom of a pan, to look through the crack between the mismatched steel doors.
They were pulling thin, flimsy stacks of glossy paper from wooden boxes with a strange picture and a single word on each crate. The symbol looked like someone's backside when they're bent over, and the word, it took a moment to sound out.
P. E. A. C. H. E. S. Peaches.
They were reading under a shop light, not word burgers, something with pictures.
"Spiderman. My favorite." Dune said, showing Sump with a pointing finger and pulling him into her lap to read to him.
This was like a fever dream, just as curious, but less terrifying. "They call those paper things peaches."
"Yup." Phil said, leaning against the flank of the car and wiping his greasy hands on his slacks. "Harvest moon is about a fortnight off. You should stay until then... According to Ardith, it was a really big deal around here when they were kiddies. We always throw a rager over it. Might do your girlie good to be here for that."
"I didn't think we were staying that long, couple days at the very most." I said truthfully, still watching them in there. Even before we got here and found out we weren't going to be alone when she went about the deal with this place, I didn't think we'd need long.
I went still and stiff. Phil had dropped his hand on my shoulder, then he was talking to me with the same tone he was using with those pups in there.
"Someday, I'm gonna have to face the hell inside me. So will you... Knowing things could have been worse isn't an excuse, Slit. Don't just step aside and tell yourself that you couldn't have done more. Wasn't fair to you when I said it, it isn't fair to Dune if you say it. Stay, just two weeks. Hold her. Let her get over this place. Maybe it'll help you move on too. Never know till you try."
I was still watching them, Ard nudging Dune, showing her a page of what she was reading, and the Scavenger laughed, resting her chin on the head of the small boy in her lap as she read out loud. Maybe this, finding these people, was doing less harm than I thought. Dune looked happy. Not crazy, not mad happy like when we found wrecks with bodies in them. Her smile now was different. With zero warning, I didn't want to stand anymore. I was so, so out of guzz. I meant to say something else, something that meant something but instead...
"I'm... I'm so fucking tired."
"Heh yeah, me too, kid. Sleep, I can handle this. I'm a better black thumb than you an' your driver combined. Honestly Jus' wanted you here to talk. You can sleep in the cab of the truck, Slit. It's okay."
As if I had regressed many thousands of days, I did what I was told like a pup, took off the leg and propped it up between the seat and wheel as I lay inside the cab while Phil worked. The noise of a mechanic doing what he does never bothered me, I slept right through, lulled even by the noise.
I didn't dream. I was too spent, too far gone.
When I woke, I found that someone had covered me. It was a sheet of cloth I didn't recognize. It wasn't Dune's. She was there too, leaning in through the passenger window, smiling, touching my face. It came back, the goodness of her shine hand on my scars there.
Thank V8.
"Hey, Duck. They're wanting us to come eat with them again. You hungry?"
Yeah, I don't think she'd argue if I said we should stay a while.
